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

This time is different

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 400 posts

Re: This time is different

#381

Post by Windchaser »

qsera wrote: post #280
libraryofbabel wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanize…

No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight. It is generating large amount of power on demand. From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be s…

Early steam engines did not produce large amounts of power on demand, though. They produced small amounts of power, were a hassle to fuel and maintain, and broke often. It was reasonable that the engineers of the 1700s said "well, until someone improves on this, it's not worth using"..

.. which is not far off from what people said about ChatGPT in 2022.

I don't know how long it'll take for AI to be as broadly impactful as the steam engine was, but.. it's definitely coming. I expect the world to look radically different in 50 years.

Re: This time is different

#382

Post by asdff »

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #344
rogerrogerr wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is the one that shook me, I’m curious if you think there’s any merit to it: Humans have essentially three traits we can use to create value: we can do stuff in the physical world through strength and dexterity, and we can use our brains to do creative, knowledge, or otherwise “intelligent” work. (Note by “dexterity” I mean “things that humans are better at than physical robots because of our shape and n…

This overlooks that there aren't enough 'intelligence jobs' in an economy for it to be impacted by this.

Intelligence jobs are sort of the apex of the economy where everything coalesces around to serve those positions ultimately. E.g. any low skilled area even devoid of any resources that basically insists upon its own existence at this point (e.g. walmart workers need gas station, gas station workers need walmart, there is a sort of economy but these are straight up consumption black holes with nothing actually being invented or produced, maybe agricultural products but not by a large fraction of the labor force any longer).

So where does that leave our world without actual creation, production, ideas? I work at the gas station and sell you zyns? You work at the walmart and sell me rotisserie chickens? We both work doubles and eat and sleep in the time remaining? Remain in this holding pattern until World Leader AI realizes we are just waste heat and culls us? I mean, that is sort of the path we are on. Disempowering people. Downskilling them. Passifying them. Removing their abilities to organize themselves. Removing access to technology and tooling. Making the inevitable as easy at it can be when it comes time for it.

We are in a death cult called business efficiency. Fire them, it's more efficient. Lean up the company. Don't invest in research, cheaper not to and buy back stock instead. These are death spirals no different than what happens with ants. We are justifying not giving our own species a seat at the table out of pragmatism. Why create a job for someone? It is inefficient, do more with less and don't worry about the unemployed it is their fault. Why pay them well and let them live comfortably? That is profit you could be making. Eventually it is going to be why feed the human species, because that is the line of logic here with business efficiency. We don't optimize to uplift our species. Quite the opposite, we optimize to hold it down and squeeze and extract.

Re: This time is different

#383

Post by Windchaser »

kavalg wrote: post #272
qingcharles wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if new jobs aren't created? I don't think it's an absolute given that because new jobs came after the invention of the loom and the tractor that there will always be new jobs. What if AI if a totally different beast altogether?

Then there will be no one to buy the robots :)

It's quite possible that the rich will essentially form a new economy.

They build the robots to build the factories, run the mines, build the solar farms, run the research labs, repair the robots, etc. They sell to and buy from each other.

Re: This time is different

#384

Post by estimator7292 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #329
massysett wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, I fully appreciate that these inventions transformed life. I’m skeptical because so much of the breathless AI chatter claims AI will eclipse all these inventions. It is the breathless AI commentators, not I, who have lost all perspective on the magnitude and sweep of history.

You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine? The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative? That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs ar…

An actual artificial intelligence? Yes, total paradigm shift. Not even a shift, we'd launch the old paradigm into the sun.

LLMs and modern day """AI"""? Don't kid yourself.

Re: This time is different

#385

Post by asdff »

bandrami wrote: post #374
selridge wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect that it’s gonna announce itself in a modal dialogue when you run the software? This isn’t like AI image generation where you’re going to convince yourself that you can tell the difference based on how you think it looks. Do you really think no one in the production chain of any of the software that you use picked up copilot in the last two years? What signal are you hoping to receive that this is h…

Well like I said in the sibling post to this one I'd expect really any of the software vendors in my professional or personal life to release either more rapidly or with a wider array of features than they were a few years ago, and that hasn't been my experience, at all.

