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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#151

Post by bscphil »

schneems wrote: post #89
DiscourseFan wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The major shift for me is now its normal to take Waymos. Yeah, there aren't as fast as Uber if you have to get across town, but for trips less than 10 miles they're my go to now.

Ive never taken one. They seem nice though. On the other hand, the Tesla “robotaxi” scares the crap out of me. No lidar and seems to drive more aggressively. The Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel is equal parts hilarious and nightmare fuel when you realize that’s what’s next to your kid biking down the street.

> Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel

I understand the argument for augmenting your self-driving systems with LIDAR. What I don't really understand is what videos like this tell us. The comparison case for a "road-runner style fake tunnel" isn't LIDAR, it's humans, right? And while I'm sure there are cases where a human driver would spot the fake tunnel and stop in time, that is not at all a reasonable assumption. The question isn't "can a Tesla save your life when someone booby traps a road?", it's "is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads?", and moreover, "how does a Tesla perform on the 99.999999% of roads that aren't booby trapped?"

Re: AI is different

#152

Post by joshdavham »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #102

One thing that doesn’t seem to be discussed with the whole “tech revolution just creates more jobs” angle is that, in the near future, there are no real incentives for that. If we’re going down the route of declining birth rates, it’s implied we’ll also need less jobs. From one perspective, it’s good that we’re trying to over-automate now, so we can sustain ourselves in old age. But decreasing population also implies…

If there are going to less people in the future, especially as the world ages, I think a lot of this automation will be arriving at the right moment.

Re: AI is different

#153

Post by morsecodist »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #80

This is an accurate assessment. I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI. I think it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world. AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans a…

> I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI

It's always interesting to see this take because my perception is the exact opposite. I don't think there's ever been an issue for me personally with a bigger mismatch in perceptions than AI. It sometimes feels like the various sides live in different realities.

Re: AI is different

#154

Post by jongjong »

People thought it was the end of history and innovation would be all about funding elaborate financial schemes; but now with AI people are finding themselves running all these elaborate money-printing machines and they're unsure if they should keep focusing on those schemes as before or actually try to automate stuff. The risk barrier has been lowered a lot to actually innovate, almost as low risk as doing a scheme but still people are having doubts. Maybe because people don't trust the system to reward real innovation.

LLMs feel like a fluke, like OpenAI was not intended to succeed... And even now that it succeeded and they try to turn the non-profit into a for-profit, it kind of feels like they don't even fully believe their own product in terms of its economic capacity and they're still trying to sell the hype as if to pump and dump it.

Re: AI is different

#155

Post by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #85
_jab wrote: post #59

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integri…

AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot. No other tech has had an impact like that, even the internet.

> AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot

Not really, there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do. It is just a asymmetric attack on the professor's (or whomever is grading) time to do that.

IMO, credentials shouldn't be given to those who test or submit assignments without proctoring (a lot of schools allow this).

Re: AI is different

#156

Post by strogonoff »

As any other technology, at the end of the day LLMs are used by humans for humans’ selfish, driven by mental issues and trauma and overcompensation, maybe even paved with good intentions but leading you know where, short-sighted goals. If we were to believe that LLMs are going to somehow become extremely powerful, then we should be concerned, as it is difficult to imagine how that can lead to an optimal outcome organically.

From the beginning, corporations and their collaborators at the forefront of this technology tainted it by ignoring the concept of intellectual property ownership (which had been with us in many forms for hundreds if not thousands of years) in the name of personal short-term gain and shareholder interest or some “the ends justify the means” utilitarian calculus.

Re: AI is different

#157

Post by xpe »

000ooo000 wrote: post #64
drooby wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carpenters, landscapers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, elderly care, nurses, cooks, servers, bakers, musicians, actors, artists... Those jobs are probably still a couple decades plus off from displacement. some possibly never, And we will need them in higher numbers.. and perhaps it's ironic because these are some of the oldest professions. Everything we do is in service of paying for our housing, transportation,…

What this delusion seems to turn a blind eye to is that a good chunk of the population is already in those roles; what happens when the supply of those roles far exceeds the demand, in a relatively short time? Carpenters suddenly abundant, carpenter wages drop, carpenters struggling to live, carpenters forced to tighten spending, carpenters decide children aren't affordable.. now extrapolate that across all of the im…

There’s no guarantee of an equilibrium!

Re: AI is different

#158

Post by xpe »

OneMorePerson wrote: post #141
btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

Far from an expert on this topic, but what differentiates AI from other non physical efficiency tools? (I'm actually asking not contesting). Won't companies always want to compete with one another, so simply using AI won't be enough. We will always want better and better software, more features, etc. so that race will never end until we get an AI fully capable of managing all parts (100%) of the development process (…

Companies don’t always compete on capability or quality. Sometimes they compete on efficiency. Or sometimes they carve up the market in different ways.

Re: AI is different

#159

Post by d1sxeyes »

fallous wrote: post #108
atleastoptimal wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything anyone could say about bad AI driving could be said about bad human drivers. Nevertheless, Waymo has not had a single fatal accident despite many millions of passenger miles and is safer than human drivers.

Everything? How about legal liability for the car killing someone? Are all the self-driving vendors stepping up and accepting full legal liability for the outcomes of their non-deterministic software?

In the bluntest possible sense, who cares if we can make roads safer?

Solving liability in traffic collisions is basically a solved problem through the courts, and at least in the UK, liability is assigned in law to the vendor (more accurately, there’s a list of who’s responsible for stuff, I’m not certain if it’s possible to assume legal responsibility without being the vendor).

Re: AI is different

#160

Post by econ »

For me it maps elegantly on previous happenings.

When the radio came people almost instantly stopped singing and playing instruments. Many might not be aware of it but for thousands of years singing was a normal expression of a good mood and learning to play an instrument was a gateway to lifting the mood. Dancing is still in working order but it lacks the emotional depth that provided a window into the soul of those you live and work with.

A simpler example is the calculator. People stopped doing it by hand and forgot how.

Most desk work is going to get obliterated. We are going to forget how.

The underlings on the work floor currently know little to nothing about management. If they can query an AI in private it will point out why their idea is stupid or it will refine it into something sensible enough to try. Eventually you say the magic words and the code to make it so happens. If it works you put it live. No real thinking required.

Early on you probably get large AI cleanup crews to fix the hallucinations (with better prompts)

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