Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The turbulent AI era is here

gatesnotes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 223 posts

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#131

Post by OkayPhysicist »

sscaryterry wrote: post #114
pibaker wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Homelessness on the other hand is mostly a mental health and drug addiction problem No it's not. It's not a coincidence that homelessness only skyrocketed at the same time housing price took off to the point even professionals are spending half of their salary on rent. And if you look at the statistics you'll see addiction is a widespread issue but homelessness is not — WV and NM has some of the worst overdose deat…

Exactly, I'd imagine that if I were homeless, I'd probably do drugs just to not have to deal with my unimaginable circumstances.

I volunteered with homeless youth in LA, and it can be even more practical than that. When you're homeless, you definitionally don't have somewhere secure to sleep. When you're sleeping, you're vulnerable, to theft or violence (either by other homeless people, or the cops). So you don't sleep much, and sleep lightly. That leaves you exhausted. All the time. You need some energy to work whatever hours you can find at your woefully inadequate part time jobs, so you start using stimulants. That works for a while, but now you can't get any sleep, and the extreme stress of your perilous existence is only exasperated by stimulant abuse. At some point, depressants are the only real option to get some rest. And, as a lovely side effect, they make things feel okay. There's a reason you don't find a lot of otherwise-fine heroin addicts, unlike, say, coke or meth. Mostly, the feeling of opiates is just contentment. The addictive potential is closely tied to how miserable your unmedicated life is. Which, you know, for someone sleeping in the backseat of a 30 year old car in sketchy part of town or worse, is pretty fucking miserable.

And that's how someone can go from scared 14yo runaway to bartering favors for drugs in like, a year. Hell, I'd go even further and say that all the assholes blaming homelessness on mental health issues have the causality backwards, too. Living under constant stress would break anybody's psyche. Not to mention the fact that for most people I was helping, their lives before they were homeless weren't exactly rosy, either.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#132

Post by brazukadev »

azan_ wrote: post #81
Krei-se wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO. After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.

Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.

Excel sped up reviews >100x without Bill Gates preaching daily that devs were cooked.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#133

Post by jdub »

lubujackson wrote: post #21
cheptsov wrote: post #11

Is it me or does it read like pure satire? An AI ministry, “human-reserved” jobs, and taxes on AI tokens.

Sandbags against a tsunami. When has "pump the brakes on progress" ever worked out? What we need is deep thinking on the implications and make the default way forward one where we want to go. In other words, we build a channel for the flood waters, not a wall. Creating a role for "somebody to deal with AI issues" is one of those hand-wavvy upper management moves that looks defensible but simply passes the buck to som…

Yes. We can decide not to do bad things. Globally. Occasionally, it takes some time to figure out if something is bad. Especially when there's money to be made. But when we do, we can and have stopped doing them.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#134

Post by recursive »

azan_ wrote: post #117
mcnichol wrote: post #83

I feel this is merely stating the obvious. It goes back to the industrial revolution and every revolution before and after. There was a point where they thought a majority of people would be working as switchboard operators and then telephone switching came along. Horses to cars, etc. Jobs transition, new space is created, people are caught in tbe crossfire of supply and demand curves. Incan agree the bullwhip of thi…

If AI would become better at cognitive work than humans, I don't really see what new jobs would be created.

Construction for data centers?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#135

Post by tintor »

"... AI will avoid climate change."

xAI's Colossus 1 and 2 data center mobile gas turbines beg to differ.

AI data centers are driving electricity consumption in 100s of GW, and most of that energy is not clean renewable nor nuclear.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#137

Post by ewwe »

mcmcmc wrote: post #118
sltkr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the data fed into an AI model is based on real data you can get predictability. When the AI inputs start coming from the AI outputs the wobble is introduced which results inevitably into delirium. This is asserted without evidence. There is absolutely no proof that AI requires humans in the loop to function or improve itself. Compare it with Deepmind's go-playing program, AlphaGo, which mainly involved trainin…

You have no evidence that self improvement can work at generalized tasks. Go is a simple game with a clear win condition, but deep strategy and near infinite permutations of how a game plays out. Winning a game of Go is a task well suited to machine learning. One might say you are engaging in wishful thinking by believing it’ll just continue to work across all domains. The world is much bigger than a Go board.

Anyone who works on stuff, especially novel stuff, quickly exposes the weaknesses of LLMs.

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#138

Post by ewwe »

egonschiele wrote: post #51

Does anyone else feel incredibly nostalgic for the time when Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were the richest people on earth? I remember feeling pretty good about the fact that they were trying to do so much good, and about the giving pledge. Things feel so different now.

Hahaha what a moron

was that before or after he caught STDs?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#139

Post by smallerfish »

sghiassy wrote: post #127
numeri wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> new space is created That seems to be the crux here. You think it will be, I (and a lot of other people) aren't sure it will. If new space for jobs are created, I am certain we'll be fine long term. What do you think will happen if it isn't (I know you have strong evidence for and reasons to believe it will be, but just indulge the hypothetical)?

Yes that’s the crux of the risk - will new space be created On one hand. We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs On the other hand, Terminator

> We’ve never had a technological revolution that didn’t yield more jobs

a) How many technological revolutions do you count?

b) Of these, which directly created jobs vs in which did the job numbers eventually recover?

Re: The turbulent AI era is here

#140

Post by themgt »

dgellow wrote: post #97
azan_ wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that doesn't make sense. How can you evaluate if craze is warranted without evaluating underlying technology?

I’m very familiar with both technologies, but it’s not what my comment was about. The crypto craze would have been the same if we would have ended with some actual use cases for cryptocurrencies. The level of frenzy was completely out of proportion, very aggressive, with that same attitude of „we will impose something on you, change the world, you will be left behind and stay poor forever for having not been a believ…

The boy who cried wolf is a parable we read to children to teach them the lesson that wolves are imaginary creatures you shouldn't believe in.
Post reply on HN