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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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

#241

Post by LtWorf »

tirant wrote: post #220
anon7000 wrote: post #169

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 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 yo…

Armies and pinkertons made capitalism succesfull.

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

#242

Post by jacquesm »

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…

The independently wealthy still need the economies of scale provided by a normal society.

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

#244

Post by bad_username »

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…

> Whenever I join a new project, within 6 months, I control/maintain all the core modules of the system and everything ends up hooked up to my config files, running according to the architecture I designed. Happened at multiple companies

I am regularly tempted to do this (I have done this a few times), but unless I truly own the project (being the tech lead or something), I stop myself. One of the reasons is reluctance to trespass uninvited on someone's else territory of responsibility, even if they do a worse job than I could. The human cost of such a situation (to the project and ultimately to myself) is usually worse than the cost of living with status quo. I wonder what your thoughts are on this.

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

#246

Post by retinaros »

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…

Most of corporate people dont provide direct value…

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

#247

Post by myth_drannon »

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…

Can the process be similar to a sudden collapse of USSR's economic system? The leaders weren't stupid and tried to keep it afloat but with underlying systemic issues everything just cratered.

Can the process be modelled using game theory where the actors are greedy corporate leaders and hungry populace?

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

#248

Post by hurturue »

nextworddev wrote: post #99
xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we'll continue to have human coding competitions for entertainment purpose. Good luck trying to live off the prize money though.

Hikaru makes good money streaming on Twitch tho

so you're telling me there will be money for about 100 top streaming programmers

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

#249

Post by p-e-w »

9rx wrote: post #228
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.

> 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.

Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.

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

#250

Post by bad_username »

AI currently lacks the following to really gain a "G" and reliably be able to replace humans at scale:

- Radical massive multimodality. We perceive the world through many wide-band high-def channels of information. Computer perception is nowhere near. Same for ability to "mutate" the physical world, not just "read" it.

- Being able to be fine-tuned constantly (learn things, remember things) without "collapsing". Generally having a smooth transition between the context window and the weights, rather than fundamental irreconcilable difference.

These are very difficult problems. But I agree with the author that the engine is in the works and the horses should stay vigilant.

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