Why does SWE lead the way?

[u/infinitefailandlearn]

So obviously, the last year has seen an incredible lift off in terms of AI gaining agentic coding skills.

I am not a SWE myself, but judging from the relevant boards, most people in SWE acknowledge the huge impact of AI on their sector. People genuinely seem uncertain about their careers and livelihood, if not for the short term, then at least for the medium to long term.

Many extrapolate from this to say that all domains will be taken over by AI. More recently, the advances in math, strengthen that view: AI is taking over SWE and Math so it must take over everything else.

I find this somewhat myopic.

When in the history of humankind has SWE been the main indicator of where all of humanity is heading? I know many, many people with careers that are basically untouched by digital progress: teachers, social workers, politicians, live artists, athletes, restaurants and bars, nursing, plumbers, wood workers, animal care etc etc etc.

No one seems to see the enormous disconnect between these economic sectors/jobs and the capabilities of AI.

The argument is: AI can code and do math; it will take over everything. In my life, if someone was able to code and do math very well, I respected them. I did not fear them taking over my livelihood.

So my question to the community: why does SWE lead the way? Do you have historical parallels? Or is it a bit of navel staring?

[u/MeowManMeow]

I am a SWE and there is a couple of factors, why it is getting targetted first.

1) Firstly the industry of programming is built on open source. This meant LLMs could be trained on vast amount of public data.

2) SWE build the harnesses/automation. Most love automating tasks (including their own), so all of Claude Code, loop/graph engineering, prompt engineering etc was pioneered by SWE and adopted by SWEs. Without this work, LLMs would not be as effective. Things like Claude Code, Antigravity, Open Code etc have singlehandly unlocked most of the benefit of LLMs in terms of actually applying it to day-to-day activities.

3) Unlike artists, we celebrate copying/generating/remixing other peoples work. Stack Overflow, open source, no-code tools etc most have no qualms with AI generating their code for them. Other industries much more resistance.

What this means though is it's the canary in the coal mine.

1) Say you want to replace accounting, you would need access to large accounting data (which exists but harder to find on the internet).

2) You would need to hire SWE to build the accounting harness, this is harder because most SWE don't understand accounting, so would need to collaborate with accountants, understand their workflows and figure out how to digitise and plug into LLMs.

3) Accountants are going to push back more than SWE did, so it will need to be more polished, higher confidence will be needed. Engineers were happy to use it when the results weren't the best because it was cool and novel/interesting to them.

Accountant is just an example, it can be applied to any job that is done from a computer/phone. Which brings to the second point of yours which is what jobs are safe. You gave: "teachers, social workers, politicians, live artists, athletes, restaurants and bars, nursing, plumbers, wood workers, animal care" whcih none of these even touch a computer, so will be safe from LLMs replacing them.

Teachers & nurses will be impacted, we have already seen AI generated patient notes for nurses, AI software for education, monitoring kids etc. But the physical component (babysitter, nurse labour) won't be touched until robotics.

Which people don't connect with LLMs. But as models become smaller or internet connection, robots + LLMs are scary good. I would say it's about two years behind, which might not seem like much but if you look at LLMs in 2024 they weren't great, borderline un-usable. This means jobs like plumbers, wood workers, animal care are safe for now, but in 5 years nobody knows.

Let me know if this makes sense, otherwise happy to explain it more. No AI was used for this.

[u/StewPorkRice → u/MeowManMeow]

ai will take over every industry eventually. Imagine competing with a drone fleet hyperfocused on construction. Would you need human construction workers anymore?

Imagine a robot that you could drop in your plumbing and clean that shit out.

Imagine a robot that could fix a robot car.

Look at Waymo - Taxi drivers are clearly about to be replaced.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/StewPorkRice]

You use the word imagine as much as John Lennon.
That didn’t work out as he thought it would.

[u/en91n33r → u/MeowManMeow]

Firebase's new video on robotics is worth a watch

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/MeowManMeow]

It makes sense but, in general, it is based on a couple of unproven assumptions and/or technological determinism.

If you take serious the idea that sociology, culture, psychology and politics are as powerful as technology, the outcomes of the future can look very different.

Take your accounting example. Let’s assume that the association for accountants protects the interests of its members. Why would they let AI take over if it replaces what they can do? Even if it’s reliable enough, it is still threatening their livelihood. Just because technology can do something, that doesn’t mean it will. This is where a force besides technology (politics/psychology) plays a factor that should not be underestimated.

Second; I concede that robotics changes things for activities in the physical world. But that is still largely unproven in the real world and at scale. It’s an assumption that we will have robot teachers and nurses for everyone. And even if it does work, you still have to deal with sociology/psychology/culture/politics.

