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AI: Accelerated Incompetence

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Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#81

Post by pydry »

silvestrov wrote: post #47
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?

This will require companies to be able to survive for some time using the old code and to recognise the importance of cleaning up. Has this ever happened besides the Y2K fixes? Wouldn't it be much more likely that the companies will simply go under? Or that they will make a team that writes a completely new version of the code, somewhat like Mac OS X was a replacement of MacOS 9 and not a cleanup.

Yeah, it happened at the end of the last outsourcing boom. It's often a very quiet transformation though - a tacit recognition that a fashion failed doesn't get the same PR as "groundbreaking new business fad" because to do so too explicitly would humiliate all of the executives who were the driving force the original fashion.

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

Publications like the Economist or the WSJ that drive a lot of this hype among the investor and executive classes are loath to point out that their readers and owners are the proverbial emperor not wearing any clothes.

One of the benefits of tech unions (if they existed in any meaningful way) would be to point out where the emperor is naked in a way that is a bit harder to ignore than the kerfuffle that occurs inside hacker news threads or subreddits dedicated to experienced devs.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#82

Post by iamacyborg »

anyonecancode wrote: post #73

I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physi…

> I think you could make similar arguments about mapping technology like Google and Apple Maps -- that using them decreases people's skills in navigating the physical world, atrophying our sense of direction and geography. And actually, that's not wrong. People really do often struggle to navigate these days if they don't have the crutch of something like Google Maps. It really has changed our relationship to the physical world in many ways

Entirely anecdotal but I have found the opposite. With this mapping software I can go walk in a random direction and confidently course correct as and when I need to, and once I’ve walked somewhere the path sticks in my memory very well.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#83

Post by Havoc »

>I don't think anyone believes that a computer program is literally their companion

That's what I thought. The AI girlfriend/boyfriend app things seem to suggest otherwise

I don't get it, but apparently others do

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#84

Post by talkingtab »

If you have a new unknown, tool, things go wrong in two ways. For example a hammer.

If it works, like to hit a nail, you end up smashing everything in sight. If it fails, like digging a garden, you end up thinking it is stupid.

But there is a third case.

You use it to do something that you did not know you could do before. Like to planish metal.

People are experiencing the first case and second.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#85

Post by mjburgess »

paradite wrote: post #52
mjburgess wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with people "who have spent time in machine learning or reinforcement learning" is that they've spent no time, literally none, understanding what a concept is. There is no such thing as a higher dimensional concept, nor can they be projected into a weight space, because they aren't quantities. The concept, say, "Dog" composes with the concept, "Happy" to form "Happy Dog". The extension(Dog) is all possibl…

You seem to believe "concept" is a concept in English language. It is not. Concept is an abstraction layer above human languages. Here's a good article that touched on this topic: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability/glossa...

I'm very well-familiar with the literature in this area. I understand that computer scientists, with obscene and wild abandon, will just pick whatever word suits their agenda and define it opportunistically, without regards to the confusion it will cause -- indeed, seemingly with this aim -- to "impress" the reader and make their research seem extraordinary.

"Concept" is not a term from computer science, its use here has not only been "narrowed" but flat-out redefined. "Concept" as used in XAI (a field in which i've done research) is an extremely limited attempt to capture the extension of concepts over a given training domain.

Concept, as used by the author of this article that you are replying to, and 99.9999999...% of all people familiar with the term, means "concept". It does not mean what it has been asserted to mean in XAI.

And one of the most basic features of concepts is their semantic content, that they compose, that they form parts of propositions, and so on.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#86

Post by baq »

EncomLab wrote: post #14

Remember when 3d printing was going to replace all manufacturing? Anybody? AI is closer to this sentiment than it is to the singularity.

I have a 3d printer and cadded me some parts, I don't have an injection molding plant.

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#87

Post by mrkeen »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #3

Is AI perhaps an opportunity for years of paid cleanup and re-design work that those of us who have dedicated decades to learning the craft of software engineering will be able to cash in on?

I think this is too optimistic.

All of us are already in tech debt. The post-AI mess won't look significantly different from the pre-AI mess.

If anything I would expect management to throw more money at AI in hopes of fixing the mess (if management even perceives such a mess).

Re: AI: Accelerated Incompetence

#90

Post by bandoti »

frenchmajesty wrote: post #40

I disagree with the author here. His point can be summarized as "LLMs produce bad code, LLMs lead to the teams's average skills decreasing and they can't maintain large codebases over time". Yet nowhere he addresses the #1 flaws to his position: rate of improvement of the technology, and its promise to deliver on saved money and gained speed. In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a…

> Google and Meta also boast publicly +30% of new lines of code are AI-generated in their companies today.

You realize that Google and Meta sell AI products, right? So what you cited is effectively an ad campaign. Also the 30% NEW code is likely whittled down to 5-10% added to production after heavy edits. The devil is in the omitted details. :)

> In all the companies I've seen engineering leadership hardly really gives a shit about things OP says are important.

People put too much stock in “engineers” and “managers”. What we’re really talking about here is in the realm of sociology and psychology.

I think there’s a lot of evidence (just ask anyone in academia) that AI is already diminishing people’s ability to think for themselves.

There’s a lot of power in AI it’s true—but let’s not get blinded by the gold and leave everyone bloodied in the muck.

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