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

191–200 of 268 posts

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#191

Post by kcplate »

krageon wrote: post #123
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?

Machine guns are in a lot of airports these days, in Europe as well. It is assuredly not strange anymore (though it does come across as hostile and extremely unsafe).

My experience it’s far more common to see them in airports outside the US. Shortly after 9/11 it was pretty common to see heavily armed guards in the US because there was an overt military presence at that time.

What I see now is occasional police officers with their standard sidearms, but rarely see anyone more armed than that.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#192

Post by sanderjd »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #78

The main fallacy with this article is assuming that generative AI is just another tool that we use. But what happens when the tool becomes far more capable intellectually than the person wielding the tool? Why have that person around? What would they do that the AI can't do? We're not there yet of course and short term this dynamic plays out of tools enhancing productivity and lowering cost. But at some point it flip…

This keeps happening in these discussions, instead of discussing LLMs, people want to skip to discussing this other, totally speculative, thing. It's like people are already bored with this new technology and have nothing to say about it, so they talk about this other thing that isn't boring yet.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#193

Post by sanderjd »

goatlover wrote: post #89
jillesvangurp wrote: post #78

The main fallacy with this article is assuming that generative AI is just another tool that we use. But what happens when the tool becomes far more capable intellectually than the person wielding the tool? Why have that person around? What would they do that the AI can't do? We're not there yet of course and short term this dynamic plays out of tools enhancing productivity and lowering cost. But at some point it flip…

The question we should be asking is why do we want AI that can do anything faster, better, cheaper than us? Corporations would like to not have to pay labor costs, and some would argue a society where nobody has to work is utopian. But do you trust governments like the US to figure out UBI? Do we really have any sort of sociological understanding of what such a society would be like? Do we have an understanding of wh…

Because we can use them to eliminate tedious tasks and make better use of our limited time on this mortal coil.

The article covers this. Is it bad that we don't have teams of people spending their lives pulling barges up rivers or writing out copies of documents by hand? No, it isn't bad.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#194

Post by sanderjd »

didibus wrote: post #166

We did automate for the last 200 years, and it created more creative jobs as a return, less manual labor and more mental/creative labor. Now we're about to automate that as well. I am not sure there is anything else to take it's place this time though.

I'm finding a lot of the comments here very odd. This exact thing was covered in the article, indeed, was the core thing covered in the article. This is just a restatement of something the article spends significant time debating. You need to say what you found lacking in that counterargument, not just restate the position.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#195

Post by sanderjd »

inciampati wrote: post #109

> This is one reason I think the future of LLMs is to move from prompt boxes to GUIs and buttons - I think ‘prompt engineering’ and natural language’ are mutually contradictory. Yes. Just like search. But that didn't mean that search was replaced by a bunch of radio buttons and click boxes. On the contrary, we learned how to use freeform search. And we will do the same for LLMs. What I'm seeing is that the systems ar…

I'm excited to "why not both?" this. I'm excited for "UIs with buttons and boxes" enhanced by a conversational interface.

Just to illustrate by way of one example I've had bouncing around in my head: imagine a zotero-like interface for accumulating tagged information, where it's both built from pulling out information from conversations and can be explored conversationally. I want to click a button that says "show me all the information I've accumulated about LLMs (or whatever)", which includes both links and conversations I've had about it, and I also want to be able to say that same thing to the conversational interface.

In truth, I think we already have examples of this paradigm, in the various "copilot" interfaces, where you can do both things.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#196

Post by sanderjd »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #10
somewhereoutth wrote: post #9

Or it could be that the time/effort required to craft a prompt and check the output is not worth it for most/all use cases, and thus after the initial excitement ChatGPT and friends gather dust much like blockchain and Apple Vision.

Yeah this hype has opened my eyes to the fact that there are so many people who haven't already found a flow for internet searches that's more streamlined than this AI stuff. Don't we all do this every day?

This works way better for me for many kinds of things I previously did with search, and also does not at all replace other kinds of things I did (and still do) with search.

To a large extent, it has demonstrated to me that wading through stack overflow or blog posts or canonical documentation to figure out how to do some technical thing was actually a way worse workflow than I thought it was. But searching "what to do in my town this weekend" or "what are the best books about xyz" remains the best workflow.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#197

Post by sanderjd »

loveparade wrote: post #11
somewhereoutth wrote: post #9

Or it could be that the time/effort required to craft a prompt and check the output is not worth it for most/all use cases, and thus after the initial excitement ChatGPT and friends gather dust much like blockchain and Apple Vision.

I don't think this is a good analogy. A better analogy is the multiple previous AI hype cycles. They played out similarly. They brought some truly new capabilities that are used in production, just like LLMs will become a widely used tool, but failed to live up to the AGI hype even though everyone was convinced we're just a step away back in the 80s already and in a few years machine will do all our work. The only re…

This is what it looks like to me too. Except I do think the tools are significantly more useful than in previous cycles. But I do think the hype cycle model is the right one. And I find it super odd that people keep jumping to the AGI thing. I honestly struggle mightily to see what they're seeing in gpt-4 that makes them feel like we're on the brink of a general intelligence.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#198

Post by sanderjd »

famouswaffles wrote: post #12
loveparade wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a good analogy. A better analogy is the multiple previous AI hype cycles. They played out similarly. They brought some truly new capabilities that are used in production, just like LLMs will become a widely used tool, but failed to live up to the AGI hype even though everyone was convinced we're just a step away back in the 80s already and in a few years machine will do all our work. The only re…

>The only reason people don't see this is because they weren't around back then. It's not going to be different this time. There are people who've been around who think it's going to be different this time. Look it's fine if you don't. Maybe you'll be right and they'll be wrong but this "anyone who disagrees is ignorant" rhetoric is uncalled for. You shouldn't need to result to ad hominems.

I tend to agree with the comment you replied to, but I also agree with this. It isn't too be ignored that lots of people see something different this time. But I don't see the same thing as they do...

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#199

Post by kcplate »

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 think AI will probably eliminate almost all future knowledge worker jobs through simple attrition. In 20 years, perhaps 1 human knowledge worker will be doing the work of 100 (measured by todays productivity) augmented by integrated AI in the tools they use.

I am convinced that short of certain trades, we will watch AI erode everything. Personally, I am on a mission to convince my 2 year old grandson that becoming a plumber is the key to his future wealth.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#200

Post by famouswaffles »

climatologist wrote: post #58
_gabe_ wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask a random college freshman in computer science to write a backtracking sudoku solver with coroutines and/or fibers in their language of choice. Oof, only 1 out of 10 can do it...? I guess 9 out of 10 college freshmen aren't generally intelligent? (I mean, I certainly wasn't very intelligent as a college freshman, but I'm pretty sure that's not the way you're using that word here). Anyways, these kinds of strawmen…

I think everyone should have a test in their back pocket for testing claims made by companies making AI tools. Mine is backtracking sudoku solver with constraint propagation but that's because I know LLMs are incapable of recursion and backtracking. Usually people get the point I'm making but sometimes I have to elaborate further. LLMs are cool toys but calling them intelligent is stretching the definition of "intell…

Any test a lot of humans will fail is simply not a test of General Intelligence. That should be obvious enough.

And GPT-4 does do this in a couple iterations.

Post reply on HN