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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

#441

Post by timr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #420
timr wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked for an example and I provided one that I thought illustrated the mistakes GPT makes in a vivid way -- mistakes that are already leading people astray. The fact that this particular example was coupled with a silly prediction is just gravy. In short, I don't know if we "agree", but I think OP is/was correct that GPT generates lots of subtle mistakes. I'd go so far as to say that the folks filling this thread…

Getting back to that example from that post, though, thinking about it more, "remove all ASCII emojis except the one for shrugs" makes absolutely no sense, because you can't represent shrugs (either with a unicode "Person shrugging" character emoji, or the "kaomoji" version from that code sample that uses Japanese characters) in ASCII, at all. So yes, asking an LLM a non-sensical question is likely to get you a non-s…

Well, explain it however you like, but the point is that GPT is more than happy to confidently emit gibberish, and if you don't know enough to write the code yourself (or you're outsourcing your thinking to it), then you're going to get fooled.

I'd possibly argue that knowing how to ask the right question is tantamount to knowing the answer.

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

#442

Post by bradjohnson »

lanstin wrote: post #417
bradjohnson wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The answer in the Javascript console is still a correct answer. It's wrong in the same way that saying 1/1 = 1.0004 is wrong. It's not a matter of chosen precision in that it doesn't make the answer correct when you increase the number of zeros between 1 and 4.

It makes it less wrong. For most calculations people do we don’t that very many digits of precision for any one calculation.

That's true. I think that it is analogous to the discussion of AI limitations. Both of these are tools and are not categorically exclusive.

In the case of translation of floating point numbers from base-2 to base-10 we have to make approximations which will often be slightly wrong forever without regard for amount of precision.

With AI, depending on the pre-conditions, the AI could be stuck in a state of being slightly wrong forever for a specific question without regard to further refinement of the query.

These are both still useful as tools. We just need to be able to work on the amount of refinement of the answer that the AI gives, which may be able to be solved fairly well through prompt engineering, if not through the advancement of GPT itself.

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

#443

Post by moonchrome »

kingboss wrote: post #364
Herval_freire wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could one day be possible for AI content to be so superior to human content that it becomes distinguishable. We may actually be identifying human content by how inferior it is to AI generated content. It could be happening already.

Why would I choose the inferior product?

Have you met hipsters ?

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

#444

Post by ajmurmann »

rob74 wrote: post #276
dahart wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Why don't we first automate the jobs that need to be done, but nobody wants to do anymore?

Why do you think nobody is working on automating that? And if nobody wants to do these jobs why is anyone doing these jobs right now?

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

#445

Post by gavinhoward »

Closi wrote: post #431
gavinhoward wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea isn't to write better code faster, it's to build better products faster. All else being equal, better code means better products. Also, to have a better product without better code, you're implying that the design of the product is better and that these "AI" tools help with that. Until they can reason, they cannot help with design.

Everyone has limited time, and if AI assistance can increase the speed you can develop & iterate the product to better match user needs that is how it can result in a better product. Equally if it can help devs launch a month earlier, that’s a huge advantage in terms of working out early product/market fit. All things being equal, I would rather have a company with better product/market fit than one with great code (…

> if AI assistance can increase the speed you can develop & iterate the product to better match user needs that is how it can result in a better product.

That's a very big "if", and one I just don't think will exist.

Also, that only helps at the beginning. Add the product gets more complex, I believe the AI will help less and less until velocity will become slower than companies like mine.

And product/market fit is just a way for companies to cover up the fact that their founders wanted to found a company, not solve a real problem. If you solve a real problem first, founding a company is simple and you "just" have to sell your solution.

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

#446

Post by gavinhoward »

Closi wrote: post #437
gavinhoward wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need my business to grow. I want to support myself and my wife. That's it. You can call that whatever you like, but stagnation isn't it, unless you think that SQLite is stagnant because SQLite had the same business model. "AI" design will not help until we have a true AI that can reason. (I don't think we ever will.) Why is reasoning necessary? Because design is about understanding constraints and working wit…

GPT4 can clearly already reason IMO (I mean it can play chess fairly well without ever being taught, or if you create a puzzle from scratch and tell it to it it can try to work it out and describe the logical approach it took). It’s definitely surprising that a next-word generator has developed the ability to reason, but I guess that’s where we are! What is your definition of reasoning that you do not think GPT-4 wou…

> What is your definition of reasoning that you do not think GPT-4 would demonstrate signs of?

Heh, there have been many attempts to define reasoning. I haven't seen a good one yet.

However, I'm going to throw my hat into the ring, so be on the lookout for a blog post with that. I've got a draft and a lot of ideas. I'm spending the time to make it good.

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

#447

Post by Closi »

lanstin wrote: post #432
labrador wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to break it to you, but a for loop is a for loop is a for loop is a for loop...

Here, I have this short program; can you please tell me if it will terminate or loop forever?

Humans can’t solve this either :)

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

#448

Post by bradjohnson »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #352
ModernMech wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 on…

I don't think it's fundamentally different, and I think you're conflating complexity with randomness.

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

#449

Post by JohnBerryman »

softwaredoug wrote: post #257

Everyone’s worried about AI taking their software jobs, yet humanity faces existential problems around climate change, poverty, failed states, etc. And huge opportunities like space exploration and better health care. Maybe this has more to do with our ego - losing perceived status as masters of the universe, when in reality hard, intractable problems exist more than ever. Why aren’t we changing to work on them? Mayb…

I think that ego/status is a big part of it. And the loss aversion bias. Our thought process is "This thing is going to be able to do software as well as a human, therefor it is going to take my job." When a more optimistic and probably more realistic take is "This thing is going to do the boring parts of software, so I can spend my time building out the more interesting, big-picture parts of code. I'm going to be so much more productive." But the fear of loss is so much more distracting than the potential gain. ... And what is it that we fear losing? Status! Software development is in high demand, it's a sought after role, we feel "special".

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

#450

Post by Closi »

gavinhoward wrote: post #446
Closi wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT4 can clearly already reason IMO (I mean it can play chess fairly well without ever being taught, or if you create a puzzle from scratch and tell it to it it can try to work it out and describe the logical approach it took). It’s definitely surprising that a next-word generator has developed the ability to reason, but I guess that’s where we are! What is your definition of reasoning that you do not think GPT-4 wou…

> What is your definition of reasoning that you do not think GPT-4 would demonstrate signs of? Heh, there have been many attempts to define reasoning. I haven't seen a good one yet. However, I'm going to throw my hat into the ring, so be on the lookout for a blog post with that. I've got a draft and a lot of ideas. I'm spending the time to make it good.

Well GPT4 certainly fulfils the existing definitions of reasoning, so maybe you should call your thing something else instead of redefining ‘reasoning’ to mean something different?

Otherwise it’s just moving the goalposts.

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