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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

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Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#51

Post by AnarchismIsCool »

Biologist123 wrote: post #43

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child l…

When I was growing up they just traumatized us all into thinking our houses were going to burn down all the time and we'd frequently find ourselves on fire necessitating rolling around on the floor. Also, quicksand and outrunning alligators.

Then again, that is the reality they're in now, so there's an argument they should be spending a good amount of time getting ready for that. I'd rather they not be sitting there pikachu-faced when the rate of human migration skyrockets so they decide to just start killing them all or something similarly stupid.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#52

Post by thanatos519 »

I'm much less concerned about the impact of AI than about climate change and ecological destruction.

A radical shift in the distribution of work and wealth is long overdue.

I'm sure our children will be better off for AI if it can help us get through the coming war, famine, plague, and "natural" disasters.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#53

Post by moshun »

Biologist123 wrote: post #43

The writer says: “[My children] are more viscerally worried about climate change”. I’m not surprised. I recently heard from a friend that her 7 year-old child had, as a class assignment, to create a timeline setting out the impact of climate change over their lifetime. I was gobsmacked, and feel this amounts to a form of psychological child abuse. It’s a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, but having a small child l…

I’m not sure being honest with children about something that impacts them so heavily is the wrong move here.

Traumatized or not, I suspect teaching children about the problem in clear terms will lead to a better informed generation of scientists, lawmakers, and voters. Hopefully they make and stick to better decisions then those that came before.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#54

Post by Swizec »

inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

> It seems like our careers could just be snuffed out instantly with little recourse available. I say "seems like" because I have no idea if that's real or perceived but it's very hard plan ahead.

If the average business leader remains as unable to precisely express their desires as they are now, our jobs will be just fine. 80% of the work is in the wisdom and experience to ask the right questions to tease out what people really want and consolidate their conflicting desires.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#55

Post by ildjarn »

keiferski wrote: post #13

I think kids are a lot more prepared for this future than professional technologists probably realize. If you ask them today what profession they want to be, you often get “YouTuber” as an answer. Which might seem like a joke, but I think it’s actually quite accurate in terms of future professions. The jobs at most risk from AI are “anonymous” ones in which the creator of the work is unknown to its consumer. Writing,…

You don’t think AI generated content creators are a threat?

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#56

Post by j4yav »

I feel like the future pretty much has to be more local, in person, and human, and as much as you can interact with the internet as a utility rather than as the main source of interaction in your life it is for the best. That’s probably the best lesson you can teach your kids if you don’t want them to be part of society that just sort of permanently falls into the internet, always plugged in via goggles or brain implant and fed AI generated content, never to return. It already seems like there’s a group that is basically terminally online and it seems like it’s only going to get worse.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#57

Post by findingMeaning »

Well at least you guys are lucky enough to have kids. There are us unfortunate ones who happen to just graduate at the wrong time. We, are eternal juniors, with niche skills within a narrow CS domain. So competition is extremely high for us.

We would be lucky if we get to survive next five years. There is no way for us to get into something tangible, if we are resident of relative south (asia, SA, Africa). Surviving for the next day in the developed world is the game we play.

How about home country? What is the point when globalization floods the local market. We were wiped out there, hence we had to leave. Everything we want to do, giant corpos do it cheap or for free. In relative south of the world, people lack money. So data privacy doesn't matter. The concept of paying for software doesn't exists.

In the developed side, existing is a dread with no hope. There are enough competent people joining the field who get more priorities. For eternal juniors like us, please show hope. Pretty you may find it difficult to relate to any words here. Anyone born in the west are taught to find their purpose, other countries not so much. It's all about money because money solves 99% issue over there.

