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Raising Children on the Eve of AI

juliawise.net

141–150 of 237 posts

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#141
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For autonomous robots to replace the millions of tradesmen and workers, it would require vastly more resources than are being put toward this now. I wouldn’t expect human labor to be replaced in this way for a century or two.

Potentially they can use early versions of the automation to accelerate this.

Already do. CNC lathes, (GOF)AI designing chips. A "century or two" is a framing so alien to me that I don't understand how anyone can think it would take that long.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#142
post #123
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These robots can also teleport and charge anywhere or do you predict an expedition to some mine in Africa when they are at the stage where they need some cobalt? I'm just finding it funny thinking of 15 Spots queuing for a flixbus / greyhound bus because they need to go get some raw material across the continent.

I expect cobalt to be mined in the cheapest possible way. If that's humans, humans have work[0]. If humans don't have work, the only alternative to robots is, what, well-trained squirrels? > I'm just finding it funny thinking of 15 Spots queuing for a flixbus / greyhound bus because they need to go get some raw material across the continent. Me too. But I expect actual logistics to be much like current logistics, so…

You don’t have to do all this hand waving about what you think is going to be happening in the near future.

Just explain why AGI will be in our near. Frankly, I don’t see how from what we have now.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#143

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…

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. Our daughter is ten and when it comes to AI and stuff, I am not worried about our kids. It's us who will suffer most from it. Remember when you were young and had to explain your parents over and over again how the…

> but explaining the new world, which is going to be completely foreign to you

It might be different this time, if we are looking at accelerating higher order change.

Human's have a speed limit. AI progress doesn't, and its rate of improvement is going to surpass the rate any human child can learn.

Crossing major thresholds tends to break previous patterns.

(Not trying to be downer. Just trying to understand what may happen, regardless of whether I like it or not.)

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#144
post #119

A lot trying to predict the future. But kids need love and attention. And if you teach them to think for themselves there is not much more you can do. As for the “should I even have kids” argument? Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. I’m sorry I’m an optimist.

> Sure don’t have kids. Your line ends here while others will potentially live among the star. That's a weird take. This isn't house Lannister vs house Stark you know. To keep the bloodline going really shouldn't be the first thing that comes to mind while considering having a child imho.

That’s true we do all share a lot of genetic code. And even then, better choose a life you’re happy with.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#145
post #132
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your passion was to plow the field by hand then I agree. Otherwise it is definitely not an equivalent.

Farmer protests are in the news at the moment, and the people quoted by the journalists are talking about farming as a passion. The more the farms automate, the fewer farmer workers there can be. Logic isn't part of these protests either: the farmers are being told "you're making more food than we need, please make less" and yet the placards are (in the local language) "no farms = no food".

No, I specifically meant if your passion was to plow the field by hand. All I want is not to put an equals sign between something that takes years of formal education and years of self study and development, and something you can master in a week or month. Being and engineer or doctor is who you (partly but permanently) become. The tractor didn't rob anyone of their farming passion. It did make plowmen become factory workers and if that was someone's true passion then an exception must be granted, but I really think the 1 to 1 comparison between something that can be mastered in a week vs years doesn't do anyone proper justice.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> I'm not going to worry too much about my career being snuffed out by AI until AI actually exists. Can you explain what underpins this position? Is it about timelines, likelihoods, not taking preparative actions in general or what?

Sure, I don't think the likelihood is high.

I think it's unlikely we'll develop an AI any time soon which can consistently solve critical thinking problems that even a junior developer can solve. LLMs exhibit very little of that problem solving behavior. They synthesize information from existing information and often what they produce is nonsensical. When people have argued that there is some kind of reasoning going on there, I haven't found it convincing. I use an LLM every day, it makes me more productive, it speeds up a lot of tasks. It doesn't replace the executive thinking that I hire people for (even pretty junior people), like delegating a problem, having them go off and think through various angles and come up with a really good conclusion... an LLM won't ever do this on its own, it can assist the person who's doing it though.

I can see a scenario where everyone working for me becomes twice as efficient with an LLM (me too) and it translates to a dev hiring freeze and a tougher job market, maybe for years even. As I mentioned in another comment I think devs who don't stay on the cutting edge will be at risk of losing their jobs. But fundamentally there's a lot of room for software to be solving more problems than it is today, grow the supply and the demand will likely grow with it, so the "human developers will disappear so quickly I shouldn't have a child" scenario is hyperbole and kinda toxic tbh.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#147
I think the future predictions miss one major possibility: That ubiquitous/powerful AI is available only to very few people (super rich and corporations) and everybody else is pushed back to basically subsistence living, where they have nothing of value to offer the other side of society because everything has been automated away.

So maybe sharpen your kids on their manual labour too

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#148
post #80
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…

Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.

In the grand scheme of things, definitely. But that didn't help out-of-work laborers and miners watching their children slowly starve.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#149
post #28

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 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…

I feel like some people living wealthy cushy American lifestyles think the world is fine the way it is. It's not. The world has a dramatic lack of physical and mental labor, which is the cause of economic struggle. The best hope these people have for their lives to improve is in fact the development of AI assistants and andorids that increase the available labor. First and foremost advancements in AI lead to more products and services for less cost. That is the primary effect. Secondary effects are about how these new products are distributed in the population, and yes there will surely be a lot of economic distruption. But we will certainly figure out how to distribute them because the truth is that no rich person has a need for a hundred family cars, a thousand watermelons, or a thousand houses. Yes, the rich will get richer, but the poor will also get richer.

Re: Raising Children on the Eve of AI

#150
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could have said the same about the use of tractors. People used to farm by hand. All those people were replaced. Yet here we are doing just fine.

In the grand scheme of things, definitely. But that didn't help out-of-work laborers and miners watching their children slowly starve.

Yea but it helped the arguably larger portion of the population which dont see their children starve anymore due to cheaper food.
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