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Generative AI and The Future of Work

maestroai.substack.com

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Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#81

Post by melagonster »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #36
henry_bone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do a man's job, you take something away from the man." You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work. Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for the work. Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for…

That sounds pretty Luddite to me. I don't think the average person wants to be doing the menial work, vs architecting a grander vision IE the purpose for the work.

many AI is designed for doing research, medical and writer work.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#82

Post by oliveshell »

kobalsky wrote: post #68
RyanShook wrote: post #35

Does anyone else feel like the crypto crowd just migrated to AI?

what a weird moment to take a stab at AI, right now when all the projects are starting to bear fruit and we can see advances that remind me of moore's law in the 90s. these projects have direct commercial applications right now.

Honestly? I get it.

What you say about AI is true; however, from where I'm standing, it seems there is still too much greed-driven, mindless "no problem; we'll simply brute-force the problem of inventing a machine that does human-level cognition, which is a thing we admit we do not understand at all"-type enthusiasm, and not enough openness, humility, and critical thinking in the field.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#83

Post by henry_bone »

optimalsolver wrote: post #77
henry_bone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do a man's job, you take something away from the man." You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work. Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for the work. Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for…

I'm pretty sure that quote is from Star Trek: Insurrection.

Yep. You are right. Insurrection.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#84

Post by oliveshell »

oliveshell wrote: post #53
RyanShook wrote: post #35

Does anyone else feel like the crypto crowd just migrated to AI?

No, but I do think that both of these things are revealing to us just how bad highly technical people and highly intuitive and empathetic people are at properly communicating with one another. (It is a broad generalization to assume that these traits are mutually exclusive. They do, of course, co-exist in many people. However, it seems to me that the number of people in whom they coexist robustly are few. However, if…

Replying to myself to apologize to all future readers for the absolute hash I made of the above comment.

I distractedly typed it out while doing something else and didn't realize how unintelligible I made it sound until it was too late to edit!

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#85

Post by jbcranshaw »

d_burfoot wrote: post #45
jbcranshaw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point on the terminology. What do you think the right terminology should be? LLMs is too much of a mouthful and is not as informative for the general public, imo. People are also using Foundation Models, which I rather like.

+1 to Foundation Models. I don't share your concerns about LLMs, though, and often refer to the future involving LXMs where X could be images, audio, bioinformatics data, etc

Ooh, I like LXMs. Hadn't heard that before.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#86

Post by Gh0stRAT »

toss1 wrote: post #48
Gh0stRAT wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In classic Information Theory, information is basically surprise value — how much unexpected info is in the message? — yet these "AI" systems put out the most expected subset in each instance. Forgive me, but isn't this kind of moving-the-goalposts? Information is the surprise value from the recipient's point of view, which meas the recipient's bayesian prior probability is "expected". Saying "these "AI" systems pu…

Yes, the AI's output could be surprising to the point of view of many recipients. This does not mean anything more than that the AI has a greater breadth of training background, which is likely. We get the output most likely expected from any of (or the average of) the humans whose writing/drawing/whatever was included in the input set. What we will not be getting from the AIs is any creative output based on unique u…

>This does not mean anything more than that the AI has a greater breadth of training background, which is likely.

This has nothing to do with Shannon's definition of information. The light from a star going supernova or a tsunami hitting shore convey information without any kind of agency nor intent being involved.

>What we will not be getting from the AIs is any creative output based on unique understanding, as we would from an intelligent, creative human.

This is a really big assumption here that I don't think is justified. Are you assuming that humans have some non-physical soul which makes us somehow different from any other deterministic information-processing system?

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#88

Post by imtringued »

Karunamon wrote: post #39
henry_bone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do a man's job, you take something away from the man." You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work. Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for the work. Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for…

I don't know about you but if I had the ability to dictate requirements and to get a program out the other side that matches those requirements, the process of coding has become mere busywork that can be eliminated for the benefit of me and everyone else. I'm sure the buggy whip makers had pride in their work as well.

But none of what you are talking about has happened today and even the buggy whip reference doesn't make sense because the buggy whip market disappeared because we stopped using horses. The buggy whip equivalent would be the IDE.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#89

Post by imtringued »

XorNot wrote: post #38
henry_bone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Star Trek: First Contact: "When you build a machine to do a man's job, you take something away from the man." You surrendered the need to think to the machine. You are lesser for it. I don't think these AIs are just removing drudgery, like, say, a calculator. They actually do the work. Or more correctly, they produce something that will pass for the work. Wholesale embracing of this sort of technology is bad for…

Does this mean pair programming makes you a worse engineer? Or even just "asking for a second opinion"?

If you do pair programming and the other person always does all the work, then yes.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#90

Post by imtringued »

smoldesu wrote: post #10
teknopaul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications remains small." That's not my experience, I am continuously amazed by the amount of tasks worker bees manage to do in excel. I kind of wish MS access was more of a thing, because when eventually it doesn't scale and you need a "proper" system, it takes a rewrite.

That's fair enough, I've seen some pretty cool things in spreadsheet software too. My larger point, though, is that most people end up using spreadsheets to do the same thing. It's fun to imagine novel uses for a spreadsheet, like a DAW or video game, but ultimately it's not very useful for that. Similarly, ChatGPT is great for writing convincing text - that's what everyone uses it for. Can it solve math though? Not…

>Mostly, I'm a curmudgeon and I despise these "flying car of the future" articles.

When you understand how the sausage is made it is hard to be overly excited. I fail to be "mind blown" by ChatGPT because every time someone claims it can do task X they only managed to scrape by within its significant limitations.

If you want superhuman intelligence you are going to need to break through the short term memory limitation of humans. If the AI can memorize a 1 million line code base then it will be practical but everyone is only working with small code snippets or generates the entire code from scratch and then extrapolates that to a million line codebase even though that isn't possible. That is the height of impracticality.

And before anyone accuses me of moving goalposts. I'm not the one moving them. It's the people telling me it can make manual programming obsolete. Why not just stick with what it can do instead of making these claims?

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