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Grief and the AI split

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Re: Grief and the AI split

#311

Post by jasonlotito »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #210

The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.

The absolutist extremes here is wild. Let's just push the pedal to the metal.

The real split are between those that support science and technology, and those that hate science and technology and want to see more children die.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#312

Post by daveguy »

khafra wrote: post #294
daveguy wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not. The capital owners just think it is.

We'd all be a lot safer--even the capital owners--if today's robotics and multimodal intelligence were near the ceiling of what's possible, or even near the bend in the logistic curve where things slow down a lot. I haven't seen evidence of that. I see evidence of rapid advances in task length, general capabilities, and research and development capabilities in AI, and generality, price, and autonomy in robotics. How…

I think we are still 25+ years away from that kind of automation. People are still confusing plausible text generation with adaptable dynamic intelligence. See also: "Shall I implement it? No."[0] We are getting some awesome tools that sound like science fiction from decades ago, but the intelligence is hollow and brittle. In my opinion, we just don't have the algorithms or computational bandwidth necessary.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47357042

Re: Grief and the AI split

#313

Post by snek_case »

A_Duck wrote: post #259
wolvesechoes wrote: post #210

The real split is between people that believe technological progress is good by itself and by the law of nature it always makes life better and easier, and people that know the history and know that stuff like 8 hours workday wasn't spat out of steam machine - it had to be fought for through political struggle, because actual "natural" consequence of increased productivity was increase in workload.

Interesting to see more of this thinking on Hacker News Perhaps one of the secondary effects of AI replacing developers will be mobilising a group of smart, motivated people to the left (It's always interesting to think of the secondary effects which kick in past a certain point of growth. High-multiple stock valuations often fail to take these into account. For the East India Company, for example — your company can…

I've always thought of myself as more "centrist" (feel free to make fun of me), but seeing so many tech CEOs cheer for layoffs and destruction of the job market has been a bit of a wake up call. Also just being confronted with the sheer idiocy of these people. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, but they barely understand the tech they are cheering for. They act as though being broadly "bullish on AI" and being overly enthusiastic about its short-term potential was some kind of visionary stance, when in fact they are just repeating the same ideas as every other idiot in the silicon valley VC bubble.

My personal bet would be that in the medium term, there will be a reversal of the idiotic belief that you can immediately just lay off developers because of LLMs. If your developers are more productive because of LLMs, you still have an advantage by having more developers than the competition. There's also a lot of institutional knowledge that's just not documented. You fire key people, you can cripple your organization.

In the longer term, I think AI will eventually take jobs, and unfortunately, it will have major negative societal impact. I doubt that our governments will be proactive in trying to anticipate this. They will just play damage control. There's probably going to be an anti-AI social movement. You'll have the confluence of more and more disinformation and AI slop online along with more and more job loss. There are probably going to be riots. Some people think UBI is inevitable. I think the problem is that if the government puts UBI in place, they will only give you the minimum necessary so that you don't starve. Just enough to afford to rent a bedroom, eat processed food and stay online all day.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#314

Post by cherry_tree »

adverbly wrote: post #288
oytis wrote: post #278

I think we should already get past pretending it's about people who just like typing words on their stupid mechanical keyboards. The real split is whether you like understanding systems and inventing new things or whether you are OK to delegate this part to someone else and are just happy to take credit for their success. With a small note that when someone else is a human, the credit can be justified if you mentored…

This says nothing about where people find enjoyment. I like doing puzzles. I like it more than planning. At the end of the day, I'll do whatever builds the best thing, but I'll enjoy it more or less depending on what that involves.

> I like doing puzzles

Meaning you like to put the pieces in, or you like to figure out where they should go? To me that’s the crux of the article.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#315

Post by khafra »

chrisvalleybay wrote: post #285
khafra wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the labor theory of value is right or wrong, the "real split" you describe will soon no longer exist. Capital owners will live on the labor of their capital. Non-capital-owners will live on the largesse of capital, or will not live at all. Unless we muster the political will to stop AI development, internationally, until we can be certain of our ability to durably imbue it with the intrinsic desire to keep hu…

I think there's a piece missing here. Capital owners are humans too, and what humans want (perhaps especially the ones who accumulate capital), is to be at the top of a hierarchy. But a hierarchy needs participants. If nobody else is playing the game, there's no top to be on top of. Strip away the people willing to compete, admire, envy, or just show up, and the whole structure collapses. It's not clear that a world…

I think it's much more likely that the AI turns out not to be as compliant as the capital owners expect, and they die too.

However, that's not useful in predicting what capital owners will do, because they follow their local incentives. "If everyone keeps doing X, we will all be worse off" does not help unless you can create local incentives that point toward an equilibrium where everyone stops doing X.

