And what happened to human population? It skyrocketed. So humans are going to get replaced by AI and human population will skyrocket again? This analogy doesn't work.
Virtual humans?
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
321–330 of 663 posts
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#322Horses 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. There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made…
The thing that replaces the old memos is not email, its meetings. It not uncommon for meetings with hundreds of participants that in the past would be a simple memo.
It would be amazing if LLMs could replace the role that meetings has in communication, but somehow I strongly doubt that will happens. It is a fun idea to have my AI talk with your AI so no one need to actually communicate, but the result is more likely to create barriers for communication than to help it.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#323funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encoun…
It's interesting to see Cyberpunk 2077 became somehow relatable more and more.
I remember reading Burning Chrome, written in 1982, and one of the characters commented on late-stage capitalism.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"it's difficult to make someone understand a thing when his job depends on him not understanding it"
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#326Horses pull carts. Chessbots play chess. Humans do lots of things. Equivalence in one thing is not equivalence in the vast collection of things we do.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#328It might be better to think about what a horse is to a human, mostly a horse is an energy slave. The history of humanity is a story about how many energy slaves are available to the average human. In times past, the only people on earth who had their standard of living raised to a level that allowed them to cast there gaze upon the stars were the Kings and there courts, vassals, and noblemen. As time passed we have l…
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#329I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works. It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful qu…
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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#330I think my software engineering job will be safe so long as big companies keep using average code as their training set. This is because the average developer creates unnecessary complexity which creates more work for me. The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like interest…
Although it's sad, I have to agree with what you're alluding to. I think there is huge overhead and waste (in terms of money, compute resources and time) hidden in the software industry, and at the end of the day it just comes down to people not knowing how to write software.
There is a strange dynamic currently at play in the software labour market where the demand is so huge that the market can bear completely inefficient coders. Even though the difference between a good and a bad software engineer is literally orders of magnitude.
Quite a few times I encountered programmers "in the wild" - in a sauna, on the bus etc, and overheard them talking about their "stack". You know the type, node.js in a docker container. I cannot fathom the amount of money wasted at places that employ these people.
I also project that actually, if we adopt LLMs correctly, these engineers (which I would say constitute a large percentage) will disappear. The age of useless coding and infinite demand is about to come to an end. What will remain is specialist engineer positions (base infra layer, systems, hpc, games, quirky hardware, cryptographers etc). I'm actually kind of curious what the effect on salary will be for these engineers, I can see it going both ways.