alt Hacker NewsPrecisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.
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But AI might actually get you there in terms of superior pedagogy. Personal Q&A where most individuals wouldn't have afforded it before.
There are a lot of people in academia who are great at thinking about complex algorithms but can't write maintainable code if their life depended on it. There are ways to acquire those skills that don't go the junior developer route. Same with debugging and profiling skills
But we might see a lot more specialization as a result
That’s a good analogy but I think we’ve already went from 0 to 10 rungs over the last couple of years. If we assume that the models or harnesses will improve more and more rungs will be removed. Vast majority of programmers aren’t doing novel, groundbreaking work.
People would have said the same about graphing calculators or calculators before that. Socrates said the same thing about the written word.
The determining factor is always "did I come up with this tool". Somehow, subsequent generations always manage to find their own competencies (which, to be fair, may be different).
This isn't guaranteed to play out, but it should be the default expectation until we actually see greatly diminishing outputs at the frontier of science, engineering, etc.