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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#341

Post by randomNumber7 »

munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

> Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article?

I'm happy to miss all the stuff that was written just for the financial benefit of the author.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#342

Post by sweezyjeezy »

gritspants wrote: post #336
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc I think SWE as a ma…

I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.

I think your numbers are off. TAM for office workers is ~20T a year, of which SWE compensation is ~3T. So if they can make 3T x 10% X 5 years = 1.5T that covers their current valuations. It's not as insane as you make out, even not taking into account the other high risk areas like legal, accounting etc

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#343

Post by pnexk »

gritspants wrote: post #336
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc I think SWE as a ma…

I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.

Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.

I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#344

Post by aerhardt »

konschubert wrote: post #219
munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser. Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.

To add, I don’t think my ancestor Spaniards for example needed the help of machines to deplete mines in America. They also came already equipped with all kinds of legal systems, including the Requerimiento, which they read out loud to natives in preposterous spectacle.

In general the transition from feudalism to capitalism, including the formation of the legal systems that supported the latter, happened gradually for maybe up to four or five centuries before the steam engine had been invented.

Sure, the Industrial Revolution further accelerated the development of property rights, mercantile, and civil laws, but all in all I don’t think there’s much truth that machines were the primary cause of such developments.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#345

Post by [deleted] »

pnexk wrote: post #343
gritspants wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.

Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society. I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike th…

[deleted]

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#346

Post by randallsquared »

throwanem wrote: post #245
steveklabnik wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll…

> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.

No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#347

Post by anal_reactor »

cjcole wrote: post #213
munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

"but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution" You're not the only one. The current Pope Leo XIV explicitly named himself after the the previous Leo, Pope Leo XIII, who was pope during the Industrial Revolution (1878-1903) and issued the influential Encyclical Rerum novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor) in response to the upheaval. “Pope Leo XIII, with the historic Encycli…

[flagged]

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#348

Post by randomNumber7 »

EamonnMR wrote: post #333
munificent wrote: post #150

There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…

> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale. The idea that copyright simply doesn'…

It's not possible (or at least extremely hard) to prove that the final weights they come up with resulted from copyright infringement.

Thats why they are evaluated so high on the stock market. Basically the will steal all the value of intellectual property in a semi legal way.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#349

Post by satvikpendem »

lelanthran wrote: post #225
steveklabnik wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consent is absolutely important, but that does not mean that every single thing in the entire world requires explicit consent. You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. That does not mean you're a bad person. Free use is an important part of intellectual property law. If it did not exist, the powerful could, for example, stifle public criticism by declaring that they do not consent to you using…

> You did not ask me for consent to use my words in your comment. I am not representing your words as mine. I am not using your words to profit off. I am not making a gain by attributing your words to you. > There has to be lines for cases where requiring attribution is required, and cases where it is not. You are blurring the lines between "using a quote or likeness" and "giving credit to". I am skeptical that you d…

> you don't feel you need any consent from the people you are taking from

In most cases, no, I (and it seems most others) don't feel the need for that, it is only you who seems to have an ideological hangup over this.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#350

Post by satvikpendem »

gritspants wrote: post #336
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc I think SWE as a ma…

I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.

That's how human progress works. No one can want or need it because they cannot conceptualize wanting it until someone shows that it is possible. Now, many of those wants become needs.
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