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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

#141

Post by candiddevmike »

richardles wrote: post #64

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…

That sounds like a horrible onboarding experience. Human mentors provide a lot more than just answering questions, like providing context, comraderie or social skills, or even coping mechanisms. Starting a new job can be terrifying for juniors, and if their only friend is faceless chat bot...

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

#142

Post by trollbridge »

whycombinetor wrote: post #75
trollbridge wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

CRUD apps are ridiculously simple and have been in existence my entire life. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to make a basic CRUD and host it somewhere. The bulk of useful but simple business apps are just a CRUD with a tiny bit of customisation and integration around them.

It is true that LLMs make it easier to build these kind of things without having to become a competent programmer first.

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

#143

Post by bdangubic »

twodave wrote: post #134
adventured wrote: post #16

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’m not anti-AI; I use it every day. But I also think all this hand-wringing is overblown and unbalanced. LLMs, because of what they are, will never replace a thoughtful engineer. If you’re writing code for a living at the level of an LLM then your job was probably already expendable before LLMs showed up.

except you know, you had a job. and coming out of college could get one… if you were graduating right now in compsci you’ll find a wasteland with no end in sight…

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

#144

Post by [deleted] »

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)

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by goatlover »

ghssds wrote: post #72
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.

When horses develop technology and create all sorts of jobs for themselves, this will be a good metaphor.

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

#146

Post by kfarr »

hephaes7us wrote: post #87
jondwillis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I feel like the real ah ha moment is still coming once there is a GPT-like thing that has been trained on reality, not its shadow.

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

#147

Post by schmichael »

somenameforme wrote: post #137
twodave wrote: post #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…

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours.

At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology.

Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will reach workers as, if it does at all.

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

#148

Post by machomaster »

somenameforme wrote: post #137
twodave wrote: post #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…

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires.

We just instead started doing Bullshit Jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

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

#149

Post by scotty79 »

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.

There's only so much you can learn from humans. AI didn't get superhuman in go (game) by financing more new good human go players. It just played with itself even discarding human source knowledge and achieved those levels.

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

#150

Post by marcus_holmes »

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…

I'm optimistic.

Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became more responsive and served their customers better. And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.

There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having humans do them makes administration slow and expensive. Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this meeting never happened at all because the person making the decision just told the LLM and it did it".

You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better.

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