The work done by horses was not the only work out there. Games played by chess masters was not the only sport on the planet. Answering questions and generating content is not the only work that happens at work places.
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
301–310 of 663 posts
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> please name what metric you think is meaningful Job satisfaction and human flourishing By those metrics, AI is getting worse and worse
AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it. AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more resources, to give the most important thing people have - time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be like complaining that the objective positive of increased food production is actually a negative, because people are getting fatter.
Imagine anthropomorphing this hard.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
The crucial observation is the fact that automation has historically been a net creator of jobs, not destroyer.
Sure, if you're content to stack shelves. AI isn't automation. It's thinking . It automates the brain out of human jobs. You can still get a job that requires a body. My job doesn't require a body, so I'm screwed. If you're say, a surgeon or a plumber, you're in a better place.
Yes, AI is automation. It automates the implementation. It doesn't (yet?) automate the hard parts around figuring out what work needs to be done and how to do it.
The sad thing is that for many software devs, the implementation is the fun bit.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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-r…
First of all, it's not unlikely that the dentist is the owner. And in any case, when you have a small system of less than 150 people, it's easy enough for a handful of people to see what's actually going on.
Once you get to something in the thousands or tens of thousands, you just have spreadsheets; and anything that doesn't show up in that spreadsheet might as well not exist. Furthermore, you have competing business units, each of which want to externalize their costs to other business units.
Very similar to what GP described -- when I was in a small start-up, we had an admin assistant who did most of the receipt entry and what-not for our expense reports; and we were allowed to tell the company travel agent our travel constrants and give us options for flights. When we were acquired by a larger company, we had to do our own expense reports, and do our own flight searches. That was almost certainly a false economy.
And then when we became a major conglomerate, at some point they merged a bunch of IT functions; so the folks in California would make a change and go home, and those of us in Europe or the UK would come in to find all the networks broken, with no way to fix it until the people in California started coming in at 4pm.
In all cases, the dollars saved is clearly visible in the spreadsheet, while the "development velocity" lost is noisy, diffuse, and hard to quantify or pin down to any particular cause.
I suppose one way to quantify that would be to have the Engineering function track time spent doing admin work and charge that to the Finance function; and time spent idle due to IT outages and charge that to the IT department. But that has its own pitfalls, no doubt.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#305Earlier 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 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.
Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case that grandmasters playing with computer assistance ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or humans alone.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#306Earlier 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.
In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work, but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#307An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exci…
I think a lot about how much we altered our environment to suit cars. They're not a perfect solution to transport, but they've been so useful we've built tons more road to accommodate them. So, while I don't think AGI will happen any time soon, I wonder what 'roads' we'll build to squeeze the most out of our current AI. Probably tons of power generation.
Customer service will be almost fully automated, and human customers will be forced to adapt to the bots.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#308> A system that costs less, per word thought or written, than it'd cost to hire the cheapest human labor on the face of the planet.
Is it really possible to make this claim given the vast sums of money that have gone in to AI/LLM training?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#309How about we stop trying the analogy clothing on and just tell it like it is? AI is unlike any other technology to date. Just like predicting the weather, we don't know what it will be like in 20 months. Everything is a guesstimate.
Against that you have the Moore's law like predictions that AI would be getting to around human levels around now from Moravec and the like that have proved fairly spot on. I think you may find it's more like the AI chess ranking graph than the weather.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#310Earlier 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.
Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for YPeople seem to think this discussion is a binary where either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to cause widespread misery.