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AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

economist.com

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Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#291

Post by mmargenot »

kragen wrote: post #287
mmargenot wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do agree that there's a lot of garbage and navel-gazing that is directly downstream from the creation of LLMs. Because it's easier to task and evaluate an LLM [or network of LLMs] with generation of code, most of these products end up directly related to the production of software. The professional production of software has definitely changed, but sticky impact outside of the tech sector is still brewing. I think…

Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software…

For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. A lot of that is garbage, but quantity has a quality all its own.

If you look at, e.g. this clearly vibe-coded app about vibe coding [https://www.viberank.app/], ~280 people generated 444.8B tokens within the block of time where people were paying attention to it. If 1000 tokens is 100 lines of code, that's ~444M lines of code that would not exist otherwise. Maybe those lines of code are new products, maybe they're not, maybe those people would have written a bunch of code otherwise, maybe not. I'd call that an explosion either way.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#292

Post by riku_iki »

AbstractH24 wrote: post #245
Kapura wrote: post #30

Digital spreadsheets (excel, etc) have done much more to change the world than so-called "artificial intelligence," and on the current trajectory it's difficult to see that changing.

The likely outcome is LLMs being the next the iteration of Excel From its ability to organize and structure data, to running large reporting calculations over and over quickly, to automating a repeatable set of steps quickly and simply. I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

> I’m 36 and it’s hard for me to imagine what the world must have been like before spreadsheets. I can do thousands of calculations with a click

I imagine people eventually would switch on some simple programming and/or language for this, and world would be way more efficient compared to spreadsheet mess

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#293

Post by chrisco255 »

toss1 wrote: post #244
chrisco255 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yet there _will_ (eventually) be one generation that is right. Most likely outcome would be that humans evolve into something altogether different rather than go extinct.

The Fermi Paradox might want to have a word here... Particularly considering the law of large numbers in play where incalculable large chances have so far shown only one sign of technologically-capable life —— ours, and zero signs of any other example of a tech species evolving into something else or even passing the Great Filter.

The Fermi Paradox overestimates the likelihood of intelligent life outside of earth. We haven't even found hard evidence of life anywhere outside of our planet. There's not even a verifiably hospitable planet for water-based lifeforms anywhere within dozens of lightyears from earth. Even if a hospitable planet exists within a range we can one day get to, unless it has the same volcanic properties and makeup as earth, it's most probable that life itself never even developed there.

Even where life may have developed, it's incredibly unlikely that sentient intelligence developed. There was never any guarantee that sentience would develop on Earth and about a million unlikely events had to converge in order for that to occur. It's not a natural consequence of evolution, it's an accident of Earth's unique history and several near-extinction level events and drastic climate changes had to occur to make it possible.

The "law of large numbers" is nothing when the odds of sentient intelligence developing are so close to zero. If such a thing occurred or occurs in the future at some location other than Earth, it's reasonably likely that it's outside of our own galaxy or so far from us that we will never meet them. The speed of light is a hell of a thing.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#294

Post by riku_iki »

omnicognate wrote: post #156
chpatrick wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are absolutely not "fully understood". We understand how the math of the architectures work because we designed that. How the hundreds of gigabytes of automatically trained weights work, we have no idea. By that logic we understand how human brains work because we've studied individual neurons. And here's some more goalpost-shifting. Most humans aren't capable of novel mathematical thought either, but that doesn…

We don't understand individual neurons either. There is no level on which we understand the brain in the way we very much do understand LLMs. And as much as people like to handwave about how mysterious the weights are we actually perfectly understand both how the weights arise and how they result in the model's outputs. As I mentioned in [1] what we can't do is "explain" individual behaviours with simple stories that…

> And as much as people like to handwave about how mysterious the weights are we actually perfectly understand both how the weights arise and how they result in the model's outputs

we understand on this low level, but LLMs through the training converge to something larger than weights, there is a structure of these weights which emerged and allow to perform functions, and this part we do not understand, we just observe it as a black box, and experimenting on the level: we put this kind of input to black box and receive this kind of output.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#295

Post by dgfitz »

mmargenot wrote: post #291
kragen wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software…

For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. A lot of that is garbage, but quantity has a quality all its own. If you look at, e.g. this clearly vibe-coded app about vibe coding [ https://www.viberank.app/ ], ~280 people generated 444.8B tokens within the block of time where people were paying attention to it. If 1000 tokens is 100 lines of code, that's ~444M lines of code that would not exi…

> For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development.

So, AI is to software what muscle cars were to air emissions quality?

