Still looking for the AI in the room. Where is it exactly? Surely nobody is claiming LLMs are AI?
The AI Layoff Trap
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#12Still looking for the AI in the room. Where is it exactly? Surely nobody is claiming LLMs are AI?
AI doesn't need to be AGI to be useful. Surely, you've tried Claude Code before and found it more helpful than Clippy?
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#13I use AIs for coding with moderate success, but the more I work with them, the more I am convinced that "intelligence on tap" is a pipe dream, especially in domains where logical thinking in novel (ie not-in-dataset) contexts is required.
Recently, I tasked it to study a new Czech building permit law in conjunction with some waste disposal regulations and the result was just tragic. The model (opus 4.6) just could not stop drawing conclusions from obsolete regulations in its training dataset, even when given the fulltext of the new law. The usual "you are totally right" also applied and its conclusions were most of the time obviously wrong even to a human with cursory knowledge of the subject.
I ended with studying the relevant regulations myself over the weekend.
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#14The trick is bypassing the human consumer as well. Companies satisfy (human) consumer needs as a byproduct of profit maximization. But human consumers are inefficient. They have to sleep, require medical care, etc. A purely machine economy would be far more efficient. Therefore in the limit we should eliminate reliance on human labor and consumption to build a more perfect and efficient world.
The "economy on a chip" thought experiment .
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#15neo-luddism dressed up in economic jargon. the authors suggest the only effective tool is to tax companies based on how much automation they achieve. Penalizing efficiency is a guaranteed recipe for stagnation and if we'd done this at any point in our past we would have not made it out of the dark ages
The Chicago School would probably hate it
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#16neo-luddism dressed up in economic jargon. the authors suggest the only effective tool is to tax companies based on how much automation they achieve. Penalizing efficiency is a guaranteed recipe for stagnation and if we'd done this at any point in our past we would have not made it out of the dark ages
It’s funny, I think most people roll their eyes when Trump says things like “you’ll be tired of winning, you’ll say ‘please no more winning’”.
But recommendations to tax efficiency are unironically that (just dressed in more serious language). “Please stop giving us what we want so efficiently, we want to work more for it!”
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#17I use AIs for coding with moderate success, but the more I work with them, the more I am convinced that "intelligence on tap" is a pipe dream, especially in domains where logical thinking in novel (ie not-in-dataset) contexts is required. Recently, I tasked it to study a new Czech building permit law in conjunction with some waste disposal regulations and the result was just tragic. The model (opus 4.6) just could no…
"The model (opus 4.6) just could not stop drawing conclusions from obsolete regulations in its training dataset"
To be fair, humans are also often like this. If some rule/law/model was deeply ingrained into them, they often cannot stop thinking in terms of that rule, even if they are clearly in a new context (like a new country).
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#18neo-luddism dressed up in economic jargon. the authors suggest the only effective tool is to tax companies based on how much automation they achieve. Penalizing efficiency is a guaranteed recipe for stagnation and if we'd done this at any point in our past we would have not made it out of the dark ages
Let companies manage to automate 100% of their processes by having their own country/law/constitution!
Companies produce goods which people consume. If you hand everything over to the oligarch class, how will people consume products built by companies???
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#19Let’s take AGI to its inevitable raw conclusion. Not by the definition (ab)used by clueless VCs screaming about abundance, but by what is already happening using the worst case: The abundance of mass layoffs and job displacement due to funding and building of AI systems is the true definition of AGI. We might as well get there faster instead of delaying it. You have already seen Oracle and Block attributing their lay…
Get where faster? Get what over with? Aren’t you talking about destroying livelihoods? Pushing people into poverty and/or homelessness? What is the benefit exactly?
I guess the argument would go that a new economic model will be required at that stage.
There isn't much point in having people do jobs they don't like which are trivial to automate just for money, but at the point where there isn't enough economically useful things for everyone to do, the current system falls down.
> What is the benefit exactly?
Well one benefit would be international competitiveness. The country that does it slowest will be the country doing more work for less output.
Re: The AI Layoff Trap
#20Still looking for the AI in the room. Where is it exactly? Surely nobody is claiming LLMs are AI?
Of course it's AI. It's not AGI yet.