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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

aphyr.com

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#231

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

apsurd wrote: post #152
peterbell_nyc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing plenty of this. The quality of agentic code is a function of the quantity and quality of adversarial quality gates. I have seen no proof that an agentic system is incapable of delivering code that is as functional, performant and maintainable as code from a great team of developers, and enough anecdotes in the other direction to suggest that AI "slop" is going to be a problem that teams with great harnesses wi…

I take your point but then it makes me think is there no more value in diversity? [Philosophy disclaimer] So in a code-base diversity is probably a bad idea, ok that makes sense. But in an agentic world, if everything is run through the Perfect Harness then humans are intentionally just triggers? Not even that, like what are humans even needed for? Everything can be orchestrated. I'm not against this world, this is a…

> Why have any humans at all

Why have humans do work at all? We could have a radically better existence. It would mean that the few at the top of the pyramid lose their privileged position relative to the rest of us, but we could, actually, have that world of abundance for all.

Work in the current sense arguably isn't even desirable

Maybe I've just read too many Culture books.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#232

Post by menaerus »

fragmede wrote: post #223
omega3 wrote: post #150

The answer has always been the same: self-regulated profession and trade unions. Instead the ever efficient software engineers have efficiently dug their own grave. The regulated professions aren't going to be affected by the AI because their members understand that preservation of job security[0], their pay and QOL is more important than automating themselves out of existence. [0] https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opi…

Which regulated professions? Trade unions still require work for their members to do. If there's a recession and say a construction slump, it doesn't matter how high or low the union's regulations are for their members, if there's no work, there's no work. Medical doctors are a special case, but eg iron workers theres the official list people get called up from, but you're not getting called up from that list if ther…

> Which regulated professions?

All other engineering (civil, chemistry, mechanical, electrical, ...) and semi-engineering (architecture) disciplines.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#233

Post by Folcon »

jerf wrote: post #176
fny wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so damn obsessed with the singularity? You don't need superintelligence to disrupt humanity. We easily have enough advancement to change the economy dramatically as is. The adoption isn't there yet.

Even after I explained the exact usage I was invoking, the attractive nuisance of all the science fiction that has gotten attached to the term still prevented you and Quarrelsome from reading my post as written. I really wish the term hadn't been mangled so much. Though the originator of the term bears a non-trivial amount of the responsibility for it, having written some rather good science fiction on the topic hims…

The most interesting factor of the dynamic around things like near singularity is the things that I feel are coupled to it

Basically the ability to reason about first and second order effects

IE, before the cellphone was invented you could have predicted the it, things like star trek envisaged a world of portable communication

What impact the cellphone had was predictable to some people, on the one hand increased convenience of communication as well as the end of making a call and wondering who was going to pick up, which was a definite consideration pre-mobile when you called a place and not a person, now we just assume that when we call someone we'll get them and not their family

The second order effects were less obvious, ease of access to someone meant being always accessible, so now everyone could be contacted whenever someone wanted them, it changed the dynamics of life for many, not to mention the effects of different technologies combining, the personal computer and the mobile phone becoming one in the form of the smartphone gave everyone a computer in their pocket, let alone adding the internet into the mix

Each of these changes were completely unpredictable to the people pre-cellphone, once again, compare modern day trek and the originals

I still vividly remember the moment one of the characters in discovery asked the computer to give her a mirror, the same behaviour of countless people now using the fact that their selfie camera functionally gives them a portable mirror in the form of their phone, that was unpredictable

So that's one form of being unable to predict the future

But there's another interesting dynamic I think, which is each direction of technical development is accelerating, which means that we may soon hit the point that only a subject matter expert will be able to predict or perhaps even be aware of what happens in any particular field, so we may get a period where before we can't predict the future, we may have some strange middle ground where we're constantly surprised by the developments we see around ourselves and when we look into it find this new discovery has been around months or years

I certainly have experienced that once or twice, however I'm wondering if that may become the new normal

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#234

Post by fatata123 »

kaibee wrote: post #169
Quarrelsome wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover the singularity makes this crass assumption that a single player takes all. It seems to ignore a future of many, many AI players, or many, many human + AI players instead. Furthermore, regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, who as a race are cognitively extremely diverse and adaptive.

> regardless of how smart one thing is, it cannot win towards infinite games of poker against 7 billion humans, AI isn't one thing though. Really its kind of a natural evolution of 'higher order life'. I think that something like a 'organization', (corps, governments, etc) once large enough is at least as alive as a tardigrade. And for the people who are its cells, it is as comprehensible as the tardigrade is to any…

[dead]

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#235

Post by yubblegum »

Always a pleasure to read the thoughts of Kyle.

I wonder if he self censored here regarding potential futures here as concentration of stupendous wealth in generational hands and obscene wealth disparity coupled with machines that can do what "bodies" can naturally points to depopulation as a goal for the elite and their (future) spawn that are not on the choping blocks.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#236

Post by [deleted] »

_doctor_love wrote: post #50

Another interesting one from 'aphyr -- I think the points around the Ironies of Automation deserve deeper focus, possibly even a separate follow-up post. I would encourage folks to look at the following industries: nuclear safety, commercial aviation, remote surgery. These industries have dealt with the issues of automation for much longer than we have as programmers. In the research I've done, these industries went…

[deleted]

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#238

Post by sambuccid »

hn_acc1 wrote: post #218
sambuccid wrote: post #188

Great article, near the end it talks about where the money go and if there will be universal basic income. I think those paragraph had an assumption that if models get very smart all the money will go to big tech. But, thanks to all the companies working on open-weight models, I'm starting to think this might no longer happen. Currently open-weights models are said to be just months behind the top players (and I thin…

Even if hardware is "cheap" and open-source/weight models are available.. Now what? How does this benefit the average person who just wants to have a 9-5 job and go home and hang with family / enjoy some hobbies? Not everyone's idea of utopia is "all the code I could ever think of writing at my fingertips 24x7".. I mean, I sometimes code for fun, etc. But I also do other things. I don't WANT to be able to do 25x my c…

I share your concerns, and I was very happy with the state of the art(at least for us developers) before LLMs arrived, while now I'm constantly worrying about the future, and almost accepting in the future I'll no longer have the time to manually "craft" the code 9-5, which is a huge part of what I love about my job.

But since we are now in this reality I want to try and understand what the future might be, so I can prepare, and maybe if possible also influence it. If I could influence it by trying to limit AI I would, if I can't then at least I would like for the models to be accessible to everyone, to limit the "a few rule the world" scenario.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#239

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

itissid wrote: post #93

For any one who has not read the cockpit recording of air-france-447 I would encourage them to[1]. It is simply jaw dropping study in how things go wrong so fast — a risk with AI we have barely begun to acknowledge let alone regulate as a community. [1]( https://tailstrike.com/database/01-june-2009-air-france-447/ )

That's the one where one of the pilots pulled up the entire time, ignoring an alarm literally blaring the word "stall" for 2 minutes.

The poor captain found out I the last 10s what he had been doing but it was too late.

A couple accidents occurred largely due to Airbus averaging conflicting inputs with nothing more than a small warning light when it occurred. I'm pretty sure they would have gotten the Boeing treatment if social media was more entrenched at the time.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work

#240

Post by acoard »

ofjcihen wrote: post #146
acoard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plato on how reading and writing make us more forgetful as we rely on this new technology: > And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longe…

I see this copy-pastad everywhere these days but it misses a huge point which is that written things don’t read or understand themselves.

Isn't that exactly what Plato's saying? The books cannot understand themselves, and we rely upon them, and in doing so that changes us.
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