Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by reeredfdfdf » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:08 AM UTC

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…

"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value."

I wish corporations really acted this rationally.

At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, preventing them from seeing as many patients as they otherwise would. Cost savings may look good on spreadsheet, but really the overall efficiency of the system suffered.

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

#222

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by kaluga » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

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

#224

Post by fzeroracer » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

raincole wrote: post #14

barbazoo wrote: post #2

Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.

What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better. Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?

AI is getting better at every benchmark. Please ignore that we're not allowed to see these benchmarks and also ignore that the companies in question are creating the benchmarks that are being exceeded.

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

#225

Post by valine » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:10 AM UTC

socketcluster wrote: post #203

I think my software engineering job will be safe so long as big companies keep using average code as their training set. This is because the average developer creates unnecessary complexity which creates more work for me. The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like interest…

Humans don’t learn to write messy complex code. Messy, complex code is the default, writing clean code takes skill.

You’re assuming the LLM produces extra complexity because it’s mimicking human code. I think it’s more likely that LLMs output complex code because it requires less thought and planning, and LLMs are still bad at planning.

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

#226

Post by reeredfdfdf » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:11 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

ible wrote: post #5

People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other. The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each oth…

I'm optimistic. Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by…

"I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better."

I'm not sure most of those organizations will have many customers left, if every white collar admin job has been automated away, and all those people are sitting unemployed with whatever little income their country's social safety net provides.

Automating away all the "boring jobs" leads to an economic collapse, unless you find another way for those people to earn their living.

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

#227

Post by baq » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:11 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #218

baq wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.

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

#228

Post by 9rx » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:12 AM UTC

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.

> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not computers with human oversight.

Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell me why I'm wrong.

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

#229

Post by fzeroracer » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:13 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #16

It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear c…

I worked for a company that was starting to shove AI incentives down the throat of every engineer as our product got consistently worse and worse due to layoffs and the perceived benefits of AI which were never realized. When you look at the companies that have shifted to 'AI first' and see them shoveling out garbage that barely works, it should be no surprised that people both aware of how the sausage is made and not are starting to hate it.

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

#230

Post by tirant » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 7:13 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #165

thedailymail wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.…

A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life phil…

I wonder what would be the proportion of answers between different society economic levels.

What we know so far though is that many of the traditional values were bound to the old society structures, based on the traditional family.

The advent of the sexual revolution, brought by the contraception pill, completely obliterated those structures, changing the family paradigm since then. Only accentuated in the last decade by social media and the change in the sexual marketplace due to dating apps.

Probably today many young people would just prioritize reputation (eg followers) over wealth and life philosophy. As that seems to be the trend that dictates the sexual marketplace dinámics.