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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#171

Post by tablespoon »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #149
tablespoon wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only , with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little mo…

While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.

> While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.

I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#172

Post by turkeygizzard »

DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

If you are a manager, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire senior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire managers and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire anyone and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce?

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#173

Post by rhn_mk1 »

anonyfox wrote: post #160
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy…

Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#174

Post by anon7725 »

KrugerDunnings wrote: post #77

Working as a software engineer I often feels like I am living in the world of the Handmaidens Tale as a women with a functioning womb where the hole of society is organised around controlling everything I do. Hopefully LLM will change this but I do not underestimate the intellectual laziness of most "knowledge workers"

You’re saying this un-ironically in the post-Roe world?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#175

Post by anonyfox »

tablespoon wrote: post #133
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?] If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it . But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in mos…

you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth. They might call the police, but all thats needed is the officers ignoring the call willingly. Why should they defend those billionaires? What should they do? Rich people depend on many individual poor laborers, all of them can simply decide to no longer accept his state of affairs and there is lietrally nothing the billionaires could do against it.

Ideally, defund the police and so on, so that every state worker also is keen on getting that wealth redistribution done.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#176

Post by green_man_lives »

crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

The Luddites were not protesting technology because technology is inherently evil. They were against the capitalistic ownership of the means of production.

So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up.

When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you, there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former laborers to exist, or just let them starve.

So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of people live in the resulting AI-powered society.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#177

Post by raldi »

tablespoon wrote: post #163
raldi wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?

> What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product? Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart? Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.

Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution.

If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#178

Post by tablespoon »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #144
tablespoon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?] If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it . But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in mos…

I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well conn…

> I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased.

Those round to the same number: 0.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#179

Post by anon7725 »

imtringued wrote: post #41
PaulWaldman wrote: post #11

Current higher level programming languages are developed for humans to develop software closer to their natural language. If in the future humans will be writing and debugging little code, these LLMs will naturally evolve to directly writing Assembly. Scary to think about, but also makes me wonder how many non-technical people cope today with the "black box" of a computer. About twenty years ago, I had a professor ex…

I don't understand why it would write in assembly. That is not portable and it makes verification difficult and also assembly has less grammatic structure which LLMs rely upon.

I wonder what the best output language for an LLM is? The one that has the most training examples? Or something that has other properties that make it easier to generate?

I’d guess that the languages with the fewest implicit behaviors (so no Scala or Haskell) would be easiest. Maybe Go is the generation language of choice?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#180

Post by LeoPanthera »

angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

For what it's worth, that was exactly my experience with GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is a lot better at generating code. Almost spookily good, at least for some languages. It makes far fewer mistakes.
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