AI and the Automation of Work • Hacker News Board

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#141

Post by koheripbal » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

thatsadude wrote: post #135

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!

Maybe at first, but they will likely not keep any humans around for long.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#142

Post by koheripbal » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:41 AM UTC

cm277 wrote: post #127

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 agree with the article; GPT is not AGI, it's ABSI (automated BS intelligence). That's certainly useful and it will automate some jobs, but a) it's just an enabling technology for new applications, b) we haven't seen these applications yet, so we have no real idea what the impact will be. To put it another way: the enabling tech for iPhone was (mainly) multitouch capacitive displays. I dont think anyone predicted Ub…

We are all BS intelligence. People who think little of AI forget how bad the rest of us are also

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#143

Post by MicropenisMike » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:42 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #83

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…

Chess engines overtook human chess players more than a decade or two ago and human chess is thriving. Activities don't become less rewarding for you simply because someone else is better at it, even if that's a machine. A robotic arm can probably lift more than I do, doesn't take my enjoyment from working out away. And people enjoy the human aspect and narrative in any activity in its own right. And that's the worst…

Chess is a leisure activity, not work, you cannot compare the impact of automation of the two.

Also, chess engines did kill chess. Chess used to be a spectacle on the national stage, from 2000 up until Queen's Gambit and the following streamer boom, chess was largely dead.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Chess&hl...

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#144

Post by joshuahedlund » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:51 AM UTC

MicropenisMike wrote: post #143

Barrin92 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chess engines overtook human chess players more than a decade or two ago and human chess is thriving. Activities don't become less rewarding for you simply because someone else is better at it, even if that's a machine. A robotic arm can probably lift more than I do, doesn't take my enjoyment from working out away. And people enjoy the human aspect and narrative in any activity in its own right. And that's the worst…

Chess is a leisure activity, not work, you cannot compare the impact of automation of the two. Also, chess engines did kill chess. Chess used to be a spectacle on the national stage, from 2000 up until Queen's Gambit and the following streamer boom, chess was largely dead. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Chess&hl...

Human chess is still an activity that earns people money tho

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#145

Post by revelio » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:52 AM UTC

shaunkoh wrote: post #98

keyle wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. Particularly if you're a polgyglot working with many different stacks. You know how to do something in X and you've never done it in Y. Explain it to ChatGPT and it gets you 95% there. It's a huge time saver. Sure you could do it by browsing the web and sticking together a bunch of pieces, rewrite it twice etc.

100%. I do know it might come bite me in the ass at some point. Already I didn’t realise my docker container was saving data to the NON-PERSISTENT data volume. But that was a greater reflection of Chatgpt taking me beyond my knowledge limits, and me being in a place where my ignorance of my ignorance can lead to not-great consequences.

Don't feel too bad about that one. I've seen Docker's default of non-persistent storage cause disaster even for professionals with years of experience. It's just a really bad bit of design.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#146

Post by iinnPP » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:53 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #137

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…

> 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…

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#147

Post by version_five » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #119

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?

> It's also very... American to not think mention the absurdity of machine guns at airports Now you mention it, despite the two respective national stereotypes, the only airports where I can remember seeing machine guns on the security team were one of the London airports. If I saw machine guns in SFO or JFK, I was too tired from the flight to remember.

From what I can remember, it's an everyday occurrence in various european cities to see police armed with machine guns. The first time I saw it it was very surprising and I wondered what was going on. Definitely not a uniquely american thing.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#148

Post by benedictevans » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:57 AM UTC

kranke155 wrote: post #114

As any now typical text of this nature, it cites very little real data. Here is an article on how recent historians believe that English male height during the Industrial Revolution went down due to malnutrition: https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/09/13/did-livin... Historians now think the Industrial Revolution was a giant economic boom where the majority of individuals actually became poorer. Here is an I…

As I said, sometimes the job goes different people in different places, and there’s always frictional pain in the adjustment On the other hand, you are correct that I didn’t post data saying that unemployment hasn’t fallen, but then that is self-evident. We do not have 50% unemployment now because machines took half the jobs, and we are all of us vastly more prosperous than we were in 1800 or 1900 - again, I don’t think I need to post a chart to the obvious.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#149

Post by version_five » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

raincole wrote: post #84

danmaz74 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

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.

That's a particular case of the general idea that there are a lot of completely clueless people, whether tech bros, business leaders, politicians, etc that have only the most superficial understanding of various problems and are arrogant enough to think that their super simple solution is novel and can address the problem.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#150

Post by moffkalast » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:59 AM UTC

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".

Yeah, areas where there's a high liability and potential loss of life are the last ones that will be fully automated. On the other hand, most office jobs are easy targets because work can be verified in non-realtime before using it.

Trains and planes already operate completely autonomously 99.9% of the time. Yet we still have pilots and train engineers there to handle the edge cases because having one or two people to keep an eye on a million dollar machine that can kill hundreds of people and cause billions in property damages if handled incorrectly works out to be a pretty good deal.

This is the main problem with self driving cars. They can kill people.