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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#191

Post by throw9384940 »

pcrh wrote: post #177
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow, linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier technology (or "horses" in this case), happen…

For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect. The model T Ford motor car reached peak production in 1925 [0], and for an inexact comparison (I couldn't find numbers for the US) the horse population of France started to decline in 1935, but didn't drop below 80% of its historical peak until the late 1940's down to 10% of its peak by the 1970's [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.or…

Frech eat horse meat. Cattle is still present in US...

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#192

Post by baq »

vlovich123 wrote: post #183
enduser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to auto…

I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.

Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a species.

(Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very grim and depressing situation)

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#193

Post by ahf8Aithaex7Nai »

vlovich123 wrote: post #183
enduser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to auto…

I think you’ve missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it wasn’t cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If successful, the end state is full automation because it’s strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.

Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#194

Post by jordwest »

samdoesnothing wrote: post #189
jordwest wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea of dollars as purely a trading medium where absolute prices don't matter wouldn't be such an issue if wages weren't always the last thing to rise with inflation. As it is now anyone with assets is only barely affected by inflation while those who earn a living from wages have their livelihood eroded over time covertly.

Barely affected? They benefit massively from it. That is why the rich get richer.

True, in terms of share of the pie for sure

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#196

Post by avereveard »

enduser wrote: post #138
twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to auto…

Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon.

Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset.

Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement.

This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's energy and gpus.

Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of million can be employed there?

Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#197

Post by baq »

kfarr wrote: post #146
hephaes7us wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically, at a certain point the training would likely involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators), rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in textual form.

Yeah I feel like the real ah ha moment is still coming once there is a GPT-like thing that has been trained on reality, not its shadow.

Reality cannot be perceived. A crisp shadow is all you can hope for.

The problem for me is the point of the economy in the limit where robots are better, faster and cheaper than any human at any job. If the robots don’t decide we’re worth keeping around we might end up worse than horses.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#198

Post by jordwest »

overfeed wrote: post #116
jacquesm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think by the time the wealthy realize they're setting themselves up for the local equivalent of the French Revolution it will be a bit late. It's a really bad idea to create a large number of people with absolutely nothing to lose.

I suspect the wealthy think they can shield themselves by exerting control over mass media, news outlets, the press, and domestic surveillance, all amplified by AI. If all that fails, they have their underground bunkers on faraway islands and/or backup citizenships.

> I suspect the wealthy think they can shield themselves by exerting control over

Agreed and I think this is a result of a naive belief that we humans tend to have that controlling thoughts can control reality. Politicians still live by this belief but eventually reality and lived experience does catch up. By that time all trust is long gone.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#199

Post by baq »

8note wrote: post #129
richardles wrote: post #64

I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works. It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful qu…

you still lose a bit from not having those juniors' questions around - where is your documentation sucking or your code is confusing?

Both questions are getting scary good answers from the latest models. Yes, I tried, on a large proprietary code base which shouldn’t be included in any training set.
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