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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#221

Post by ben_w »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #162
marcusjt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it lie? Or just get things wrong sometimes? Lying requires knowledge that what you are saying is not the truth, and usually there's a motive for doing so. I don't think ChatGPT is there yet... or is it?

Sure, it's not lying, you're right, there's no will there, I'm anthropomorphism. It is producing entirely wrong facts / pseudo-opinions (as it can't actually have an opinion).

I was about to suggest "pathologically dishonest", but then I looked up the term and that seems to require being biased in favour of the speaker and knowing that you're saying falsehoods.

"Confabulate" however, appears to be a good description. Confabulation is, I'm told, associated with Alzheimer's, and GPT's output does sometimes remind me of a few things my mum said while she was ill.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#222

Post by throwaw12 »

strange wording

> It is not AI that will end up stealing your job,

> it will be stolen by people that have learnt to use AI to become more productive

This is by definition AI stealing your job. AI will not come and say: hey move on, I will do this job, everything is accomplished indirectly.

With same logic you can say, there are no bad politicians, it's people who are following their advice are bad

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#223

Post by lnsru »

globalise83 wrote: post #219

I think this is right. There is no AI in the foreseeable future that would be able to understand a complex business, prioritise and roadmap some future strategy, and convert that into business requirements detailed enough to implement as working software, architect a proper solution, and then work with an AI to develop and verify the software through an incremental development process. But I do believe that there are…

You can outsource everything right now to some dirt cheap offshore team. I doubt, that outsourcing alone will make you very rich.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#225

Post by gspencley »

I'm not as worried about AI "stealing" my job as I am worried that it's going to make my job unappealing.

As a software engineer, what motivates me most is the creative aspect of it. I like building and designing things. I like thinking about every line of code that I write. If people start outsourcing their coding to generative AI, and if I find myself feeling pressured to follow suit in order to keep up, then everything I enjoy about coding goes away.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#226

Post by Retric »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #204
Retric wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have been increasing automation, but over the lifetime of the company it’s a reasonable description for how the majority of all packages where handled. What’s eye opening is the kiva robots only increase the items picked per worker per hour from ~100 to ~300 even though they drastically reduce the amount of walking.

"only"? You just pointed out that they result in 300% increased worker productivity and that's "only"??? Especially when this discussion is based around someone saying they won't use technological productivity enhancers because they want to go the "bespoke" route.

How much support staff for that hardware + how large an investment + how large are ongoing costs like electricity + how much risk if that hardware fails vs offsetting 30$/hour/worker. So yes “only” as it’s a win but not nearly as large as a win than it seems like.

PS: “300% increased worker productivity” a 300% increased productivity for pickers would be 4x as many packages picked not 3x. But, again actual productivity didn’t increase that much because some people need to maintain these systems and most of them expect more than 15$/hour.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#227

Post by klodolph »

ajmurmann wrote: post #189
dahart wrote: post #84

At some level it’s tautological. Initially I had a similar negative reaction other commenters had, but I think I’m deciding I like the people framing. Obviously this is not an either-or. It’s not a question of AI vs people, it’s both AI+people. But only people are making the choices. People are building AI, people who can use AI will choose to use it, and people who run businesses will choose to allow it and/or incor…

Comparing to outsourcing or, even less fitting, immigration is a terrible analogy. Those jobs and their income go to other humans. Other humans who will consume goods and services, this is especially true for immigration. I'd also argue that offshoring is morally positive because it moves the work and associated income to where people need it more, that's why the labor is cheaper there Both automation and global move…

I don’t think policing analogies is serving the conversation well.

Someone whose job disappears in a puff of smoke doesn’t have a reason to care about whether the job was automated or whether it was moved overseas—in both cases, the economic activity is still there (or more likely, it’s increased), but the workers who trained for it are no longer getting compensated, and our concerns are for the welfare of these workers. Social consequences and all that.

Manufacturing jobs face both outsourcing and automation. The resulting productivity gains have certainly not been “swallowed”—consumer goods are just so damn cheap and plentiful these days—but the overall impact on local economies is sometimes disastrous. If you take a look at the US manufacturing sector, the output is higher than ever (maybe minus a dent from COVID), and the resulting benefits are spread across the US population (better access to manufactured goods), but the relative power of labor and capital is diverging—and both automation and outsourcing are making that possible. They both allow capital owners to create goods with lower labor costs. That’s the whole point, and the analogy makes a lot of sense.

IMO, a big part of the problem is that capital owners are so effectively able to externalize risk.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#228

Post by JohnFen »

kfkfodlnfkfdk wrote: post #205
JohnFen wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I know people below the poverty line who have access to cheap forms of insulin that didn't even exist fifty years ago because rich people funded the research They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true

> They wouldn't even be alive if your lie was true

I'm not lying. I admit I could be wrong (although I can bring up counterexamples to yours), but I was not intentionally attempting to deceive anyone.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#229

Post by fnimick »

dahart wrote: post #207
ajmurmann wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing to outsourcing or, even less fitting, immigration is a terrible analogy. Those jobs and their income go to other humans. Other humans who will consume goods and services, this is especially true for immigration. I'd also argue that offshoring is morally positive because it moves the work and associated income to where people need it more, that's why the labor is cheaper there Both automation and global move…

Okay, it’s not a perfect analogy, but from the perspective of a business owner, the choice is to put money into something expensive like local human labor, or something cheaper whether it’s remote labor or automation of some kind. Lots of tools have been accused of stealing jobs over the years, from factory machines to vehicles to computers. In that sense, I’m only borrowing an analogy with a long rich tradition. The…

Who's making the choice though? There's no one person or even one group of people in charge, short of political regulation.

If AI is less expensive than humans, then anyone who doesn't use AI will get outcompeted by those who do. That's the unfortunate reality of markets. Wealth always becomes more and more concentrated until a democratic initiative opposes it.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#230

Post by timr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #196
the_doctah wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you haven't used it enough. ChatGPT is wrong all the time for me, sometimes insultingly wrong. The confidence in it's incorrect answers just makes it that much worse. I can't buy any of this hype for a "word-putting-together" algorithm. It's not real intelligence.

Please give some examples then. I've found the GPT-4 version to be remarkably accurate, and when it makes mistakes it's not hard to spot them. For example, I commented last week that I've found ChatGPT to be a great tool for managing my task list, and for whatever reason the "verbal" back-and-forth works much better for my brain than a simple checklist-based todo app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35390644 . B…

OK, here's one: this substack [1] was flying around a week or two ago, asserting that the marginal value of programmers will fall to zero by 2030. What a dream! No more annoying nerds!

The code in the post is wrong. For this "trivial" example, if you just blindly copied it into your code, it would not do what you want it to do. I love this example not just because it's ironic, but because it's a perfect illustration of how you need to know the answer before you ask for the solution. If you don't know what you're doing, you're gonna have a bad time.

I'm not at all concerned about the value of programmers falling to zero. I'm concerned that a lot of bad programmers are going to get their pants pulled down.

[1] https://skventures.substack.com/p/societys-technical-debt-an...

(Edit: and as a totally hot take, while I'm not worried about good programmers, I think the marginal value of multi-thousand word, think-piece blogposts is rapidly falling to zero. Who needs to pay Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlon to write silly, incorrect articles, when ChatGPT will do it for free?)

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