Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is different

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 920 posts

Re: AI is different

#351

Post by saint_yossarian »

BoorishBears wrote: post #226
tfourb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather). Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least…

I've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.

How many of those rides required human intervention by Waymo's remote operators? From what I can tell they're not sharing that information.

Re: AI is different

#352

Post by amanaplanacanal »

mmmore wrote: post #272
andrewmutz wrote: post #201

Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.

Here's a thoughtful post related to your lump of labor point: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TkWCKzWjcbfGzdNK5/applying-t... What economists have taken seriously the premise that AI will be able to do any job a human can more efficiently and fully thought through it's implications? i.e. a society where (human) labor is unnecessary to create goods/provide services and only capital and natural resources are required.…

If it is decades or centuries off, is it really understudied? LLMs are so far from "AI will be able to do any job a human can more efficiently and fully" that we aren't even in the same galaxy.

Re: AI is different

#353

Post by mofeien »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #155
atleastoptimal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot. No other tech has had an impact like that, even the internet.

> AI has already rendered academic take-home assignments moot Not really, there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do. It is just a asymmetric attack on the professor's (or whomever is grading) time to do that. IMO, credentials shouldn't be given to those who test or submit assignments without proctoring (a lot of schools allow this).

> there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do.

Name three?

Re: AI is different

#354

Post by socalgal2 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #42
btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

Do you live in SF (the city, not the Bay Area as a whole) or West LA? I ask because in these areas you can stand on any city street and see several self driving cars go by every few minutes.

It's irrlevant that they've had a few issues. They already work and people love them. It's clear they will eventually replace every uber/lyft driver, probably every taxi driver, they'll likely replace every doordash/grubhub driver with vehicles design to let smaller automated delivery carts go the last few blocks. They may also replace every truck driver. Together that's around 5 million jobs in the USA.

Once they're let on the freeways their usage will expand even faster.

Re: AI is different

#355

Post by afro88 »

ares623 wrote: post #326
afro88 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like engineers coming up with higher level programming languages. No one (well, nearly) hand writes assembly anymore. But there's still plenty of jobs. Just the majority write in the higher level but still expressive languages. For some reason everyone thinks as LLMs get better it means programmers go away. The programming language, and amount you can build per day, are changing. That's pretty much it.

I’m not worried about software engineering (only or directly). Artists, writers, actors, teachers. Plus the rest where I’m not remotely creative enough to imagine will be affected. Hundreds of thousands if not millions flooding the smaller and smaller markets left untouched.

Artists: photography. Yet we still value art in pre photography mediums

Writers: film, tv. Yet we all still read books

Play actors: again, film and tv. Yet we still go to plays, musicals etc

Teachers: the internet, software, video etc. Yet teachers are still essential (though they need to be paid more)

Jobs won't go away, they will change.

Re: AI is different

#356

Post by econ »

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #189
econ wrote: post #160

For me it maps elegantly on previous happenings. When the radio came people almost instantly stopped singing and playing instruments. Many might not be aware of it but for thousands of years singing was a normal expression of a good mood and learning to play an instrument was a gateway to lifting the mood. Dancing is still in working order but it lacks the emotional depth that provided a window into the soul of those…

Humans sing. I sing every day, and I don't have any social or financial incentives driving me to do so. I also listen to the radio and other media, still singing.

Do others sing along? Do they sing the songs you've written? I think we lost a lot there. I can't even begin to imagine it. Thankfully singing happy birthday is mandatory - the fight isn't over!

People also still have conversations despite phones. Some even talk all night at the kitchen table. Not everyone, most don't remember how.

Re: AI is different

#357

Post by amanaplanacanal »

Davidzheng wrote: post #129
pton_xd wrote: post #103

AI is only different if it reaches a hard takeoff state and becomes self-aware, self-motivated, and self-improving. Until then it's an amazing productivity tool, but only that. And even then we're still decades away from the impact being fully realized in society. Same as the internet.

Do we not have any sense of wonder in the world anymore? Referring to a system which can pass the Turing test as a "amazing productivity tool" is like viewing human civilization as purely measured by GDP growth.

Probably because we have been promised what AI can do in science fiction since before we were born, and the reality of LLMs is so limited in comparison. Instead of Data from Star Trek we got a hopped up ELIZA.

Re: AI is different

#358

Post by azan_ »

torben-friis wrote: post #252
btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

>But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to? IF there is intellectual/office work that remains complex enough to not be tackled by AI, we compete for those. Manual labor takes the rest. Perhaps that’s the shift we’ll see: nowadays the guy piling up bricks makes a tenth of the architects’ salary, that relation might invert. And the indirect effects of a society that values intellectual wor…

The relation won’t invert because it’s very easy and quick to train guy pilling up bricks while training architect is slow and hard. If low skilled jobs will pay much better than high skilled then people will just change their job.

Re: AI is different

#359

Post by [deleted] »

socalgal2 wrote: post #354
chrisco255 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

Do you live in SF (the city, not the Bay Area as a whole) or West LA? I ask because in these areas you can stand on any city street and see several self driving cars go by every few minutes. It's irrlevant that they've had a few issues. They already work and people love them. It's clear they will eventually replace every uber/lyft driver, probably every taxi driver, they'll likely replace every doordash/grubhub drive…

[deleted]

Re: AI is different

#360

Post by hashmush »

sebmellen wrote: post #190
Waterluvian wrote: post #175

The thing that blows me away is that I woke up one day and was confronted with a chat bot that could communicate in near perfect English. I dunno why exactly but that’s what felt the most stunning about this whole era. It can screw up the number of fingers in an image or the details of a recipe or misidentify elements of an image, etc. but I’ve never seen it make a typo or use improper grammar or whatnot.

In a sense, LLMs emergently figured out the deep structure of language before we did, and that’s the most remarkable thing about them.

I dunno, it seems you have figured it out too, probably before LLMs?

I'd say all speakers of all languages have figured it out and your statement is quite confusing, at least to me.

Post reply on HN