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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

#351

Post by gavinhoward »

teawrecks wrote: post #329
gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

"Sure, robot assembly units have a much higher throughput with a much lower error rate and virtually zero risk for injury, but they lack a 'human touch'. That will be our differentiating factor." Even if one manufacturer gets away with this argument, it fundamentally hinges on them being the minority. The question then becomes who will be the lucky few to get away with this argument? And what will the vast majority c…

Working machines are different from thinking machines.

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

#352

Post by Wowfunhappy »

ModernMech wrote: post #260
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer in the Javascript console is still a correct answer. The user did not specify a level of precision, and web browsers are programmed to use a precision level which is reasonable under most circumstances. If the user needs a higher level of precision, he or she needs to specify that as part of the question (such as by not using floating point numbers). I don't mean to be pedantic. I teach coding to elementar…

> I don't mean to be pedantic. I'm sorry in advance, but this reply is just to meet pedantry with pedantry. > A computer will always do what you tell it to do. This is the Bohr model of computers. It's the kind of thing you tell elementary school students because it's conceptually simple and mostly right, but I think we know better here on HN. Pedantically, computers don't always do what you tell them to, because the…

That's true. An earlier version of my comment called out hardware problems as an exception—insufficient error correction for neutrino bit flips is fundamentally a hardware problem—but I removed it before posting. In a way, I feel hardware bugs do still follow this principle: The electrons in the circuits are behaving as they always do, just not in the way we intended. But I agree this gets philosophically messy—no one "programmed" the electrons.

My underlying point is that, at least in 99.999% of cases, the problem isn't the calculator, it's the human using the calculator incorrectly. And although you could draw some parallels between calculators and AIs with regard to selecting the right tool and knowing when and how to use it, I'd say the randomness involved in an LLM is fundamentally different.

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

#353

Post by [deleted] »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #247
buf wrote: post #2

There are two types of people: 1. People afraid AI will take their jobs 2. People using AI to take people's jobs

The language is all wrong here. You don't own your job. You are not entitled to perpetual payment for whatever it is you are doing. A job is not a possession. You are not being robbed of your job. You simply do labor in exchange for money based on the value of that labor. And sometimes you do that under some long term arrangement with an employer and sometimes based on more short term arrangements. Either way, the ar…

[deleted]

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

#354

Post by gavinhoward »

m348e912 wrote: post #27
gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

AI driven business will be cheaper, and faster. The "better" factor will be a case by case situation. One could argue that your competitor combined with their skills, expertise, AND AI would have a market advantage over you.

And my bet is that they will not, long term.

If you use "AI" to increase productivity, you're doing it by reviewing the code from the "AI" less than you would your own. That lack of review, and testing, will slow down velocity over time as the software becomes untenable, unmanageable, and too complicated to understand.

Meanwhile, my slow velocity at first will result in great design and little technical debt. Eventually, my velocity will increase, and I'll beat my competitors.

"A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [1]

[1]: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185

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

#355

Post by asdfman123 »

gavinhoward wrote: post #332
asdfman123 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: one thing I think AI will be able to do really well early on is refactoring. Code is often ugly because humans just don't have the time to make it look nice. But if I had a good AI tool, I could make my code beautiful. This is hardly the first time humans have invented a tool to make complicated tasks easy. The sweet spot has always been knowing how to use the tools to maximize your productivity, but al…

Countercounterpoint: I doubt that AI will do as well in refactoring as me. I refactor religiously . I hate code that is subpar, so I'll refactor and refactor. In my current project, I have 180 commits that mention refactoring in the log message, and some of those are huge redesign commits. And I haven't even released it yet!

I would do that if I could, but at my brand name tech company (and a lot of others) they seem to treat refactoring as completely wasted time.

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

#356

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #306
rob74 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't we first automate the jobs that need to be done, but nobody wants to do anymore? One example: sorting mixed garbage and filtering out recyclable plastics (of various types), cans, paper etc. would be a great application for AI, wouldn't take away anyone's job (at least not in developed countries), and would be good for the environment.

People do want to do them. That's why they do them. They simply don't ask for more money than the AI would require yet. Once there's a sufficient margin in it, not exactly at the cut-off but perhaps at 150-200%, they're gone.

> People do want to do them. That's why they do them.

Incredibly naive. Very few people enjoy their jobs. I imagine job satisfaction of anything dealing with garbage is low. The only reason people stick to it is because it pays decently, plus maybe some sort of factor intrinsic to the job like not having to deal with people.

But generally, people do their job because they have to do them in order to put a roof over their head and food on the table.

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

#357

Post by zelphirkalt »

goldfeld wrote: post #113
rf15 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I am absolutely no fan of the new AI products, and the only question you have to answer for yourself is: can you leverage this technology for what you are trying to do? For me the answer was "yes", and I now enjoy having copilot around to dynamically type boilerplate I'd need much longer to type and fill out myself.

