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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#431

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

jhbadger wrote: post #425
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 s…

Do you get the feeling that AI generated content is lacking something that can be incrementally improved on?

Seems to me that it's already quite good in any dimension that it knows how to improve on (e.g. photorealism) and completely devoid of the other things we'd want from it (e.g. meaning).

Re: AI is different

#432

Post by torben-friis »

azan_ wrote: post #358
torben-friis wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But as its capabilities improve, what do displaced humans transition to? IF there is intellectual/office work that remains complex enough to not be tackled by AI, we compete for those. Manual labor takes the rest. Perhaps that’s the shift we’ll see: nowadays the guy piling up bricks makes a tenth of the architects’ salary, that relation might invert. And the indirect effects of a society that values intellectual wor…

The relation won’t invert because it’s very easy and quick to train guy pilling up bricks while training architect is slow and hard. If low skilled jobs will pay much better than high skilled then people will just change their job.

That’s only true as long as the technical difficulties aren’t covered by tech.

Think of a world where software engineering itself is handled relatively well by the llm and the job of the engineer becomes just collecting business requirements and checking they’re correctly addressed.

In that world the limit for scarcity might be less in the difficulty of training and more in the willingness to bend your back in the sun for hours vs comfortably writing prompts in an air conditioned room.

Re: AI is different

#433

Post by MichaelZuo »

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…

That’s the fundamental issue with most “analysis”, and most discussions really, on HN.

Since the vast vast majority of writers and commentators are not literal geniuses… they can’t reliably produce high quality synthetic analysis, outside of very narrow niches.

Even though for most comment chains on HN to make sense, readers certainly have to pretend some meaningful text was produced beyond happenstance.

Partly because quality is measured relative to the average, and partly because the world really is getting more complex.

Re: AI is different

#434

Post by keiferski »

jhbadger wrote: post #425
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 s…

CGI is a good analogy because I think AI and creators will probably go in the same direction:

You can make a compelling argument that CGI operators outcompeted practical effects operators. But CGI didn’t somehow replace the need for a filmmaker, scriptwriter, cinematographers, etc. entirely – it just changed the skillset.

AI will probably be the same thing. It’s not going to replace the actual job of YouTuber in a meaningful sense; but it might redefine that job to include being proficient at AI tools that improve the process.

Re: AI is different

#435

Post by vrighter »

ACCount37 wrote: post #296
thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla uses only cameras, which sounds crazy (reflections, direct sunlight disturbances, fog , smoke, etc. LiDAR, radar assistance feels crucial https://fortune.com/2025/08/15/waymo-srikanth-thirumalai-int...

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

which cameras have stereoscopic vision and the dynamic range of an eye?

Even if what you're saying is true, which it's not, cameras are so inferior to eyes it's not even funny

Re: AI is different

#436

Post by ACCount37 »

tfourb wrote: post #333
ACCount37 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans use only cameras. And humans don't even have true 360 coverage on those cameras. The bottleneck for self-driving technology isn't sensors - it's AI. Building a car that collects enough sensory data to enable self-driving is easy. Building a car AI that actually drives well in a diverse range of conditions is hard.

That's actually categorically false. We also use sophisticated hearing, a well developed sense of inertia and movement, air pressure, impact, etc. And we can swivel our heads to increase our coverage of vision to near 360°, while using very dependable and simple technology like mirrors to cover the rest. Add to that that our vision is inherently 3D and we sport a quite impressive sensor suite ;-). My guess is that th…

Yes, human vision is so bad it has to rely on a swivel joint and a set of mirrors just to approximate 360 coverage.

Modern cars can have 360 vision at all times, as a default. With multiple overlapping camera FoVs. Which is exactly what humans use to get near field 3D vision. And far field 3D vision?

The depth-discrimination ability of binocular vision falls off with distance squared. At far ranges, humans no longer see enough difference between the two images to get a reliable depth estimate. Notably, cars can space their cameras apart much further, so their far range binocular perception can fare better.

How do humans get that "3D" at far distances then? The answer is, like it usually is when it comes to perception, postprocessing. Human brain estimates depth based on the features it sees. Not unlike an AI that was trained to predict depth maps from a single 2D image.

If you think that perceiving "inertia and movement" is vital, then you'd be surprised to learn that an IMU that beats a human on that can be found in an average smartphone. It's not even worth mentioning - even non-self-driving cars have that for GPS dead reckoning.

Re: AI is different

#437

Post by marstall »

mindwok wrote: post #225
aurareturn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More companies. See my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=44919671&goto=item%3Fi...

This is the optimistic take and definitely possible, but not guaranteed or even likely. Markets tend to consolidate into monopolies (or close to it) over time. Unless we are creating new markets at a rapid rate, there isn’t necessarily room for those other 900 engineers to contribute.

8 billion people. only, what, 1 billion are in the middle class? Sounds like we need to be creating new markets at a rapid rate to me!

Re: AI is different

#438

Post by vrighter »

ACCount37 wrote: post #409
BuckRogers wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except a car isn’t a human. That’s the mistake Elon Musk made and the same one you’re making here. Not to mention that humans driving with cameras only is absolutely pathetic. The amount of accidents that occur that are completely avoidable doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that all my car needs to be safe and get me to my destination is a couple cameras.

This isn't a "mistake". This is the key problem of getting self-driving to work. Elon Musk is right. You can't cram 20 radars, 50 LIDARs and 100 cameras into a car and declare self-driving solved. No amount of sensors can redeem a piss poor driving AI. Conversely, if you can build an AI that's good enough, then you don't need a lot of sensors. All the data a car needs to drive safely is already there - right in the c…

if additional sensors improve the ai, then your last statement is categorically untrue. The reason it worked better is that those additional sensors gave it information that wac not available in the video stream

Re: AI is different

#439

Post by marstall »

nikolayasdf123 wrote: post #49
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…

> what do displaced humans transition to? go to any war-torn country or collapsed empire (Soviet). I have seen/grow-up myself in both — you would get desperation, people giving-up, alcohol (famous "X"-cross of birth rate drop and deaths rising), drugs, crime, corruption/warlord-ing, rural communities hit first and totally vanish, then small-tier cities vanish, then mid-tier, only the largest hubs remain. loss of scie…

that was because the economy was controlled/corrupt and not allowed to flourish (and create job-creating technologies like the internet and AI).

Re: AI is different

#440

Post by suddenlybananas »

boulos wrote: post #350
tfourb wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you live in a place with perfect weather year round? I don’t and I haven’t seen a robo taxi my entire life. I do have access to a Tesla though and it’s current self-driving capabilities are not even close to anything I would call „autonomous“ und real world conditions (including weather). Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least…

Our next vehicle sensor suite will be able to handle winter weather ( https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo... ).

I'll believe it when I see it.
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