AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will • Hacker News Board

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#291

Post by gavinhoward » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #18

gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

> becoming more like the AI... Current AI systems have a wide variety of outputs. They can totally be asked to complete a task in a 'wildly unusual' way, and will come up with all kinds of non-bland answers, just as you hope to do manually... If answers being 'non-bland' is your differentiator, then someone will come along and specifically ask an AI for that.

And the AI, not being any different from the AI used by anyone else, will not give an answer that isn't bland. It's still the same weights used by everyone else.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#292

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

This is roughly how I look at it. Human certified product will command a premium in a world where AI will lose its ability to differentiate. And if at some point we really can't tell the difference any more then we should re-think our societies and what makes us human, because then we might as well roll over and give computers voting rights.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#293

Post by fnimick » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #238

marginalia_nu wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be that as it may, the collective behavior and shape of society has undeniably changed.

Has it? Because when I look at humanity over the ages, I see a select few using technology and violence to exert power and influence over the great many to further their own desires. I don't see that changing in the future anytime soon, especially before AI gets to be the next technology in a long line of technology used to oppress and inflict violence on others.

Aren't you excited to take the human element out of the loop of enforcing property ownership rights?

In China, in Tianenmen, they had to bring in forces from the countryside because the city police wouldn't fire on their neighbors. AI won't have any restrictions or morals. An AI-powered law enforcement force would gun down every single person in a city if authorities called for it.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#294

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

lolsowrong wrote: post #15

gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.

This comment is not useful. Calculators are not a replacement for human intelligence and creativity.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#295

Post by fnovd » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

hiccuphippo wrote: post #48

simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you use a spellchecker when you send out emails about your company? How about doing research with a regular search engine? "Refusing to use AI" doesn't make sense to me as a blanket policy. If you're going to make that commitment - to yourself or to anyone else - you'll need to be a lot more precise in what you actually mean by that.

It's like being a vegan knowing farms still use bees for pollination and "organic" fertilizers from animal farms, or a human rights activist who uses a smartphone. Sometimes people just want to feel good about themselves and ignore the cognitive dissonance.

Someone worried about the exploitation of bees is still going to be a vegan, since it takes more acres of crops to grow a pound of beef than a nutritionally-equivalent basket of produce. The idyllic picture of cows grazing in an open field might be accurate as far as the number of farms on the planet, but pound-for-pound our meat comes from factory farms where they grow massive amounts of corn and soy to feed the animals.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#296

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

fnovd wrote: post #279

gavinhoward wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Username checks out because you missed the point. Yes, I know calculators can encourage people to not think; I should know because I wrote one. [1] But the current "AI" tech is so much worse on that front. It's a difference of degree, and that degree does matter. By the way, when I was learning to fly helicopters [2], I used my calculator to calculate weight and balances, but I also did it by hand! [1]: https://git.g…

I'm sure that all was very rewarding for you. I'm not sure how it translates into a business. We don't want to teach accountants to deploy their own calculator from the command line and we don't want pilots to do math while they're flying. You act like encouraging people not to think is a problem. Thing is, you'd be wrong. We want people not just to think, but to focus. If I'm a pilot and I have to worry about the ru…

It is the ability to do the calculations that matters, not that you would do so in actual practice. He very explicitly mentioned 'while I was learning'.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#297

Post by gavinhoward » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

gautamdivgi wrote: post #177

gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

Everyone uses AI today directly or indirectly. All search engines and possibly stackoverflow and Reddit will start supporting LLMs. Unless you never use these in your business you will be using AI.

I doubt marginalia_ru's search engine will, but even if it does, I'll make my own.

Yeah, I am that sure of my position.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#298

Post by theonlybutlet » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

Aerroon wrote: post #153

photochemsyn wrote: post #144

I see this sentiment expressed frequently: > "The past decades have shown that the benefits of technology are unevenly distributed, with some rich becoming super-rich with a good portion of the people lagging behind. However, it is also fair to say that the average well being in the world has steadily increased." The average is far less important than the median , when it comes to social stability. You could argue th…

I'm not sure I agree with that assertion in the first place. Life has improved a lot for most people, but it has improved in ways that you don't really notice. Your car is safer, your apartment is safer, your neighbor's apartment is safer (so it's less likely to burn down yours), there's less crime, there's less hunger, there's more available life saving medicines etc etc. These improvements just aren't all that noti…

You only need to go look at the productivity & remuneration graph over the last 50 years to see that that doesn't hold. They're diverging. Inequality continues to increase, yes everyone's standard has been improving but the common man is getting less and less of that additional value-add from their additional productivity.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#299

Post by patrickmay » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

gpanders wrote: post #254

gspencley wrote: post #225

I'm not as worried about AI "stealing" my job as I am worried that it's going to make my job unappealing. As a software engineer, what motivates me most is the creative aspect of it. I like building and designing things. I like thinking about every line of code that I write. If people start outsourcing their coding to generative AI, and if I find myself feeling pressured to follow suit in order to keep up, then every…

I completely agree. Many of the recent articles and blog posts written by AI enthusiasts giving examples of how AI makes their job "easier" or "more productive" just demonstrates this to me even further. What they call "more productive" looks to me like "incredibly boring". In addition, another point I don't often see mentioned is the alarmingly likely possibility that all AI-enhanced software engineering will go thr…

Emacs will always be here.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#300

Post by gavinhoward » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 4:02 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #178

gavinhoward wrote: post #13

I completely disagree. I'm building a business, and this business will be based on excellent software and excellent support for that software. I will refuse to use AI. But instead of AI users taking my job, I'm sure that refusing to use AI will become my differentiator as every AI user becomes more and more like each other. You may think that good AI users will not become so bland, but they will. Human laziness will…

You’re going to develop this software in house and not allow your engineers to use AI in that process? That’s not only unenforceable, it’s business suicide.

I don't have employees, never will. Pretty easy to enforce if it's just me.