Username checks out.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#58

Post by safety1st »

inference-lord wrote: post #12

I became a parent about a year ago, completely unprepared for this future. My Son was born around the time ChatGPT-4 was released and I remember all the Geoffrey Hinton interviews which were really apocalyptic sounding, he is has a kind of kookie mad scientist vibe about him too. I remember thinking, like what the fuck just happened? Like I just woke up in a movie. I've learned to accept the situation, and realize th…

I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Right now we have LLMs and they're a very far cry from any form of AI that could replace a software engineer wholesale. In my little corner of the software engineering universe I have not seen any credible hiring manager say they were going to fire developers and replace them with LLMs (I have seen this threat from one or two of the least credible and least successful hiring managers I know, which I think speaks volumes).

Here is what I would worry about, as a software engineer if you are not using an LLM as part of your workflow and using it well, yeah you may ultimately lose your job and you may even deserve to lose it. Despite their flaws they're immensely powerful simply because they represent a whole new class of tooling. The tools in this industry change all the time and you never get to stop learning, this is just another example.

But how someone could look at all this and have it factor into their decisions about whether to have children... is beyond me. I think that person has to be living in the realm of speculative fiction, not in the present material universe. We don't have AI. We don't really have a clear path to the general AI that would be a thing you could just swap in for a random employee. I don't know who this chick is who wrote this article, I hate to throw shade but she's like a young mother who thinks about things and is worried? What is her specific experience with hiring and with AI? "Fire and replace with AI" is not a real hiring trend.

I don't even think the software industry as we know it is under threat... I think LLMs might 10x our productivity when we iron out the kinks but the demand for more software in the world will simply grow with them. I am referring to Marc Andreessen's observation about a decade ago that "software is eating the world," this is still the case, there is no sign that the demand for software is declining, if anything it's increasing, so if we learn to make software cheaper with robot helpers it's unlikely the dev job market is going to be decimated (sure maybe it could stagnate but a job market in the doldrums is hardly a reason to not have a kid or the start of the apocalypse).

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#59

Post by geitir »

bbor wrote: post #31
alumic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I drove around today listening to the most recent Lex Fridman podcast, in which the founder of Boston Dynamics was describing replacing human labor with machines that were capable of learning by seeing. I have family in the trades. I pursued tech and fell in love with the field. Listening to the interviewee, I began to feel sick to my stomach at the glib description of what amounts to ripping away peoples' livelihood…

Work is equivalent to worth. We are not biologically or sociologically prepared to differentiate the two. I’m gonna say there’s a very very selective “we” in use here. I’m sure you’re accurately reporting your surroundings, but many people outside America (and a few within it!) are very much already there. Plus, like, isn’t that kinda depressing? What are disabled people “worth”? If I choose to be an unpopular niche…

There is worth in the spiritual sense in that all living things are worthy and all of man are created as equals.

There is worth in a sociological sense in that a disabled person may be a positive contributor to the society in one way, but because of their disability cannot be in another. Similarly a niche artist is a positive contributor in their niche, where an unpopular artist indicates they may be considered less of a contributor than others.

In the sociological sense I would argue yes it is possible to compare “worth”.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#60

Post by throwanem »

Vecr wrote: post #48
throwanem wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VNM applied in the realm of ethics is definitionally utilitarian.

> That your utility function may be off model from the most doctrinaire possible interpretation of the theory does not seem to me the same as saying this is not an example of a theory. Sure, I don't want to get into a definitional argument. However, any VNM utility function can be the exact opposite of anything you propose as good, just by inverting the comparison order. If you have numerical outcome scores that coul…

Well, yeah, that's the fundamental failure of utilitarianism: it's so abstract as to say nothing meaningful, because it explicitly delegates the entire definition of what actually is ethical to the utility function, and nothing past that is distinct from any other ethical theory. Again I grant this varies from Bentham's definition, but Bentham has been dead a long time now. Modern utilitarianism has been defined by Singer, for better or for worse - mostly worse - and Singerism is what I describe. In any case, Bentham's version still bears the flaw; 'good' can stretch with sufficient cleverness to cover all the virtue or deontology in the world.

> It's a HN thing.

I doubt that; this and your prior comment are the second and third time I've seen it in eleven years of active participation here. Are you using some kind of extension or script to augment the UI? If so, I strongly suspect that is causing it.

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