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

AI is different

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 920 posts

Re: AI is different

#411

Post by keiferski »

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning:

Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task.

In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market.

You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known.

Of course this doesn’t apply to every job, and indeed many jobs have already been “replaced” by AI. But any analysis which isn’t reflectively factoring in the reception of AI into the background is too simplistic.

Re: AI is different

#412

Post by bboygravity »

schneems wrote: post #69
chrisco255 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

Carbon tax on a state level to try to fight a global problem makes 0 sense actually.

You just shift the emissions from your location to the location that you buy products from.

Basically what happened in Germany: more expensive "clean" energy means their own production went down and the world bought more from China instead. The net result is probably higher global emissions overall.

Re: AI is different

#413

Post by dongping »

schneems wrote: post #69
chrisco255 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

The robotaxi business model is the total opposite of scaling. At my previous employer we were solving the problem "block by block, city by city", , and I can only assume that you are living in the right city/block where they are tackling.

Re: AI is different

#414

Post by CSSer »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #397

It's not a matter of "IF" LLM/AI will replace a huge amount of people, but "WHEN". Consider the current amount of somewhat low-skilled administrative jobs - these can be replaced with the LLM/AI's of today. Not completely, but 4 low-skill workers can be replaced with 1 supervisor, controlling the AI agent(s). I'd guess, within a few years, 5 to 10% of the total working population will be unemployable due to no fault…

I'm not at all skeptical of the logical viability of this, but look at how many company hierarchies exist today that are full stop not logical yet somehow stay afloat. How many people do you know that are technical staff members who report to non-technical directors who themselves have two additional supervisors responsible for strategy and communication who have no background, let alone (former) expertise, in the fields of the teams they're ultimately responsible for?

A lot of roles exist just to deliver good or bad news to teams, be cheerleaders, or have a "vision" that is little more than a vibe. These people could not direct a prompt to give them what they want because they have no idea what that is. They'll know it when they see it. They'll vaguely describe it to you and others and then shout "Yes, that's it!" when they see what you came up with or, even worse, whenever the needle starts to move. When they are replaced it will be with someone else from a similar background rather than from within. It's a really sad reality.

My whole career I've used tools that "will replace me" and every. single. time. all that has happened is that I have been forced to use it as yet another layer of abstraction so that someone else might use it once a year or whenever they get a wild feeling. It's really just about peace of mind. This has been true of every CMS experience I've ever made. It has nothing to do with being able to "do it themselves". It's about a) being able to blame someone else and b) being able to take it and go when that stops working without starting over.

Moreover, I have, on multiple occasions, watched a highly paid, highly effective individual be replaced with a low-skilled entry-level employee for no reason other than cost. I've also seen people hire someone just to increase headcount.

LLMs/AI have/has not magically made things people do not understand less scary. But what about freelancers, brave souls, and independent types? Well, these people don't employ other people. They live on the bleeding edge and will use anything that makes them successful.

Re: AI is different

#415

Post by avidphantasm »

chrisco255 wrote: post #42
btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

> A human driver is still far more adaptive and requires a lot less training than AI

I get what you are saying, but humans need 16 years of training to begin driving. I wouldn’t call that not a lot.

Re: AI is different

#416

Post by avidphantasm »

avidphantasm wrote: post #415
chrisco255 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can What makes you think that? Self driving cars have had untold billions of dollars in reaearch and decades in applied testing, iteration, active monitoring, etc and it still has a very long tail of unaddressed issues. They've been known to ignore police traffic redirections, they've run right through construction barriers, and recently…

> A human driver is still far more adaptive and requires a lot less training than AI I get what you are saying, but humans need 16 years of training to begin driving. I wouldn’t call that not a lot.

And the problem for Capitalists and other anti-humanists is that this doesn’t scale. Their hope with AI, I think, is that once they train one AI for a task, it can be trivially replicated, which scales much better than humans.

Re: AI is different

#417

Post by Paradigma11 »

parineum wrote: post #70
solarkraft wrote: post #23

> After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures. A lot of AI’s potential hasn’t even been realized yet. There’s a long tail of integrations and solution building still ahead. A lot of creative applications haven’t been realized yet - arguably for the better, but it will be tried and so…

I'd argue that the applications if LLMs are well known but tgat LLMs currently aren't capable of performing those tasks. Everyone wants to replace their tech support with an LLM but they don't want some clever prompter to get it to run arbitrary queries or have it promise refunds. It's not reliable because it's not intelligent.

I think autonomous support agents are just missing the point. LLMs are tools that empower the user. A support agent is very often in a somewhat adversarial position to the customer. You don't want to empower your adversary.

LLMs supporting an actual human customer service agent are fine and useful.

Re: AI is different

#418

Post by diggan »

howtofly wrote: post #389
diggan wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste What a sad way of viewing huge fields of creative expressions. Surely, a person sitting on a chair in a room improvising a song with a guitar is producing something not considered "waste"?

It's all about human technology, which enables massive resource consumption. I should really say humans never truly produce anything in the realm of technology industry.

But that's clearly not true for every technology. Photoshop, Blender and similar creative programs are "technology", and arguably they aren't as resource-intensive as the current generative AI hype, yet humans used those to create things I personally wouldn't consider "waste".

Re: AI is different

#419

Post by c0balt »

mofeien wrote: post #353
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

> there are plenty of things that LLMs cannot do that a professor could make his students do. Name three?

1. Make the student(s) randomly have to present their results on a weekly basis. If you get caught for cheating at this point, at least in my uni with a zero tolerance policy, you instantly fail the course.

2. Make take home stuff only a requirement to be able to participate in the final exam. This effectively means cheating on them will only hinder you and not affect your grading directly.

3. Make take home stuff optional and completely detached from grading. Put everything into the final exam.

My uni does a mix them on different courses. Especially two and three though have a significant negative impact on passing rates as they tend to push everything onto one single exam instead of spread out work over the semester.

Re: AI is different

#420

Post by keiferski »

keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.)

The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct.

What actually seems to be happening, however, is this:

- obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market

- companies want writers that understand how to use AI tools to enhance productivity, but understand how to modify copy so that it doesn’t read as AI-written

- the meta-skill of knowing what to write in the first place becomes more valuable, because the AI is only going to give you a boilerplate plan at best

And so the only jobs that seem to have been replaced by AI directly, as of now, are the ones writing basically forgettable content, report-style tracking content, and other low level things. Not great for the jobs lost, but also not a death sentence for the entire profession of writing.

Post reply on HN