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

361–370 of 920 posts

Re: AI is different

#361

Post by yapyap »

Well this is a pseudo-smart article if I’ve ever seen one.

“It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base”

The author is critical of the professionals in AI saying “ even the most prominent experts in the field failed miserably again and again to modulate the expectations” yet without a care sets the expectation of LLMs understanding human language in the first paragraph.

Also it’s a lot of if this then that, the summary of it would be: if AI can continue to grow it might become all encompassing.

To me it reads like a baseless article written by someone blinded by their love for AI to see what a good blogpost is but not yet blinded enough to claim ‘AGI is right around the corner’. Pretty baseless but safe enough to have it rest on conditionals.

Re: AI is different

#362

Post by azan_ »

visarga wrote: post #105
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…

> displace humans ... AI can displace human work but not human accountability. It has no skin and faces no consequences. > can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily ... Are we talking about AI that always needs trainers to fix their prompts and training sets? How are we going to train AI when we lose those skills and get rid of humans? > what do displaced humans transition to? Humans with all powerful A…

> AI can displace human work but not human accountability. It has no skin and faces no consequences.

Let’s assume that we have amazing aj and robotics, better than humans at everything - if you could choose between robosurgery (completely automatic) with 1% mortality and for 5000 usd vs surgery performed by human with 10% mortality and 50000 usd price tag, would you really choose human just because you can sue him? I wouldn’t. I don’t thing anyone thinking rationally would.

Re: AI is different

#363

Post by yladiz »

BoorishBears wrote: post #321
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. How many cities are Waymo in now? I think what they are doing is terrific, but each car must cost a fortune.

The cars aren't expensive by raw cost (low six figures, which is about what an S-class with highway-only L3 costs) But there is a lot of expenditure relative to each mile being driven. > The goalpost will be when you can buy one and drive it anywhere. This won't happen any time soon, so I and millions of other people will continue to derive value from them while you wait for that.

Low six figures is quite expensive, and unobtainable to a large number of people.

Re: AI is different

#364

Post by kbrkbr »

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…

Here is another perspective:

> In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs

That may well be why these technologies were ultimately successful. Think of millions and millions being cast out.

They won't just go away. And they will probably not go down without a fight. "Don't buy AI-made, brother!", "Burn those effing machines!" It's far from unheard of in history.

Also: who will buy if no one has money anymore? What will the state do, when thus tax income goes down, while social welfare and policing costs go up?

There are other scenarios, too: everybody gets most stuff for free, because machines and AI's do most of the work. Working communism for the lower classes, while the super rich stay super rich (like in real existing socialism). I don't think it is a good scenario either. In the long run it will make humanity lazy and dumb.

In any case I think what might happen is not easy to guess, so many variables and nth-order effects. When large systems must seek a new equilibrium all bets are usually off.

Re: AI is different

#365

Post by moffkalast »

bsder wrote: post #249
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…

> we wound up with more and better jobs. You will have to back that statement up because this is not at all obvious to me. If I look at the top US employers in say 1970 vs 2020, the companies that dominate 1970 were noted for having hard blue collar labor jobs but paid enough to keep a single earner family significantly above minimum wage and the poverty line. The companies that dominate in 2020 are noted for being s…

This was already a problem back then, Nixon was about to introduce UBI in the late 60s and then the admin decided that having people work pointless jobs keeps them better occupied, and the rest of the world followed suit.

There will be new jobs and they will be completely meaningless busywork, people performing nothing of substance while being compensated for it. It's our way of doing UBI and we've been doing it for 50 years already.

Obligatory https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

Re: AI is different

#366

Post by fsflover »

LightBug1 wrote: post #336
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…

As someone else said, until a company or individual is willing to risk their reputation on the accuracy of AI (beyond basic summarising jobs, etc), the intelligent monkeys are here for a good while longer. I've already been once bitten, twice shy. The conclusion, sadly, is that CEO's will pause hiring and squeeze more productivity out of existing hires. This will impact junior roles the most.

Haven't you seen companies developing autonomous killing drones?

Re: AI is different

#367

Post by inferiorhuman »

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…

  It's irrlevant that they've had a few issues.
The last Waymo I saw (a couple weeks ago) was stuck trying to make a right turn on to Market St. It was conveniently blocking the pedestrian crosswalk for a few cycles before I went around it. The time before that one got befuddled by a delivery truck and ended up blocking both lanes of 14th Street. Before Cruise imploded they were way worse. I can't say that these self-driving cars have improved much since I moved out of the city a few years back.

Re: AI is different

#368

Post by motorest »

juniperus wrote: post #298
motorest wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA? Which class mobility is this that you speak of? The one that forces the average US citizens to be a paycheck away from homelessness? Or is it the one where you are a medical emergency away from filing bankruptcy? Have you stopped to wonder how some European countries report higher median household incomes than t…

the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

> the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

Is it, though? The US reports by far the highest levels of lifetime literal homelessness, which is three times greater than in countries like Germany. Homeless people on Europe aren't denied access to free healthcare, primary or even tertiary.

Why do you think the US, in spite of it's GDP, features so low in rankings such as human development index or quality of life?

Re: AI is different

#369

Post by latexr »

thephotonsphere wrote: post #259
BoorishBears wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Indeed. Mark Rober did some field tests on that exact difference. LiDAR passed all of them, while Tesla’s camera-only approach failed half.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ

Re: AI is different

#370

Post by amanaplanacanal »

poink wrote: post #44
alex1138 wrote: post #34

Open letter to tech magnates: By all means, continue to make or improve your Llamas/Geminis (to the latter: stop censoring Literally Everything. Google has a culture problem. To the former... I don't much trust your parent company in general) It will undoubtedly lead to great advances But for the love of god do not tightly bind them to your products (Kagi does it alright, they don't force it on you). Do not make your…

> It will undoubtedly lead to great advances "Undoubtedly" seems like a level of confidence that is unjustified. Like Travis Kalanick thinking AI is just about to help him discover new physics, this seems to suggest that AI will go from being able to do (at best) what we can already do if we were simply more diligent at our tasks to being something genuinely more than "just" us

Angela Collier has a hilarious video on tech bros thinking they can be physicists.
Post reply on HN