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AI and the Automation of Work

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Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#231

Post by IanCal »

climatologist wrote: post #213
IanCal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have strongly believed the best way of evaluating the state of AI is to look at what people complain it can't do. It's taken a few short years to go from "keep a coherent story over more than a sentence" to "write a multithreaded sudoku solver in one shot". Many programmers would fail to do this. I'm not even sure a randomly selected human would understand the question. And I'm wondering if you've setup any loops l…

> write a multithreaded sudoku solver in one shot I did not say anything about threads but I did hint at the fact that coroutines can be used creatively to solve problems which require backtracking and constraint propagation. The fact that this is still controversial means a lot of people are unaware LLMs do not support backtracking, recursion, and constraint propagation. Sudoku is just an obvious example of a proble…

Llms don't have to support something internally to know about those concepts, those are entirely different things.

> Such problems can also be expressed as integer programs but even fewer people know how to do that so I don't usually bring it up but it would be another good test for any software system that is claimed to be intelligent by the corporate marketing department.

It's very telling if the level of testing is "can it do something few people in the field can?".

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#232

Post by IanCal »

climatologist wrote: post #207
famouswaffles wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any test a lot of humans will fail is simply not a test of General Intelligence. That should be obvious enough. And GPT-4 does do this in a couple iterations.

Humans are not generally intelligent.

Then you have a wildly different bar than the vast majority of the people in any agi conversation and should state this upfront.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#233

Post by JeremyNT »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64
abhaynayar wrote: post #55

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to g…

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.

I've tried phind and it's almost always worse than a Google search. It often has a reasonable answer, but with Google I typically find more complete information and sometimes better rebuttals and alternatives.

I view the thing as a neat toy. Can you learn from it? Maybe. But if you think this allows you to learn something you couldn't otherwise, I wonder if you're really being honest with yourself.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#234

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

benedictevans wrote: post #227
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #116

"We don’t have AGI, and without that, we have only another wave of automation, and we don’t seem to have any a priori reason why this must be more or less painful than all the others." We don't need AGI to eliminate 200+ million jobs. The output of a network driving a car can be literally two signed floating points, left-right/accelerate-brake; in hindsight we will understand there is little intelligence in going fro…

The entire point of the essay is to debate this assertion, and it provides a great many very basic reasons to think is wrong.

The article speaks more about the "knowledge workers", the CC Baxters of the world performing more or less bullshit jobs [1]. The 2-3 billion unemployables of the next 10-20 years are not knowledge workers and will all be replaced forever by embedded robotics with good enough networks and statistical learning for following given goals while generating sub-goals.

Boston Dynamics' Spot costs $75K today and Atlas is around $150K, once the price gets closer to $10K there is very little reason to ever employ persons as assembly line workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, machine operators, truck drivers, janitors and cleaners, agricultural workers, security guards, food service workers, garbage collectors, and so on.

And even if 3 billion people could be forced to do spreadsheets to "earn" a living, "by the sweat of [their] brow", that would be an even sadder world than our currently sad world.

My argument is that we need a new metaphysics for what work and life means, one where the right of a person to have food and shelter is not tied to the economic value they produce. But I have no hope for this world: the trillionaires of tomorrow will share even less than the billionaires of today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#235

Post by climatologist »

IanCal wrote: post #232
climatologist wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans are not generally intelligent.

Then you have a wildly different bar than the vast majority of the people in any agi conversation and should state this upfront.

What exactly do you want me to state up front? A general intelligence can solve general problems when those problems are formally specified. Sudoku is a good example of a formally specified problem that can be solved by most people but not by LLMs. This is because LLMs and all neural networks are simply DAGs of function which do not support recursion or backtracking.

Adding recursion to neural networks has been tried a few times but no one actually knows how to stabilize their dynamics so the industry has settled on feed forward networks with constrained function blocks which have stable dynamics with respect to back propagation of errors.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#236

Post by climatologist »

IanCal wrote: post #231
climatologist wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> write a multithreaded sudoku solver in one shot I did not say anything about threads but I did hint at the fact that coroutines can be used creatively to solve problems which require backtracking and constraint propagation. The fact that this is still controversial means a lot of people are unaware LLMs do not support backtracking, recursion, and constraint propagation. Sudoku is just an obvious example of a proble…

Llms don't have to support something internally to know about those concepts, those are entirely different things. > Such problems can also be expressed as integer programs but even fewer people know how to do that so I don't usually bring it up but it would be another good test for any software system that is claimed to be intelligent by the corporate marketing department. It's very telling if the level of testing i…

What exactly are you confused about? Plenty of people can learn about constraint propagation and integer programming but LLMs do not have the capability to solve integer programs because LLMs (and neural networks in general) are not generally intelligent.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#237

Post by shepherdjerred »

js8 wrote: post #76
shepherdjerred wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the gap between a Co-pilot written test and a human-written test? Are tests written by co-pilot better than no tests? Developers generally hate writing tests, so I suspect more and more unit tests will be generated. I've worked with someone who does this and it seems insane to me, although I never got to see the generated tests they were referring to, so I can't give specifics.

> What's the gap between a Co-pilot written test and a human-written test? IMHO the gap is that human-written test understands the (unwritten) specification (which might be as simple as "program doesn't crash"), and tests the program against it. I am of the (pretty radical, it seems) opinion that the (especially unit) tests that just take the code as the specification, instead of having specification coming from else…

Do you know of any good resources to read about testing? How did you learn what you know?

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#238

Post by TapWaterBandit »

JimtheCoder wrote: post #208
kcplate wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here I think you are thinking about this wrong. AI is going to be built directly into Excel so I think it will harm a lot of especially entry level type work for analysts. I think AI will probably eliminate almost all future knowledge worker jobs through simple attrition. In 20 years, perhaps 1 human knowledge worker will be doing the work of 100 (measured by todays productivity) augmented by integrated AI in the t…

"I think AI will probably eliminate almost all future knowledge worker jobs through simple attrition. In 20 years, perhaps 1 human knowledge worker will be doing the work of 100 (measured by todays productivity) augmented by integrated AI in the tools they use." Lump of labour fallacy?

Yea, I don't think this will happen over the longterm.

I do see worker dislocation in certain sectors though, can't see how LLM's won't substantially shake-up office work especially as Microsoft is already busy building them into the Office Suite.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#239

Post by lawrenceyan »

ChatGTP wrote: post #174
dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

What would an economy like the one you describe look like in practice? What would be the use of an AI picking coffee beans if there is no one with a job to buy the coffee beans? There is an unresolved issue here for sure. Unless the machines are self-sustaining, there's not going to be much use for multi-billion dollar data-centers and millions of dollars in electricity bills and expensive robots if there is absolute…

This is where a method for distribution like basic income comes in as a companion to capitalism / AI.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#240

Post by rushingcreek »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #85
rushingcreek wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.

The Pair Programmer feature is absolutely fantastic and a massive gamechanger. It helped me figure out the architecture for a new app I'm planning. I showed it to a senior developer in my coworking space and he said - in his own words - "yep, that's how I would approach it too".

Wow, that's amazing! We'd love to talk to you about your experience and hear your feedback -- my email is michael@phind.com.
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