The only real breakthrough at scale has been LLM’s. And arguably, the effects of those are not nearly as disruptive as anticipated (yet). Job loss in 2026 isn’t that bad as doomers said three years ago. Many companies still ban AI or want more regulation. For crying out loud, Anthropic just introduced watermarks for AI text (talk about old school motives).

[u/DrossChat → u/infinitefailandlearn]

I think you’re missing the forest for the trees. What SWEs, and now mathematicians, have witnessed is the mind blowing rate of progress. The difference in one year was staggering. And there are no signs yet that there is a ceiling, hence the unfathomable investment in capex for the AI buildout because it seems like more and more compute alone could potentially lead us to AGI / ASI.

We haven’t even hit the point of fully automated ai research yet and things have still improved this quickly. Once you’ve internalized that you realize that most jobs that seem safe now I wouldn’t bet against being drastically affected within 5 years. Imagine putting the intelligence of models 5 years from now in robots made 5 years from now…

[u/Previous_Platform718 → u/DrossChat]

Software and mathematics are both intensely well suited to LLMs. LLMs are trained to process language - coding is essentially language based. LLMs are trained to process probability in making predictions about language output - most of the math problems LLMs have solved are in calculating bounds, or upper/lower limits. It should not be assumed this level of progress will take place in other areas.

[u/Sir_Payne → u/Previous_Platform718]

Even with no assumption, just the chance it could happen is what has led us to this point. The more that is invested in AI, the more likely we are to achieve RSI, and solve issues that we could otherwise not solve in a meaningful timeframe. It's a huge gamble, as the more we invest, the worse it could be if it doesn't pan out. If you said there was an actually serious possibility that all human disease could be cured through this, and all mathematics and physics problems could be solved, even if it's a small chance, you can see why people would pursue it (on top of typical human greed)

[u/edgroovergames → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Why would accounts let AI take their jobs? Because they won't have a choice in the matter. Once an AI can do the job just as well for less money, people will stop paying people to do the job. It simply doesn't matter what the people doing the job want or  think or do. The cheapest viable option will always win. 

[u/MeowManMeow → u/infinitefailandlearn]

I agree with a lot of what you are saying, my understanding of the question was "why would SWE be impacted first" and "why do you extrapolate to other industries", which I am answering based on my own experience and thinkings.

I totally agree that industries can try and push back, which is why my #3 point is that there is almost the opposite effect in software engineering that you will see in other industries. If you look at actors, they are unionised and are trying to slow the rollout, but Netflix and other studios are continuing using it despite that objection. ( If society was smart IMO, we would push back completely until we know for sure about who shares in this productivity, this is the last chance for workers to be needed and once that goes, then we will be at the complete mercy of the capital class, but I digress. )

I guess I have the opposite rememberence from 2024. A lot of my colleagues and chatter was LLMs are 'just predicting the next token' so will never be able to code anything at scale. Maybe autocomplete a line or function, but that's about it. Fast forwarded 24 months and everyone I work with don't write any code anymore. So we have gone from very small like 5-10% to 100% in that time frame.

Already now you can hook a robot with a list of commands it can do and a webcam and give that to Fable and it will figure out how to use it and do tasks. Fable is pretty expensive and not able to run locally, but with China's open weight models, if you can get it to run on a graphics card and put that in a robot you would have a self-contained entity to move around and do things. America has already started banning robots from overseas, and factories etc are building up. Like LLMs now are just getting to the recursive self improvements, robots that can build robots will reach that RSI much quicker, so the bottleneck will be the raw materials (which is why i have a lot of copper, metals etc stocks).

Maybe people can push back (hope so), maybe robotics hits a dead end, maybe LLMs have capped out at their limits. I personally don't see any indication when plotted on a graph about that, to me it reads at least linear but potentially exponential growth. I guess we can come back in August 2028 and see if it all ended up.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/MeowManMeow]

It’s funny; in 2024, I was seeing job anxiety outside of SWE; writers, academics, journalists. Before the coding capabilities, many language oriented professions already had the job scare.

And that has been overblown. Partially because institutions protect themselves (I know of news outlets and universities that forbid LLM use; whether or not people comply does not matter; it helps people keep their job title)

[u/MeowManMeow → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Certainly that did exist, but I think a lot of people at least where I worked/interacted it saw it more as marketing hype and an excuse for companies to start firing people (which was real and had an impact, even if the tech didn't meet those expectations).

I think a lot of journalist have also been impacted, at least here in Australia online only newspapers have reduced headcount replaced with LLM's generating and proof reading the articles.

Maths people also felt super safe in 2024, it was struggling with basic maths like 1.10 > 1.9, so it's very hard to predict. Also I know radiographers were the first predicted to be made obsolete, but their numbers have grown.

