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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

aphyr.com

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#71

Post by aphyr »

enraged_camel wrote: post #59

>> Imagine a co-worker who generated reams of code with security hazards, forcing you to review every line with a fine-toothed comb. One who enthusiastically agreed with your suggestions, then did the exact opposite. A colleague who sabotaged your work, deleted your home directory, and then issued a detailed, polite apology for it. One who promised over and over again that they had delivered key objectives when they…

> It personifies the tool as a colleague with agency,

Er, just to be clear, I am not personifying these tools. This entire section is a critique of the attempt to frame LLMs as "coworkers".

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#72

Post by echelon »

jerf wrote: post #37

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…

> The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve.

Even using the models we have today, we have revolutionized VFX, video production, and graphics design.

Similarly, many senior software engineers are reporting 2-10x productivity increases.

These tools are some of the most useful tools of my career. I don't even think the general consumer public needs "AI" in their products. If we just create control surfaces for experts to leverage and harness the speed up and shape and control the outcomes, we're going to be in a very good spot.

These alone will have ripple effects throughout the economy and innovation. We've barely begun to tap into the benefits we have already.

We don't even need new models.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#73

Post by sophacles »

faangguyindia wrote: post #69
fnimick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you have evidence as basis for this very confident statement... where?

Intuition. It comes from the spiritual awakening and being aware of your consciousness. Only Time will prove what turns out be right.

You worship the AI?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#74

Post by nostrademons »

jerf wrote: post #37

The interesting question to me at the moment is whether we are still at the bottom of an exponential takeoff or nearing the top of a sigmoid curve. You can find evidence for both. LLMs probably can't get another 10 times better. But then, almost literally at any minute, someone could come up with a new architecture that can be 10 times better with the same or fewer resources. LLMs strike me as still leaving a lot on…

Somewhere around 2005-2007, when people were wondering if the Internet was done, PG was fond of saying "It has decades to run. Social changes take longer than technical changes."

I think we're at a similar point with LLMs. The technical stuff is largely "done" - LLMs have closer to 10% than 10x headroom in how much they will technologically improve, we'll find ways to make them more efficient and burn fewer GPU cycles, the cost will come down as more entrants mature.

But the social changes are going to be vast. Expect huge amounts of AI slop and propaganda. Expect white-collar unemployment as execs realize that all their expensive employees can be replaced by an LLM, followed by white-collar business formation as customers realize that product quality went to shit when all the people were laid off. Expect the Internet as we loved it to disappear, if it hasn't already. Expect new products or networks to arise that are less open and so less vulnerable to the propagation of AI slop. Expect changes in the structure of governments. Mass media was a key element in the formation of the modern nation state, mass cheap fake media will likely lead to its fragmentation as any old Joe with a ChatGPT account can put out mass quantities of bullshit. Probably expect war as people compete to own the discourse.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#75

Post by dlev_pika »

Aurornis wrote: post #14
greatpost wrote: post #5

Thank you for this aphyr. My one ask is people seem to put “CEOs” on a pedestal any time things come up, like they’re an alien life form and oh no they’re going to do something terrible. There are good company executives and shitty ones. You should try to start a company and see if you can be one of the better ones.

Class warfare generalizations have become the safe outlet for internet rage because going after CEOs and billionaires is most “punching up” construction that is generally relatable. An unintended side effect that I’ve noticed is that it normalizes bad behavior of CEOs for those who invest a lot of “CEOs bad” grist (Reddit, Threads, even Hacker News). When someone, usually early career, takes a job with a bad CEO afte…

“No war but class war” rings as true in 2026 as it did 40 years ago

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#76

Post by buildbot »

I love the analogy of AI coding as witchcraft! It’s very accurate to how working with these tools feels - At one point I was forced to invoke a “litany against stubbing” in a loop to make claude code actually implement a renode setup for some firmware. That worked really well.

It feels like hexing the technical interview come to real life ;)

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#79

Post by aphyr »

_doctor_love wrote: post #50

Another interesting one from 'aphyr -- I think the points around the Ironies of Automation deserve deeper focus, possibly even a separate follow-up post. I would encourage folks to look at the following industries: nuclear safety, commercial aviation, remote surgery. These industries have dealt with the issues of automation for much longer than we have as programmers. In the research I've done, these industries went…

Thank you for this! I really wanted to go deeper on human factors, and I think there's a lot to be said about CRM and sociotechnical systems design, especially when ML gets used for decision support. Ultimately wound up truncating that section (along with more of the economic critique) because the piece was already far too long.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#80

Post by faangguyindia »

sophacles wrote: post #73
faangguyindia wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intuition. It comes from the spiritual awakening and being aware of your consciousness. Only Time will prove what turns out be right.

You worship the AI?

I see AI has great utility and we'll figure out ways to better it. If I had any power, i would run Nuclear Power plants to run AI dafacenters and find other near infinite sources of energy to create deeper and deeper AIs. This level of ai tech is at its infancy, it's evidently clear. People are assuming it will stall soon, and won't go beyond a certain point. I don't believe this at all, I am believing it will go much much fatherer then this
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