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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

andyljones.com

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

#211

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

> For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much slower than you might expect.

Not really, given that the article goes into detail about this in the first paragraph, with US data and graphs: "Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US disappeared."

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

#212

Post by baq »

mlrtime wrote: post #107
renewiltord wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, politically, housing becoming cheaper is considered a failure. And this is true for all ages. As an example, take Reddit. Skews younger, more Democrat-voting, etc. You'd think they'd be for lower housing prices. But not really. In fact, they make fun of states like Texas whose cities act to allow housing to become cheaper: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1nw4ef9/... That's just an example, b…

Thank you, I've replied too many times that if people want low priced housing, it's easily found in Texas. The replies are empty or stating that they don't want to live there because... it's Texas. So the young want cheap affordable housing, right in the middle of Manhattan, never going to happen.

Don’t blame people they want to live close to where the good jobs are.

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

#213

Post by NitpickLawyer »

actionfromafar wrote: post #85
namesbc wrote: post #53

Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity... https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.

They can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not).

No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the capabilities are here.

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

#215

Post by baq »

goatlover wrote: post #160
johnsmith1840 wrote: post #52

I mean it's hard to argue that if we invented a human in a box (AGI) human work would be irrelevent. But I don't know how we could watch current AI and anyone can say we have that. The big thing this AI boom has showed us that we can all be thankful to have seen is what a human in a box will eventually look like. The first generation of humans to be able to see that is a super lucky experience to have. Maybe it's one…

Why a human in a box and not an android? A lot of jobs will require advanced robotics to fully automate. And then there are jobs where customer preference is for human interaction or human entertainment. It's like how superior chess engines have not reduced the profession of chess grandmasters, because people remain more interested in human chess competition.

The assumption is superhuman AGI or a stronger ASI could invent anything it needed really fast, so ASI means intelligent robots within years or months, depending on manufacturing capabilities.

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

#216

Post by baq »

wrs wrote: post #15

Point taken, but it's hard to take a talk seriously when it has a graph showing AI becoming 80% of GDP! What does the "P" even stand for then?

It’s called exponential growth and humans are well known to be almost comically bad at identifying and interpreting it.

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

#217

Post by baq »

mrtesthah wrote: post #184

LLMs can only hallucinate and cannot reason or provide answers outside of their training set distribution. The architecture needs to fundamentally change in order to reach human equivalence, no matter how many benchmarks they appear to hit.

The sometimes stumble and hallucinate out of distribution. It’s rare, it’s more rare that is actually a good hallucination, but we’ve figured out how to enrich uranium, after all.

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

#218

Post by skissane »

baq wrote: post #192
vlovich123 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off.

And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes.

The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.

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

#219

Post by baq »

glitchc wrote: post #66
echelon wrote: post #29

> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did. > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less. This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry. Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or…

Well, tbf the author was hired to answer newbie questions. Perhaps the position is that of an evangelist, not a scientist.

I couldn’t have made a worse take if I tried

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

#220

Post by tirant »

anon7000 wrote: post #169
schmichael wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will rea…

> Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours I mean, that basically just sums up how capitalism works. Profit growth is literally (even legally!) the only thing a company can care about. Everything else, like product quality, pays service to that goal.

That’s not a good summary of capitalism at all because you omit the part where interests of sellers and buyers align. Which is precisely what has made capitalism successful.

Profit growth is based primarily on offering the product that best matches the consumer wish at the lowest price, and production cost possible. That benefits both the buyer and the seller. If the buyer does not care about product quality, then you will not have any company producing quality products.

The market is just a reflection of that dinámica. And in the real world we can easily observed that: Many market niches are dominated by quality products (outdoor and safety gear, professional and industrial tools…) while others tend to be dominated by non-quality (low end fashion, toys).

And that result is not imposed by profit growth but by the average consumer preference.

You can of course disagree with those consumer preferences and don’t buy low quality products, that’s why you most probably also find high products in any market niche.

But you cannot blame companies for that. What they sell is just the result of the aggregated buyers preferences and the result of free market decisions.

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