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Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

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Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#401

Post by WWLink »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #332
zwkrt wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the "main source of inequality" is that tech allows a small number of people to use technological and fiscal leverage to make an outsized impact on society as a whole. Anyone who has a job that produces value in a 1:1 way is positioned to be 'disrupted'. NLP, etc, just provides more tools for companies to increase their leverage in the market. My bet is that GPT-4 is probably better at being a paralegal than at l…

This is exactly what has happened to commercial and investment banking (market/trading) in the last 30 years. Computers and mass automation. Even if your profits only grow with inflation (in reality, they grow much faster), but you can reduce costs each year (less labour required), then return on equity continues to rise. It is crazy to me that most big commercial banks still have so many physical branches. I guess t…

This has changed considerably. Chase remodeled most of their existing branches so they have like, 1 teller, and 2 or 3 people sitting at desks for other transactions. That's it. The days where your usual branch had a line of like 15 tellers are long gone. Out here in southern california, I think they also closed many of their branches in the past few years.

But looking back further - ohhhhhh yeah dude. Oh yeah. Totally. For a brief period my mom worked at a BofA facility that _processed paper checks_. Like they had a whole big office for it. That's completely 100% gone now. The checks get scanned at the point of entry (cash registers, teller counters, etc) and then shredded.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#402

Post by 1attice »

WalterBright wrote: post #383
1attice wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet. So what? You are performing 'induction from history', which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur. Discontinuities occur. Fire gets tamed. Alphabets get invented. What went before is only a solid guide to the future absent any major disruption to the status quo . There is no a-prior…

> which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur The "this time it's gonna be completely unlike anything seen before!" is much more suspect. > fleshing out your position here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window The parallels with your theory are unmistakable. Prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work.

You still haven't stepped away from historical induction -- your argument still depends on this time not being radically different than last time. There are good reasons -- presented everywhere, right now -- to suppose that this time is substantively different. Sundar Pichai called the invention of AI the most important thing humanity has worked on -- more important than fire, or the alphabet -- and I share his view. It's out there, commonly, in the intellectual wild; you cannot, on pain of being unconvincing, simply ignore it. "Big, if true," and it very well might be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqd516M0Y5A

I propose that you invest in a more convincing line of argument. The burden of proof lies heavy upon you.

Secondly -- for the life of me -- I don't see how we got from "prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work" (a claim, by the way, that Keynes would take exception to) to the view that automating most of the intellectual work on the planet will have nugatory impact, or that we'll all just vy to become celebrated Twitch streamers or influencers or whatever (assuming that synthetic influencers don't take off -- oh, wait, they did: https://www.synthesia.io/glossary/ai-influencer)

Even were you correct (and Keynes wrong), the instantaneous conversion of meaningful labour --- journalism, counselling, engineering -- into, as you say, "make-work" (the position I infer you are taking) would have tremendous cost.

Need I invoke Rawls here on widely-distributed self-respect/self-esteem? It's actually one of the prerequisites, he notes, for a stable civilization; https://academic.oup.com/book/32571/chapter-abstract/2703665...

At minimum, the psychological impact of such a transition would make the developed world's COVID hangover look like a day at the zoo.

Finally, the Parable of the Broken Window specifically refers to destructive work. Non-productive work is not covered. https://finshots.in/archive/dig-holes-and-get-paid-to-fill-t.... And that is to say nothing about how economic fruits are distributed -- a whole other matter, upon which, I again infer, you have no further comment.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#403

Post by amrocha »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #324
amrocha wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of life is not achievable on minimum wage, even if you choose to live in a small city

GP said "barber". You said "minimum wage". I'm confused. GP is saying (I think) that you can live well outside a big city on working class wages.

You're right, I conflated the two in my head. The jobs they listed are jobs associated with minimum wage, or close to it, in my mind.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#404

Post by 1attice »

1attice wrote: post #402
WalterBright wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur The "this time it's gonna be completely unlike anything seen before!" is much more suspect. > fleshing out your position here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window The parallels with your theory are unmistakable. Prosperity doesn't come from jobs that are little more than make-work.

You still haven't stepped away from historical induction -- your argument still depends on this time not being radically different than last time. There are good reasons -- presented everywhere, right now -- to suppose that this time is substantively different. Sundar Pichai called the invention of AI the most important thing humanity has worked on -- more important than fire, or the alphabet -- and I share his view.…

Allow me to indulge in my own historical induction.

Up until Louis Pasteur invented the germ theory of illness, it was broadly understood, across many different cultures, that disease had its origins in one or all of: witchcraft, possession, loose morals, blocked meridians, etc.

