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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

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Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#41

Post by stavros »

ImHereToVote wrote: post #38
stavros wrote: post #26

I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes alone: "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!" Yeah. And that's OK. Because nobody will need to shoe horses any more! If I forget how to write tests, what's the problem? It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write te…

You are both right. You won't need the skills. The problem is that you will want to eat and have housing. Maybe we get UBI. But if Jeff Bezos and some friends own all of the production. What would they do with your UBI dollars? Where can he spend them? He can make his own yachts and soldiers.

You're making a logical leap in "you don't need the skills, but there's someone willing to pay you for them".

Who is this person who's paying for useless skills, and doesn't that go against the definition of "need"?

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#42

Post by ImHereToVote »

godelski wrote: post #39

To all the people that are confused by "skeptics": Yes, LLMs are powerful tools Yes, LLMs can be useful I think "skeptic" is the wrong word for most of us. There's certainly people that will just deny that LLMs and ML can do anything useful. But I don't think that's the majority of the "skeptic" crowd. I'm an ML[0] researcher. Of course I love these machines! And you know what? I really fucking want to build some god…

I don't think it matters whether an LLM will get us there or some sort of causal transformer that we don't have the training data for yet.

What happens to the majority of the planet's biomass when we get there? If it's a new paradigm that does the trick. It might sneak up on us like the GPT-2 capabilities.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#43

Post by ang_cire »

stavros wrote: post #26

I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes alone: "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!" Yeah. And that's OK. Because nobody will need to shoe horses any more! If I forget how to write tests, what's the problem? It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write te…

> "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!"

No, this would be more akin to saying, "if we don't know how to change our car's oil anymore because we have a robot that does it, soon nobody will know, while still being reliant on our cars."

For your analogy to work, we would have to be moving away from code entirely, as we moved away from horses.

> It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write tests, for some reason (maybe because the LLM is bad at it) then I won't forget how to!

Except that once you forget, you now would have to re-learn it, and that includes potentially re-learning all the pitfalls and edge cases that aren't part of standard training manuals. And you won't be able to ask someone else, because now they all don't know either.

tl;dr coding is a key job function of software developers. Not knowing how to do any key part of your job without relying on an intermediary tool, is a very bad thing. This already happens too much, and AI is just firing the trend into the stratosphere.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#44

Post by JustinCS »

tw04 wrote: post #27
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #5

I feel (hah!) that we've reached a point where instead of focusing on objective things that the LLM-based systems can do, we are wasting energy and "ink" on how they make us feel. And how others using them make us feel. And how Hollywood-style stories about "AI" make us feel. And how people commenting on these things make us feel. And so on. IMO it's best to focus on objective things that the systems can do today, wi…

> instead of "let's see if they can drive from point A to point B first". We are now at the point where they can do that, somewhat reliably, No, we really aren’t. Let me know when any of those systems can get me from Souix falls South Dakota to Thunder Bay Ontario without multiple disengagements and we can talk. Based on what I’ve seen we’re still about 10 years away best case scenario and more likely 20+ assuming so…

When you put it like that, it makes me wonder if we can just stick to using the self-driving cars in the Bay Area and not go to these bad and dangerous places.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#45

Post by buovjaga »

renewiltord wrote: post #33

It's hard for me to take all of this seriously because I sat and listened to how Google Search was going to ruin everyone's mind and without the skill of manual research we'd all be turned into imbeciles. Back then we didn't have this particular modern meme of "extremely dangerous" for something like a syntactically inaccurate file so I suppose no one said it was "extremely dangerous" for people to copy-paste code fr…

> But that doesn't mean that I have to lay any more credence to the guys who have, since time immemorial, said "this new thing makes something easier; it will make us worse because we do not slog as much".

I don't use LLMs myself, but the anecdotes about skill atrophy seem credible. From the OP: "Even for me it shows. I tried to write some test code recently and I absolutely forgot how to write table tests because I generate all that. And it’s frightening."

An article about the topic that tries to stay positive: https://addyo.substack.com/p/avoiding-skill-atrophy-in-the-a...

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#46

Post by ben_w »

aianus wrote: post #18
SomeoneOnTheWeb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the world is more or less ending because of that. People lack more and more critical thinking skills because they aren't taught about that in school. Sure multiplying 3-digit numbers is not really useful in everyday's life, but the important part is not the knowledge itself, it's the capacity to think and solve problems.

You can easily measure the capacity to think and solve problems with paper-and-pencil exams every week or two not hours of daily busywork.

If such tests actually measured the capacity to think and solve problems.

Thing is, LLMs beat humans on the words of such tests (if not the pencil part), and indeed basically all stabdardised tests at every level.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#47

Post by ianks »

stavros wrote: post #26

I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes alone: "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!" Yeah. And that's OK. Because nobody will need to shoe horses any more! If I forget how to write tests, what's the problem? It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write te…

> I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes

I sympathize with this viewpoint, but I do think it’s important to recognize the differences here. One thing I’ve noticed from the vibe-code coalition is a push towards offloading _cognition_. I think this is a novel distinction from industrial innovations that more or less optimize manual labor.

You could argue that moving from assembly to python is a form of cognition offloading, but it’s not quite the same in my eyes. You are still actively engaged in thinking for extended periods of time.

With agentic code bots, active thinking just isn’t the vibe. I’m not so sure that style of half-engaged work has positive outcomes for mental health and personal development (if that’s one of your goals).

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#48

Post by ImHereToVote »

renewiltord wrote: post #33

It's hard for me to take all of this seriously because I sat and listened to how Google Search was going to ruin everyone's mind and without the skill of manual research we'd all be turned into imbeciles. Back then we didn't have this particular modern meme of "extremely dangerous" for something like a syntactically inaccurate file so I suppose no one said it was "extremely dangerous" for people to copy-paste code fr…

I would posit that social media has made us worse. Hell, TV made our minds worse. I know it rotted mine to an extent. maybe there are externalities to search too. Maybe it devolved critical thinking skills. having a source at our fingertips made us source obsessed. Your cognitive dissonance just needs a good source to be placated.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#49

Post by JodieBenitez »

philosophty wrote: post #35

The elephant in the room here is that, like so many issues, AI has become political for some people. In this case your "AI skeptic friends" are your "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" friends. For 95% of people AI is just a new technology to be loved and feared. There are some real technical debates to be had about the capabilities of LLMs and agents but that's not what's driving this "AI skepticism" at all. The "…

Maybe you could consider that some of us are not AI skeptics "in advance" and have already witnessed its downsides that in some particular conditions outweight its upsides.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#50

Post by mixermachine »

stavros wrote: post #26

I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes alone: "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!" Yeah. And that's OK. Because nobody will need to shoe horses any more! If I forget how to write tests, what's the problem? It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write te…

The big problem is that LLMs not only replace "shoeing your horse" or some other singular task. If you let them they can replace every critical thought or every mental effort you throw at them. Often in a "good enough" (or convincing enough) way Especially for learners this is very bad because they will never learn how to come to any proper thought process on their own. How should they be able to check the output?

We basically are training prompt engineers without post validation now.

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