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I wish GPT4 had never happened

chaudhry.notion.site

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Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#171

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. Many people claim their lives would be better if they never had to work, but they are bullshitting themselves with childhood naivete. Not working is a sucking void of boredom, nihilism, hedonism, and despair. I've been through some of that befo…

> What a profoundly naive opinion. Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working [...]

Agreed. I just spent a week volunteering. (At the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, repairing machines.) It actually cost me money to do, but it was incredibly satisfying to just go and do a concrete thing that made the world better and was immediately beneficial to people. Especially in the company of other good people doing the same.

But I think a lot of people have had only terrible jobs (valuable work in inhumane conditions) or bullshit jobs (meaningless work in whatever conditions), so I get how so many people have been conditioned out of seeing the personal, emotional, very human value in work.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#172

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

i believed people want meaning, and might not need a job until Covid. Many people have no intrinsic drive - and a "get to work to earn it" provides this.

The lockdowns, at least in the U.S., caused people to improve themselves surely - but they then had no idea how to fill their time and binge watched TV, watched Tik Tok, etc.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#173

1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs…

>that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives

Except this isn't what happens

Assuming that you make a product that people actually want, the company will direct almost all of the proceeds to enrich shareholders and executives (You know, "fIdUcIaRy dUtY")

The products may be good for a few years but eventually get worse and become either wasteful (if they weren't already wasteful) or actively spyware

So no, I don't expect anything positive for most humans to come out of corporate control of AI that allows you to eliminate human jobs.

In what regime of capitalism is a shareholder incentivized to retain expensive employees over equally or more effective machines? History tells is there is no regime that would support that over any time period because the human is now just a "cost" or "wasteful" to the profit margin of the company.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#174

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

The big issue is the transition. What happens when we still need around 30% employment to keep things going. Neither enough automation for everyone to take permanent holiday nor enough labour to go around for everyone to make the current way sustainable. I have no good answer for how to address this middle point.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#175

1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs…

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

How much do you think you would have had to pay for an iPhone 200 years ago? Are you sure society hasn't benefitted from productivity increases?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#176
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experimented with coding with GPT a few times now. GPT is legitimately interesting as an alternative search interface to StackOverflow. I've found that 15 to 45 minutes of searching with Google/StackOverflow can be reduced to just 5 minutes with GPT. But beyond that, it's been very disappointing. Whenever I've tried getting it to write something even slightly non-trivial (i.e. tougher than just copy/pasting from on…

It’s odd how we have such different experiences. As an example yesterday I had GPT4 take an existing python script, clean it up, add timing statistics and progress bars. 10 mins works. Would have taken me probably 1 hour. I do think you have a point about it being most useful for trivial or boilerplate problems but it’s still very useful as there is always much of that.

It's like they said, it depends a lot on what kind of work you're doing and whether you are working with public frameworks or internal APIs. If you're just banging out some code that is very similar to what other people write using very well-known APIs, then it's fantastic. If you need to debug a large complex code base, then it doesn't currently have enough capacity to understand and retain all the information required. It can't do many other things you would need as well.

I'm currently writing a demo that I'll present next week using Jetpack Compose, and it's a UI toolkit I'm not really familiar with, so it's been really helpful for that. In fact, I have a tool that is almost like a build system that compiles English language spec files down to the code, and then allows me to edit them and to continue to work with the AI by just changing the spec and the code simultaneously. That's been really tremendously effective, especially with GPT-4.

On the other hand, for working on my main product, it's pretty useless because all of that work is debugging and making a lot of small changes all over the code base, which is too advanced for it currently. And I think that will get solved, but it isn't solved yet.

BTW the above paragraphs were dictated using the Whisper API. I didn't change a single thing about it. Whisper is just as impressive and useful as the LLMs, in my view.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#177
I think that governments and organizations are asleep at the wheel when it comes to the unreasonable effectiveness of AI agents(virtual and physical). If Priya and 100's of millions of people lose their incomes it stands to reason that the government/organizations can empower these people to generate a source of sustenance using AI as well.

I can't but not imagine a future where a country, lets call it Xhina, starts building robotic agents to do exactly that, where these Physical AI agents could make and fetch food, housing and provide damn good guidance on education, medical and legal issues. I would call it Good-enough AI(GAI) and its coming.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#178

Funny thing - I've been using ChatGPT as a programming assistant. My experience with it is that the more knowledgeable I am at the domain, the more useful it is. It often generates code that won't compile or won't run correctly, but that sort of goes in the correct direction, enough that I can spot the blunders and refine my questions. Quite often I even learn a few new things when using it to explore libraries and f…

My friends in the gaming industry have the complains they can't get new junior and associate members on their team for development. Instead companies want to throw more tooling at them to make the senior developers more productive. With how bad companies are at providing on the job training now, what does the future look like with 100x developers versus newbies that can't talk to AI?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#179

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

You want to increase depression, this is how you do it.

People need shit to do, and as much as we lie to ourselves that everyone is a budding artist who if only freed from the bounds of work would create the worlds next masterpiece - that is just not reality. Most people would actually sit around getting high/drunk, playing video games, watching porn and being miserable.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#180

1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs…

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?

It's here, you're living in it, most likely. You just have to lower your wants to the standards of whenever that prediction was made.

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