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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

andyljones.com

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#31
post #2

Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.

What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better. Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?

> please name what metric you think is meaningful

Job satisfaction and human flourishing

By those metrics, AI is getting worse and worse

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#35
post #5

People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other. The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each oth…

I'd be more worried about the implicit power imbalance. It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#36

It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear c…

> The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent

I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who don't have their boots on the ground.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#37

It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear c…

I don't think is the case; I think what's actually going on is that the HN crowd are the people who are stuck actually trying to use AI tools and aware of their limitations.

I have noticed, however, that people who are either not programmers or who are not very good programmers report that they can derive a lot of benefit from AI tools, since now they can make simple programs and get them to work. The most common use case seems to be some kind of CRUD app. It's very understandable this seems revolutionary for people who formerly couldn't make programs at all.

For those of us who are busy trying to deliver what we've promised customers we can do, I find I get far less use out of AI tools than I wish I did. In our business we really do not have the budget to add another senior software engineer, and we don't the spare management/mentor/team lead capacity to take on another intern or junior. So we're really positioned to be taking advantage of all these promises I keep hearing about AI, but in practical terms, it saves me at an architect or staff level maybe 10% of my time and for one of our seniors maybe 5%.

So I end up being a little dismissive when I hear that AI is going to become 80% of GDP and will be completely automating absolutely everything, when what I actually spend my day on is the same-old same-old of trying to get some vendor framework to do what I want to get some sensor data out of their equipment and deliver apps to end customers that use enough of my own infrastructure that they don't require $2,000 a month of cloud hosting services per user. (I picked that example since at one customer, that's what we were brought in to replace: that kind of cost simply doesn't scale.)

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#39

"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did." I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to p…

the stability of no govt faced risk over a 20% increase in horse unemployment

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#40

It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear c…

> The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who don't have their boots on the ground.

That's what I've observed. I currently have more work booked than I can reasonably get done in the next year, and my customers would be really delighted if I could deliver it to them sooner, and take on even more projects. But I have yet to find any way that just adding AI tools to the mix makes us orders-of-magnitude better. The most I've been able to squeeze out is a 5% to 10% increase.
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