[alex-robbins]

You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.

[monster_truck]

I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.

There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.

[AngryData]

Im more convinced we are heading that way every year. Certainly not anytime soon, but 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Seems plausible to me. Most people don't even know how their house electricity system is setup or works, or how their plumbing system works despite being incredibly simple, not to mention more advanced technologies. We are surrounded by internal combustion engines and yet less and less people actually understand them each day and it becomes more and more specialized knowledge. How many people know how a refrigerator works despite being incredibly simple technology and the basics necessary to understand it covered by atleast freshman highschool science class if not earlier?

We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.

[fallingknife]

Who cares what most people know about plumbing and electrical wiring? It's not most people's job to fix it when it breaks.

[__MatrixMan__]

It's not that I think that future generations are dumb or anything like that, it's just that the longer an assumption is held, the less likely people are to be prepared for it being invalidated.

Many of the people who designed our electrical infrastructure are still alive. Far fewer are needed to keep it running. If we must rethink our priors, I'd rather have both groups in the room while we do it.

[make3]

With the state of how the ai agents stuff already is, if you don't think that most tech jobs will be automated away in our lifetime, I don't what to tell you.

Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.

I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future

[fallingknife]

My 3 month old son is twice as big as he was when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10!

[bongodongobob]

I feel like you're coming from a place where GPTs value lies only in coding. I use it for planning all the time, saving me hours per week.

For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.

[zwnow]

Well big tech wants to replace all the white collar jobs with their bullshit ChatGPT wrappers, so it wouldn't be surprising if actual skill vanishes.

[ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7]

Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.