A whole lot of useless, unabated toxic garbage?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#296

Post by joquarky »

aNoob7000 wrote: post #257
cainxinth wrote: post #255

Here’s what amazes me about the reaction to LLMs: they were designed to solve NLP, stunningly did so, and then immediately everyone started asking why they can’t do math well or reason like a human being.

Because the heads of tech companies jumped on TV and said that AGI was around the corner to basically prepare for job losses. They just can't shut up about how AI is going to either save us all or kill us all.

Well the job losses have certainly arrived.

Whether that is due to AI, WFH->offshoring, or end of ZIRP is anybody's guess.

All I know is any tech meetups I go to are full of people looking for work and the recruiters that normally stop by have vanished.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#297

Post by joquarky »

mallowdram wrote: post #256
andy99 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its probably cliche but I think it's both overhyped and under hyped, and for the same reason. They hype comes from "leadership" types that don't understand what LLMs actually do and so imagine all sorts of nonsense (replacing vast swaths of jobs or autonomously writing code) but don't understand how valuable a productivity enhancer and automation tool to can be. Eventually hype and reality will converge, but unlike e…

AI was a colossal mistake. A lazy primate's total failure of imagination. It conflated the "conduit metaphor paradox" from animal behavior with "the illusion of prediction/error prediction/error minimization" from spatiotemporal dynamical neuroscience with complete ignorance of the "arbitrary/specific" dichotomy in signaling from coordination dynamics. AI is a short cut to nowhere. It's an abrogation of responsibilit…

Let me use AI to translate this into plain English:

> AI was a huge mistake. It shows a lack of imagination and confuses ideas from different sciences. Instead of helping us improve how we communicate, it reinforces our weakest habits. Computer science pretends to make things more efficient, but really it just extracts value in shallow ways. This is poor, second-rate thinking.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#298

Post by mallowdram »

joquarky wrote: post #297
mallowdram wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI was a colossal mistake. A lazy primate's total failure of imagination. It conflated the "conduit metaphor paradox" from animal behavior with "the illusion of prediction/error prediction/error minimization" from spatiotemporal dynamical neuroscience with complete ignorance of the "arbitrary/specific" dichotomy in signaling from coordination dynamics. AI is a short cut to nowhere. It's an abrogation of responsibilit…

Let me use AI to translate this into plain English: > AI was a huge mistake. It shows a lack of imagination and confuses ideas from different sciences. Instead of helping us improve how we communicate, it reinforces our weakest habits. Computer science pretends to make things more efficient, but really it just extracts value in shallow ways. This is poor, second-rate thinking.

It lacks references, it's garbage, advertising, cliff-notes for apes uninterested, devolving, asleep, bored, and needing to be told what to think without knowing why or how. The inertia in CS, and the inertia and entropy CS unleashed on the gen public will take years to cleanse from the system before we get back to imaginative progress and invention.

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#299

Post by spicyusername »

kragen wrote: post #289
spicyusername wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that these are accelerating technologies. maybe they don't actually work for that yet. So you're not going to see code that wouldn't exist without LLMs (or books that wouldn't exist without Word), you're going to see more code (or more books). There is no direct way to track "written code" or "people who learned more about their hobbies" or "teachers who saved time lesson planning", etc.

You must have failed to notice that you were replying to a comment of mine where I gave a specific example of a book that I think wouldn't exist without Word (or similar WYSIWYG word processors), because you're asserting that I'm never going to see what I am telling you I am currently seeing. Generally, when there's a new tool that actually opens up explosive changes and development of new products, at least some of…

I noticed.

Books written with WYSIWYG could have been written by hand just fine, it would have just been more painful and taken longer. What WYSIWYG unlocks is more books, not new kinds of books. And sure, you might argue that more books is new books, which is fair.

So it is with LLMs. We're going to get more code, more lesson plans, etc. Accelerating.

    Do people writing code with AI today have anything comparable?
Like every fourth post on here is someone talking about their workflow with LLMs, so... I think they do?

Re: AI might yet follow the path of previous technological revolutions

#300

Post by akomtu »

aeternum wrote: post #278
akomtu wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those steam engines, trains and submarines were steps toward what we are seeing now. AI is the logical culmination and the purpose of technology.

People said similar things about the internet: never before has all human knowledge been available in one place (they forgot about libraries apparently). I think it's more likely that AI is just a further concentration of human knowledge. It makes it even more accessible but will AI actually add to it? Why doesn't the logical culmination of technology require quantum computers? Or the merging of human and machine bra…

AI means technology no longer needs humans. With AI, technology will become a quasi-lifeform, competing with us for resources.
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