Were you to do historical induction on the spawning of illness theory, you might well conclude that no theory of illness would be scientifically verifiable. You might have argued that anyone claiming a radical change in medicine was deluded, alarmist, or simply excitable.

And you would have missed out on the multiple decades of extra health that you've had on account of antibiotics, sterile procedure, and disinfectant. Your induction from history would have caused you to miss the disanalogy.

Something to think about next time you're at the doctor.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#405

Post by karmasimida »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #119

Wow - this is just wild. I've seen lots of arguments around "AI won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs." Even if you take that with the benefit of the doubt (which I don't really think is warranted): 1. You don't need to take everyone's job. You just need to take a shitload of people's jobs. I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality,…

AI is Pandora’s box, once it is out it is out.

We are into a new reality and no need to lament the old one, because it is gone anyway

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#406

Post by winternett »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #119

Wow - this is just wild. I've seen lots of arguments around "AI won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs." Even if you take that with the benefit of the doubt (which I don't really think is warranted): 1. You don't need to take everyone's job. You just need to take a shitload of people's jobs. I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality,…

I see the real story at the end of the day as "Ai will take a sht load of jobs from everyone until it screws up royally, and then companies will need to rehire at a higher rate...

We keep committing seppuku by emerging technology to where hubris becomes a large scale financial or even a physical crash, and the smartest ones of us avoid the knee jerk reaction to quick over-adoption of new and unpredictable tech. The main problem is that there are so many forces pushing us towards adoption of whatever is packaged and marketed most heavily, and we need to incorporate better rollbacks and ways of gradually adopting new tech. Testing is also a quickly dying art, as seen with Twitter... This will be our downfall if not properly reigned in.

The people (self proclaimed tech leaders) who we exalt have already shown us that they are impulsive, and driven by greed, vanity, and ego. If we continue to let them act as "golden children", and continue to make them more and more wealthy, there will be no going back to fairness in our world. Tax them fairly, hold them accountable, stop letting them influence politics, stop electing rich people and people with conflicts of interest, and let everyone have a voice and equal opportunity to climb into responsibility based on their incremental successes... We're not doing any of that at all right now -- it greatly worries me.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#407

Post by robben1234 »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #387
nl wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should speak to some teachers - or at least school students. I guarantee students are more excited about it than tech people because they are using it to successfully pass assignments.

The system gave them work to keep them busy, now its been automated and keeps the system busy. I only regret it didn't exist when I was in school.

Most things can only be learned through practice. Students skipping practice makes the whole system useless. Spinning wheels just to spin wheels.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#408

Post by nl »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #387
nl wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should speak to some teachers - or at least school students. I guarantee students are more excited about it than tech people because they are using it to successfully pass assignments.

The system gave them work to keep them busy, now its been automated and keeps the system busy. I only regret it didn't exist when I was in school.

I think saying "oh it's busy work" without proposing a solution that doesn't involve orders of magnitude more work for teachers probably should spend a a few days in close proximity to a high school teacher.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#409

Post by robben1234 »

JamesAdir wrote: post #136
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #119

Wow - this is just wild. I've seen lots of arguments around "AI won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs." Even if you take that with the benefit of the doubt (which I don't really think is warranted): 1. You don't need to take everyone's job. You just need to take a shitload of people's jobs. I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality,…

You are a founder of a startup. A notable VC wants to invest millions of dollars but insists that the contract will be in their language which is Finnish. Would you trust GPT to translate the contract or reach out to a professional human translator? We've got Google translate from 2006, and there are still millions of translators at work all around the world. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss those jobs.

Here's an anecdote for you:

Recently I needed a couple payslips translated from German to English and then certified. Google Translate can translate, but cannot certify.

Professional licensed translator took significant amount of money and sent me a document for review with most numbers somehow mixed up. It took days of back and forth over the email for them to fix it.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#410

Post by oska »

xp84 wrote: post #166
mostlysimilar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is possibly a death spiral. GPT is only possible because it's been trained on the work humans have learned to do and then put out in the world. Now GPT is as good as them and will put them all out of work. How can it improve if the people who fed it are now jobless?

Presumably it will improve the same way humans did -- once it's roughly on par with us it'll be just as capable of innovating and trying new things. The only difference is that for humans, trying a truly new approach to something isn't really done that often by most. "GPT-9" might regularly and automatically try recomputing all the "tricky problems" it remembers from the past with updated models, or with a few tweake…

> once it's roughly on par with us it'll be just as capable of innovating and trying new things

This is complete nonsense. An LLM has no ability to innovate or 'try new things'.

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