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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

#151

Post by machomaster »

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?

E.g using Rails and generate scaffolding. Makes it real fast and easy to make a CRUD app.

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

#152

Post by thedailymail »

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…

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane.

"There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."

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

#153

Post by machomaster »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #31
raincole wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it.

AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more resources, to give the most important thing people have - time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be like complaining that the objective positive of increased food production is actually a negative, because people are getting fatter.

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

#154

Post by goatlover »

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.

Did the population of work/service dogs decline? Horses were already a form of automation over human labor.

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

#155

Post by goatlover »

Avicebron wrote: post #74
dzonga wrote: 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 nurses, mechanics, and janitors are still needed.

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

#156

Post by visarga »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150
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…

An ATM is a reliable machine with a bounded risk - the money inside - while an AI agent could steer your company into bankruptcy and have no liability for it. AI has no skin and depending on application, much higher upper bound for damage. A digit read wrong in a medical transcript, patient dies.

> There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.

Managing risks, can't automate it. Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.

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

#157

Post by frchalli »

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…

> The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value.

There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made that faster, then printers reduced the need for the manual copying, then email reduced the need to print something out, and now instant messaging reduces email clutter and keep messages shorter.

All along that timeline there were fewer and fewer people involved, all for the valuable task of communication. While they may not have held these people in high esteem, they were critical for getting things done and scaling.

I’m not saying LLMs are perfect or will replace every job. They make mistakes, and they always will; it’s part of what they are. But, as useful as people are today, the roles we serve in will go away and be replaced by something else, even if it’s just to indicate at various times during the day what is or isn’t pleasing.

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

#158

Post by defrost »

goatlover wrote: post #154
OccamsMirror wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did the population of work/service dogs decline? Horses were already a form of automation over human labor.

Bullocks.

That's what Sandy over the road (born 1932, died last year), used to hitch up every morning at 4am, when he was ten, to sled a tank of water back to the farm from the local spring.

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

#159

Post by visarga »

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.

> What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood?

LLMs have over 1B users and exchange over 1T tokens with us per day. We put them through all conceivable tasks and provide support for completing those tasks, and push back when the model veers off. We test LLM ideas in reality (like experiment following hypothesis) and use that information to iterate. These logs are gold for training on how to apply AI in real world.

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

#160

Post by goatlover »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #52

I mean it's hard to argue that if we invented a human in a box (AGI) human work would be irrelevent. But I don't know how we could watch current AI and anyone can say we have that. The big thing this AI boom has showed us that we can all be thankful to have seen is what a human in a box will eventually look like. The first generation of humans to be able to see that is a super lucky experience to have. Maybe it's one…

Why a human in a box and not an android? A lot of jobs will require advanced robotics to fully automate. And then there are jobs where customer preference is for human interaction or human entertainment. It's like how superior chess engines have not reduced the profession of chess grandmasters, because people remain more interested in human chess competition.
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