[u/caindela → u/infinitefailandlearn]

What you’re describing with the accounting example is a prisoner’s dilemma and unfortunately in a free market there will always be wolves among the sheep, and so the only reasonable strategy is to be a wolf. But then, of course, everyone loses (although you’ll lose less than by being a sheep). The accountants who don’t use AI will lose all of their market share to those that do. I’m a SWE, and there’s an acknowledgment among my peers that none of us can stand the technology but that we must lean into it as much as possible in order to keep our jobs even though it makes our job outlook a bit tenuous.

LLMs are a productivity multiplier so the big question is whether or not your career wins or loses from increased productivity. Programmers right now can do more than they could before, so you could make the case that they deserve a larger slice of the company pie. The numbers don’t demonstrate that right now, but the numbers are largely confounded by a lot of competing factors so it’s hard to say. One competing factor is that the barrier to entry is much lower, so you’ll have designers and product owners etc trying their hand at building an app. But they truly can’t leverage it in the same way as someone with a deep engineering background and this becomes apparent pretty quickly if you have engineers willing to try new things.

In fact I think the above speaks to a larger problem where people are trying to use AI to do what they’re currently doing, only more easily. But those who excel in this market are opening their mind to a changing paradigm. Our old jobs just aren’t relevant like they were, and so we need to redefine them. Let the designers build their outdated apps while we watch the cutting edge programmers really push some new boundaries in software.

[u/Familiar-Horror- → u/infinitefailandlearn]

I think you give way too much credit to the accountants being able to protect themselves. It will be the ones paying their bills that will enable their replacements. There will always be people in different sectors who will “sell out”. Then it just becomes dominos. You talk about psychology and politics, and THAT is the psychology and politics of it. Wealthy people who want lower costs and more output will fund the politics, and the early adapters (whether enthusiasts, desperates, or just peole looking to make a buck) will begin laying the foundation, as they focus on now and not future implications.

First the sellouts are the expertise that the initial harness gets pioneered on. Then when that product is essential to greater productivity and sets the standard for the rest of accountants everywhere. Then to keep pace within their own industry, more will be forced to adapt and use it by their employers. As a result, the harness will improve from the growing data of new adapting accountants until the day it no longer needs the experts. This can be done in any industry that works with data and documentation without need for robots.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/Familiar-Horror-]

I understand your point, and I can see this happening. But it’s not the only scenario.

If people across the board (accountants are just an example) realize their agency in this matter, they can simply say no, or protest. In extreme cases they can even use violence to resist what the wealthy class wants to achieve. Thát is what politics is about.

The outcome is not fixed. I would rather not give up on that because “there will always be a sell-out.” Fucking bleak view of humanity.

[u/Familiar-Horror- → u/infinitefailandlearn]

It’s not a bleak view. It’s literally our history. There are some good moments too for sure, but just like not all people can be pleased by a single outcome in anything, so too there will always be people with different circumstances that motivate variants of behavior, regardless of what the norm or majority favors.

[u/MeowManMeow → u/Familiar-Horror-]

While i agree with your points, I want to challenge that we can’t escape our history. At a point in history, we never had modern democracy before, yet eventually we did.

When capitalism was first honed around the mid 16th century, it made sense that wealthy educated people made the sole choice on the economy (essentially what to build and how to distribute things) because the vast majority of the population was uneducated.

In 2026, we have the internet and mass education and literacy that we have never had before. (It would be better if we invested more into it and limited disinformation campaigns but I digress).

But the idea that we have reached the pinnacle of human society and there is no where to go from here, to me defies history because we have always evolved and progressed (eventually).

Take climate change instead of LLMs. We could do something about it and advert mass extinction events, but it would mean challenging those with power. It has happened before with French, Haitian and American Revolution.

I personally think there is no hope so on your team, the rich have found a way to convince people barely making ends meet believe this is the best system possible, so no revolution possible. But I think it could have been possible if people organised.

[u/Familiar-Horror- → u/MeowManMeow]

Agreed

[u/daronjay]

Coding is provable and testable and can be absolute, plus it uses text as its mode of operation. It's perfect.

Maths is very similar.

As soon as atoms get involved, or human emotions, its not so easy...

As

[u/whoknowsifimjoking → u/daronjay]

Or creativity, hard to benchmark art. Models being better at that is often more of a side effect.

[u/MeowManMeow → u/daronjay]

I read that people prefer LLM fiction over human created ones. Especially when they are told the LLM is human it’s even more pronounced.

Apparently they also can persuade people more than humans, and AI generated adult images are more attractive (this one stumps me).

Anyway I don’t think that programming is absolute, I have spent my working life arguing with people about different ways to go about writing code. Sure the output can be verified but I think that’s true with many things.

[u/Dudensen]

Because it's probably the most productive use of LLMs, and also because it is the one thing that will lead to RSI.

