Live data from Hacker News

What will be left for us to work on?

normaltech.ai

91–100 of 291 posts

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#91
post #7

Question: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?

For a few weeks but now we gotta give AI estimates i.e. smash it out quicker. So things will get miserable again.

I didn't do fewer hours in these weeks but had time to explore and innovate a little.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#92
post #59

You need to first address 1)What is work? 2)Why we need to work? Animals don't "work". Not atleast for their own sake. If there is enough green pasture and water around, they don't even migrate to other places. So if work is meant to provide food and shelter and if machines can ensure that, humans don't need to "work". Wealth is only a reserve capacity to help future generations so that they don't need to work for th…

This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take. Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive. This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...

Sure. But either way we aren’t going to have to worry about it. We’ll have post scarcity utopia, or we’ll have died. But there is an argument that the billionaire need to pay attention to: an ASI that kills 7 billion people won’t mind killing a few more.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#93
Researching advances in science and healthcare and therapy and raising children and whatever else Sam Altman cares to fund. If all our money is going to go to him, then the question is what does he want to spend it on? He gets to decide. Which is not really the place I wanted to be in, but that's where we are.

Does he want to fund the arts? Humanities?

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#94
post #8

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things c…

In such a future where LLMs hypothetically dominate the SDLC, the trade would be much more like pottery than medicine - i.e. a commodity in such obscene abundance that its functional utility would be entirely divorced from its creation.

In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content to delegate their entire software diet to generative superplatforms that script themselves to perform any arbitrary software function. The idea of paying for individual bespoke software programs would become an anachronism for an era where software was so difficult to produce that entire teams spent years painstakingly tweaking programs to spec.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#96
post #7

Question: Does anybody here yet personally has less (to) work 'cause of AI?

Yes, I have seen it happen on enterprise consulting.

For example, all the work like translations that used to be done by humans, now it is a CMS AI feature.

Secondly teams setup.

It used to be we did everything ourselves for development, then cloud, SaaS products and serverless decreased the teams size required for delivery.

Now with AI, there is an even greater push for low code/no code tooling, with agents, leaving the actual programming left for MCP tools that might not yet be available for the project.

Thus you get a team of five doing what used to be about 15 a decade ago.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#97
post #63

He's basically saying that even though AI capability is high and rapidly increasing, it is not reliable, creative or tasteful enough to replace humans. Further he implies that it will take decades before this is the case. But we already do have have some kind of measurement of most of these types of side factors, and they actually aren't at zero and are increasing rapidly. So the implication that they will not be hum…

It’s already the case that I’m no longer paid to type source code into a computer, but rather to control agents that do that. There’s still plenty of demand for human expertise and labor. It’s possible that this will change as well. What gives me hope that I won’t be completely useless in the future is Marx’s labor theory of value, which states that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of human labor…

Are you sure there isn't something qualitatively different from general purpose AI and robotics as opposed to the type of automation that Marx knew?

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very short-sighted, and exceedingly common, take. Until the machines aren't owned by anyone (or owned by everyone, take your pick on the phrasing), the owners of the machine have no need to keep you alive. This take is basically "Don't worry, people like Sam Altman are looking out for us"...

Sure. But either way we aren’t going to have to worry about it. We’ll have post scarcity utopia, or we’ll have died. But there is an argument that the billionaire need to pay attention to: an ASI that kills 7 billion people won’t mind killing a few more.

What happens in the space between when we think we have reached an equilibrium and an eventual incipient utopia, and whenever 9/10ths or whatever of the population is dead? What will AIs think of our fitness, anyway? Are we training them to be non-judgmental (and how is that safer or less safe?) and enforcing some weird idea of "equality"? Or are we teaching AIs to choose our choices for us, and our survivors, down the line? What will people be like when that time comes, anyway?

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#99
You’re not the horse rider moving to the car. You are the dung beetle.

The only question is what next?

Our only hope is to teach the AI to meld with our bodies and use them for gestation, energy or hibernation. The alternative is sustenance.

Re: What will be left for us to work on?

#100
post #8

I have been writing software for over 40 years and have had a long time interest in and some work in AI over that time. I wouldn’t say this gives me any more prognosticating power about how all of this is ultimately going to go, but I believe we're soon nearing an area of plateauing; whether that's because the science itself is plateauing or the intervention of governments is going to force plateau it. So if things c…

In such a future where LLMs hypothetically dominate the SDLC, the trade would be much more like pottery than medicine - i.e. a commodity in such obscene abundance that its functional utility would be entirely divorced from its creation. In such a future there would be a handful of lucky well paid artisans, a healthy community of hobbyists, and the overwhelming population of the planet who would be perfectly content t…

I think the big difference is that the only thing anyone ever needs a pot to do is hold fluids (or soil). It's a lot easier to spec out than a modern software product.
Post reply on HN