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I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

simonwillison.net

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Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#301

Post by bsder »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

> Narrow AI, AI with guardrails, AI with multiple safety redundancies - these don't elicit the same reaction. They seem to be valid, acceptable forms of automation.

Maybe because AI is only good at things that have been artificially made crappy?

Search engine? AI is a godsend at wiping out all the advertising and SEO glop since circa 2000. 80%+ of my AI stuff is something a search engine could do 25 years ago.

Produce a shell script example that a junior needs? AI is very good at coughing up the code for a bunch of things that have disastrously bad documentation from 1985 or disastrously stupid implementations from 1990 such that a junior engineer can finally get on with what they're supposed to be doing.

Generating the same webby Javascript slop that as everybody else in the universe? Solid--but the question is "If the Javascript slop is so boilerplate to generate that an AI can generate it, why does it exist, at all?" People have been lamenting the death of Hypercard, VB6, and Flash for a yonks age now and yet we still don't have replacements with the same ease of use.

Doing mind-numbing refactors of my codebase or generating boilerplate unit tests? Okay-ish. But why doesn't my editor have easy access to the AST so that I can type a couple of keystrokes and do it myself (thankfully this finally seems to be coming online).

Every single thing that AI produces okay-ish results for me on is something that has either been artificially enshittified or could have been automated decades ago.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#302

Post by martin-t »

hunterpayne wrote: post #291
martin-t wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a full theory yet, it's something I started thinking about recently. That being said, it's clear that in the current system, rich people can get richer faster than poor people. We have a two class system a) workers who get paid per unit of work b) owners who capture any surplus income, who decide hiring/firing/salaries, who can sell the company and whose wealth keeps increasing (assuming the company does…

Two things: > - He owns 100% of the future value of the company despite being created only 10% by him. Well, not exactly, he was creating 100% for the first year and 10% from then on. 1) If you believe this, then you have a massively simplistic view of employee value. The distribution of actual value provided by employees is probably log normal, and certainly not normal (gaussian). 2) This is basically the labor theo…

> you have a massively simplistic view of employee value

That's why I talk about skill levels later, but briefly because this is a comment, not a book.

There's also a difference between how much value is provided can be attributed to a particular person vs a particular position. Some positions allow a much wider range of possible outcomes. How much extra wealth does a 90th percentile carpenter produce over and average carpenter? What about programmer, fashion designer, manager, salesman, doctor?

Does this mean the value of life of different people is based on how productive they are?

Because each person has roughly the same amount of time available to them and if they are spending an equal amount of it building a company, does one deserve to own more of it? Should this distribution be the same or different from the (monthly) monetary compensation?

These are rhetorical questions (mostly) but they are questions society should be discussing IMO.

Tangent: a carpenter who has no salesman and is so shit at selling his furniture that he gives it away for free is still producing value for society, even if he goes broke doing it. OTOH a salesman who has no carpenter and is so shit at making furniture that nobody wants it even for free is not producing any value at all.

> This is basically the labor theory of value

Ok, I need to read up on LVT. Seems like I am finally getting somewhere because I can't believe I am the only one saying things like this but at the same time I have not found anybody else with similar opinions. At best, I've seen people try to pattern match my opinions onto something similar they were familiar with but actually different.

> If it was true, the value of a newly discovered gold mine would be 0.

I don't know how this results from LVT yet but it seems what I am proposing must then be fundamentally different depending on how you meant it:

a) You meant gold as a natural resource with inherent value. It is necessary for making e.g. some electronics. The only question remains how to distribute the reward for discovering and mining it.

b) You meant gold as a substitute for money, ignoring its value as a natural resource. In that case, yes, money is a medium of exchange, you can't eat it or make anything out of it (maybe a fire?). Having more money in circulation does not bring any extra value for society, it just multiplies all monetary values by a number slightly larger than 1. (OTOH for the person discovering and mining it, it would be beneficial but only because he now has more relative to others. The same way as if he printed more money.)

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#303

Post by cyanydeez »

quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #39

I find the contrast between two narratives around technology use so fascinating: 1. We advocate automation because people like Brenda are error-prone and machines are perfect. 2. We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. These aren't contradictions because we only advocate for automation in limited contexts: when the task is understandable, the execution is reliable, the pro…

Brenda makes obvious errors. BrendAI makes subtle off by 1 errors.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#304

Post by latchup »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #192
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it doesn’t have to be as accurate as a human to be a helpful tool. I disagree. If something can't be as accurate as a (good) human, then it's useless to me. I'll just ask the human instead, because I know that the human is going to be worth listening to.

