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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

aphyr.com

481–490 of 830 posts

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#481
post #455

What the author is missing is that in his decision to limit the use of LLMs in his work, he omits the part where he “can”. E.g. he is resourceful and accomplished enough to be able to do the work he desires with no LLMs - but most people actually can’t. There are whole swaths of people software engineers that don’t write tests because “it slows them down” but they have never learned how to write testable code. And wh…

People learn what they need to learn to be successful (if they want to be successful). The newer generation of coders will learn exactly what it takes to be better than their peers, and that will still include building rock solid, highly performant software to beat the competitors, or they'll lose their jobs and someone better will do it.

If they do it entirely using AI to code, and the end output is good enough, they'll learn all the right skills to do this.

Human's always think everything is sliding into doom, and inevitably, it doesn't.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#482
post #433
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the other hand, shouldn't it be the objective of humanity to not HAVE to work for the most basic survival and to fit into society? Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.

But in another world doesn’t automation just produce yet another set of things to do? Perhaps i am doing this all wrong but in my world more automation has never produced less work unless I conveniently told no one and therefore filled “free” time how i wanted.

You're sending mixed messages here. Automation is going to put us all out of jobs, or automation isn't going to produce less work and so we'll still have lots to do?

Personally, I think until real AGI, the current LLMs will automate a lot of tasks, but the market will adapt and humans still end up with about the same percentage of employment and wages.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#483
post #70

> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would…

Yeah, I think about this a lot. Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight. Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding. Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again. This effor…

There are two sides to each coin though. For an employer, that grind is just additional cost that could be reduced by "AI".

It's like the difference between hand-made furniture and IKEA.

Until OpenAI etc need to turn a profit.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#484
Author seems depressed, my personal take is that no one can change technological évolution. It's going to happen.

Just flow with it and all it's bullshit, yeah life will be a little worst but it will still be better than those who chose to completely ignore it.

If the world is going mad, be the craziest of all these crazy motherfucker. At least it's interesting, I'm very curious to know what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.

Maybe, just maybe lol, we'll finally have this dreamed world where robots do all the work and we, human, can just enjoy ourselves 24/24.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal". On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.

How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on? Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look…

Any country that tries to ban private ownership of nuclear weapons would fall completely behind in all nuclear-weapon-related technologies. Should we therefore encourage the private ownership of nuclear weapons?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Troll post? You state that "other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living, then go on to talk about things that trucks do, not personal vehicles

I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones. The technology is the same. Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck.

You, personally, can't tell the difference between someone's car and a delivery truck?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#487
post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt. They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases. I know it is the classic sci-fi dystopia where somehow despite endless advances in tech and automation, the masses can't figure out how to make it work for themselves and end up living in shanty towns on t…

> If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt. > They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases. If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to ex…

> If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet.

So we reach this post scarcity society, where everyone could be living a life of luxury, but this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who would they be?), somehow form this uniform view that they just don't want 99.9% of other people around and let them all die off while they guard themselves in gated cities or something.

It just makes no sense at all to me. Like in a sci-fi novel or movie where it is a plot requirement, ok, but in reality, I just cannot see the path and all the things required to get to that particular reality. So many ways it would work out differently.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#488

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills. You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

I agree. Studies show time and time again that smart people are more efficient even at tasks that may not look like they require a smart person. So while people might not have been paid to do thinking jobs I don't buy that the intelligent did not always have had an edge, all else being equal.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#489

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

Can't say why but I enjoyed so much reading this comment

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#490
post #17

This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can b…

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

They have some positive effect in some situations but the overall effect has destroyed cities and made people fat and isolated.

Kind of like how fat and salt are good for you until you over consume. The world has massively overconsumed cars.

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