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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#361

Post by fullstackchris »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

it's a con job and strawman take. if we collectively think token generators can replace humans completely, well then we've already lost the plot as a global society

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#362

Post by saberience »

9rx wrote: post #256
p-e-w wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently human chess grandmasters also need “oversight” from airplanes, because without those, essentially none of them would show up at elite tournaments.

Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and perform while there, without airplanes. Computer chess systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without human oversight.

What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is, that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even really understand their moves or why they do them and have no hope to ever compete.

The same will be true of every other intellectual discipline with time. It's already happening with maths and science and coding.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#363

Post by kllamnjro »

jstanley wrote: post #341
frchalli wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> At first, there were many people typing, then later [...] There were more people typing than ever before? Look around you, we're all typing all day long.

I think they meant that there was a time when people’s jobs were:

1. either reading notes in shorthand, or reading something from a sheet that was already fully typed using a typewriter, or listening to recorded or live dictation

2. then typing that content out into a typewriter.

People were essentially human copying machines.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#364

Post by bgwalter »

netsharc wrote: post #360
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.

Well, in this case corporations stop buying people and just fire them instead of letting them retire. Or an army of Tesla Optimi will send people to the glue factory.

That at least is the fantasy of these people. Fortunately. LLMs don't really work, Tesla cars are still built by KUKA robots (while KUKA has a fraction of Tesla's P/E) and data centers in space are a cocaine fueled dream.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#365

Post by JohnMakin »

netsharc wrote: post #360
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.

I don’t think you’re realizing that the OP understands this, and that in this analogy, the horses are human beings

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#366

Post by maciejzj »

netsharc wrote: post #360
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.

We don't know what the author had in mind, but one has to really be tone deaf to let the weirdness of the discussion go unnoticed. Take a look at the last paragraphs in the text again:

> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

> I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.

> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

While most of the text is written from cold economic(ish) standpoint it is really hard not to get bleak impression from it. And the last three sentences express that in vague way too. Some ambiguity is left on purpose so you can interpret the daunting impression your way.

The article presents you with crushing juxtaposition, implicates insane dangers, and leaves you with the feeling of inevitability. Then back to work, I guess.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#367

Post by lbreakjai »

richardles wrote: post #64

I'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…

This sounds horrible. Onboarding should ideally be marginally about the "what". After all, we already have a very precise and non ambiguous system to tell what the system does: the code.

What I want to know when I join a company is "why" the system does what it does. Sure, give me pointers, some overview of how the code is structured, that always helps, but if you don't tell me why how am I supposed to work?

$currentCompany has the best documentation I've seen in my career. It's been spun off from a larger company, from people collaborating asynchronously and remotely whenever they had some capacity.

No matter how diligent we've been, as soon as the company started in earnest and we got people fully dedicated to it, there's been a ton of small decisions that happened during a quick call, or on a slack thread, or as a comment on a figma design.

This is the sort of "you had to be there" context the onboarding should aim to explain, and I don't see how LLMs help with that.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#369

Post by andai »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

Is it good when number of human go up? Is bad when go down?

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#370

Post by thaumasiotes »

barrkel wrote: post #358
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

Incentives rule everything. For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning more wars. Today, the stock market and material wealth dominates. If elite dominance of the means of production requires the immiseration of most of the public, that's what we'll get.

> For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning more wars.

That's almost 100% backwards. The Republic expanded. The Empire, not so much.

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