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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#421

Post by baconbrand »

bloaf wrote: post #111
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…

I think it is important to remember that "decades" here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2004) I also think that most job domains are not actually more nuanced or complex than driving, at least from a raw information perspective. Indeed, I would argue that driving is something like a worst-case scenario when it comes to tasks: * It requires many different inputs, at high sampling rates, cont…

I’m pretty sure you could generate a similar list for any human job.

It’s strange to me watching the collective meltdown over AI/jobs when AI doesn’t do jobs, it does tasks.

Re: AI is different

#422

Post by baconbrand »

motorest wrote: post #375
huimang wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product, i.e. the ones who stand to benefit from adoption. There is no standard way to measure productivity since it's subjective. It's far more likely that companies will use whatever scapegoat they can to fire people with as little blowback as possible, especially as the other commenter noted, people were getting hired like crazy. Each one…

> These supposed "productivity gains" are only touted by the ones selling the product (...) I literally pasted an announcement from the CEO of a major corporation warning they are going to decimate their workforce due to the adoption of AI. The CEO literally made the following announcement: > "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy wrote. "We will need fewer pe…

The CEO is marketing to the company’s shareholders. This is marketing. A CEO will say anything to sell the idea of their company to other people. Believe it or not, there is money to be made from increased share prices.

Re: AI is different

#423

Post by marstall »

OneMorePerson wrote: post #141
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…

Far from an expert on this topic, but what differentiates AI from other non physical efficiency tools? (I'm actually asking not contesting). Won't companies always want to compete with one another, so simply using AI won't be enough. We will always want better and better software, more features, etc. so that race will never end until we get an AI fully capable of managing all parts (100%) of the development process (…

every software company i've ever worked with has an endless backlog of features it wants/needs to implement. Maybe AI just lets them move through these feature more quickly?

I mean most startups fail. And in software startups, the blame for that is usually at least shared by "software wasn't good enough". So that $20million seed investment is still going to go into "software development" - ie programmer salaries. they will be using the higher level language of ai much of the time, and be 2-5 times more efficient - but will it be enough? No. Most will still fail.

Re: AI is different

#425

Post by jhbadger »

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…

>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.

But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical sets in favor of CGI was making movies worse. And it was! You had backgrounds and monsters that looked like they escaped from a video game. But that complaint has pretty much died out these days as the tech got better (although Nolan's Oppenheimer did weirdly hype the fact that its simulated Trinity blast was done by practical effects).

Re: AI is different

#426

Post by marstall »

brap wrote: post #331
bambax wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to think about AI and jobs is Uber/Google Maps. You used to have to know a lot about a city to be a taxi driver; then suddenly with Google Maps you don't. So in effect, technology lowered the requirements or training needed to become a taxi driver. More people can do it, not less (although incumbents may be unhappy about this). AI is a lot like this. In coding for instance, you still need to have some sense o…

Even with Google Maps, we still need human drivers because current AI systems aren’t so great at driving and/or are too expensive to be widely adopted at this point. Once AI figures out driving too, what do we need the drivers for? And I think that’s the point he was making, it’s hard to imagine any task where humans are still required when AI can do it better and cheaper. So I don’t think the Uber scenario is realis…

The spinning jenny put seamstresses out of work. But the history of automation is the history of exponentially expanding the workforce and population.

8 billion people wake up every morning determined to spend the whole day working to improve their lives. we're gonna be ok.

Re: AI is different

#427

Post by 7952 »

badestrand wrote: post #251
closewith wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of only somewhat reliably fulfilling very narrowly scoped tasks that require no creativity or expertise. This alone is enough to completely reorganise the labour market, as it describe an enormous number of roles.

How many people could be replaced by a proper CMS or a Excel sheet right now already? Probably dozens of millions, and yet they are at their desks working away. It's easy to sit in a café and ponder about how all jobs will be gone soon but in practice people aren't as easily replacable.

For many businesses the situation is that technology has dramatically underperformed in doing the most basic tasks. Millions of people are working around things like defective ERP systems. A modest improvement in productivity in building basic apps could push us past a threshold. It makes it possible for millions more people to construct crazy excel formulas. It makes it possible to add a UI to a python script where before there was only a command line. And one piece of magic that works teliably can change an entire process. It lets you make a giant leap rather than an incremental change.

If we could make line of business crud apps work reliably, have usable document/email search, and have functional ERP that would dissolve millions of jobs.

Re: AI is different

#428

Post by xpe »

acivitillo wrote: post #372
xpe wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. I prefer the concepts and rigor from political economy: markets are both preference aggregators and coordination mechanisms. Does your framing (voting machines and weighing machines) offer more clarity and if so, how? I’m not seeing it.

His framing is that markets are collective consensus and if you claim to “know better”, you need to write a lot more than a generic post. It’s so simple, and it is a reminder that antirez’s reputation as a software developer does not automatically translate to economics expert.

I think you are mixed up here. I quoted from the comment above mine, which was harshly and uncharitably critical of antirez’s blog post.

I was pushing back against that comment’s snearing smugness by pointing to an established field that uses clear terminology about how and why markets are useful. Even so, I invited an explanation in case I was missing something.

Anyone curious about the terms I used can quickly find explanations online, etc.

Re: AI is different

#430

Post by marstall »

nine_k wrote: post #167
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…

> And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. I think it did not work like that. Automatic looms displaced large numbers of weavers, skilled professionals, which did not find immediately find jobs tending dozens of mechanical looms. (Mr Ludd was one of these displaced professionals.) Various agricultural machines and chemical products displace…

temporary - thats the key. people were able to move to the cities and get factory and office jobs and over time were much better off. I can complain about the socially alienated condition I'm in as an office worker, but I would NEVER want to do farm work - cold/sun, aching back, zero benefits, low pay, risk of crop failure, a whole other kind of isolation etc etc.
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