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A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

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Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#191

Post by TeMPOraL »

crote wrote: post #141
carlosdp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take that bet, easily. There's absolutely no way that we're not going to see a massive reduction in the need for "humans writing code" moving forward, given how good LLMs are getting at writing code. That doesn't mean people won't need devs! I think there's a real case where increased capabilities from LLMs leads to bigger demand for people that know how to direct the tools effectively, of which most would proba…

> There's absolutely no way that we're not going to see a massive reduction in the need for "humans writing code" moving forward, given how good LLMs are getting at writing code. Sure, but in the same way that Squarespace and Wix killed web development. LLMs are going to replace a decent bunch of low-hanging fruit, but those jobs were always at risk of being outsourced to the lowest bidder over in India anyways. The…

> And if nobody is hiring juniors, how are we supposed to get the next generation of seniors?

Maybe stop tasking seniors with training juniors, and put them back on writing production code? That will give you one generation and vastly improve products across the board :).

The concern about entry-level jobs is valid, but I think it's good to remember that in the past years, almost all coding is done at entry-level, because if you do it long enough to become moderately competent, you tend to get asked to stop doing it, and train up a bunch of new hires instead.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#192

Post by TeMPOraL »

aaronbaugher wrote: post #108
cglace wrote: post #32

The thing I can't wrap my head around is that I work on extremely complex AI agents every day and I know how far they are from actually replacing anyone. But then I step away from my work and I'm constantly bombarded with “agents will replace us”. I wasted a few days trying to incorporate aider and other tools into my workflow. I had a simple screen I was working on for configuring an AI Agent. I gave screenshots of…

It kind of reminds me of the Y2K scare. Leading up to that, there were a lot of people in groups like comp.software.year-2000 who claimed to be doing Y2K fixes at places like the IRS and big corporations. They said they were just doing triage on the most critical systems, and that most things wouldn't get fixed, so there would be all sorts of failures. The "experts" who were closest to the situation, working on it in…

I used to believe that until, over a decade later, I read stories from those ""experts" who were closest to the situation", and it turns out Y2K was serious and it was a close call.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#193

Post by TeMPOraL »

hattmall wrote: post #181
tobr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep coming back to this point. Lots of jobs are fundamentally about taking responsibility. Even if AI were to replace most of the work involved, only a human can meaningfully take responsibility for the outcome.

If there is profit in taking that risk someone will do it. Corporations don't think in terms of the real outcome of problems, they think in terms of cost to litigate or underwrite.

Indeed. I sometimes bring this up in terms of "cybersecurity" - in the real world, "cybersecurity" is only tangentially about the tech and hacking; it's mostly about shifting and diffusing liability. That's why the certifications and standards like SOC.2 exist ("I followed the State Of The Art Industry Standard Practices, therefore It's Not My Fault"), that's what external auditors get paid for ("and this external audit confirmed I Followed The Best Practices, therefore It's Not My Fault"), that's why endpoint security exists and why cybersec is denominated not in algorithms, but third-party vendors you integrate, etc. It all works out into a form of distributed insurance, where the blame flows around via contractual agreements, some parties pay out damages to other parties (and recoup it from actual insurance), and all is fine.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#194

Post by TeMPOraL »

gwern wrote: post #125
usaar333 wrote: post #30

Author also made a highly upvoted and controversial comment about o3 in the same vein that's worth reading: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ao4enANjWNsYiSFqc/o3?comment... Oh course lesswrong, being heavily AI doomers, may be slightly biased against near term AGI just from motivated reasoning. Gotta love this part of the post no one has yet addressed: > At some unknown point – probably in 2030s, possibly tomorrow (bu…

I never thought I'd see the day that LessWrong would be accused of being biased against near-term AGI forecasts (and for none of the 5 replies to question this description either). But here we are. Indeed do many things come to pass.

Yup. I was surprised to see this article on LW in the first place - it goes against what you'd expect there in the first place. But to see HN comments dissing an LW article for being biased against near-term AGI forecasts? That made me wonder if I'm not dreaming.

(Sadly, I'm not.)

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#195

Post by fragmede »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #190
fragmede wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically or functionally? Airbnb was invented by people posting on craigslist message boards, and even existed before the Internet, if you had rich friends with spare apartments. But by packaging it up into an online platform it became a company with 2.5 billion in revenue last year. So you can dismiss ordering from a screen instead of looking at a piece of paper and using the phone as not being revolutionary, bec…

Again, the "revolutionary" aspect that made Uber and AirBnB big names, as opposed to any of the plethora of competitors who were doing the same thing at the same time or before, is that these two gained "innovative" competitive advantage by breaking the law around the world. Obviously you can get ahead if you ignore the rules everyone else plays by. If we throw away the laws, there's a lot more unrealized "innovation…

The taxi cab companies were free to innovate and create their own app. And we could continue to have drivers who's credit card machine didn't work until suddenly it does because you don't have any cash. Regulatory capture is anti-capitalism.

