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

AI and the Automation of Work

ben-evans.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 268 posts

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#131

Post by throwbadubadu »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #111
dsign wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's the last job you want to automate with "AI". Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being w…

>Have you been at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in France? The security people there look like paratroopers[^1]. It's terrifying, and it's a reason I avoid that particular airport every time I fly. It sends the message "Paris is an unsafe place to be, we are very paranoid, blame the others, don't come here." The machine guns have no business among civilians, being with robots or people, period. In europe there's 1-2…

> In europe there's 1-2 orders of less police brutality and issues overall, but the tradeoff is you randomly have military police walking around with rifles

I doubt any relation of these two facts, or cannot see it.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#132

Post by ricardo81 »

danmaz74 wrote: post #72
dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

"A security guard at an airport can be a a machine gun on wheels" - are you serious? That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people. It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

Agree on your sentiment.

To be honest, if we're talking about most minimum wage jobs being performed better by AI (I would imagine being armed security, at least in the UK is a lot more than min wage, because of the responsibility and trust of course), I'd worry less about their AI machine gun at airports vs the existential questions around there being a working class (in the original sense).

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#133

Post by TapWaterBandit »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #125
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be quite surprised if AI (as we've seen so far) threatens manual jobs as these have already been under quite intense pressures to automate for well over a century. The low-hanging fruit IMO are most likely to be anything that is done entirely via/inside a computer. Because interacting in the digital world is much less of an issue than having to deal with digital + physical world like manual jobs do. That's not to…

Not really afraid of that at all. On the contrary, you cannot just take an AI and make it do stuff. You need experts to parameterize and train it. It is also a bit more complicated than a pid controller where you turn a few knobs. For training you would need domain experts. The same reason we didn't see too widespread automation in industry. You actually need a lot of engineers to automate systems for their specific…

I agree that engineers will likely be fine (if at all decent). But there are many more jobs done on computers that are fairly routine which are the ones that will be threatened.

> An AI currently isn't even capable of doing excel business analysis without the data being checked. This check has to be done by an analyst as well. It cannot even do book keeping without errors and the work to check for errors surpasses doing it yourself.

Here I think you are thinking about this wrong. AI is going to be built directly into Excel so I think it will harm a lot of especially entry level type work for analysts. If any part of your job is using microsoft/Mac software I think you will see a radical shake up in work (that will still enable more people to be entrepreneurs etc so on balance a good thing).

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#134

Post by staz »

ido wrote: post #99
raincole wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a very good example to understand how "AI evangelists" think. Anyone with even slightest common senes would immediately understands why it's a bad idea, but AI evangelists just can't.

We had a whole series of films (RoboCop) warning us about exactly this particular Torment Nexus[0] [0] https://twitter.com/alexblechman/status/1457842724128833538

non twitter link https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#135

Post by thatsadude »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #41

I am pretty concerned about AGI. I love computer science and programming. I would love to get into research after I finish my Masters in a couple of years. I think it's fair to say that _some day_ we will achieve AGI. It might not be in 10 years, or 1000, but eventually we'll get there. When we do have AGI, what would that mean for someone like me? Would there be any reason to have programmers (or similar) at all? Wo…

I'm concerned about who AGI will serve? Rich people surely!

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#136

Post by TapWaterBandit »

js8 wrote: post #81
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you mean like something you can wheel in and install or a humanoid style robot you could use in any kitchen? Cause in theory you're just talking about a dishwasher lol. If you mean a robot that could clean in any kitchen without breaking anything, I'd say at least 20 years. As in you could move it from kitchen to kitchen with no install needs. I suppose another way to look at it is this: how many businesses use ro…

I can imagine a "box", say 1x1x2 meters, that you get in your home, it will have a plexiglass on it, and inside, it will have several AI-controlled arms, and you will be able to command it to fix anything in that space. Not really sure about cooking, but you could ask for example to fix your trousers, or repair a notebook, or make a fitting for water tap, and so on, and it would autonomously do it (it would ask to or…

That is a very cool concept I hadn't considered. No idea of feasibility but would love to see it or something similar happen.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#137

Post by ben_w »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #61
dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

I'd be quite surprised if AI (as we've seen so far) threatens manual jobs as these have already been under quite intense pressures to automate for well over a century. The low-hanging fruit IMO are most likely to be anything that is done entirely via/inside a computer. Because interacting in the digital world is much less of an issue than having to deal with digital + physical world like manual jobs do. That's not to…

> Something like working in a kitchen is a long way off (or at least will require a redesign of kitchens from the ground up or humanoid robotics that are effective, reliable, and reasonably cheap)

Factories that make food are already a thing.

I didn't know there was an entire TV series dedicated to just this topic until 5 minutes ago, but I have seen at least one short segment about the topic, specifically Viennetta ice cream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_Factory

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#138

Post by FeepingCreature »

hutzlibu wrote: post #121
FeepingCreature wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A dishwasher isn't autonomous. I'm talking about the second. I think if we don't solve general intelligence first, we should be able to get there in three to four years.

"An autonomous robot cleaning the dishes on its own in an unfamiliar kitchen without breaking anything" " I think if we don't solve general intelligence first, we should be able to get there in three to four years" Very unlikely. I mean you can build something that roughly does that already today, but it will break things and/or it will be so slow it is unusable. Also you have to take savety into account. The robot m…

Right. I think the kitchen scenario is more constrained than self-driving (for one, you don't have to continuously keep moving to be safe), and the people who I think are at the forefront of self-driving are also doing robots, and "perform tasks in an unfamiliar kitchen" is a ML classic. My main assumption for "don't injure humans" is that even small animals routinely manage to avoid doing actions that would be potentially harmful, so it doesn't seem to require full general intelligence.

And of course, if we crack an AI that can work on AI better than humans can, that solves - or at any rate obviates - all other AI problems by proxy.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#139

Post by ben_w »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #133
raxxorraxor wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really afraid of that at all. On the contrary, you cannot just take an AI and make it do stuff. You need experts to parameterize and train it. It is also a bit more complicated than a pid controller where you turn a few knobs. For training you would need domain experts. The same reason we didn't see too widespread automation in industry. You actually need a lot of engineers to automate systems for their specific…

I agree that engineers will likely be fine (if at all decent). But there are many more jobs done on computers that are fairly routine which are the ones that will be threatened. > An AI currently isn't even capable of doing excel business analysis without the data being checked. This check has to be done by an analyst as well. It cannot even do book keeping without errors and the work to check for errors surpasses do…

> Here I think you are thinking about this wrong. AI is going to be built directly into Excel so I think it will harm a lot of especially entry level type work for analysts.

I'd go further and say:

Excel is the automation: "computer" used to be a profession rather than a machine, and a linear regression line-of-best fit is basically the same maths as a single (no backprop) perceptron, which we used to have to calculate by hand.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#140

Post by Loquebantur »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #118
digitalengineer wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports, even in the hands of humans. Even if lethal force is required, would you want a security person (not a trained policeman) to "start blasting" and spraying bullets with a machine-gun?

I first thought so as well but have now been desensitized by machine guns at school. The war on terror really drove people crazy...

Yes, measured by impact, foreign terrorism was terrifyingly successful.

The "answers" the US came up with rather exacerbated the problem. Most also don't work with homegrown terrorism at all.

Using AI to profile such potential endemic perpetrators is ironically just another instance of trying to fit the problem to the tool.

Post reply on HN