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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

#291

Post by nopinsight »

reeredfdfdf wrote: post #226
marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm optimistic. Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by…

"I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better." I'm not sure most of those organizations will have many customers left, if every white collar admin job has been automated away, and all those people…

AI agents might be able to automate 80% of certain jobs in a few years but that would make the remaining 20% far more valuable. The challenge is to help people rapidly retrain for new roles.

Humans will continue to have certain desires far outstripping the supply we have for a long time to come.

We still don’t have cures for all diseases, personal robot chefs & maids, and an ideal house for everyone, for example. Not all have the time to socialize as much as they wish with their family and friends.

There will continue to be work for humans as long as humans provide value & deep connections beyond what automation can. The jobs could themselves become more desirable with machines automating the boring and dangerous parts, leaving humans to form deeper connections and be creatively human.

The transition period can be painful. There should be sufficient preparation and support to minimize the suffering.

Workers will need to have access to affordable and effective methods to retrain for new roles that will emerge.

“soft” skills such as empathetic communication and tact could surge in value.

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

#292

Post by lomase »

wyre wrote: post #119
actionfromafar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.

gonna tell claude to write all my code in one line

Imagine you are a Perl programmer writing js...

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

#293

Post by listenallyall »

reeredfdfdf wrote: post #221
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…

"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value." I wish corporations really acted this rationally. At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, pre…

But wouldnt these spreadsheets be tracking something like total revenue? If a doctor is spending time on admin tasks instead of revenue-generating procedures, obviously the hospital has accountants and analysts who will notice this, yes?

I'll contrast your experience with a well-run (from a profitability standpoint) dentist's office, they have tons of assistants and hygienists and the dentist just goes from room-to-room performing high-dollar procedures, and very little "patient care." If small dentist offices have this all figured out it seems a little strange that a massive hospital does not.

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

#294

Post by lomase »

hurturue wrote: post #245
tills13 wrote: post #200

Person whose job it is to sell AI selling AI is what I got from this post.

person whose job is to not be replaced by AI saying AI is hype is what I get from your comment

I does not work buddy. Nobody gets paid to not buy AI.

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

#296

Post by baq »

impossiblefork wrote: post #264
enduser wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is competition between corporations and nations that drives an arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x, then the next company/nation needs to compete. The companies/countries that retire their humans and try to auto…

I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the competitive landscape between employers and workers. In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go on for years to matter.

A strike going long enough and becoming big enough becomes a political matter. In the limit, if politicians don't find a solution, blood gets spilled. If military and police robots are in place by that time, you can ask yourself what's the point of those unproductive human leeching freeriders at all.

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

#297

Post by MLgulabio »

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…

[dead]

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

#298

Post by lomase »

trollbridge wrote: post #142
whycombinetor wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean when you say building crud apps should be automated?

CRUD apps are ridiculously simple and have been in existence my entire life. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to make a basic CRUD and host it somewhere. The bulk of useful but simple business apps are just a CRUD with a tiny bit of customisation and integration around them. It is true that LLMs make it easier to build these kind of things without having to become a competent programmer first.

I don't know what kind of CRUD apps you work on. The kind of CRUD apps people pay me to work on are not simple.

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

#299

Post by actionfromafar »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #213
actionfromafar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.

They can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not).…

LLMs won't ever shut up. That seems unfixable. But a "hack" would perhaps be to train them to make longer patches but which actually removes code.

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

#300

Post by Gud »

gniv wrote: post #295

This makes me think of another domain where it could happen: electricity generation and distribution. If solar+battery becomes cheap enough we could see the demise of the country-scale grid.

I work in the energy sector. I test high voltage gas insulated switchgear for a living.

With this setup, you would need batteries that can sustain load for weeks on end, in many parts of the world.

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