alt Hacker NewsThis is not a problem unique to the mathematical community.
What about software developer community? AI has eliminated the need for junior software engineers. Almost no one is hiring junior software engineers. But companies still need senior software engineers. Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?
What is the solution? I don't think the solution is to say AI progress in software, mathematics etc. should be halted.
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"Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?" If I were an AI fan, my answer would be this: By that time, AI will have improved enough that it can replace senior software engineers as well.
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of AI, and I am currently writing software without any help from AI, as I prefer.
There is nothing preventing Junior Developers to develop their own systems and understand it.
In fact, the world is always filled with curious people who like to go one level below.
This hysteria about losing "Junior Software Engineers" -- most of them in it for money, promotion rather than craftmanship, is over-rated.
People who love solving puzzles will always find ways to sharpen their mind.
People who love understanding things, will always find ways (AI will help them tremendously).
People who love taking shortcuts will always find ways for it (AI or not)
> This is not a problem unique to the mathematical community.
Ahh that's OK then. Everyone's in this same boat simultaneously in multiple industries! Cool!
> What is the solution? I don't think the solution is to say AI progress in software, mathematics etc. should be halted.
I think the solution from the maths world is to not grant these AI papers (or their human sponsors) the normal courtesies of "regular order", just as you would not with an AI lawyer or someone who was just pressing enter at a law firm.
But in the software world, nobody gives a shit, apparently. We are collectively morally bankrupt and should not be granted the regular order to help other people to decide what to do with us.
AI progress is so massively out pacing any rate of loss of senior developers though.
Just for a thought experiment lets say junior hiring actually goes to 0% starting today and there is no other route into software dev for example maybe it is illegal for anyone under 22 today going forward to work in dev. Maybe something like ~2-2.5% of the workforce retires each year? And lets just define senior as 10+ YOE so 75% of the current batch of ~40 year working timeline. For simplicity lets just say the other 25% don't ever become senior devs and in 10 years the total number of senior devs has reduced 33% due to retirements. ChatGPT public launch was less then 4 years ago! Look at the ludicrous progress in the timespan. Even if progress suddenly massively slows or hits a wall it is currently hard to fathom it not improving at a rate of 3% a year.
More realistically I think we just have no ability to predict wtf things will look like 10+ years out at this point which is the point in this artificially constrained timeline where a reduction of senior devs just due to time would even start to be noticeable I think.
AI models and tooling has advanced significantly in the last 6 months. Give it a couple of years and the companies will not need senior software engineers. They will need someone to steer the AI, maybe. Why would anyone need senior software engineers?
AI progress in software
I'm not old enough to have gone through the revolution that was programming languages that got increasingly more abstract and decoupled from the metal, but surely there's a lesson that can be learned from that era?
I hope we discover a solution before innovation totally stalls, but I do not think any solution has been found yet. And I agree that halting AI is unlikely to be the solution because even if we halt the big companies China for example can still do AI.
Some people hope AI will get good enough in a few years that it can innovate without human experts. Maybe? But that remains to be seen.
It would be exceptionally fascinating, if AI, due to the limitations of how it models information, and the way that it warped incentives, if AI ended up being a net inhibitor of progress than accelerator.
We know how this goes, at least in broad strokes. We've been through it before, just not with "knowledge" work. If there is demand for something then supply will show up to provide it.
Some jobs will stick around in vastly diminished numbers with tasks that are completely different than what they used to be to produce the same output (e.g. farmer). Other jobs will be eliminated entirely (e.g. switchboard operator). I'm guessing things like software engineering will go the way of the farmer, with the main unknown being just how much demand for software there is.
Or the broader reproducibility problem that’s been silently plaguing most of academia for decades with little to no mention. Many, many, many papers and theses and assumptions we build on may be bunk.
AI development should be harnessed in such a way that AI augments humans without replacing them. Tools that replace human intelligence altogether are not true progress for humanity.
I think we will see the same trend as other industries. “Good enough” but produced cheap is better business than “really good” but expensive. I assume most software will go that way, or has gone that way already. AI will probably cover most of it and only a few senior engineers will be needed. Basically like any other industry where it went from everybody being a craftsman to a few people building the machines that then can be used by relatively untrained people.
> Without junior engineers how will there be senior software engineers in the future?
My take is: the bar to what counts to HR as "senior" will go down as businesses everywhere try to adapt and hire more seniors - "senior" now just a name, as it becomes the new "junior". Then everyone will pat each other on the back till it all goes down in the flames of bankruptcy.
My company hired a junior dev that was helping a senior one, then after layoffs and financial issues senior was fired, and junior left to pick mission critical code with a stick and codex.
I think this will be a self-correcting problem once the damage is done, and the only cure is more cowbell, I mean - TIME.
In the age of extraction capitalism where building sustainable, profitable companies is not the goal, no one will care.
You see in this thread. Even seniors are shipping slop because at the end of the day its the companies shitheap of a codebase, not theirs, they will ship with slop code all the same.
In other words, they are increasingly devauing their own senior position and discarding their hard earned skills that make them seniors in the first place.
There will be no more seniors. Tech companies will hire junior llm agent wranglers who took a class in undergrad doing this. That is probably the nearterm.
AI slop is basically the grey goo scenario but happening on the level of information and thought.
Tons of corporations rely on the fact that human interaction within software production will be as minimal as possible, and no one actually cares who trains the seniors of the future.
Junior software engineers not being hired is not the same as not needing them. Now I have to fight senior employees that do worse things than junior employees (and produce worse software than two years ago), because they delegate their work to the AI without checking or reviewing anything at all, or questioning the AI architecture "decisions", and we have more incidents than ever...