alt Hacker NewsThat’s the thing here. Software engineering is an intelligence-complete problem. If AI can solve it, then it can solve any sort of knowledge work like accounting, financial analysis, etc
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gedy • today at 3:13 AM
You are right, but I think at the moment, a lot of people are confusing "software engineering" with "set up my react boilerplate with tailwind and unit tests", and AI just is way better for that sort of rote thing.
I've never felt comfortable with the devs who just want some Jira ticket with exactly what to do. That's basically what AI/LLMs can do pretty well.
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Only if by "solving it", you mean being able to write any program to do anything.
Software engineering is a hubris-complete problem. Somehow, being able to do so much seems to make us all assume that everyone else is capable of so little. But just because we can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, and because AI can write 1000 programs to do 1000 different things, it doesn't mean that we can write the million other programs that do a million other things. That would be like assuming that because someone is a writer and has written 1 book, that they are fully capable of writing both War & Peace and an exhaustive manual on tractor repair.
Financial analysis is not easier than programming. You don't feed in numbers, turn a crank, and get out correct answers. Some people do only that, and yeah, AI can probably replace them.
"Computing" as a field only made sense when computers were new. We're going to have to go back to actually accomplishing things, not depending on the fact that computers are involved and making them do anything is hard so anyone who can make them do things is automatically valuable. (Which sucks for me, because I'm pretty good at making computers do things but not so good at much of anything else with economic value.) "What do you do?" "I use computers to do X." "Why didn't you just say you do X, then?" is already kind of a thing; now it's going to move on to "I use AI to do X."
Then again: the AI-dependent generation is losing the ability to think, as a result of leaning on AI to do it for them. So while my generation stuck the previous generation with maintaining COBOL programs, the next generation will stick mine with thinking. I can deal with that. I like thinking.
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