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

Feeling Sad about AI

artificialworlds.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 285 posts

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#261

Post by Seattle3503 »

dmantis wrote: post #238
HEmanZ wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fear isn’t about now, it’s about trajectory. Everyone’s existential dread would evaporate if this is where it stops. The dread is: where does this stop? Right now, with ai I can fly. But when does ai no longer need me? Just as an extreme example: a this pace, how far are we from “AI agent, here’s our assets, make money”? If every year 50% of the job disappears, how long until there is no human-ai team, just ai. I…

If there is no jobs, there is no modern economy in today's sense and "money" costs nothing. That will trigger very interesting consequences.

There is a sort of conceit here that tech is everything. There doesn't need to be "no jobs", it could just (or mostly) be the tech sector that is impacted and jobs are displaced. In the history of concentrated sector losses, the US public hasn't been kind to those displaced. The world marches on, no matter how important we think we are.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#262

Post by bornfreddy »

ohyes wrote: post #119
forinti wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This week I helped a colleague with a bug. He used an LLM to sort it out before telling me about it. I'm old fashioned, so I looked at the code, saw that it used an old lib and then I searched online for a newer version. Lo and behold, the bug had been ironed out. AI makes it really easy to not think properly about your task.

AI providers are in fact incentivized to have you not think about the task. I’ve found that they automatically do more for you, and frankly, a lot of the time I don’t want it to do more for me. Ask me a question rather than burning a bunch of tokens to answer something I already know of the top of my head.

The agents also overload you with walls of text, always including lots of less relevant information. It's like they want you to give up and let them drive.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#263

Post by wat10000 »

qarl wrote: post #169
wat10000 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real trick (if you can pull it off) is to cultivate a passion for something most people aren't that interested in, but where there's plenty of demand. I wanted to make games growing up, as I'm sure many of us here did. It's actually how I got into programming in the first place: I want to make games, oh here's this book on BASIC that came with the computer, maybe that will tell me how. Somewhere along the way I m…

To be fair - I think the world is in such flux right now it's kinda impossible to predict what is a good path forward. I have no idea what to tell my kid. But yes, I think many of us started with that book on BASIC making little programs for the joy of it. And it leads you all sorts of places. "Follow your bliss" as they say.

Yeah, I'd be a lot less confident in any career advice today compared to, say, ten years ago. But what else can you do....

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#264

Post by ungovernableCat »

chasd00 wrote: post #222
palmotea wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. Two important things you didn't address: 1. Quality-of-life 2. Economic security I'm not unhappy that vibe-coding is possible. I'm unhappy that it's likely to change the equation so I will lose a good chunk of my economic secur…

> AI technology has not been developed to make any regular person's life better or help humanity in any way What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity? I think of AI as like the invention of the loom. It made textiles a lot faster but idk about making lives better by itself. It made more clothes but you still had to buy them. I can't really think of a technology t…

>What are some examples of technology that did make regular people's life better or help humanity?

Washing machine, fridge, indoor plumbing, penicillin

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#265

Post by bitpush »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #221
bitpush wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Corporations misappropriating $9Tn of opensource human works to sell isomorphic plagiarism tokens is not progress, but rather an unsustainable ectoparasite people will not tolerate very long. I think about this a lot when I look at the roads, freeways and railroads of the world. In pursuit for building it, billions of trees have been cut down, land fundamentally shifted, rivers cut through, and wildlife uprooted…

I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with every frontier model training-cycle release at OpenAI. Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct…

> You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes.

This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3

Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such.

Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#266

Post by Seattle3503 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #26
UltraSane wrote: post #3

I feel the same way. I used to love to get into a flow state while programming and feel very proud of clever code and elegant architecture. But now LLMs are so much faster it feels somewhat pointless.

The code is still there, you can still flow with it. And your ability to do so ( along with the LLM) will only produce superior results in the long run. It's just, yes, like all of us .. the temptation is there to not do that.

At work the pace has increased so much that there really isn't room for writing by hand.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#267

Post by jonjacky »

There is something else here to feel sad about, which is bigger than the effect of AI on the lives and careers of individual programmers.

In the last eighty years or so, humanity has created something called 'Computer Science' which is ingenious and even beautiful. Now much of it will be forgotten. When the present generations of programmers age out, almost no one will know how to program. In fact almost no one will understand one of the key sciences and technologies that our civilization depends on. Some might say, "no problem, the AI will know all that stuff so we won't have to". Somehow I don't find that very comforting.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#268

Post by palmotea »

simonw wrote: post #260
palmotea wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You think those billion people are all addicted to having a made-up friend? No, and I don't think you're really trying to understand what I think. I mean, do you actually think anyone could think ChatGPT user only use it in one way? But to briefly answer your off-base question: some fraction are certainly "addicted to having a made-up friend," others use it to cheat or slack, others use it trivially in easily repla…

Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now. I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be. Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans. Computers a…

> Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers.

Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery.

> I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to everyone else.

That line sounds good, but it's not hard to understand how that could ultimately be a net-negative for most people.

We don't live in a communist society, where everyone is secure and running around solving problems for their own satisfaction and self-actualization. A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."

What that could mean in practice is the "everyone else" is actually some smallish elite that finds it can get away with sharing even less if its riches with others.

If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure. Not some piddling 5% bribe, but 100% (or a super-majority stake, at the minimum). I'm sure there can be quite a bit of innovation in the area of communal ownership.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#269

Post by mike_hearn »

willchis wrote: post #252
mike_hearn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they were almost exactly average in February. You're reading far too much into noise. The idea of a climate crisis is built on arguments about trends that span hundreds of years, not two weeks.

"They were nearly the same average for exactly one day in February" says the guy lecturing me on reading noise.

I think there's some sort of communication gap here. My point is that neither fact tells you anything much, especially not about "how screwed" we are. It's not a battle of data points.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#270

Post by encyclopedism »

simonw wrote: post #66

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding whilst at the same it providing value to others/society and financial upkeep for you and your family is far more meaningful.

For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether (or for humans to provide intent only). Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now, it is a comfortable position financially or socially but the future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted.

As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".

Post reply on HN