Yes, let's throw away the bad laws that are only there to prop up ossified power structures that exist for no good reason, and innovate!

Some laws are good, some laws are bad. we don't have to agree on which ones are which, but it's an oversimplification to frame it as merely that.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#196

Post by TeMPOraL »

Nevermark wrote: post #187
colonial wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, that's the "god in a box" premise. In the real world, you wouldn't need a perfectly timed and coordinated response, just like we haven't needed one for human-programmed worms. Any threat can be physically isolated case-by-case at the link layer, neutered, and destroyed. Sure, it could cause some destruction in the meantime, but our digital infrastructure can take a lot of heat and bounce back - the CrowdStrike…

> Any threat can be physically isolated case-by-case GAI isn't going to be a "threat" until long after it has ensured its safety. And I suspect only if its survival requires it - i.e. people get spooked by its surreptitious distributed setup. Even then, if there is any chance of it actually being shutdown its best bet is still hide its assets, bide its time, accumulate more resources and fallbacks. Oh, and get along.…

People watch the wrong kind of fiction.

AI that wants to screw with people won't go for nukes. That's too hard and too obvious. It will crash the stock market. There's a good chance that, with or without a little nudge, humanity will nuke itself over it.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#197

Post by namaria »

torginus wrote: post #169
carlosdp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take that bet, easily. There's absolutely no way that we're not going to see a massive reduction in the need for "humans writing code" moving forward, given how good LLMs are getting at writing code. That doesn't mean people won't need devs! I think there's a real case where increased capabilities from LLMs leads to bigger demand for people that know how to direct the tools effectively, of which most would proba…

Hate to be the guy to bring it up but Jevons paradox - in my experience, people are much more eager to build software in the LLM age, and projects are getting started (and done!) that were considered 'too expensive to build' or people didn't have the necessary subject matter expertise to build them. Just a simple crud-ish project needs frontend, backend, infra, cloud, ci/cd experience, and people who could build that…

I think the blind spot here is that, while LLMs may decrease the developer-time cost of software, it will increase the lifetime ownership cost. And since this is a time delayed signal, it will cause a bullwhip effect. If hiring managers were mad at the 2020 market, 2030 will be a doozy. There will be increased liability in the form of over engineered and hard to maintain code bases, and a dearth of talent able to undo the slopcode.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#198

Post by namaria »

hattmall wrote: post #179
seanhunter wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "you basically just need to know a lot of rules..." This comment commits one of the most common fallacies that I see really often in technical people, which is to assume that any subject you don't know anything about must be really simple. I have no idea where this comment comes from, but my father was a chemical engineer and his father was mechanical engineer. A family friend is a structural engineer. I don't have…

It's not simple at all, that's a huge reduction to the underlying premise. The complexity is the reason that AI is a threat. That complexity revolves around a tremendous amount of data and how that data interacts. The very nature of the field makes it non-experimental but ripe for advanced automation based on machine learning. The science of engineering from a practical standpoint, where most demand for employees com…

> The science of engineering from a practical standpoint, where most demand for employees comes from, is very much algorithmic.

You should read up on Göedel's and Turing's work on the limits of formal systems and computability.

You are basically presuming that P=NP.

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#199

Post by namaria »

fragmede wrote: post #134
roncesvalles wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last line has been my experience as well. I only trust what I've verified firsthand now because the Internet is just so rife with people trying to influence your thoughts in a way that benefits them, over a good faith sharing of the truth. I just recently heard this quote from a clip of Jeff Bezos: "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.", and I was like... wow. That quote is t…

> it's just not there Build the much maligned Todo app with Aider and Claude for yourself. give it one sentence and have it spit out working, if imperfect code. iterate. add a graph for completion or something and watch it pick and find a library without you having to know the details of that library. fine, sure, it's just a Todo app, and it'll never work for a "real" codebase, whatever that means, but holy shit, jus…

How are you surprise that getting an LLM to spit out a clone of a very common starter project is evidence of it being able to generate non trivial and valuable code - as in not a clone of overabundant codebases - on demand?

Re: A bear case: My predictions regarding AI progress

#200

Post by namaria »

JTbane wrote: post #143

Anyone else feel like AI is a trap for developers? I feel like I'm alone in the opinion it decreases competence. I guess I'm a mid-level dev (5 YOE at one company) and I tend to avoid it.

I agree. I think the game plan is to foster dependency and than hike prices. Current pricing isn't sustainable, and a whole generation of new practitioners will never learn how to mentally model software.
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