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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

#81

Post by rvz »

billisonline wrote: post #50

An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exci…

Remember, these companies (including the author) have an incentive to continue selling fear of job displacement not because of how disruptive LLMs are, but because of how profitable it is if you scare everyone into using your product to “survive”.

To companies like Anthropic, “AGI” really means: “Liquidity event for (AI company)” - IPO, tender offer or acquisition.

Afterwards, you will see the same broken promises as the company will be subject to the expectations of Wall St and pension funds.

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

#83

Post by actionfromafar »

jordwest wrote: post #62
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…

It would be kinda funny if not so tragic how economists will argue both "[productive improvement] will make things cheaper" and then in the next breath "deflation is bad and must be avoided at all costs"

But is it really, though? Dollars aren't meant to be held.

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

#84

Post by taneq »

blondie9x wrote: post #73

This post is kind of sad. It feels like he's advocating for human depopulation since the trajectory aligns with horse populations declining by 93% also.

Not advocating, just predicting. And not necessarily actual population, just population in paid employment.

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

#85

Post by actionfromafar »

namesbc wrote: post #53

Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity... https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.

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

#87

Post by hephaes7us »

jondwillis wrote: post #51
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…

Workshopping this tortured metaphor: AI, at the limit, is a vampiric technology, sucking the differentiated economic value from those that can train it. What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood? This, to me, is a big problem, because a model will tend to drift from reality without more training-blood. The owners of the tech need to reinvest in the hosts.

Realistically, at a certain point the training would likely involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators), rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in textual form.

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

#88

Post by mxfh »

burroisolator wrote: post #6

"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…

I just have no idea how rigerously the data was reviewed. The 95% decline simply does no compute with

4,500,000 in 1959

and even an increase to

7,000,000 in 1968

largely due to increase in recreational horse population.

https://time.com/archive/6632231/recreation-return-of-the-ho...

So that recreational existence at the leisure of our own machinery seems like an optional future humans can hope for too.

Turns out the chart is about farm horses only as counted by the USDA not including any recreational horses. So this is more about agricultural machinery vs. horses, not passenger cars.

---

City horses (the ones replaced by cars and trucks) were nearly extinct by 1930 already.

City horses were formerly almost exclusively bred on farms but because of their practical disappearance such breeding is no longer necessary. They have declined in numbers from 3,500,000 in 1910 to a few hundred thousand in 1930.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/...

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

#89

Post by jacquesm »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #69
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…

To give backing i’m from Australia which has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth. This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is higher) etc. Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... This is a recent development where…

I think by the time the wealthy realize they're setting themselves up for the local equivalent of the French Revolution it will be a bit late. It's a really bad idea to create a large number of people with absolutely nothing to lose.

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

#90

Post by zdragnar »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #69
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…

To give backing i’m from Australia which has ~2.5x the median wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth. This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is higher) etc. Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... This is a recent development where…

> All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right?

You could tax 100% of all of the top 1%'s income (not progressively, just a flat 100% tax) and it'd cover less than double the federal government's budget deficit in the US. There would be just enough left over to pay for making the covid 19 ACA subsidies permanent and a few other pet projects.

Of course, you can't actually tax 100% of their income. In fact, you'd need higher taxes on the top 10% than anywhere else in the West to cover the deficit, significantly expand social programs to have an impact, and lower taxes on the middle class.

It should be pointed out that Australia has higher taxes on their middle class than the US does. It tops out at 45% (plus 2% for medicare) for anyone at $190k or above.

If you live in New York City, and you're in the top 1% of income earners (taking cash salary rather than equity options) you're looking at a federal tax rate of 37%, a state tax rate of 10.9%, and a city income tax rate of 3.876% for a total of 51.77%. Some other states have similarly high tax brackets, others are less, and others yet use other schemes like no income tax but higher sales and property taxes.

Not quite so obvious when you look closer at it.

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