The coding was never the slow part.

Re: This time is different

#386

Post by asdff »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #192
parliament32 wrote: post #123

When I look at LLMs as an interface, I'm reminded of back when speech-to-text first became mainstream. So many promises about how this is the interface for how we'll talk to computers forevermore. Here we are a few decades later, and we don't see business units using Word's built-in dictation feature to write documents, right? Funny how that tech seems to have barely improved in all that time. And, despite dictation…

I'd say speech to text is unsolvable for a more fundamental reason that it's hard to actually speak out an entire document flawlessly in one take. Spoken language is very different to written language, which is why for example you can easily tell when an article is transcribing a spoken interview.

Even today seems like speech to texts works like it did 25 years ago where its breaking up sentences into individual words and trying to match the individual words. So you might get these stupid nonsense sentences from similar sounding words. It isn't like an old school human transcriber where they might miss words on the recording but they can fill in the blanks using their own knowledge of the language or how the speaker talks.

Re: This time is different

#387

Post by asdff »

tengbretson wrote: post #50

LLMs have not radically transformed the world yet because the number of people capable of solving problems by typing into a blinking cursor on a blank screen is actually quite small. Take that subset of the population and reduce it to those that can effectively write communicative prose, and its even smaller still. It's just an interface problem. The VT100 didn't change the world overnight either.

Hiring seems to be way down in my world as a result of LLM. It isn't so much people staring blankly that I worry about, but companies thinking hey maybe we can get away with not replacing headcount for a while longer, or maybe this tool will help bootstrap the offshore team to be at parity with the expensive onshore team.

Re: This time is different

#388

Post by bandrami »

asdff wrote: post #385
bandrami wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well like I said in the sibling post to this one I'd expect really any of the software vendors in my professional or personal life to release either more rapidly or with a wider array of features than they were a few years ago, and that hasn't been my experience, at all.

The coding was never the slow part.

I'm certainly sympathetic to that argument, but if you scroll way back this thread started with the question of whether or not AI is transformative, and if it is neither faster nor better that would suggest "no".

Re: This time is different

#389

Post by prpl »

It is different this time.

In certain professions it wasn't uncommon to spend $3k/year or more (in 2026 dollars) on software licenses - Adobe CS4/CS6 etc... with a handful of products easily pushed over that. In other professions. All sorts of other jobs require people to pay for their own tools as well.

What I get for $150/month I'd easily pay twice or more for that if I had to, even out of pocket if I had to for current functionality - even if was frozen in time. I'd imagine many, if not most, readers on hacker news would do the same. Multiplied across the entire population of software developers (and broader population using AI) - I think it's clear to see what AI is worth in a grounded way.

Re: This time is different

#390

Post by jodrellblank »

nancyminusone wrote: post #340
jodrellblank wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine? The AI commentators are not saying that ELIZA will change the world, they’re saying that one of the big companies is moments away from an AGI. Sam Altman called a recent ChatGPT model a “PhD level expert”; wouldn’t infinite PhDs for $20/month or $200/month be transformative? That is, your objection isn’t the usual “LLMs ar…

>You think an artificial intelligence would have less impact on the world than the steam engine? Not op, but yes, 100%. Steam backs nearly all development of technology of the last 150+ years. Where do you think the power come from to make things? More than half of the world's power *still* runs on steam, as will many of the systems running AI. If steam power never existed, not only would you not exist but there's a…

> "If you don't believe the effect is large"

It's not that I "don't believe the effect is large", but the changes from pre-intelligence planet Earth to post-intelligence planet Earth are larger because they include the invention of steam, and literally everything else too: language, writing, irrigation, cities, trade, numbers, currency, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, nations, governments, supply chains, steam, etc.

An AGI that can solve the problems we think are solvable, but we can't solve, would be huge. Any sci-fi idea that isn't ruled out by the laws of physics, but that we haven't got the brains to solve, any breakthrough that we think should be there but we haven't found, any problem that requires too much time to learn, or too many parts to hold in one human mind, any coordination that is too big for one team, any funding problem, any scarcity problem, any disease or illness problem, any long timeframe problem, are all on the table as possibilities.

Post reply on HN