Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Just own the damn robots

thereformedbroker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 356 posts

Re: Just own the damn robots

#111

Post by letlambda »

EliRivers wrote: post #10
jboggan wrote: post #8

"We’re in an age where we’re being told AI is about to start writing its own software." The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.

All the problems in every serious piece of software I've ever worked on stem from the customer (be it external or in-house) not knowing what they want, the person in charge of capturing that doing a pretty bad job of it anyway, and the chain from there to the person writing the software taking that failure and making it worse. AI writing software will just get me another flavour of the wrong software. AI working out…

>AI writing software will just get me another flavour of the wrong software. AI working out what people want the software to do would be useful.

Maybe we can deliver that wrong software in 100ms instead of 100 days.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#112

Post by nradov »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54
mooreds wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some might say it's a "Brave New World" :) The real question is what happens to the 90%.

The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it mat…

Very few people would "thrive" on a basic income. Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. People need a reason to exist and meaningful work to do. Very few have the drive and discipline to become artists/inventors/philosophers/musicians/actors. Plus the majority of those who do become artists are unlikely to create anything that the rest of society would value. Have you been to an Arts & Crafts fair lately? Most of the stuff there has negative value, in that you'd have to pay me to take it.

We need a better solution than basic income.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#113

Post by bufordsharkley »

Waterluvian wrote: post #98

Reads like this are slowly convincing me not to buy into the world of mortgages and debt and to just live the rest of my life paying for everything in cash. I tried to buy a house last year with my wife but the market exploded where I live and suddenly houses were 40% more expensive from last year. So we still rent, which makes me feel incomplete. Like I'm kind of failing my duty of bringing the Canadian Dream to my…

It's no surprise that we're seeing more and more anxiety coalesce around land: this is the classical economic expectation of what would happen as automated output starts to outperform labor, and capital can be automatically produced. When this happens, scarce natural resources (such as location) increase in value. Henry George saw this nearly 140 years ago, with his "Fool's Paradise" thought experiment.[0]

As efficiency rises and rises, can the cost of living ever approach zero, or will the landlords (in their many forms) be able to extract what they will? This is a very important question we need to answer.

[0] http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/George/grgPP15.html#...

Re: Just own the damn robots

#114

Post by sunpar »

adventured wrote: post #15
pdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors are willing to accept much lower long-term returns for safe haven assets. If you're going to "just own the damn robots" at any price, you're essentially paying for this sort of insurance.

I agree investors will continue to own these companies in a very big way. They won't continue to maintain much less inflate the premium that presently exists. Microsoft for example has barely grown its income in a decade. On what planet should they have a 28 pe ratio? The stock has tripled (!) in five years on the back of zero income growth. It's massive value destruction just waiting to happen. Shareholders will not…

Microsoft has to defer reporting revenue on sales of Windows 10. From their recent investor letter:

"We delivered $90.0 billion in revenue and $22.3 billion in operating income this past fiscal year. Adjusting for Windows 10 revenue deferrals and restructuring expenses, revenue was $96.7 billion with $29.3 billion in operating income."

That is 31% more revenue and 34% more operating income compared to 2012 (the 5 year time period you're citing). Stock backs will also move the price -- there's almost a billion fewer shares outstanding now than there were 5 years ago.

Of course, investors buy companies for future performance and not for past performance. I would suggest that investors like MSFT's current strategy and management considerably more than their past, and as the management continues to increase profits, investors gain more confidence.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#115

Post by nradov »

ansible wrote: post #23
jboggan wrote: post #8

"We’re in an age where we’re being told AI is about to start writing its own software." The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.

I've been thinking about this more this year. Earlier this year, I finished watching "Person of Interest" (maybe not ironically) on Netflix. So far we've been applying ML/DL to problems like image recognition, which has produced quite useful products. But these things are still far away from Artificial General Intelligence. And I've been studying AI / AGI research for decades as well. In the early years, there was an…

Static analysis tools can already find obvious bugs. Except they have a high false positive rate. And then fixing the bugs without breaking something else is still far beyond what we can automate. There is no universal fitness function to tell the difference between good versus bad software, thus no way to consistently automate improvements.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#116

Post by Terr_ »

> In this context, the FANG stocks are not a gimmick or a fad, they’re a f---ing life raft.

Note that if you are employed in one of those companies, you should think twice how you'd want to invest in them, because you're actually putting a bunch of your eggs in one basket.

I keep remembering those poor Enron employees whose retirement funds were mainly in stock of Enron itself, so that they were both unemployed and financially ruined when the scam fell apart.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#117

Post by ThomPete »

paulpauper wrote: post #40
pdog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investors are willing to accept much lower long-term returns for safe haven assets. If you're going to "just own the damn robots" at any price, you're essentially paying for this sort of insurance.

but Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are software, not hardware, so you're not owning the robots.

Robots isn't the right word. Automation is the right word.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#118

Post by throwawayjava »

nradov wrote: post #112
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors. The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society. I suppose it mat…

Very few people would "thrive" on a basic income. Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid. People need a reason to exist and meaningful work to do. Very few have the drive and discipline to become artists/inventors/philosophers/musicians/actors. Plus the majority of those who do become artists are unlikely to create anything that the rest of society would value. Have you be…

> Look at communities today where a large percentage of people live on government aid.

You mean like retirement communities?

Re: Just own the damn robots

#119

Post by ThomPete »

robotresearcher wrote: post #92
jameshart wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The robots are not literally robots in this story. Trading algorithms are robots. Uber's ability to connect riders and drivers is a robot. That said, Amazon and google are in the robot hardware business literally, too.

Amazon is, but their customer is themselves. They use 50,000 robots today and that will grow fast. Google doesn't sell robots. I don't know if they use them, apart from a few for research.

Their web spider is a robot. We are far past the time when humans could catalog that much change.

Re: Just own the damn robots

#120

Post by mdorazio »

eksemplar wrote: post #26
arichard123 wrote: post #21

I just don't buy it. I understand I'm in a minority, so let me indulge myself and explain, for a moment, why I think AI / Robots are nothing to worry about. My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have. My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a…

I work in business development in the public sector. First we did digitzation, turning paper archives into something digital. Then we started standardizing and connecting the archives while improving worker interaction with them. These days we're doing automation. None of this has led to people getting fired. It has cost a massive amount of jobs though. All unnoticed because we simply didn't rehire for positions when…

> we simply didn't rehire for positions when someone retired because the digitization hadn't eaten whole workflows but only 5 minutes here and there

I think this is a very important part of automation in the knowledge worker sector that people often miss. Automation doesn't have to get a single person fired to lead to high unemployment, it just has to make managers stop and ask, "do we really need to replace that person who left?". I've been seeing the same thing as you over the last decade with companies I've consulted with where headcount gets pared down here and there every year, and the remaining employees are expected to use more technology tools and wear more hats to fill in the gaps.

Post reply on HN