"Artificial Intelligence is gonna take our jobs," proclaims the A.I. doom theorists!
Well. Sometimes theories get proven to be true.
Such appears to be the case in the murder of Stack Overflow -- which has taken a huge nosedive in usage since the public releases of GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and other A.I. systems.
That first massive drop aligns with availability and releases of GitHub Copilot. The second with the public release and popularity spikes of ChatGPT.
Two A.I. systems which provide code (of unknown and dubious origin), on demand, to programmers in need of it. Effectively eliminating the use case for sites such as Stack Overflow.
"But," annoying people will say, "correlation does not equal causation!"
As true as that is... you also don't have causation without correlation.
And, let's say you are investigating a murder. Just, you know, hypothetically.
One suspect:
- Was in the vicinity when the murder took place
- Had a weapon capable of that specific murder
- And directly benefited from the murder
... Maybe -- just maybe -- that suspect should be investigated further.
Now, to be fair, Stack Overflow isn't actually dead at this point. Right now we merely have an attempted murder.
But, if those numbers drop much further, we're going to need to draw a chalk outline.