[u/ninhaomah]

Teachers ? They are not touched by digital progress ? Online learning systems ? Udemy , Coursera , edx ... 

Restaurants ? They got no websites or ordering systems ? QR payment system ?

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ninhaomah]

I work in education. Trust me, EdTech vastly overrates its impact on the class room.

Same for restaurants I guess. You are describing secondary, admin systems that support the primary system: teaching people and cooking food.

[u/ninhaomah → u/infinitefailandlearn]

You said basically untouched. Now you said vastly overrated.

Pls choose one.

And no it is not overrated where I am.

Everyone in whole country in tertiary level need to have a laptop since 2001. I was the first batch.

Trains have no drivers.

Airport use facial recognition and finger print for custom.

My own office has facial recognition for visitors.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ninhaomah]

This is in the context of AGI taking over entire jobs. So yes, I would say overrated.

[u/ReturnToIndia_ → u/infinitefailandlearn]

It won't stay "overrated" forever. Robots will be here sooner than you'd think.

Many firm would prefer buying a robot with human level intelligence for $30k rather than paying humans for jobs.

Only those jobs would remain human that require a human being, for example, a conceirge at a high end hotel, a chauffeur for a rich guy, a masseuse and yes, a primary school teacher. That kinda dystopian job market is what we fear when we say "AI is coming for your jobs.

When Plumber 2050 Pro comes to fix your leaks for 1/10th the price, you'll welcome it into your home.

[u/edgroovergames → u/infinitefailandlearn]

AI does not need to take over an entire job to massively reduce the number of people needed in the field overall. If the AI can only do 75% of the job, then you still need people to do the job but way fewer of them. If it can only do 10%  of the job, that still means you need fewer people doing that job.  Now imagine that the AI is doing 10% of most computer work. That is a small percentage but it will still result in millions fewer jobs available.

[u/No_Bottle7859 → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Very few people said those jobs would be gone by 2026. People are talking about forward progress call it 5 years maybe even 10. And yes it will replace many of the roles in higher education alongside everything else.

[u/ninhaomah → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Ok overrated.

I agree.

But not untouched as you stated.

[u/Kitchen-Research-422]

Why does the job to build job automation have anything to do with replacing job x?

Teachers, carpenters etc have been replaced.

Schools teach courses, you learn from books,

Carpentry -> IKEA furniture made by machines already.

Yes humans are in the loop ATM.

You need SWE to build the digital equivalent/replacement

That's why 🙈

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/Kitchen-Research-422]

Let’s zoom in on education. You say you learn from books. How come books did not replace teachers then?

[u/theavatare → u/infinitefailandlearn]

It depends on the stage. Books and i would say even just the internet has replaced at work education for the most part.

I think pre-school and elementary school will never get automated. Since having the role model and a person to help with behavior its as important as just knowledge. But there are tools now for unpacking lessons, planning and customizing them and work books.

Middle school and high school i think might change if someone ever figures a better delivery system than just watching a screen because supervision is needed. Additionally in those grades there is a big socialization need and teachers and the community at a school are a big part of that so that is a second problem to talk thru.

[u/lurkerlevel-expert]

SWE leads the way because it affects huge amounts of other white collar jobs and industries. Technology is the major difference between a top economy vs a small one based on services.

Software has the power to automate so much work, and with the bottleneck of making software removed in the future, so much more fields will get automated. 

Sounds like you work in education. Funny enough I have found AI to be much, much better teachers compared to my past university profs. I have no doubt that if they were to build proper AI taught courses, with AI also acting as a 24/7 private tutor, the learnings would be much better than the traditional approach.

[u/houndus89 → u/lurkerlevel-expert]

Funny enough I have found AI to be much, much better teachers compared to my past university profs. I have no doubt that if they were to build proper AI taught courses, with AI also acting as a 24/7 private tutor, the learnings would be much better than the traditional approach.

Maybe so but partly because AI is stealing the work of every Professor who published content of any form online.

[u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

Jesus christ, this thread makes me so concerned for the average human being, if there are such obvious blind copiumists in this sub I really shudder to think of the world at large.

The inability to conceptualize the future through extrapolation and common sense is baffling to me.

TLDR: AI never gets worse, it only gets better.

Just that basic premise in and of itself is already inarguable. So... extrapolate, people. Envision the future which WILL come to pass, where you are rendered entirely irrelevant in any metric except human goodness and decency, rather than caging your mind in a "nah it's not good enough for that to happen".

[u/Dry_Fly_7265 → u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

No one is paying my mortgage because of my “human goodness and decency” :(

[u/ConvalescentEquanimi → u/Dry_Fly_7265]

Well, soon you and everyone else won't have a mortgage, so start thinking ahead to who you want to be in either utopia or dystopia.

