Live data from Hacker News

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

cmte.ieee.org

471–480 of 496 posts

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

#471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree, but to be fair my perspective is informed by this talk I watched not too long ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmJ4xLC1ObU

I've now watched that video, and I'm going to say what I disagree with. First, he claims that Copilot/GPT only needs more data and more compute to get better. I disagree. It needs both, for sure, but I think it needs more. Also, it won't get any more data! As LLM's are used more and more, the data fed in will be more and more like what they would generate anyway, which will lead to the models overfitting on things an…

Interesting summary and rebuttal. Appreciate you taking the time to watch the video I linked.

>>He claims they have reasoning capabilities.

I think here you touch on the crux of LLM conversation. In my limited experience with GPT, it does appear to have some basic reasoning ability, but that could be that it's really good at regurgitating its trained dataset and it just appears that it's reasoning. I think over time we'll be able to sort this question out.

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

#472
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s absurd as well. Jobs won’t be stolen, different jobs will be created. At a certain point we will move past scarcity, and maybe we won’t have to labor to not die. What’s so important about a job? Humans need meaning, but meaning doesn’t have to be delivered by PayChex at the expense of the human soul.

Not having to labor is attractive to someone who has a solid foundation of accumulated wealth - at least a house with a garden in a first world country inherited from parents. For the rest of us skilled labor was (and still is for a while) a means to accumulate some wealth, get an own place to live, move to a different country we want to live in, get some things like travelling an hobbies that are not strictly necess…

It’s a fair point - health care isn’t the only thing holding us in bondage. I’d note that I think humans will still work, but it’ll be more directed towards causes (we see this emerging as a generational demand now that work be meaningful) that talk to the human. I think, and now we are really ranging afield, that we already see as society’s move to post scarcity reproduction rates drop materially and some of these issues around “where to live” become less crushing. Additionally, as the need to be proximate to a human hamster wheel containment facility (office) we can utilize the broader infrastructure for our bag of mostly carbon water home and garden.

I think the issue will be less about whether it’s possible or whether we won’t get what we want, but more about breaking down norms and inertia and biases and mental constraints and the need for accountants to keep us in hamster wheels for their moral view of the world.

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

#473

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…

I started a business over the last week and I Rapidly iterated domain names with chatgpt Did logo mockups in midjourney AI Did website list mockups in midjourney AI Rapidly iterated copy and cool sounding text with ChatGPT Got font faces and style guides with ChatGPT Got landing page code in React with ChatGPT I can code. I would have been distracted by juggling all of the designers that I hired, so distracted that I…

That sounds like an imitation of a business so far. How many sales have you closed? What have you delivered?

Your domain name means nothing, as long as it is not weird.

A logo is not necessary until you are big.

"Cool sounding text" does not give you sales or trust from clients.

Font faces are not of any importance when starting a business.

A well made web page with a structure and copy that is actually useful for potential clients is what is essential for an online business. An honest description of what you offer and on what terms. Good professionals can help you do this, or you can do this yourself with some effort and good sense. Bad professionals or AI will create something meaningless, window decoration.

I see a lot of programmers take the same attitude as small/medium size business owners, that the design and web site is a "storefront" or some kind of necessary evil to get done and out of the way as quickly as possible to get on with the "real work". But the actual real work is the web site if you're an online business. Your care should go into it.

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

#474
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These LLM's are not Turing-complete. Aren't they? I view them as "language processors", that execute one token (instruction) at a time, and use the token window as their working memory. Sure, they have a limit to their instruction count (8k/32) before stopping. The working memory is small, but 8k tokens goes a lot longer than 8 kB. I've seen you state in other comments that LLM's cannot reason. I used to think so t…

To demonstrate that LLM's are Turing-complete, give them a small program and some inputs, then tell them to tell you the outputs for each of the inputs. In order to be Turing-complete, they would need to have edges between nodes (I don't know what they are called in ML parlance) that can go to previous nodes, as well as edges that are only conditionally taken. > They exhibit intelligence in that they can understand a…

> give them a small program and some inputs, then tell them to tell you the outputs for each of the inputs

I just tried this with all three versions of ChatGPT (3.5 legacy, 3.5, 4), and they all did it correctly.

>In order to be Turing-complete, they would need to have edges between nodes (I don't know what they are called in ML parlance) that can go to previous nodes, as well as edges that are only conditionally taken.

If you look at a neural network at the lowest level, it is trivial to implement a NAND gate with them. It just takes a few nodes. And LLMs have a feedback loop through their context window.

With NAND gates and a feedback loop you can build any CPU.

There are many examples of people asking ChatGPT to act like a CPU and pretend to execute instructions, or like a Python interpreter, or a Dungeon Master and respond to what the human players do.

Now, that doesn't make it an AI in itself. But it shows that there is no fundamental limit to its computational capabilities.

> They exhibit the intelligence of the humans that wrote the material used to train their models, nothing more.

Do you mean that they're just pattern matching input text against a fuzzy database and responding with canned answers?

If so, that's not what's going on in my view. That might have been accurate for the earlier LLMs.

