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Playing in the Creek

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Re: Playing in the Creek

#101

Post by LinuxAmbulance »

dachris wrote: post #22
doctoboggan wrote: post #5

This is an excellent essay, and I feel similar to the author but couldn't express it as nicely. However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the advice and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. The author indicated they stepped away from a high paying finance job for moral reasons, which is admirable. But wallstreet continues on and does not lack for people willing to play the "make as much money…

The paperclip maximizers are already here, but they are maximizing money. One recent HN comment [0] comparing corporations and institutions to AI really stuck with me - those are already superhuman intelligences. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43580681

Corporations certainly have advantages over individuals, but classifying them as superhuman intelligences misses the mark. I'd go with a blind ravenous titan instead.

Re: Playing in the Creek

#102

Post by DrSiemer »

hacb wrote: post #43
DrSiemer wrote: post #23

So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true? To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books an…

> The calculator did not erase math wizards The major difference is that in order to use a calculator, you need to know and understand the math you're doing. It's a tool you can work with. I always had a calculator for my math exams and I always had bad grades :) You don't have to know how to program to ask ChatGPT to build yet another app for you. It's a substitute for your brain. My university students have good gr…

This is incorrect. You very much need to know how to program to make an AI build an app for you. Language models are not capable of creating anything new without significant guidance and at least some understanding of the code, unless you're asking it to create projects that tutorials have been written about. AI in it's current form is also just "a tool you can work with".

Like with the calculator, why would you need to be able to calculate things on paper if you can just have a machine do it for you? Same goes for more advanced AI: what's the point of being able to do things without them?

Not to offend, but in my opinion that's nothing more than a romantic view of what humans "should be capable of". 10 years from now we can all laugh at the idea of people defending doing stuff without AI assistance.

Re: Playing in the Creek

#103

Post by hacb »

DrSiemer wrote: post #102
hacb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The calculator did not erase math wizards The major difference is that in order to use a calculator, you need to know and understand the math you're doing. It's a tool you can work with. I always had a calculator for my math exams and I always had bad grades :) You don't have to know how to program to ask ChatGPT to build yet another app for you. It's a substitute for your brain. My university students have good gr…

This is incorrect. You very much need to know how to program to make an AI build an app for you. Language models are not capable of creating anything new without significant guidance and at least some understanding of the code, unless you're asking it to create projects that tutorials have been written about. AI in it's current form is also just "a tool you can work with". Like with the calculator, why would you need…

Of course, an AI will not "magically" code an app the same way 10 developers will do in a year, I don't think we disagree on this.

However, it allows you to do things you don't understand. I'm again taking examples from what I see at my university (n=1): almost all students deliver complex programming projects involving multi-threading, but can't answer a basic quizz about the same language in-person. And by basic question I mean "select among the propositions listed below the correct keyword used to declare a variable in Golang". I'm not kidding, at least one-third of the class is actually answering something wrong here.

So yeah, maybe we as a society agree on the fact that those people will not be software engineers, but prompt engineers. They'll send instructions to an agent that will display text in a strange and cryptic language, and maybe when they'll press "Run" lights will be green. But as a professional, why should I hire them once they earned their diploma? They are far from being ready for the professional world, can't debug systems without using LLMs (and maybe those LLMs can't help them because the company context is too important), and most importantly they are way less capable than freshly graduated engineers from a few years back.

> 10 years from now we can all laugh at the idea of people defending doing stuff without AI assistance.

I hope so, but I'm quite pessimistic unfortunately. Expertise and focus capabilities are dying, and we are more and more relying on artificial "intelligence" and its biases. But the future will tell

Re: Playing in the Creek

#104

Post by fragmede »

DrSiemer wrote: post #23

So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true? To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books an…

> The calculator did not erase math wizards

But it did. Quick, what's 67 * 49? A math wiz would furrow their brow for a second and be able to spit out an answer, while the rest of us have to pull out a calculator. When you're doing business in person and have to move numbers around, having to stop and use a calculator slows you down. If you don't have a role where that's useful then it's not a needed skill and you don't notice it's missing, like riding s horse, but doesn't mean the skill itself wouldn't be useful to have.

Re: Playing in the Creek

#105

Post by BrenBarn »

nkozyra wrote: post #71
BrenBarn wrote: post #28

It's a nice article. In a way though it kind of bypasses what I see as the main takeaways. It's not about AI development, it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can". The problems that we see with AI have little to do with AI "development", they have to do with AI marketing and promulgation. If the author had gone ahead and dammed the creek with a shovel, or blown off his hand…

> it's about something mentioned earlier in the article: "make as much money as I can". I think it's a little deeper than that. It's the democratization of capability. If few people have the tools, the craftsman is extremely valuable. He can make a lot of money without a glut of knowledge or real skill. In general the people don't have the tools and skills to catch up to where he is. He is wealthy with only frontload…

I don't agree. "Capability" is a red herring. It's not about what we can do, it's about what we allow ourselves to do.