Why would you be absolutely no fan of a sure technological improvement? Is it because of the personal threat to professionals? Not commenting personally on you here, but I am very surprised at programmers' lack of nose for opportunities and how, after realizing GPT could do coding even before replacing retail and industry jobs, coders are completely on the defense. Is it a threat to job availability and security? Yes…

I think many are not actually against usage of these kinds of ML models in general, but against what is done using them right now: Code laundering, violation of licenses, intransparency, training on personal data, no responsible person to talk to, no way of having data removed, that one does not want in the model or the model to train from, and more.

Any of these can lead to dystopia.

When we use computer vision to identify benign or malignant tumors, we might cost someone a job, but at least what that model was trained on can be known and we are not leaking personal data in the model and probably there is no violation of licenses or similar to the data that was used to train the model. The model is very limited in output. The consequences are kind of simple to monitor or predict, because the model can only be used in its specialized area of use.

With the new crop of ML models the situation is different. Lawmakers were asleep while these things became popular and there is no knowing, how it will all pan out, because the output is of a more general nature, that can touch any subject, any area of expertise. No one knows what they have been trained on and whether there is anything in that training data, that should not have been used, and there is no simple way (that I know of) to operate out any such data after training the model.

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

#358

Post by ajmurmann »

sharemywin wrote: post #339
ajmurmann wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a median child mortality or literacy rate? For net-worth, which I never mentioned, your own source shows increases over time of both median and average since 2016. All the distressing situations you describe of course are real, but were they less common in the US in the past? QoL has gone up tremendously over the last fifty years, especially if you look at it globally. Do we need something like UBI to avoid…

UBI? let's just start with reliable food, housing and medical(including mental health). and shore up some kind of retirement funds. then lets talk about cost effective daycare so raising a child doesn't destroy your financial prospects. If there's anything left I'm all about it.

I suggest UBI because I believe it's the most cost-effective way to allow people to get those things. Targeted intervention have often high overhead and undesirable side effects. For example, demand-side interventions to support limited goods and services drive up the price of these things while cost controls frequently lead to prices going actually up, due to the regulatory overhead. See https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...

Let's just raise the poverty floor instead and let people decide what to do with the money.

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

#359

Post by fnovd »

gavinhoward wrote: post #314
fnovd wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that all was very rewarding for you. I'm not sure how it translates into a business. We don't want to teach accountants to deploy their own calculator from the command line and we don't want pilots to do math while they're flying. You act like encouraging people not to think is a problem. Thing is, you'd be wrong. We want people not just to think, but to focus. If I'm a pilot and I have to worry about the ru…

You don't know much about aviation, do you? Aviation is about redundancy . Redundancy is a good use of a pilot's focus. That's why I did both. I didn't blindly trust my calculator to not have bugs (even though I wrote it!), and I didn't blindly trust my hand calculations to be correct. If they agree, though, it's a good sign that everything is in good order. That's what redundancy is for, to ensure that a problem in…

Redundancy is not a good use of focus for most people (except SREs and the like). The whole point of redundancy is to remove something from focus. I'm guessing you checked everything by hand for the sole purpose of not having to focus on these calculations mid-flight. I'm sure most commercial pilots rely on a larger organization to make these checks for them and their organization probably employs its own system of checks and redundancies at scale. Putting that all on the pilot is not going to give you a sustainable transportation business.

If you're just trying to get off Gilligan's island, that's another thing entirely.

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

#360

Post by Herval_freire »

JohnFen wrote: post #334
Herval_freire wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening. If AI has a 99% chance of replacing you, then you'd rather consider the 1% alternative simply because there's no place for you anymore? If AI will replace you there are steps that can be taken to prevent it from replacing you. This involves things like Resistance or changing what you do into something that can't be as easily repl…

> What should affect whether something is considered is it's likelihood of happening. Right, which is why I don't spend a lot of time considering a future where "AI content may even be preferable and better than human produces content." In part because I don't think this is likely at all. But also in part because if it does happen, then there's literally no way to compete with that. My career will be over, and it's u…

>I'm having a very hard time seeing what could be done (in the possible future we're talking about).

Easy. While industrial automation has largely eliminated repetitive mechanical tasks robotics has not yet advanced to the point where it can replicate the versatility of the human form. The gap is partly closing with 3D printing but this is not moving nearly as fast as AI. Additionally there's just multitudes of construction jobs, maintenance jobs, physical jobs that can't be replaced.

I wouldn't go so far as to call jobs involving physical movement "menial". Think of the machinist and the carpenter.

This is one path. The other path is regulation or resistance. Ban AI usage like how the government bans your right to copy things you own (aka money).

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