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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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

#71

Post by davidw »

tyre wrote: post #63
atleastoptimal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all expensive because of artificial barriers meant to keep their prices high. Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries. Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they’re in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the US.

If we had less regulation of insurance companies, do you think they’d be cheaper? (I pick this example because our regulation of insurance companies has (unintuitively) incentivized them to pay more for care. So it’s an example of poor regulation imo)

Health care is the more complicated one of the examples cited, but housing definitely is an 'own goal' in how we made it too difficult to build in too many places - especially "up and in" rather than outward expansion.

Stuff like this isn't Wall Street or Billionaires or whatever bogeyman - it's our neighbors: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...

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

#72

Post by ghssds »

ible wrote: 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…

People are animals.

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

#74

Post by Avicebron »

dzonga wrote: post #70
websiteapi wrote: post #22

funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…

yeah that my question to the author too - if A.I is to really earn its keep it means A.I should help in getting more physical products into people's hands & helping with producing more energy. physical products & energy are the two things that are relevant to people's wellbeing. right now A.I is sucking up the energy & the RAM - so is it gonna translate into a net positive ?

That's the question though isn't it. If everyone got a subscription to claude-$Latest would they be able to pay their rent with it?

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

#75

Post by whycombinetor »

trollbridge wrote: post #48
jacobsenscott wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I try and use a "state of the art" LLM to generate code it takes longer to get a worse result than if I just wrote the code myself from the start. That's the experience of every good dev I know. So that's my benchmark. AI benchmarks are BS marketing gimmicks designed to give the appearance of progress - there are tremendous perverse financial incentives. This will never change because you can only use an LLM…

Right. With careful use of AIs, I can use it to gather information to help me make better designs (like giving me summaries of the current best available frameworks or libraries to choose for a given project), but as far as just generating an architecture and then generating the code and devops and so on for that? It's just not there, unless you're creating an app that effectively already exists, like some basic CRUD…

What do you mean when you say building crud apps should be automated?

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

#76

Post by renewiltord »

websiteapi wrote: post #22

funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…

Well, politically, housing becoming cheaper is considered a failure. And this is true for all ages. As an example, take Reddit. Skews younger, more Democrat-voting, etc. You'd think they'd be for lower housing prices. But not really. In fact, they make fun of states like Texas whose cities act to allow housing to become cheaper: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1nw4ef9/...

That's just an example, but the pattern will easily repeat. One thing that came out of the post-pandemic era is that the lowest deciles saw the biggest rises in income. Consequently, things like Doordash became more expensive, and stuff like McDonald's stopped staffing as much.

This isn't some grand secret, but most Americans who post on Twitter, HN, or Reddit consider the results some kind of tragedy, though it is the natural thing that happens when people become much higher income: you can't hire many of them to do low-productivity jobs like bus a McD's table.

That's what life looks like when others get richer relative to you. You can't consume the fruits of their labor for cheap. And they will compete for you with the things that you decided to place supply controls on. The highly-educated downwardly-mobile see this most acutely, which is why you see it commonly among the educated children of the past elite.

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

#77

Post by lowbloodsugar »

websiteapi wrote: post #22

funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…

>in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars.

Think of it another way. It's not that these things are more expensive. It's that the average US worker simply doesn't provide anything of value. China provides the things of value now. How the government corrected for this was to flood the economy with cash. So it looks like things got more expensive, when really it's that wages reduced to match reality. US citizens selling each other lattes back and forth, producing nothing of actual value. US companies bleeding people dry with fees. The final straw was an old man uniting the world against the USA instead of against China.

If you want to know where this is going, look at Britain: the previous world super power. Britain governed far more of the earth than the USA ever did, and now look at it. Now the only thing it produces is ASBOs. I suppose it also sells weapons to dictators and provides banking to them. That is the USA's future.

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

#78

Post by sendes »

OccamsMirror wrote: post #26
falcor84 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reading of tfa is exactly that - the author is hoping that we'll have at least a generation or so to adapt, like horses did, but is concerned that it might be significantly more rapid.

To be clear though, the horses didn't adapt. Their populate was reduced by orders of a magnitude.

True, but the horses' population started (slightly) rising again when they went from economic tools to recreational tools for humans. What will happen to humans?

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

#79

Post by Calamityjanitor »

barbazoo wrote: 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.

The only 'line go up' graph they have left is money invested. I'm even dubious of the questions answered graph. It looks more like a feature added to internal wiki that went up in usage. Instead it's portrayed as a measure of quality or usefulness.
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