Autopilot in airplanes is a good example to disprove that. Good in most conditions. Not as good as a human. Which is why we still have skilled pilots flying planes, assisted by autopilot. We don’t say “it’s not as good as a human, so stuff it.” We say, “it’s great in most conditions. And humans are trained how to leverage it effectively and trained to fly when it cannot be used.”

That's a downright insane comparison. The whole problem with generative AI is how extremely unreliable it is. You cannot really trust it with anything because irrespective of its average performance, it has absolutely zero guarantees on its worst-case behavior.

Aviation autopilot systems are the complete opposite. They are arguably the most reliable computer-based systems ever created. While they cannot fly a plane alone, pilots can trust them blindly to do specific, known tasks consistently well in over 99.99999% of cases, and provide clear diagnostics in case they cannot.

If gen AI agents were this consistently good at anything, this discussion would not be happening.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#305

Post by conductr »

tstrimple wrote: post #269
conductr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even greater trust. It’s just passive trust. The thing is, Brenda is her own QA department. Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. It doesn’t even fully understand the problem/question sometimes yet provides a smart definitive sounding answer. It’s like the doctor on The Simpson’s, if you can’t tell he’s a quack, you probably would follow…

> Every good Brenda is precisely good because she checks her own work before shipping it. AI does not do this. A confident statement that's trivial to disprove. I use claude code to build and deploy services on my NAS. I can ask it to spin up a new container on my subdomain and make it available internal only or also available externally. It knows it has access to my Cloudflare API key. It knows I am running rootless…

You’ve switched contexts completely with your strawman. Meaning, you’ve pivot Brenda in finance to some technical/software engineer task. You’ve pointed the conversation specifically at a use case that AI is good at, writing code and solving those problems. The world at large is much more complex than helping you be a 10x engineer. To live up to the hype, it has to do this reliably for every vertical in a majority of situations. It’s not even close to being there.

Also, context equivalent counter examples abound. Just read HN or any tech forum and it’s takes no time to hear people talking about the hallucinations and garbage that AI sometimes generates. The whole vibe coding trend is built on “make this app” then followed by hundreds of “fix this” “fix that” prompts because it doesn’t get much right at first attempt.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#307

Post by ethbr1 »

ryandrake wrote: post #164
nerdjon wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I use AI to perform X, every single time I run that AI from now until the heat death of the sun it will maybe produce Y. Forever! When it does, we don't understand why, and when it doesn't, we also don't understand why! To make this even worse, it may even produce Y just enough times to make it seem reliable and then it is unleashed without supervision, running thousands or millions of times, wrecking havoc pr…

Exactly. Fundamentally, I want my computer's computations to be deterministic, not probabilistic. And, I don't want the results to arbitrarily change because some company 1,500 miles away from me up-and-decided to "train some new model" or whatever it is they do. A computer program should deliver reliable, consistent output if it is consistently given the same input. If I wanted inconsistency and unreliability, I'd a…

The problem with this is that it runs counter to AI company valuations.

Their valuations: AI all the things

Reality: AI the minimum number of steps, surrounded by guardrails and traditional deterministic automation

But AI companies won't be worth AI money if that reality persists.

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#308

Post by intended »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #136
intended wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the luxury of theory. Yes, most situations are terrible compared to what would be if an expert was present to perfect it. Except if there isn’t an expert, and there’s a normal person, how do they know the output is right ?

not sure I get your point?

As the two other commenters pointed out

The mess already existed for a reason. There’s a certain amount of expertise in the average firm.

If they could afford an expert, they wouldn’t be the same firm.

If they do get an AI expert - how do they check the output given the level of ability they have?

Re: I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel

#309

Post by danans »

candiddevmike wrote: post #57
Aeolun wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We disavow AI because people like Brenda are perfect and the machine is error-prone. No, no. We disavow AI because our great leaders inexplicably trust it more than Brenda.

I don't understand why generative AI gets a pass at constantly being wrong, but an average worker would be fired if they performed the same way. If a manager needed to constantly correct you or double check your work, you'd be out. Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?

> Why are we lowering the bar for generative AI?

Because it doesn't need to sleep or spend time with its family.

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