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AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

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Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#211

Post by barrkel »

jimbokun wrote: post #152
barrkel wrote: post #37

The lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article. I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software. There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and si…

> The lack of robotics mention somewhat undermines this article. True but in common parlance "AI" has come to mean LLMs. > Software is eating the world The premise of the article is software ATE the world and there isn't much left to eat that hasn't been eaten.

Software hasn't eaten all it could, in my book, and AI makes a lot more stuff legible to software.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#212

Post by randcraw »

MattRix wrote: post #166
dleslie wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All skill degrade with disuse. For example, here in Canada we have observed a literacy and numeracy skills curve that peaks with post-secondary education and declines with retirement.[0] Use it or lose it, as it were. 0: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241210/dq241...

That is one factor, but it’s not the whole thing. The other key element is “cognitive offloading” where your brain stops doing stuff when it thinks it is redundant. This is similar to the photo-taking impairment effect where people will remember an event more poorly if they took photos at the event. Their brain basically subconsciously decides it doesn’t need to remember the event because the camera will remember the…

The more the role of the tool, the less the role of the craftsman.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#213

Post by cmrdporcupine »

simianwords wrote: post #197
damnesian wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to understand, when essential human nature is so predictable? Sure, we will do novel things with it. But society in the main will use to it exploit labor. same as it ever was.

“Exploit labour” is just outdated Marxism. No self respecting economist believes this kind of rhetoric anymore but it only exists amongst west coded leftist. It’s a sort of cynical fatalism to think everything is exploitation — directly coming from Marx. It’s not exploitation to mutually agree on a deal. Most of population know this except Marxists!

Ah, peak HN pseudo-libertarianism

a) just hand wave away that there is a massive power and wealth differential involved in this "mutual agreement" b) dismiss all discussions which recognize that fact... as "outdated Marxism"

Plenty of mainstream economists are capable of seeing the real world which you are pretending doesn't exist.

Even Marx meant the word "exploit" in relatively value neutral terms, just recognizing that in any economy built on private property we exploit humans the same way we do any "resource". It's up to the reader whether they see that as having any moral connotation.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#214

Post by TeMPOraL »

jimbokun wrote: post #146
TeMPOraL wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define better. Fast fashion sucks, but hand-spun cotton won't give you Kevlar or modern wind-resistant clothing or fireproof materials for your furniture or... . It's always win some, lose some with the economy, but technology itself opens previously impossible capabilities.

What is the AI equivalent of wind-resistant clothing or fireproof materials? So far the only product AI is producing is layoffs.

> wind-resistant clothing

Better autocomplete/autocorrect, "circle on screen" -> OCR anywhere, high-quality automated background removal[0].

> fireproof materials

No big examples to point at now, except maybe whatever security fixes that'll come out of Glasswing Project[1].

> So far the only product AI is producing is layoffs.

AI-related[2] layoffs are a direct consequence of useful things AI is delivering.

--

[0] - Super useful for e.g. making ID photos, which I notice I need to do increasingly often, which is likely a consequence of proliferation of remote/digital ID verification, which nicely ties us back to question 'butlike expressed, i.e. how much is technological progress actually improving things.

[1] - https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing

[2] - As opposed to "we wanted to lay off people anyway, AI just provided a socially-acceptable excuse".

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#215

Post by TacticalCoder »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

> But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding.

I do use AI daily to help me enhance code but then... I also very regularly turn off, physically, the link between a sub-LAN at home and the Internet and I still can work. It's incredibly relaxing to work on code without being connected 24/7. Other machines (like kid's Nintendo switch) can still access the Internet: but my machines for developing are cut off. And as I've got a little infra at home (Proxmox / VMs), I have quite a few services without needing to be connected to the entire world: for example I've got a pastebin, a Git server, a backuping procedure, all 100% functional without needing to be connected to the net (well 99% for the backuping procedure as the encrypted backup files won't be synch'ed with remote servers until the connection is operational).

Sure it's not a "laptop on a plane", but it's also not "24/7 dependent on Sam Altman or Anthropic".

I'll probably enhance my setup at some point with a local Gemma model too.

