101–110 of 285 posts
I rarely hear people talk about the fact that demand for new software will increase exponentially as cost to produce software crash. The ratios of devs_per_1k_lines_of_code_in_2022:devs_per_1k_lines_of_code_in_2028 and increase_in_demand:decrease_in_cost are unknown. But what if 1 dev could produce 300% more code, reducing eng cost (assuming same cost per hour per dev) to 1/3 of historical norms. Would that result in…
It's also a great example of why tech executives shouldn't be trusted, at all. "My thing will break our entire economy. I'm still gonna build it, though." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
Capitalism is a doomsday cult and these people are its prophets.
Maybe the solution might be socialism except you can own money till 10 million I guess. But I am not sure if its effective or not. Definitely loop holes. Idk
We’ve seen tech completely eliminate jobs like phone switch operators and lamp lighters. And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc. It seems like people are debating whether the impact of AI on computer-based jobs will be elimination or decimation. But for the majority of people, what’s the difference?
>And it’s decimated other professions like manual agriculture, assembly line jobs, etc. When Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, production went from hundreds of cars to thousands. It had a profoundly positive impact on the secondary market, leading to an overall increase in job creation. I've yet to see any "AI is gonna take your job" articles that even attempt to consider the impact on the secondary mar…
What if it just makes most jobs worse, or replaces good jobs with more, worse jobs? "Meat robot constantly monitored and directed by AI overlords" is technically a job.
I can't make up my mind if I'd prefer an AI boss or not. Human bosses can be quite terrible and not having to deal with an emotional being seems kinda nice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s all well and good for the humans with experience, for whom AI is a force multiplier. My concern is for the juniors - there’s going to be far fewer opportunities for them to get started in careers.
How did commercial pilots solve the problem?
I rarely hear people talk about the fact that demand for new software will increase exponentially as cost to produce software crash. The ratios of devs_per_1k_lines_of_code_in_2022:devs_per_1k_lines_of_code_in_2028 and increase_in_demand:decrease_in_cost are unknown. But what if 1 dev could produce 300% more code, reducing eng cost (assuming same cost per hour per dev) to 1/3 of historical norms. Would that result in…
and, the money to pay those new devs will just pour out like a waterfall? Some players in the ecosystem exist solely to stop payments as a cost center. Paying for work is a liability, capital expenditure and long term deals for automation are a tax writeoff. Let's be even more blunt -- slavery for labor is very profitable and makes a great economy on a large scale; taxes are healthy, production goes up, some people g…
What could stop AI from doing all jobs?
We don't even have a robot than can effectively scrub toilets, if they aren't designed for self-cleaning. Some will smile at the triviality of such things, but if you solve that you will get very rich. It surely is not at all trivial to solve. Currently I don't think we can even replace any normal clerk for any slightly more complex problem yet. Programming is essentially a form of translation and these fields will p…
Personally, I use AI a lot. It’s great for boilerplate, getting unstuck, or even offering alternative solutions I wouldn’t have thought of. But where it still struggles sometimes is with the why behind the work. It doesn’t have that human curiosity, asking odd questions, pushing boundaries, or thinking creatively about tradeoffs.
What really makes me pause is when it gives back code that looks right, but I find myself thinking, “Wait… why did it do this?” Especially when security is involved. Even if I prompt with security as the top priority, I still need to carefully review the output.
One recent example that stuck with me: a friend of mine, an office manager with zero coding background, proudly showed off how he used AI to inject some VBA into his Excel report to do advanced filtering. My first reaction was: well, here it is, AI replacing my job. But what hit harder was my second thought: does he even know what he just copied and pasted into that sensitive report?
So yeah, for me AI isn’t a replacement. It’s a power tool, and eventually, maybe a great coding partner. But you still need to know what you’re doing, or at least understand enough to check its work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctors already barely see patients for more than a couple of minutes, you want them to be faster ?
I’m actually not clear on what percentage of the doctor’s work-time is spend doing things other than talking to patients (like arguing with insurance or making records).
I worked on software for electronic medical record note taking and I'm not sure how an LLM can help a doctor speed that up tbh. All of the stats need to be typed into the computer regardless. The LLM can't really speed that up?
The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technol…
Anything a human remote worker can do, a super human remote worker will be able to do better, faster and for a fraction of the cost – this includes work that humans currently do in offices but could theoretically done remotely.
We should therefore assume if (when) AI broadly surpasses the capabilities of a human remote worker it will not longer make economic sense to hire humans for these roles.
Should we assume this then what is the human's role in the labour market? It won't be their physical abilities (the industrial revolution replaced the human's role here), it won't be their reasoning abilities (AI will soon replace the human's here), but perhaps jobs which require both physical dexterity and human-level reasoning ability humans might still retain an edge? Perhaps at least for now we can assume jobs like roofing, plumbing, and gardening will continue to exist. While jobs like coding, graphic design and copy writing will almost certainly be replaced.
I think the only long-term question at the moment is how long it will take for robotics to catch up and provide something akin to human-level dexterity with super-human intelligence? At which point I'm not sure why anyone would hire a human except from the novelty of it – perhaps like the novelty of riding a horse into town.
AI is so obviously not like other technologies. Past technologies effectively just found ways to automate low-intelligence tasks and augment human strength via machinery. Advanced robotics and AI is fundamentally different in their ability to cut into human labour, and combined it's hard to see any edge to a human labourer.
But ether way, even if you subscribe to this notion that AI will not take all human jobs it seems very likely that AI will displace many more jobs than the industrial revolution did, and at a much much faster pace. Additionally, it will target those who are most educated, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it unlike the working class who are easy to ignore and tell to re-skill, my guess would be that demands will be made for UBI and large reorganisations of our existing economic and political systems. My point is, the likelihood any of this will end well is close to zero, even if you just believe AI will replace a bunch of inefficient jobs like software engineers.