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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

#91

Post by goatlover »

carapace wrote: post #76
goatlover wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the message of Frank Herbert in the Dune universe regarding machines. They’re useful up until you start letting them do the thinking for you. Which leads to laziness, stagnation and control by an elite. So did reliance on spice for that matter.

> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. - - - - This is good and well for existing minds, but I think a lot of people will let these machines raise their children and that might cripple them. Like if you let your kids use a wheelchair instead of learning to walk? It's an imperfect metaphor.

The new movie M3GAN raises that question. It's not a great movie, but even without the eventual horror elements, it would raise disturbing implications for creating doll robots that can do the work of parenting so parents can focus on what they really care about, like work.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#92

Post by euroderf »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #58
Karunamon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, it'll free us from the tedium of code writing and give us more time for meetings. And as everyone knows, meetings are what get real programmers excited.

An every-day all-day all-hands code review, in a feeble attempt to keep up with all the code being cranked out by the A.I.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#93

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

Their product MaestroAI is marketed as “for teams” (and of course with the obligatory fading-color call-to-action buttons) presumably to attract VC $$$ but I would love something like this (powered by LLMs) to extract info from all my documents.

Maybe something like this exists? Please no DEVONThink suggestions :)

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#94

Post by toss1 »

Gh0stRAT wrote: post #86
toss1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>>The light from a star going supernova or a tsunami hitting shore convey information without any kind of agency nor intent being involved.

Right, and I'm obviously speaking loosely, but the amount of information or information value is the amount of non-redundant 'surprise'.

Receiving the supernova's signal for the first time contains valuable information, but replaying it does not.

>>Are you assuming that humans have some non-physical soul which makes us somehow different from any other deterministic information-processing system?

No, I'm speaking about the current and near-intermediate-term state of AI. This current state is basically a mashup of everything it's 'seen' in training, but without a shred of understanding. It only spits back what is statistically the most likely string of words to occur in any situation.

Ordinary humans do far better because they have understanding. A simple example shows this: Asking ChatGPT this question: "Mikes mum had 4 kids; 3 of them are named Luis, Drake, and Matilda. What is the name of the 4th kid?" [0] ChatGPT utterly fails, even when told the answer is in the question.

As in my example with the deposition, it looks great but it is just a literal mashup of training data, and worse yet, is only outputting the most average data. This produces surprisingly emotionally satisfying results, which may be useful in some contexts (marketing copy?) but isn't close to the reasoning of an ordinary human.

I'm making no claim about whether AI can get there. I suspect it ultimately will. BUT, this layer is only a small component of what must be built to get to actually abstract concepts and wield them like any child. My minor in college was neuroscience and I still follow it a bit; we're a LOOONG way from understanding what it is to get and weild concepts, nevermind how to model or reproduce that in a computer.

That's all I'm saying - the current crop is impressive, maybe even useful in some applications, but nowhere near the kind of "intelligence" that is being touted.

[0] https://twitter.com/FeraSY1/status/1614976003092234241

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#95

Post by riskable »

teknopaul wrote: post #6
smoldesu wrote: post #4

> Widespread adoption of generative AI will act as a lubricant between systems, I largely agree with this article, but I feel like you have to be careful with these general predictions. Many technologies have purported themselves to be this "business lubricant" tech (ever since the spreadsheet), but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications remains small. It feels like the same can be said for generative AI…

"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.

I always tell people that spreadsheets should be used to display data, not store it. As soon as you use spreadsheets to store data you've begun the descent into darkness.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#96

Post by riskable »

blablablerg wrote: post #13
zabzonk wrote: post #3

> The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, giving these models a human-like feel. or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming

Or worse, subtly inaccurate. The problem I have with generative AI right now, its product looks like it makes sense and sometimes it does, but there is always the risk of total nonsense hidden somewhere in the middle. So you still need someone capable to check and correct for most professional work, and sometimes that is harder or more time consuming than making the product itself. The same sort of problem with self…

> there is always the risk of total nonsense hidden somewhere in the middle

This is true of human-generated code as well. Trust me: Reviewing other people's code is my day job.

It's exceptionally rare that a malicious actor is trying to sneak something into the code. The common scenario is the developer who's new to the project not fully understanding how everything works so they copy & paste something they think is necessary but ultimately isn't and could in fact be very wrong. Just like how ChatGPT works.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#97

Post by teddyh »

oneoff786 wrote: post #80
teddyh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds a lot like “rubber duck” debugging.

If you’re willing to overlook the small detail that it is the duck explaining to you how your code works rather than you explaining to the duck then sure

Except that the duck is an unreliable confabulator, and will cheerfully make up plausible-sounding fake information when “explaining”.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#98

Post by epistemer »

smoldesu wrote: post #4

> Widespread adoption of generative AI will act as a lubricant between systems, I largely agree with this article, but I feel like you have to be careful with these general predictions. Many technologies have purported themselves to be this "business lubricant" tech (ever since the spreadsheet), but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications remains small. It feels like the same can be said for generative AI…

[dead]

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#99

Post by oneoff786 »

teddyh wrote: post #97
oneoff786 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re willing to overlook the small detail that it is the duck explaining to you how your code works rather than you explaining to the duck then sure

Except that the duck is an unreliable confabulator, and will cheerfully make up plausible-sounding fake information when “explaining”.

Shrug. Precision seems like a low importance metric when suggesting interpretations of code for the purpose of debugging.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#100

Post by j45 »

goatlover wrote: post #56
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’s the message of Frank Herbert in the Dune universe regarding machines. They’re useful up until you start letting them do the thinking for you. Which leads to laziness, stagnation and control by an elite. So did reliance on spice for that matter.

Similar to using GPS vs the cognitive load not to and learning navigation with maps and memorization.

Or back up cameras in a car.

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