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

Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

andyljones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 663 posts

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

#381

Post by cubefox »

billisonline wrote: post #50

An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exci…

> I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can

That's highly irrelevant because if it were otherwise, we would already be replaced. The article was talking about the future.

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

#382

Post by classified »

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…

> And barely anyone shares a thought like "technology should be warranted by the populace, not the other way around?"

It shines through that the most fervent AI Believers are also Haters of Humans.

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

#383

Post by empiricus »

Mawr wrote: post #208

What is this horseshit . What exactly does specifically engine efficiency have to do with horse usage? Cars like the Ford Model T entered mass production somewhere around 1908. Oh, and would you look at the horse usage graph around that date! sigh The chess ranking graph seems to be just a linear relationship? > This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires. > > Cl…

Well, for some reason horse numbers and horse usage dropped sharply at a moment in time. Probably there was some horse pandemic I forgot about.

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

#384

Post by classified »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #370
barrkel wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't that burying the lede on a technicality?

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

#385

Post by maciejzj »

pzo wrote: post #376
maciejzj wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from…

Yeah, I agree with what you said. It's not about the absolute number of people, but the social unrest. If you look at how poor we did our job at redistribution of wealth so far, I find it hard to believe that we will do well in the future. I am afraid of mass pauperisation and immiseration of societies followed by violence.

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

#386

Post by machomaster »

lomase wrote: post #302
machomaster wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it. AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more resources, to give the most important thing people have - time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be like complaining that the objective positive of increased food production is actually a negative, because people are getting fatter.

Imagine anthropomorphing this hard.

You misunderstood. This is how the conversation went:

1. Is there steady progress in AI?

2. What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better.

3. Job satisfaction and human flourishing.

Hence my answer "AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it". It came about because of the stupid comment 3, which tried to link and put a blame on unrelatable things (akin to refering to obesity when asked what metrics make him say that agriculture/transportation have not made progress in the last 100 years) and at the same time anthropomorphed AI. I only accepted the premise and continued answering on the same level in order to demonstrate stupidity of their answer.

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

#387

Post by danw1979 »

cubefox wrote: post #381
billisonline wrote: post #50

An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exci…

> I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can That's highly irrelevant because if it were otherwise, we would already be replaced. The article was talking about the future.

The article was speculating about the future.

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

#388

Post by UncleMeat »

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 have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops.

Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create a joke for you at a party. Ask an AI to write a heartfelt letter to somebody you respect. Have an AI make a digital likeness of your grandmother so you can spend time with her forever. Have an AI tell you what you should say to your child when they are sad.

Hell. Hell on earth.

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

#389

Post by rindalir »

pzo wrote: post #376
maciejzj wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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. Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from…

As someone who raises horses and other animals, I can say with pretty high certainty that most of the horses were not allowed to "retire". Horses are expensive and time-consuming to care for, and with no practical use, most horses would have been sent not to the glue factory but (at that time) to the butcher and their non-meat parts used for fertilizer.

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

#390

Post by 9rx »

saberience wrote: post #362
9rx wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compet…

> What planet are you on?

The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires legions of people to make it work.

This is the outcome of that whole "Learn to code" movement from a number of years ago, I suppose. Everyone thinks they're an expert in everything when they reach the mastery of being able to write a "Hello, World" program in their bedroom.

But do tell us what planet you are on as it sounds wonderful.

Post reply on HN