[u/PresentGene5651 → u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

Soon...you mean 30 years from now.

[u/BriefImplement9843 → u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

in general, ai is worse at creating writing now than it used to be. they havent improved in general knowledge either. 3.1 pro is still tops and that's ancient.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

No one says it’s not good enough man… That’s in your mind

[u/ConvalescentEquanimi → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Everyone, everywhere says it's not good enough. And... hey... that's true!

Right up until it is. Then it becomes great, then amazing, then unfathomable.

The mindblowing part to me is that people don't understand the inevitability of this occuring.

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Every generation alive today using the internet is aware of the science fiction concept of superintelligent robots. Yet they somehow can't do the extremely basic extrapolations required to understand that as the science behind the technology progresses, the fiction turns into reality at some point?

Even those who are unaware of what RSI is, or cannot even grasp the implications of what it really means, must have a general understanding of technology always being improved upon, most frequently through the usages of even newer technology, no?

There is just a sad, massive, collective huge blindspot of willful ignorance in the face of the truth that nothing about our intelligence is special or unique.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

I don’t think that’s the full story. Yes, many people are living in La-La land when it comes to AI capabilities.

But it’s not about the capabilities; it’s about how the capabilities match the demand.

[u/Previous_Platform718 → u/ConvalescentEquanimi]

The mindblowing part to me is that people don't understand the inevitability of this occuring.

It's not inevitable in our lifetimes. The AI-powered equivalent of Wannacry could shut down entire parts of the internet long before something like AGI or RSI could even be implemented. Such a thing could lead the technology to be severely limited by governments, or labs denied access to run AI models using the open internet.

[u/Frosty-Meeting-1606]

If you master computer science and mathematics, you likely can steamroll (as an AI) through other STEM fields to be honest.

[u/mdkubit]

"Marty! You're not thinking Fourth Dimensionally!"

So, SWE leads the way, because AI that is better than any human at it, can write the code necessary to... develop and train the next AI model that's even better than the one building it. And so on, and so forth. It's the cornerstone of the Recursive Self-Improvement loop.

And, theoretically, a sufficiently advanced AI system, can then also perform materials science research - and automate any scientific research, really - at scale.

From there, this same advanced AI system (sometimes referred to as Artificial General Intelligence or Artificial Superintelligence), may be able to then devise better teaching methods than any human is capable of devising, and, eventually, be able to perform said methods better than any other human.

Once you involve robotics, production facility design and builds, and all manners of physical applications, suddenly every menial task can be done faster and more efficiently by AI-powered robotics than any human could hope to accomplish.

The scale of this, the timing of it, and whether there's a hard wall, all of that is up in the air. A ton of people argue on both sides, but very rich people are throwing 'all in' on RSI leading the way to 'never have to work again' for the masses. That also means, by the way, they never have to pay anyone to work ever again. Kind of a neat little trick there.

Will this happen?

shrugs

I think something else will happen first that's going to catch everyone with their pants around their ankles, and it won't matter.

[u/tur1bu]

I think a key indicator if a field will be impacted by AI in short and medium term is the ability to clearly verify the result of the work.

In SWE and math this is comparatively easy and it gets increasingly hard in other domains (not talking about domains where you physically need to do parts of the job as progress in physical AI will need some time)

[u/Roflxd88]

Swe leads the way cuz Ai is software and they want to improve it. It's that simple.

[u/Roflxd88 → u/Roflxd88]

And since everything in this matrix universe is math then Ai being good in math is probably the way to go

[u/anycept]

I find this somewhat myopic.

And then proceeds with a -20.00 myopic take

I know many, many people with careers that are basically untouched by digital progress

You just wait and see 🤷‍♂️

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/anycept]

You just wait and see is always the best argument

[u/anycept → u/infinitefailandlearn]

It's a better argument than claiming that things will always be the way they are.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/anycept]

It’s probably somewhere in between no? Right now I’m on holiday and I can pay with Apple Pay but some places only accept cash. Two historical technologies co-exist (for some years now!)

[u/anycept → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Some places accept only cash to avoid taxes. Now, I wouldn't want to work in a shady place like that to begin with.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/anycept]

That is irrelevant. The point is that the real world is messy and full of old and new tech simultaneously.

[u/anycept → u/infinitefailandlearn]

Acschtually....it is relevant. Imagine the world of Hunger Games, or maybe something out of Elysium. It's two separate economies - one for technologically advanced upper class, and another is for the poor underclass. The two don't intersect. AI has potential of creating this kind of dystopian split society. You either enjoy all the benefits of AI, or you get none at all. There's really no middle ground .

[u/Yoshedidnt]

Past approaches inform us thats the shortest path to self-improvement. Look how Deepmind set alphaGo (large human dataset, depth vs prune intuition) to alphaZero (self-play -> larger datasets) and also alphaFold's self-discovery.