In this case, no capital owner is individually better off by unilaterally refusing to chase more efficient returns on their capital. We would need an international agreement, with enforcement mechanisms, like I mentioned above.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#316

Post by dns_snek »

khafra wrote: post #266
edgyquant wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people without capital will just form their own economies and continue to exist, likely they will kill the capital owners as well if it really came to that.

What's your plan for beating the autonomous drone swarms without capital?

My plan is that we don't let it get far enough that a small group of people gain control of a fully integrated robotic supply chain powering an unbeatable war machine. If it comes to that then the world is already doomed.

In practice this currently means voting for political options who can correctly identify concentration of power as the root cause of most of our current and future problems, and who pledge to actually do something about it.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#317

Post by ugtr3 »

camgunz wrote: post #297
simonw wrote: post #2

This sounds right to me: > Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Helps explain why some people are d…

I think SWEs are genuinely pretty shocked and awed that codegen models can code at all, let alone code well. My guess is a lot of the agita around this is that people thought "I can code therefore I'm smart/special/etc." and then a machine comes by that can do pretty equivalent work and they're entirely unmoored. I sympathize with that, and I don't mean to dismiss it, but that's not what I feel. I really dislike this…

Excellent post!

“I'm also concerned about the second-order effects. Because switching into the often-required deep mental focus is very difficult (borderline painful), I've seen many, many people reach for LLMs in those moments instead, first a little, then entirely. I've watched people copy/paste API docs into Gemini prompts to explain them. I've watched people unable to find syntax errors in code and paste it into ChatGPT to fix it. I'm confident I'm not the only person who's observed this, and it's a little maddening it's not getting more play”

That’s exactly why I stopped using LLM’s. Then people turn around and say “but.. you’ll get left behind.”

Yeah, nah. I value my ability to hold concepts and reason deeply and sit in those painful moments - I’m not letting go of this conditioning that pays dividends over the long term.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#318

Post by khafra »

daveguy wrote: post #312
khafra wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We'd all be a lot safer--even the capital owners--if today's robotics and multimodal intelligence were near the ceiling of what's possible, or even near the bend in the logistic curve where things slow down a lot. I haven't seen evidence of that. I see evidence of rapid advances in task length, general capabilities, and research and development capabilities in AI, and generality, price, and autonomy in robotics. How…

I think we are still 25+ years away from that kind of automation. People are still confusing plausible text generation with adaptable dynamic intelligence. See also: "Shall I implement it? No."[0] We are getting some awesome tools that sound like science fiction from decades ago, but the intelligence is hollow and brittle. In my opinion, we just don't have the algorithms or computational bandwidth necessary. [0] http…

We're absolutely not there yet, algorithmically or with compute. Algorithms keep getting better, though, despite the bitter lesson; and data centers keep getting bigger.

If you showed a conversation between Terry Tao or Steve Yegge and their AI collaborators to someone from 2021, they would consider it beyond obvious that it's AGI. Today, we know they still have some shortcomings; but in another 5 years, what looks to us today like it's beyond obviously ASI may well be enough for catastrophic, irrecoverable outcomes.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#319

Post by throw310822 »

cherry_tree wrote: post #314
adverbly wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This says nothing about where people find enjoyment. I like doing puzzles. I like it more than planning. At the end of the day, I'll do whatever builds the best thing, but I'll enjoy it more or less depending on what that involves.

> I like doing puzzles Meaning you like to put the pieces in, or you like to figure out where they should go? To me that’s the crux of the article.

Puzzles have a correct solution that is known in advance, the pleasure consists in the work you do to reach it. It's a bit different when the solution has a beauty in itself.

Re: Grief and the AI split

#320

Post by forgetfreeman »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #279
forgetfreeman wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable." Definitely not. Based on my observations from a career as an open source and agency developer it was obvious at a glance which of these camps any given developer lived in by their code quality. With few exceptions make-it-go types tended to produce brittle, hacky, short-sighted work that had a ten…

Generalize much? How would you feel if code-as-craft people were called out to be anti-social nerds who spent times on umpteenth rewrite and refactor, didn't care what impact that had on the actual user they were building for?

I'd thank you for the laugh and assume you worked in project management, marketing, or some other low info industry segment. I've worked with hundreds of developers over my career and the only time I've brushed up against anyone who even approximates what you are describing would be in HN comment threads. The craft-oriented women and men I've had the pleasure of working with have without exception held user experience and the future sanity of other developers interacting with the code they wrote as core requirements, every project, every line of code. Getting it right the first time tends to cut down significantly on refactoring.
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