171–180 of 663 posts
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?
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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. M…
The point about ai not having “skin” (I assume “skin in the game”) is well taken. I say often that “if you’ve assigned an ai agent the ‘a’ in a raci matrix, you’re doing it wrong”. Very important lesson that some company will learn publicly soon enough.
I am not an AI sceptic.. I use it for coding. But this article is not compelling.
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.
No one wants to say the scary potential logical conclusion of replacing the last value that humans have a competitive advantage in; that being intelligence and cognition. For example there is one future scenario of humanity where only the capital and resource holders survive; the middle and lower classes become surplus to requirements and lose any power. Its already happening slowly via inflation and higher asset prices after all - it is a very real possibility. I don't think a revolution will be possible in this scenario; with AI and robotics the rich could outnumber pretty much everyone.
How about we stop trying the analogy clothing on and just tell it like it is? AI is unlike any other technology to date. Just like predicting the weather, we don't know what it will be like in 20 months. Everything is a guesstimate.
This is the correct take. We all have that "Come to Jesus" moment eventually, where something blows our minds so profoundly that we believe anything is possible in the immediate future. I respect that, it's a great take to have and promotes a lot of discussion, but now more than ever we need concretes and definitives instead of hype machines and their adjacent counterparts. Too much is on the line here regardless of…
While in the last year I’ve seen generated images go from complete slop to indistinguishable from real photos. It’s hard to know what is right around the corner and what isn’t even close.
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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)
We've blundered into a system that has the worst parts of socialized health care and private health insurance without any of the benefits.
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…
I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happen…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production
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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?
At least currently humans do not need AI to reproduce.
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...
I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is really empowering some of them. The lack of building human context / connections etc is real, and I don't think LLMs can meaningfully help there. Hence my skepticism for the horse analogy.
This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.