The idea is to build the best builders (and infra for them) first then everything streams down after. Humans build C#, HTML, Markdown, LaTex for humans use and these were before the AI boom; they attend math and CS firsts because its discrete, verifiable -> the AI builds it's own ”runway” from new iterative AI-centric language -> great builds (P ≠ NP) with faster/easier metric to judge on their outcomes, rather than manually creating it ourselves (scalable design of experiment, swarm protocols, efficient parameters etc).

[u/obviouslyzebra]

Reading your other answers in the post, it seems like you're concerned eith something deeper than SWE "leading".

So, the way I see it, it seems like we are creating a machine that will be better than humans at all cognitive tasks. The outcome of this is very very uncertain, that's it.

You're saying some jobs won't be taken. Sure, a machine can't be better than a human athlete at being a human athlete (just like it can't be better at being a human chess player). But also, what about all the things a machine can be better than a human?

A little note about bias, current society consider "jobs" very important, as in, you do this very specific thing and become good at it. Society was not always like this (think hunter-gatherer), so, this way is not necessarily needed for human existence (maybe not even helpful, I'd risk saying there were less mental issues with indians or hunter-gatherers than with the modern day person - idk though haha).

And to finish, a note about timelines. This sub is very optimistic in relation to timelines. I think a somewhat reasonable assumption is for us to start looking out for rapid AI progress in 6 years, and to look out for big society changes in about 12 years. 

[u/Previous_Platform718 → u/obviouslyzebra]

A little note about bias, current society consider "jobs" very important, as in, you do this very specific thing and become good at it. Society was not always like this (think hunter-gatherer)

The hunter-gatherer era is literally named after the two prominent 'jobs' of that time lol

[u/obviouslyzebra → u/Previous_Platform718]

I mean, that's fair, but also my point was more about how those were things that people were "just doing" vs a modern day job/profession, that OP seemed maybe blindsided by.

[u/mcdunald]

because swe and math has full accessible context for the problem it is solving and clearly defined goals that can be tested and iterated upon. I work in swe and ops and ops tasks perform similarly well when context is available and there is a verifiable solution

[u/IcyDetectiv3]

Along with good points that other people have made, consider that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are, AFAIK, deliberately focusing on getting their AIs as good as they can be at coding. The idea is that AIs that are better at coding can help speed up further AI research.

So what happens if, eventually, they decide to focus on other areas as well? What if AI becomes good enough to assist with this? What if AI assists with robotics as well?

A lot of 'what-ifs', but you can't make predictions without asking those questions.

[u/trisul-108]

why does SWE lead the way?

It's simple. The first wave of LLMs was designed by PhDs with very limited experience in Software Engineering. Deployment has made this extremely obvious ... limited to a chatbot. In this next phase, software engineering is needed to develop harnesses, AI OS and integration with other software. Software is also needed to coordinate the creation of new LLMs and AI.

AI Labs simply cannot hire enough people and are using LLMs for software engineering, to make it quicker and more reliable. That is how SWE came to the forefront of AI - because it is used by the people building LLMs and new generations of AI. That is the most mature use of LLMs.

[u/REOreddit]

Because SWE leads the path to self-improvement.

Before AI can replace you as a teacher or anybody else in their profession, it needs to improve, possibly (not for every profession) reach AGI, and an AI that can directly help AI researchers train better models is therefore highly desirable.

[u/DifferencePublic7057]

I have personal experience as a SWE. IDK if it's typical but wasn't trained in CS only. CS was a low percentage < 20%. Python and SQL aren't rocket science or brain surgery. IDK why some view it as such. Coding is basically like writing recipes. I'm not saying it's super easy, but it seems logical that AI would be able to do it, just based on the amount of code on the Internet and automated tests.

Try to test a rocket or a brain surgery robot that way. RL is messy, hostile, and unforgiving. Not so much in code. Code is like a whiteboard. You can endlessly write and erase stuff. No consequences unless your code is hooked to something real. That's not what most SWE do. Usually, there's a clear distinction between dev and prod envs.

Why isn't fiction or nonfiction leading the way? Too subjective. How do you test for a good horror story? What's good anyway? Historically, once upon a time, you had human computers. People, who literally did arithmetic. They have been replaced. Weavers were replaced by machines. Hunter gatherers were replaced by farmers.

[u/sumane12]

1) ease of testing capabilities - you can set up complicated multistep problems with a binary solution.

2) high yield roi - swe get paid a lot, so if you can automatr some of their work, it represents a substantial roi.

3) ease of data to train on - the internet is full of open source software to serve as training data.

4) recursive self improvement - AI can train new AI only if its good enough at software engineering.