And all this is not mutually exclusive with my Anthropic subscription: at the flick of a switch (which is right in front of me), my sub-LAN can access the Internet again.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#216

Post by m3kw9 »

neals wrote: post #15

I had to code something on a plane today. It used to be that you couldn't get you packages or check stackoverflow. But now, I'm useless. My mind has turned to pudding. I cannot remember basic boilerplate stuff. Crazy how fast that goes.

boiler plate stuff will be like assembly code in the past, you won't need to use it.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#217

Post by randcraw »

animuchan wrote: post #203
gilleain wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, it interests me how much some people emphasise knowing facts - like dates in history or dictionary definitions of words. Facts alone are like pebbles on a beach, far better (IMO) to have a few stones mortared with understanding to make a building of knowledge. A fanciful metaphor but you know ...

This is an entirely false dichotomy though, is it not? One can both know facts and understand logic behind them, it's not like you're creating an RPG character and need to make a choice with limited character points. (Can't say time is the limiting factor either -- we're both in HN comments, valuing our own time at zero.)

And it ignores the fact that, if you refuse to remember any facts because they can be looked up, you'll be unable to form any new ideas because you'll know nothing, and you won't know what is out there to be looked up.

And of course, what if your phone dies?

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#218

Post by mlcruz »

packetlost wrote: post #185
mlcruz wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context Trust me, this is a work in progress. Right now most corporations do not have their data organized and structured well enough for this to be possible, but there is a lot of heat and money in this space. Imo, What most of the people that are not directly working in this space get wrong is assuming swes are going to be hit the hardest: There are som…

> Right now most corporations do not have their data organized and structured well enough for this to be possible, but there is a lot of heat and money in this space. I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not really referring to data systems at all, I'm referring to context on what problems are actually being solved by a business. LLMs very clearly do not model outcomes that don't have well-defined textual r…

> I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not really referring to data systems at all, I'm referring to context on what problems are actually being solved by a business. LLMs very clearly do not model outcomes that don't have well-defined textual representations.

Yeah i misunderstood your point, i completely agree with what you are saying.

I honestly do not believe that strategy, decision making and other real life context dependent are going to be replaceable soon (and if it does, its something other than llms).

> I'm not sure that I agree with white collar jobs being done for, not every process has as little consequence to getting it wrong as (most) software does.

Maybe im too biased due to working in a particularly inefficient domain, but you would be surprised how much work can be automated in your average back office.

Much of the operational work is following set process and anything out of that is going to up the governance chain for approval from some decision maker.

LLM based solutions actually makes less errors than humans and adhere to the process better in many scenarios, requiring just an ok/deny from some human supervisor.

By delegating just the decision process to the operator, you need way less actual humans doing the job. Since operations workload is usually a function of other areas, efficiency gains result in layoffs.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#219

Post by anon22981 »

thatjoeoverthr wrote: post #171
Zealotux wrote: post #4

I'm currently looking for sort of niche clothes for an event and it's the first time I had to give up on buying online because of the sheer amount of AI-generated pictures. Going to a physical store was just a much better experience, I can't recall the last time this happened, almost all sellers on Etsy are using AI for their pictures.

It's threatening to "unwind" the entire digital sector back to 1990. Online shopping damaged, job interviews done in person, essays by hand, exams proctored. Cover letters obsolete. There could be a "cognitive waterline" effect where older people who can't tell will continue living in an AI-generated bubble. Cover letters already are generated on demand specifically because people still claim to require them, even th…

I still write my cover letters myself. :( Though I do refine them with LLMs, but instruct to retain the tone and the feel of the writing.

Re: AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing

#220

Post by vel0city »

packetlost wrote: post #164
isodev wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI pessimism is hard to understand Well, it really isn’t. First, this entire post makes two assumptions: 1) that AI adds more value to the process than it removes and 2) that it’s sustainable. It’s not pessimism to want to validate these first. Are AI “gains” really transformative or simply random opportunities for automation which we can achieve by other means anyway? Can the world continue to afford “AI as a serv…

> Are AI “gains” really transformative They're transformative in the sense that will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away unless these things both get substantially better at engineering (they're good at generating code but that is like 20% of engineering at best) and we have a means of giving them full business/human levels of context. Really basic stuff gets a lot easier but…

> will shrink the optimal team size, but I don't expect the jobs to actually go away

If they've shrunk the team size, that means some jobs (in terms of people working on a problem) will have gone away. The question is, will it then make it cheap enough to work on more problems that are ignored today, or are we already at peak problem set for that kind of work?

Spreadsheets and accounting software made it possible to have fewer people do the same amount of work but it ended up increasing the demand of accountants overall. Will the same kind of thing happen with LLM-assisted workloads, assuming they pan out as much as people think?

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