Re: Playing in the Creek

#106

Post by babelfish »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #82
sepositus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think this style of argumentation is constructive and beneficial for the broader good of society? I can't think of a single person I've met who would respond positively to being labeled a (partial) sociopath after being able to only express a couple of paragraphs of thought.

Yes, I do, because I’m never going to change his mind, maybe I will, but probably not, but other people reading this can take sides and think about it in a non-direct way. Jesus turned over tables when they were trying to profit inside the church. His movement seemed to turn out pretty good.

Have you tried following the dao, instead?

Re: Playing in the Creek

#107

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

ben_w wrote: post #56
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "AI risk" because they're still tools that lack independent volition. Somebody's building them and setting them loose. They're not building themselves and setting themselves loose, and it's far from clear how to get there from here. Dumb bombs kill people just as easily. One 80-year old nuke is, at least potentially , more effective than the entirety of the world's drones.

Oh, but it is an AI risk. The analogy is with stock market flash-crashes, but those can be undone if everyone agrees "it was just a bug". Software operates faster than human reaction times, so there's always pressure to fully automate aspects of military equipment, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS Unfortunately, a flash- war from a bad algorithm, from a hallucination, from failing to specify that the m…

"AI Safety" in that particular context is easy: Keep humans in the loop and don't give AIs access to sensitive systems. With certain small antipersonnel drones excepted, this is already the policy of all serious militaries.

Besides, that's simply not what the LW crowd is talking about. They're talking about, e.g., hypercompetent AIs developing novel undetectable biological weapons that kill all humans on purpose. (This is the "AI 2027" scenario.)

Yet, as far as I'm aware, there's not a single important discovery or invention made by AI. No new drugs, no new solar panel materials, no new polymers, etc. And not for want of trying!

They know what humans know. They're no more competent than any human; they're as competent as low-level expert humans, just with superhuman speed and memory. It's not clear that they'll ever be able to move beyond what humans know and develop hypercompetence.

Re: Playing in the Creek

#108

Post by DrSiemer »

hacb wrote: post #103
DrSiemer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. You very much need to know how to program to make an AI build an app for you. Language models are not capable of creating anything new without significant guidance and at least some understanding of the code, unless you're asking it to create projects that tutorials have been written about. AI in it's current form is also just "a tool you can work with". Like with the calculator, why would you need…

Of course, an AI will not "magically" code an app the same way 10 developers will do in a year, I don't think we disagree on this. However, it allows you to do things you don't understand. I'm again taking examples from what I see at my university (n=1): almost all students deliver complex programming projects involving multi-threading, but can't answer a basic quizz about the same language in-person. And by basic qu…

Isn't it irrelevant that students do not have the answer to a basic quiz though? In a real life situation, they can just _ask an LLM_ if they need to know something.

I don't believe having this option will make people a lot less functional. Sure, some may slip through the cracks by faking it, but we'll soon develop different metrics to judge somebodies true capabilities. Actually, we'll probably create AI for that as well.

As a professional, you hire people who get things done. If that means hiring skilled LLM users, that do not fully understand what they produce, but what they make consistently works about as often as classic dev output does, and they do this in a fraction of the time... You would be crazy _not_ to hire them.

It's true that inexperienced developers will probably generate a massive tech debt during the time where AI is good enough to provide code, but not good enough to fish out hidden bugs. It will soon surpass humans at that skill though, and can then quickly clean up all the spaghetti.

Over the last two years my knowledge on how to perform and automate repetitive and predictable tasks has gradually worn away, replaced by a higher level understanding of software architecture. I use it to guide language models to a desired outcome. For those that want to learn, LLM's excel at explaining code. For this, and plenty of other subjects, it's the greatest learning tool we have ever had! All it takes is a curious mind.

We are in a transitionary time and we simply need to figure out how to deal with this new technology, warts and all. It's not like there is an alternative scenario; it's not going to go away...

Re: Playing in the Creek

#109

Post by profsummergig »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #74
criddell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can argue whatever you want to argue. I make my living with my brain so I do worry about the downsides of removing boredom and mental struggle from my days.

It's almost certainly going to be bad, and almost certainly going to be unavoidable. I can't spell for shit anymore. Ever since auto correct became omnipresent in pretty much all writing fields, my brain just kinda ditched remembering how to spell words. buuuttt Manual labor has been obsolete for at least 100 years now for certain classes of people, and fitness is still an enormous recreational activity people partak…

> I can't spell for shit anymore.

This is increasingly happening to me every day. Hope the alien overlords don't have spelling tests (as their version of IQ tests) to separate the serfs from the field-masters.

Re: Playing in the Creek

#110

Post by turtleyacht »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #33

The author seems concerned about AI risk -- as in, "they're going to kill us all" -- and that's a common LW trope. Yet, as a regular user of SOTA AI models, it's far from clear to me that the risk exists on any foreseeable time horizon. Even today's best models are credulous and lack a certain insight and originality. As Dwarkesh once asked: > One question I had for you while we were talking about the intelligence st…

State of the Art (SOTA)
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