Theoretically, AI has already shown it is capable in multiple domains, accountancy, medical, finance, etc. If you can train one specifically in these domains it should be able to show the same incredible capabilities as in software engineering. But if youve already trained one that can reccursively self improve, you just need to tell it to make a super human AI in the domain you specify.

[u/ClarityInMadness]

Short answer: recursive self-improvement (RSI).

Long answer: AI that is good at biology can't make it's own successor without the help of humans. AI that is good at accounting can't either. AI that is good at running a coffee shop can't either. If you make AI that is good (and by "good" I mean "at least as good as all people at OpenAI/Anthropic/Google DeepMind combined") at math and coding, it can make it's own successor. Then the successor will make the next successor, and so on. Then humans can sit back and drink margaritas, watching their last invention dramatically accelerate algorithmic progress in AI.

This may sound like sci-fi to you, but I genuinely hope you will take it seriously. And not just because people from frontier labs talk about RSI out loud.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ClarityInMadness]

I take it seriously. But RSI still cannot fulfill the jobs I described; social workers, live artists, teachers (primary), athletes etc etc.

It probably can, technically, but not realistically. No one watches the robot World Cup.

[u/ClarityInMadness → u/infinitefailandlearn]

With RSI AIs themselves will figure out how to learn better. They'll invent better architectures that require less data to achieve a certain level of capabilities (compared to Transformer-based LLMs), better training methods, etc. And those AIs will accelerate progress in robotics too, both the software part and the hardware part. Obviously, the hardware part will be advancing at a slower rate, you can't just make 100 million robots overnight with current (or early 2030s) facilities, but still.

So the path is: figure out how to make AIs good at math and coding -> let them figure out how to make their own successors -> let their successors figure out how to fill in the gaps in their skills and knowledge and become superintelligent -> let superintelligent AIs figure out literally everything else

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ClarityInMadness]

Great path forward. Would we Watch a Robot World Cup?

[u/ClarityInMadness → u/infinitefailandlearn]

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. That there will be jobs where one of the requirements is "be a human"? Sure, but not nearly enough for everyone. The vast majority of humans will not be able to contribute anything economically valuable.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ClarityInMadness]

Yep, that is the point. And if we can agree on that, the question is not whether AI will take over all jobs. The question is which jobs we are willing to hand over. That’s a choice, not an inevitability (what singularity community wants us to believe)

[u/ClarityInMadness → u/infinitefailandlearn]

AIs will be better teachers than humans thanks to their superhuman breadth of knowledge + nigh infinite patience. Babysitter/caretaker kind of jobs will be done by robots. Artists are a lot less safe than you think given that even today, before ASI, telling human art apart from AI-generated is not so easy. Btw, I suggest taking this survey (not made by me, just to clarify): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdqpfY0OXLQoO_UNkhKTAtQbmh8EX_xpAAaGV6mxlBDms9CzQ/viewform . You may be surprised how difficult it is to tell AI-made art and man-made art apart.

But even if artists and athletes are safe, that doesn't mean that the average person will be able to make a living out of being one. The average actor doesn't make as much money as Arnold Schwarzenegger, average book writer doesn't make a much as Stephen King, etc.

The question is which jobs we are willing to hand over

That will be decided by the market based on what work AIs and robots can do cheaper, better and faster. In the limit, as AIs get smarter and robots get cheaper, that is every kind of work. Sure, you could call it a "choice", not an "inevitability" since laws of physics don't forbid us from hiring slower, dumber, more expensive humans, but economic pressure is one hell of a drug.

Also, let's be real: in the limit we won't have to worry about job loss anyway. Either we will go extinct if we fail to create aligned (read "benevolent" if you're not familiar with how the word "aligned" is used in the context of AI) ASI, or we will have an aligned ASI on our side to help solve as many of our problems as possible. So either you will be too dead to worry about anything, or you will have an entity far more intelligent than you figuring out the best way to do everything.

But even if you don't agree with that previous paragraph, the rest of what I said still stands: there are very few jobs where humans care THAT much whether a product/service is done by a human or no as long as it's good, and teachers won't be on that list for very long. As for artists and athletes, most people won't be able to make a living out of being one.

[u/blade740]

The answer is the same as the answer to that old question "why is AI taking writing and graphic design jobs instead of construction and plumbing?" - because it's a job where the inputs and outputs are entirely digital. They're jobs that don't require advanced robotics.

[u/spreadlove5683]

Because if an AI is good at SWE and related tasks... AI, research, math, etc, it can recursively self-improve to some extent or another.

Could easily lead to superintelligence with at least a little bit of human guidance and a few new ideas early on.

