I can definitely imagine a whole swathe of paperwork-based jobs, such as regulatory, quality assurance, report-writing, and all the non-Personnel bits of HR, could become mostly-AI without a lot of problems.
The Gentle Singularity
381–390 of 557 posts
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…
>. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. >However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs For programmers I predict a future of a million micro services. Sprawling has always been an undesirable and unnecessary byproduct of growing code bases, but there's been no easy solution to that. I wonder if LLMs would perform better on a mono repo of many small services than one sprawling…
The issue as I have observed it is that software is written to cover as many use cases for as many users as possible. Obviously executives want to sell their product to as many hands as possible.
But end users often only need a tiny fraction of what the software is fully capable of, leaving a situation where you need you need to purchase 100% to use 5%.
LLMs can break down this wall by offering the user the ability to just make a bespoke 5% utility. I personally have had enormous success doing this.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular…
That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some…
>That's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough.
That's exactly why she asks an LLM to do it for her. A program like this would be <1k LOC, well within even the current LLM one-shot-working-app domain.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#384> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth…
Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#385> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth…
Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.
Does it correct for housing costs?
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a tangent: what about self scanning? Here in Sweden that is the norm. For the last ten years I've brought my own bags, packed everything like I want it as I grab it - with a quick blip from the scanner - and then checkout is no line, no cashier, no unpacking and packing things again. Just scanning my card and going through a brief screen to check that the summary looks right. Instead of a guard there's a scanner b…
Here in sweden it is not "the norm" by any definition of "norm". Also it's incredibly slower and not "one blip away". And the scanner to exit is terrible for fire safety and accessibility. Also I've seen it break with the result that you had to trigger the alarm to leave. It does not work smoothly at all, but perhaps you live in a different sweden than I.
It works pretty well in the UK. The nice thing is, I can pack my bags as I shop, so I don't feel stressed when I get to the checkout.
I use this method of shopping whenever available.
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#387> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth…
Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.
Even without including employer health insurance costs, real wages are up 67% since 1980.
Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JxBn
Details: uses the "Wage and salary accruals per full-time-equivalent employee" time series, which is the broadest wage measure for FTE employees, and adjusts for inflation using the PCE price index, which is the most economically meaningful measure of "how much did prices change for consumers" (and is the inflation index that the Fed targets)
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Real wages have risen a lot since 1980 when you include employer contributions to employee health insurance.
Even without including employer health insurance costs, real wages are up 67% since 1980. Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1JxBn Details: uses the "Wage and salary accruals per full-time-equivalent employee" time series, which is the broadest wage measure for FTE employees, and adjusts for inflation using the PCE price index, which is the most economically meaningful measure of "how much did prices change…
How has inflation behaved since 1980?
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#389> The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year. How about affordable housing?
I have this dream of having 4-5 robotic construction workers* capable of tearing down a Single Family home and building a four-plex in its stead overnight. Then, I just buy houses in High COL areas and start popping them up and moving families in ASAP. What are they gonna do evict working families? Good luck Then dissolve the underlying corporation before the municipal fines kick in and escape into the night. Render…
> What are they gonna do evict working families? Good luck
they do this all the time!
Re: The Gentle Singularity
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "next token prediction" is a distraction. That's not where the interesting part of an AI model happens. If you think of the tokenization near the end as a serializer, something like turning an object model into json, you get a better understanding. The interesting part of a an OOP program is not in the json, but what happens in memory before the json is created. Likewise, the interesting parts of a neural net mod…
As far as I understood any AI model is just a linear combination of its training data. Even if that were such a large corpus as the entire web... it's still just like a sophisticated compression of other's people's expressions. It has not made its own experiences, not interacted with the outer world. Dunno, I won't to rule out something operating solely on language artifacts cannot develop intelligence or consciousne…
Just because humans can describe it, doesn't mean they can understand (predict) it.
And the web contains a lot more than people's expressions: think of all the scientific papers with tables and tables of interesting measurements.