But the latest LLMs appear to have developed internal language processing, a world model, and capabilities to reason about things.

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

#475

I see this sentiment expressed frequently: > "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased." The average is far less important than the median , when it comes to social stability. You could argue th…

If you can not get your mind out of the employer/employee lie, then no progress can ever make anything better.

AI is a tool to help the employee get rid of the employer.

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

#476
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order for an AI to reason it doesn’t mean it has to be able to reason about everything at any level - most humans cant rediscover fundamental mathematical theorems from basic axioms, particularly if you keep removing them until they fail, but I don’t think that means most humans are unable to reason. Take this problem instead which certainly requires some reasoning to answer: “Consider a theoretical world where pe…

> "Consider a theoretical world where people who are shorter always have bigger feet. Ben is taller than Paul, and Paul is taller than Andrew. Steve is shorter than Andrew. Everyone walks the same number of steps each day. All other things being equal, who would step on the most bugs and why?" Because Ben is the tallest, his feet are the biggest, and because he takes the same amount of steps as the others, the amount…

“In this theoretical world, shorter people have bigger feet. Given the information provided, we can deduce the following height order:

Ben (tallest) Paul Andrew Steve (shortest) Since shorter people have bigger feet in this world, we can also deduce the following order for foot size:

Steve (biggest feet) Andrew Paul Ben (smallest feet) Assuming that everyone walks the same number of steps each day and all other things being equal, the person with the biggest feet would be more likely to step on the most bugs simply because their larger foot size would cover a greater surface area, increasing the likelihood of coming into contact with bugs on the ground.

Therefore, Steve, who is the shortest and has the biggest feet, would step on the most bugs.”

GPT4 solved it correctly. You didn’t.

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

#477
post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your big objection here is to using ChatGPT to generate entire paragraphs of text. I agree: I think it's rude to expect people to spend more time reading something than you spent writing it! But... there are still plenty of ways to integrate ChatGPT-like-tools into a writing process that I think avoid disrespecting your audience like that. I use it as a thesaurus, or to suggest ways my writing could be…

I think we're close enough to an understanding that I'll let you have the last word, except to correct one more misunderstanding. My objection to ChatGPT is yes, about generating full sentences. I object to it for many reasons, but not necessarily just because it's rude. My biggest concern is actually that it takes out the voice of the human. I have a hard enough time figuring out what people are thinking in person (…

> figuring out what people are thinking in person

Have you seen the latest research, where GPT-4 is shown to have "Theory of Mind"-like ability (what people are thinking) at a human 7-year old level?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083

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

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started a business over the last week and I Rapidly iterated domain names with chatgpt Did logo mockups in midjourney AI Did website list mockups in midjourney AI Rapidly iterated copy and cool sounding text with ChatGPT Got font faces and style guides with ChatGPT Got landing page code in React with ChatGPT I can code. I would have been distracted by juggling all of the designers that I hired, so distracted that I…

That sounds like an imitation of a business so far. How many sales have you closed? What have you delivered? Your domain name means nothing, as long as it is not weird. A logo is not necessary until you are big. "Cool sounding text" does not give you sales or trust from clients. Font faces are not of any importance when starting a business. A well made web page with a structure and copy that is actually useful for po…

sure, yet the point is that people at this stage would have hired others to help iterate, whether it generated sales or not, the transactions and velocity in the economy would have occurred from people trying things and paying others to help them.

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

#479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a huge amount of data supporting my viewpoint. Most of the content right now on the internet in books and in movies are generic human generated content. You literally picked the closest thing to AI-generated content, soulless statistics-driven garbage, literally the first thing that will be automated by AI in corporate media ;) > You can be creative all you want, it doesn't mean other people will care or wa…

>You literally picked the closest thing to AI-generated content, soulless statistics-driven garbage, literally the first thing that will be automated by AI in corporate media ;) I also picked the majority of all content. Generic soulless content makes up 99% of what's out there. Anything more than that is usually a random permutation which is immediately picked up and regurgitated until that unique content itself bec…

> Prove to me you didn't. Prove to me you did.

The same could be asked to any writer pre-AI, asking them to prove that they did not offload their job to a ghost writer, and that is actually not impossibile to prove, just talk with the person IRL ;)

Still, society is going down a terrible path with LLMs, a path filled with misinformation and meaningless garbage.

I believe common sense will prevail and legal limitations will be imposed, to avoid both the spread of misinformation and the degeneration of our culture (and this has already happened in the US, where you can't copyright AI-generated content).

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

#480
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3. People using AI to take other people’s jobs, because they’re afraid AI will take their jobs.

I'm in this boat. I was worried about AI for a while then I realized I have to figure out how to use it or get left behind. The problem is I am still having difficulty understanding how to use the tool effectively. Any advice would be much appreciated.

I think that's a good approach, and I've also taken it. I was skeptic but now I'm evaluating its strengths and weaknesses.

But also keep in mind there's lots of hype and lots of productivity gurus praising it as the greatest thing, instilling FMO on others.

Post reply on HN