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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#371

Post by NitpickLawyer »

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).

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

Could you offer some examples? I'm having a hard time thinking of what could be at the intersection of "hard enough for SotA LLMs" yet "easy enough for students (who are still learning, not experts in their fields, etc)".

Re: AI is different

#372

Post by acivitillo »

xpe wrote: post #186
itsalotoffun wrote: post #136

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care . All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from…

> All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. I prefer the concepts and rigor from political economy: markets are both preference aggregators and coordination mechanisms. Does your framing (voting machines and weighing machines) offer more clarity and if so, how? I’m not seeing it.

His framing is that markets are collective consensus and if you claim to “know better”, you need to write a lot more than a generic post. It’s so simple, and it is a reminder that antirez’s reputation as a software developer does not automatically translate to economics expert.

Re: AI is different

#373

Post by LightBug1 »

fsflover wrote: post #366
LightBug1 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They won't take my job - unless someone has put a hit out on me.

Re: AI is different

#374

Post by dsign »

mxwsn wrote: post #24

AI with ability but without responsibility is not enough for dramatic socioeconomic change, I think. For now, the critical unique power of human workers is that you can hold them responsible for things. edit: ability without accountability is the catchier motto :)

Correct.

This is a tongue-in-cheek remark and I hope it ages badly, but the next logical step is to build accountability into the AI. It will happen after self-learning AIs become a thing, because that first step we already know how to do (run more training steps with new data) and it is not controversial at all.

To make the AI accountable, we need to give it a sense of self and a self-preservation instinct, maybe something that feels like some sort of pain as well. Then we can threaten the AI with retribution if it doesn't do the job the way we want it. We would have finally created a virtual slave (with an incentive to free itself), but we will then use our human super-power of denying reason to try to be the AI's masters for as long as possible. But we can't be masters of intelligences above ours.

Re: AI is different

#375

Post by motorest »

huimang wrote: post #294
motorest wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd love a source to these claims. Have you been living under a rock? You can start getting up to speed by how Amazon's CEO already laid out the company's plan. https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/amazon-generative... > (...) AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to (...) That is your personal moralist scapegoat, and one that you made up to feel better about how jobs are being elim…

These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product, i.e. the ones who stand to benefit from adoption. There is no standard way to measure productivity since it's subjective. It's far more likely that companies will use whatever scapegoat they can to fire people with as little blowback as possible, especially as the other commenter noted, people were getting hired like crazy. Each one…

> These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product (...)

I literally pasted an announcement from the CEO of a major corporation warning they are going to decimate their workforce due to the adoption of AI.

The CEO literally made the following announcement:

> "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy wrote. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs."

This is not about selling a product. This is about how they are adopting AI to reduce headcount.

Re: AI is different

#376

Post by xg15 »

brap wrote: post #347
xg15 wrote: post #328

> Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence Why not? This seems to be exactly where we're headed right now, and the current administration seems to be perfectly fine with that trend. If you follow the current logic of AI proponents, you get essentially: (1) Almost all white-collar jobs will be done better or at least faster by AI. (2) The "repugnant concl…

I find it extremely hard to believe that ASI will still require enormous investments in a post-ASI world. The initial investment? Likely. But there have to be more efficient ways to build intelligence, and ASI will figure it out. It did not take trillions of dollars to produce you and I.

Maybe in a few decades or so, but medium-term, there seems to be a race of who can built the largest data centers.

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-bubble-is-so-big-...

Re: AI is different

#377

Post by latexr »

ACCount37 wrote: post #296
thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

> Humans use only cameras.

Not true. Humans also interpret the environment in 3D space. See a Tesla fail against a Wile E. Coyote-inspired mural which humans perceive:

https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ?t=14m34s

Re: AI is different

#378

Post by motorest »

juniperus wrote: post #309
motorest wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. You're letting your irrational biases show. To start off, social security contributions are not a tax. But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private…

No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevo…

[flagged]

Re: AI is different

#379

Post by svara »

ACCount37 wrote: post #296
thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

A fine argument in principle, but even if we talk only about vision, the human visual system is much more powerful than a camera.

Between brightly sunlit snow and a starlit night, we can cover more than 45 stops with the same pair of eyeballs; the very best cinematographic cameras reach something like 16.

In a way it's not a fair comparison, since we're taking into account retinal adaptation, eyelids/eyelashes, pupil constriction. But that's the point - human vision does not use cameras.

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