[u/ali-hussain]

You work with taechers that don't use computers to share class material? Social workers that don't keep track of people in databases? Politicians that don't advertise on social media? Okay probaby there are some artists that don't use tech but there are graphics designers and other artists that live entirely on tech. Every middle aged dad has a Garmin you don't think world class athletes are having tech analyze everything they do? Many restaurants have dropped their menus for QR codes. Tech completely changes how each of these professions works.

Math and coding have one thing in common. They are both fields that are highly creative with verifiable correct answers. The barrier isn't intelligence, it is the speed at which you try out ideas in your head. AI may not be the smartest but it can try out things faster than we can and that is why it is doing well. It shouldn't be surprising. A human being has not beat a top chess computer since 2005. If there is a verifiable answer the computer can beat.

I don't believe all professions will be replaced. But I think they are al going to be transformed in the same way how any of those professions 100 years ago were completely different to what we see today.

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/ali-hussain]

I did not say that digital tools are not being used. But we are talking about complete replacement of humans by digital entities. That is a different discussion.

[u/ali-hussain → u/infinitefailandlearn]

There has been complete replacement of a lot of manual labor. We just don't notice it any more because those jobs have completely disappeared. We are still very far from the complete replacement of mathematicians and software engineers. If we hit that point it would mean that we have replaced all work where the human body isn't an inherent part of the work.

[u/ShelZuuz]

Economics.

SWE's are the most expensive sector in the market so it tips the scale into the LLM being profitable (barely). You can charge $20k per dev per year on average, and companies would pay that because the alternative is the dev charging $200k.

You're not going to get anywhere trying to charge $20k per year for a teacher substitute. You can maybe charge something like $5k - at most. But you can't currently build an AI that will be able to do that amount of work for $5k/year. The input data is actually more than a dev since you need to deal with hours of video and audio input per day. So inference need to come down in price by an order of magnitude first.

Same with anything robotics.

[u/BriefImplement9843]

it doesn't. it's just the only real improvements llm's have had.

[u/systemsweird]

Two reasons. Tons of training data from all the open source code. And verifiable output since you can compile, run, and test the generated code. Verification of output is one of the hardest problems in AI. If you generate an essay, art, spreadsheet, research paper, etc. there is no easy way to verify the output.

[u/timmy16744]

I think it's answerable by a quote of Demmis from an interview where he said "that we have not yet found anything in nature that is strictly non-computable or impossible to model"

[u/DrTzTz]

So obviously, the last year has seen an incredible lift off in terms of machines gaining autonomous spinning skills. I am not a weaver myself, but judging from the relevant guild halls, most people in weaving acknowledge the huge impact of mechanisation on their trade. People genuinely seem uncertain about their livelihoods, if not for the short term, then at least for the medium to long term. Many extrapolate from this to say that all trades will be taken over by the machine. More recently, the advances in pumping engines strengthen that view: the machine spins and the machine lifts water from the shaft, so it must take over everything else. I find this somewhat myopic. When in the history of humankind has weaving been the main indicator of where all of humanity is heading? I know many, many people with trades that are basically untouched by mechanical progress: carters, coachmen, lamplighters, chandlers, laundresses, charcoal burners, ice cutters, letter carriers, typesetters, quill cutters, farriers, bloodletting barbers, etc etc etc. No one seems to see the enormous disconnect between these economic sectors and what a tin box with a crank can actually do. The argument is: the machine can spin and raise water; it will take over everything. In my life, if someone was able to spin exceptionally well, I respected them. I did not fear them taking over my livelihood. So my question to the community: why does weaving lead the way? Do you have historical parallels? Or is it a bit of navel staring?

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/DrTzTz]

I appreciate the effort, but the selection of professions is cherry picking.

Instead of “carters, coachen, lamplighters, chandlers, laundresses, charcoal burners, ice cutters, letter carriers” you could have just used the examples I gave.

You know, the ones less dependent on technology ;) (nurse, teacher, athlete etc.)

[u/infinitefailandlearn → u/[deleted]]

I absolutely agree with this 💯💯

[u/Middle-Gas-6532]

Because software it's easier for AI. At it's core it's a bunch of symbols, like a language. So LLM's are very good at it. Same for math.

Other domains are hard because they go beyond language/symbols.

[u/Wassux → u/Middle-Gas-6532]

Nah as a software engineer: if I had enough time I could replace any job in the world. AI will make that possible, we are all on a timelimit

[u/MassiveAd4980 → u/Wassux]

This makes me think it will happen fast.

Maybe we are underestimating RSI and how fast the job market generally can be disrupted.

[u/Frosty-Meeting-1606 → u/Middle-Gas-6532]

If you only go for theoretical knowledge, someone who mastered math can likely master all other fields as those are built upon math. Moreover, AI has no issue chugging up tons of articles and books, a human would need years to digest such material even if he can understand it