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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

#121
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

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

#123

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 real…

But the us is China's market, so the ccp goes along even though they are the producer. Because a domestic consumer economy would mean sharing the profits of that manufacturing with the workers. But that would create a middle class not dependent on the party leading (at least in their minds, and perhaps not wrongly) to instability. It is a dance of two, and neither can afford to let go. And neither can keep dancing any longer. I think it will be very bad everywhere.

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

#124

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…

Housing is a funny old one and speaks to it being a human problem. One thing a lot of people dont truly engage with with the housing issue is that its a massive issue of distribution. Too many people want to live in too few places. Yes, central banks & interest rates (being too low and also now being relatively too high), nimbyism, and rent seeking play an important role too but solving the "too many people live in too few places" issue actually fixes that problem (slowly, and possibly unpalatably slow for some, but a fix nonetheless)

The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism stimulating those places and making them further more attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working more actively helps distribute people to other places with more affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places become more attractive because people now actually live there.

Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow of their high house prices which only loses "real" value through inflation which people tend not to notice as much.

But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well

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

#125
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

Ctrl-F 'lines', 0 results Ctrl-F 'code', 0 results What is this comment about?

Charitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...

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

#126
Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more:

  1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value.
  
  2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of us. But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity and care, another human being who can provide those is priceless. I propose we break away and create our own new economy and the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimis…

The thing that the ultra-wealthy desire above all else is power and privilege, and they won't be getting either of that in those bunkers.

They sure as shit won't be content to leave the rest of us alone.

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

#128
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of us. But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity and care, another human being who can provide those is priceless. I propose we break away and create our own new economy and the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimis…

The thing that the ultra-wealthy desire above all else is power and privilege , and they won't be getting either of that in those bunkers. They sure as shit won't be content to leave the rest of us alone.

Yeah I know it's an unrealistic ideal but it's fun to think about.

That said my theory about power and privilege is that it's actually just a symptom of a deep fear of death. The reason gaining more money/power/status never lets up is because there's no amount of money/power/status that can satiate that fear, but somehow naively there's a belief that it can. I wouldn't be surprised if most people who have any amount of wealth has a terrible fear of losing it all, and to somebody whose identity is tied to that wealth, that's as good as death.

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

#129

I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works. It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful qu…

you still lose a bit from not having those juniors' questions around - where is your documentation sucking or your code is confusing?

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

#130
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, because they’d be waiting in the lengthy queues that would be necessary for anyone to use it. There are hard constraints to this tech that make what you’re talking about infeasible.
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