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I wish GPT4 had never happened

chaudhry.notion.site

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Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#211

Post by bryanlarsen »

eloff wrote: post #184
inimino wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is amazing in its naivete. The first sentence in the post you are replying to already includes awareness of everything you said and more, while nothing in your comment suggests you understood the post at all. Priya doesn't become 10 times more productive, someone else uses the tool to do her job, which no longer exists.

That cycle has gone on since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Jobs are destroyed, people complain and protest, new jobs are created and the total economic pie and the absolute size of the average person’s slice increases. A valid question is are there inventions for which this would not be true? I think yes for general AI, but also yes for people who are unable to migrate between a job lost and any of the new…

Disruptions in the past have almost always been good for society overall, but there have also always been significant localized negative effects. For example, a farrier may have been thrown out of work and had to switch to unskilled labor, but their sons and daughters were better off.

The issue is that as change comes faster and faster, a higher proportion of people fall into the "disrupted" category.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#212

Post by [deleted] »

listenallyall wrote: post #190
onion2k wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people find meaning, fulfillment, even contentment in working, especially when the problems are engaging and the solutions produce value. You can do that without it being a job. I enjoy making things out of epoxy resin. It's fun, creative, hard work. I'd do it a lot more if we had universal basic income. It's not my job.

> You can do that without it being a job Yes, you can , but his argument is that most people don't -- and he's right.

[deleted]

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#213

Post by simonw »

adhocmobility wrote: post #123

Hi everyone, author of the article here. I'm sorry if the article sounds overly pessimistic. I'm not making any claims with this article. I'm not proposing anything either. I do think technological progress is a good thing, even in this case. But I wrote this blog because I did have an emotional response to this technology, and wanted to pen down my thoughts. Its one thing to look at a report about the economic impac…

Have you asked Priya for her opinion about this?

You've outlined the pessimistic case.

Priya has qualifications in biotechnology. She currently spends her time doing work that sounds quite repetitive.

If AI tools can help accelerate that work, is there a more optimistic scenario where she gets to do different, related work that isn't automatable?

(I personally really hope the pessimistic case isn't what happens here, and in so many other similar situations. I understand and share your concern!)

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#214

Post by andai »

>Very few people truly understand the implications of this technology. Most people haven’t had a chance to try it yet.

Can someone explain this? People keep asking me about ChatGPT but none of them have tried it. Why? Are people too scared to even take a look? It's been free for almost half a year now!

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#215

Post by chii »

transcoderx wrote: post #175
pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

People who claim that modern industrial tech and advancements have not benefited society is arguing that they are not being disproportionately benefited.

Industrial automation did create the 2hr weeks - only that it's the people who paid capital and and invested in their creation that got those 2hr weeks.

But everybody else got the benefit as the general access and availability of many more goods and services than otherwise would've been possible.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#216

Post by brigadier132 »

GPT4 is scary, it portends a future that many of us thought would never happen a year or two ago. We all think about the potential risks, about the kind of power this kind of mechanical intelligence can grant evil individuals or just the everyday people that will be "left behind".

But even so I think we can't afford NOT to have this kind of development if we want to survive as a species. If we want our lives to improve, our loved ones to live longer healthier lives. The amount of good that can come from this technology is immeasurable. The only thing we as humanity need to do is reign in our ego just like chess and go players had to do when their crafts were rendered supposedly irrelevant in the face of an insurmountable intelligence.

And I think the risks from AI are overblown, is AI really more dangerous than the invention of gunpowder, electricity, and of course the nuclear bomb? I don't think so.

What's scary is that we live in the transition period and it could be messy. What comes after the "transition period" of having a world without AI to having a world with AI? I'm not going to try to predict that but I think there are as many if not many more positive outcomes than there are negative outcomes.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#217

Post by Tubbe »

theusus wrote: post #110
10xDev wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you need at least one developer. The question is though, how many do you still need?

From what I have seen, ChatGPT is good for small code. But, as the code gets bigger, it falls apart. I mean, it's not an analysis tool. It's a human mimicker/simulator

ChatGPT != GPT4

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#218

Post by moneywoes »

diatone wrote: post #112
hparadiz wrote: post #93

I asked GPT4 to write me a simple document. Took like 9 tries and I had to proof read it and make adjustments. And that's with a simple paragraph in a written language. Forget about doing the header and the footer properly. It's silly that I have to spell it out on HN of all places. Writing code is much more complex. There's a reason we call the job "Software Engineer". GPT doesn't know what it doesn't know. It doesn…

Maybe what you’ll see is a bigger distance between modes of the salary distribution for software engineers. Top end salaries for language model fluent high performers… and the rest. I know I’m simplifying and that there are many other factors at play in salaries, but my point is that language models are changing the cost structure of knowledge work. That is also the point of TFA. My advice: critically assess the cost…

> My advice: critically assess the cost structure of your job, and which parts neural networks will commodify. Then reposition yourself accordingly

Can you please elaborate on this? Like which part of the job is CRUD?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#219

Post by wpietri »

moritonal wrote: post #161
netbioserror wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The words "most" and "many" there are doing some herculean lifting. Look at the kind of people who do not have to work. Do they still work? No. Some sit on a beach and never lift a finger again, some become creatives and some try to recreate their successes again. None work what would be an engaging and productful job at a take-away joint.

That is in fact not true. Plenty of retirees seek out job-like things. I have a couple of examples.

A small one is my dad. He was a software developer, but thanks to Y2K consulting, he made bank and retired early. After, he spent half the year in Mexico. One of the friends he made there was a teacher. My dad ended up volunteering in the school. He had a part-time-job-like schedule and did teacher's aide things. He loved it.

On a bigger scale: In Michigan there is an arcade chain, Pinball Pete's. It was founded by Tim Arnold in 1976. I grew up there gave them a lot of quarters over years. He sold it in 1990 and retired to Las Vegas, bringing his extensive collection of arcade machines.

For a while he was doing an open house; once a month he'd let people in to play some of his collection. By 2009, he had started the Pinball Hall of Fame, a nonprofit arcade. A couple years back they moved to the Strip and expanded significantly. I was there recently and he spends hours a day there. Opening up. Collecting the quarters. Fixing machines. Telling kids to stop running.

The guy is circa 70 and he can do whatever he wants. What he wants to do is work at an arcade. He'll keep doing it until he dies.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#220

Post by SanderNL »

metta2uall wrote: post #168
eropple wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think programmers are indispensable? "Learn to code"? I think you, likely as not, have a rude awakening ahead of you. GPT can enshittify code, too. Unwind libraries into oceans of repeated Copilot-descendant code all over the place. It'll just take longer.

Just imagine how much tech debt can be generated by an overuse of GPTs... One concerning scenario is if software needed for e.g. garbage collection or food warehousing has some critical bug, but the AIs can't fix it, and the human employees (and even consultants) have a very hard time figuring out what's going on too..

Hospitals and vital government services will run on countless layers of cloud, rails and react. Everything will timeout every two requests and we will need the promised 10^19 cps supercomputers to animate our todo list. Request times will be measured in minutes and we will all accept it.

You and I will be 75 and smiling, with a tear too. We knew and understood tools that are meant for a more civilized age. Just surrender, let it go.

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