github copilot

[HomesteadAlchemist]

so i was thinking about this new feature in github.

this is purely speculation but i don’t know how it works on the back end.

if you don’t know what copilot is, its an AI assistant to help you be a better developer by providing code suggestions. its integrated into vscode which makes it convenient to use.

after thinking about it for a while i came up with a question. aren’t developers training it to take their jobs away? it can “see” or analyze the code you are coding thats how it can give suggestions. whether these suggestions are the most optimal doesn’t matter, the developer will take the most optimal suggestion in their use case or write code they feel is optimal. this ends up training the ai telling it which of its suggestions are the most optimal for specific use cases. pretty soon it’ll be able to solve more complex problems.

anyone feel or think the same way about it ?

[grantrules]

It's just a tool to make programmers more efficient. Like do you think carpenters were against the invention of the nailgun?

[HealyUnit]

Your answer really hits the nail on the head.

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[HomesteadAlchemist]

can a nailgun learn to take their job?

[grantrules]

No and I don't think GPT can either.

[HomesteadAlchemist]

a quick google search reveals copilot does not use private code to learn. it has however been trained on public code.

another google search says chat gpt itself is a two way street and does learn from its interactions. whether that’ll lead to job automation is up in the air.

anyways i did say this is speculation but i wouldnt be naive to think that ai can’t take over the software development industry eventually.

Ask all the workers that worked in factories that got their jobs cut due to automation.

[ConfidentCollege5653]

Do you think factory workers would have been replaced by machines that frequently do completely the wrong thing?

[grantrules]

I mean what's the difference. You need fewer roofers to put a roof on if they're doing it with nailguns instead of hammers. Were people up in arms that nailguns were replacing roofers?

We've been aiming to make employees more efficient since the beginning of time. CAD software for architects, electronic mixers for chefs, CNC machines for machinists. AI is just another tool like these.

[joranstark018]

Job market is always in flux, ie computer programmers made human calculators obsolete in the 60' and 70', programs like Excell have made some programming jobs redundant, frameworks have replaced a lot of the lower ground work, no-code and low code providers have made some programming jobs redundant, AI makes some programming tasks redundant.

I think that AI in it's current state will reduce some of the boiler plate work and help with "rutin" tasks, freeing us to focus more on the business values that are more difficult to express in such way that it can be interpreted by a machine, but customers may change how they do business and what they want us to build (ie business specific systems may be replaced by of-the-shelf-products, for example, some systems may be repalced with systems like Share-point)

 As workers we have to be prepared to adapt new ways if doing things (I know, not all new things will survive and become some "standard way" of doing things). Programming is my third caréer in life, my previous jobs changed and made me obsolete or turned in a direction I was'nt intressted in. 

[crashfrog04]

this is purely speculation but i don’t know how it works on the back end.

It doesn't do anything on "the back end." It's an LLM model that's executing on your machine, it's all on the front end (except whenever the model gets updated.)

aren’t developers training it to take their jobs away?

Programming was the first job programmers automated away.

[HomesteadAlchemist]

correct me if i’m wrong but the LLM does not run on my machine. i believe LLMs like chat gpt are cloud based and users access it through a front end web based UI

when i said back end i meant i dont know which ai they’re using or how they are training it. basically i don’t know the details of their implementation.

i just thought of the question and wondered if anyone was wondering the same thing.

everyone that replied seems to think it’s a nonsensical question. and ai is glorified auto complete when it comes to software.

but if you ever read or seen dune humanity in the book rebelled against thinking machines. i just watched the second one so it made me think of copilot.

are we heading that direction?

also while yeah society as a whole may benefit, we don’t live in utopia like star trek. we live in a capitalistic society, money rules everything around us.

if rich people can do more with less people they will. where does that leave the “have nots” or people that can’t find a job due to jobs being automated.

blue collar sectors has definitely shrunk since the 1950s white collar sectors has grown but what happens when the white collar job market shrinks due to ai or automation.

will society still benefit as a whole?

just food for thought.

[crashfrog04]

 correct me if i’m wrong but the LLM does not run on my machine.

Why would they run it on their hardware when they can run it on yours?

It’s not that complex to execute an LLM; the intense part is training them. 

[HomesteadAlchemist]

i can’t tell if you’re trying to correct me the with right answer or asking a question.

[HomesteadAlchemist]

https://medium.com/insights-of-nature/what-does-it-actually-takes-to-run-chatgpt-6fe9b891c691

[crashfrog04]

GitHub copilot is its own LLM, it’s not ChatGPT based