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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

#161

Post by fzzzy »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #155
fny wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.

The singularity does no such thing.

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

#163

Post by _dwt »

acoard wrote: post #139
hliyan wrote: post #126

> One of her key lessons is that automation tends to de-skill operators I recently discovered an example of this phenomenon in a completely unrelated area: navigation. About a week ago, I realized that I couldn't remember the exact turns to reach a certain place I started driving to recently, even after having driven there about 3-4 times over a period of a month. Each time I had used Google Maps. When I used to driv…

Plato on how reading and writing make us more forgetful as we rely on this new technology: > And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longe…

"Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country."

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

#164

Post by bluecheese452 »

tossandthrow wrote: post #84
nostrademons wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cycle…

You are very strong on the "slop" bias. Why? In managing a large to enterprise sized code base, I experience the opposite. I can guarantee a much more homogenous quality of the code base. It is the opposite of slop I am seeing. And that at a lower cost. Today,I literally made a large and complex migration of all of our endpoints. Took ai 30 minutes, including all frontends using these endpoints. Works flawlessly, deb…

Ironically the post saying it is not slop sounds exactly like ai slop.

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

#165

Post by _doctor_love »

aphyr wrote: post #79
_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.

You're welcome! I imagine you already know this one as well but just in case.

Learning to Learn by the late Dr Richard Hamming. See especially Chapter 2.

A point Hamming makes is that when transitions from hand to machine production occurred, usually what is built ends up changing as the old techniques don't transfer 1:1 from the old world.

So for instance, we went from nuts and bolts to rivets and welding (Dr Hamming's literal example). This required builders to produce an equivalent product to the old, built with different techniques - and crucially! - under tighter control limits.

The reason things are going all over the place with AI at the moment is that it's speed, speed, speed. They had an all hands at my company recently where the top brass talked about AI. The only thing mentioned was speed - go faster, do more, etc. Not a single soul talked about quality.

But if you know your software engineering wisdom you know that you can only pick two when it comes to speed, scope, or quality. It's going to get real dumb for a while until people realize/remember quality is how you achieve speed.

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

#166

Post by tra3 »

groby_b wrote: post #98

I really wish we'd stop arguing about AI with an "some automation failed, so all automation is bad" approach. Yes, AF447 crashed due to lack of training for a specific situation. And yet, air travel is safer than ever. Yes, that Tesla drove into a wall, and yet robotaxis exist, work well, and are significantly safer than human drivers. Yes, there are a lot of "witchcraft" approaches to working with AI, but there are…

I think you're maybe oversimplifying a bit. I dont think the argument here is that "AI" is not 100% so we shouldn't use AI. There are issues we need to be aware of.

Specifically, AI companies want to inflate the utility of AI because that's how they make money. There should be guardrails where appropriate. Unfortunately, as usual, we need to make mistakes before we can learn from them.

Robotaxis do exist, but they are not made equal. Tesla's for instance are 4x worse than humans: https://electrek.co/2026/02/17/tesla-robotaxi-adds-5-more-cr...

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

#167

Post by ryandrake »

echelon wrote: post #149
ryandrake wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly, many senior software engineers are reporting 2-10x productivity increases. But are they making 2-10x compensation compared to before these tools? If not, these tools are not really useful to you, they are useful to your employer. The most shocking thing I find about LLM-assisted development is how gleefully we are just handing all this value over to our employers, simultaneously believing that they are g…

> handing all this value over to our employers, simultaneously believing that they are great because we're producing more. You could turn the table and say that you can now launch your own business with far fewer resources. Who needs financial capital if you can do it all with solo / small team labor capital? Gossip Goblin ditched his studio and now a16z is trying to throw him money, which he's turned down. He's turn…

> If you can do those things, you're going to be a rock star with total autonomy.

What percentage of developers can do these things? 1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? A very small percentage of developers have the desire to take on the full-stack, the temperament of good entrepreneurs, the product judgment of good Product Managers and ability of good Project Managers to juggle dependencies and timeframes. What about the rest of them? The remaining 99+% of us are just handing value over to our employers and getting a 5% raise in return--if we're lucky.

So, the fact that a small percentage of rockstar developers can capture the full value of AI-assisted development reinforces the point that a small number of people/businesses are capturing that value. The vast majority of workers are not capturing any value.

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

#168

Post by aphyr »

_doctor_love wrote: post #165
aphyr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're welcome! I imagine you already know this one as well but just in case. Learning to Learn by the late Dr Richard Hamming. See especially Chapter 2. A point Hamming makes is that when transitions from hand to machine production occurred, usually what is built ends up changing as the old techniques don't transfer 1:1 from the old world. So for instance, we went from nuts and bolts to rivets and welding (Dr Hammin…

I have not read Hamming yet, thank you!

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

#169

Post by kaibee »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #155
fny wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.

> regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans,

AI isn't one thing though. Really its kind of a natural evolution of 'higher order life'. I think that something like a 'organization', (corps, governments, etc) once large enough is at least as alive as a tardigrade. And for the people who are its cells, it is as comprehensible as the tardigrade is to any of its individual cells. So why wouldn't organizations over all of human history eventually 'evolve' a better information processing system than humans making mouth sounds at each other? (writing was really the first step on this). Really if you look at the last 12,000 years of human society as actually being the first 12,000 years of the evolutionary history of 'organizations', it kinda makes a lot of sense. And so much of it was exploring the environment, trying replication strategies, etc. And we have a lot of different organizations now, like an evolutionary explosion, where life finds various niches to exploit.

/schitzoposting

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

#170

Post by _dwt »

groby_b wrote: post #98

I really wish we'd stop arguing about AI with an "some automation failed, so all automation is bad" approach. Yes, AF447 crashed due to lack of training for a specific situation. And yet, air travel is safer than ever. Yes, that Tesla drove into a wall, and yet robotaxis exist, work well, and are significantly safer than human drivers. Yes, there are a lot of "witchcraft" approaches to working with AI, but there are…

I think you may have missed a subtle point: there is an especial risk from automation which almost always works correctly. The aviation industry calls the phenomenon "automation fatigue". It's very difficult for humans to stay alert and monitor systems like these, and the use of the systems tends to lead to de-skilling over time in the very skills required to monitor them and fix the (rare but fatal - at least in aviation) error cases when they occur.
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