AI is different • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is different

#441

Post by throwaway314155 » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:11 AM UTC

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #120

throwaway314155 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real issue here is understanding _you_.

> I think the real issue here is understanding _you_. My apologies for being unclear and/or insufficiently explaining my position. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and giving me an opportunity to clarify. The original post stated: Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ... To which I asserted: This is demonstrably wrong. And provided a link to what I thought to be an approachable tutor…

I'm telling you right now, man - keep talking like this to people and you're going to make zero friends. However good your intentions are, you come across as both condescending and overconfident.

And, for what it's worth - your position is clear, your evidence less-so. Deep learning is filled with mystery and if you don't realize that's what people are talking about when they say "we don't understand deep learning" - you're being deliberately obtuse.

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edit to cindy (who was downvoted so much they can't be replied to): Thanks, wasn't aware. FWIW, I appreciate the info but I'll probably go on misusing grammar in that fashion til I die, ha. In fact, I've probably already made some mistake you wouldn't be fond of _in this edit_.

In any case thanks for the facts. I perused your comment history a tad and will just say that hacker news is (so, so disappointingly) against women in so many ways. It really might be best to find a nicer community (and I hope that doesn't come across as me asking you to leave!) ============================================================

Re: AI is different

#442

Post by djtango » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:13 AM UTC

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…

That's a Nolan thing like how Dunkirk used no green screen.

I think Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings embody the transition from old school camera tricks to CGI as they leaned very heavily into set and prop design and as a result have aged very gracefully as movies

Re: AI is different

#443

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

bboygravity wrote: post #412

schneems wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why an economics based strictly on scarcity cannot get us where we need to go. Markets, not knowing what it's like to be thirsty, will interpret a willingness to poison the well as entrepreneurial spirit to be encouraged.

We need a system where being known as somebody who causes more problems than they solve puts you (and the people you've done business with) at an economic disadvantage.

Re: AI is different

#444

Post by suddenlybananas » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:14 AM UTC

juniperus wrote: post #298

motorest wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever stopped to consider why class mobility is much much less common in Europe than in the USA? Which class mobility is this that you speak of? The one that forces the average US citizens to be a paycheck away from homelessness? Or is it the one where you are a medical emergency away from filing bankruptcy? Have you stopped to wonder how some European countries report higher median household incomes than t…

the economic situation in Europe is much more dire than the US...

Several US states have the life expectancy of Bangladesh.

Re: AI is different

#445

Post by cataphract » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:15 AM UTC

juniperus wrote: post #287

motorest wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t provide valuable things for “free” en masse without institutionalizing either slavery or robbery. The value must come from somewhere. Utter nonsense. Do you believe the European countries that provides higher education for free are manning tenure positions with slaves or robbing people at gunpoint? How come do you see public transportation services in some major urban centers being provided free of charge…

You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. It used to be called corvée. But the words being used have a connotation of something much more brutal and unrewarding. This isn't a political statement, I'm not a libertarian who believes all taxation is evil robbery and needs to be abolished. I'm just p…

If the state "confiscated" wealth derived from capital (AI) would that be OK with you?

Re: AI is different

#446

Post by cindyllm » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:19 AM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #441

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the real issue here is understanding _you_. My apologies for being unclear and/or insufficiently explaining my position. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and giving me an opportunity to clarify. The original post stated: Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ... To which I asserted: This is demonstrably wrong. And provided a link to what I thought to be an approachable tutor…

I'm telling you right now, man - keep talking like this to people and you're going to make zero friends. However good your intentions are, you come across as both condescending and overconfident. And, for what it's worth - your position is clear, your evidence less-so. Deep learning is filled with mystery and if you don't realize that's what people are talking about when they say "we don't understand deep learning" -…

[dead]

Re: AI is different

#447

Post by ACCount37 » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #385

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.

Humans are notoriously bad at driving, especially in poor weather. There are more than 6 million accidents annually in the US, which is >16k a day. Most are minor, but even so - beating that shouldn't be a high bar. There is no good reason not to use LIDAR with other sensing technologies, because cameras-only just makes the job harder.

Self-driving cars beat humans on safety already. This holds for Waymos and Teslas both.

They get into less accidents, mile for mile and road type for road type, and the ones they get into trend towards less severe. Why?

Because self-driving cars don't drink and drive.

This is the critical safety edge a machine holds over a human. A top tier human driver in the top shape outperforms this generation of car AIs. But a car AI outperforms the bottom of the barrel human driver - the driver who might be tired, distracted and under influence.

Re: AI is different

#448

Post by xpe » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #330

xpe wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what differentiates AI from other non physical efficiency tools? At some point: (1) general intelligence; i.e. adaptivity; (2) self replication; (3) self improvement.

We don't have any more idea how to get to 1, 2, or 3, than we did 50 years ago. LLMs are cool, but they seem unlikely to do any of those things.

I encourage everyone to not claim “X seems unlikely” when it comes to high impact risks. Such a thinking pattern often leads to pruning one’s decision tree way too soon. To do well, we need to plan over an uncertain future that has many weird and unfamiliar scenarios.

Re: AI is different

#449

Post by grues-dinner » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

juniperus wrote: post #233

aorloff wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time someone casually throws out UBI my mind goes to the question "who is paying taxes when some people are on UBI ?" Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?

The taxes will be most burdensome for the wealthiest and most productive of institutions, which is generally why these arrangements collapse economies and nations. UBI is hard to implement because it incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity. This creates economic crisis, taxes are basically a smaller scale version of this, UBI is like a more comprehensive wealth redistribution sche…

The problem is the "productive activity" is rather hard to define if there's so much "AI" (be it classical ML, LLM, ANI, AGI, ASI, whatever) around that nearly everything can be produced by nearly no one.

The destruction of the labour theory of value has been a goal of "tech" for a while, but if they achieve it, what's the plan then?

Assuming humans stay in control of the AIs because otherwise all bets are off, in a case where a few fabulously wealthy (or at least "onwing/controlling", since the idea of wealth starts to become fuzzy) industrialists control the productive capacity for everything from farming to rocketry and there's no space for normal people to participate in production any more, how do you even denominate the value being "produced"? Who is it even for? What do they need to give in return? What can they give in return?

Re: AI is different

#450

Post by dns_snek » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

juniperus wrote: post #309

motorest wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're missing the point, language can be tricky. Technically, the state confiscating wealth derived from your labor through taxes is a form of robbery and slavery. You're letting your irrational biases show. To start off, social security contributions are not a tax. But putting that detail aside, do you believe that paying a private health insurance also represents slavery and robbery? Are you a slave to a private…

No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism. But taxation is de facto a form of unpaid labor taken by the force of the state. If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery, and in the ideal situation, it is a benevolent sort of exchange, despite existing in the realm of slavery/robbery. In a totalitarian system, it become malevolent very quickly. It also can be seen as not benevo…

> No, I'm a progressive and believe in socialism

I'd be very interested in hearing which definition of "socialism" aligns with those obviously libertarian views?

> If you don't pay your taxes, you will go to jail. It is both robbery and slavery [...] Arguing this is arguing emotionally and not rationally using language with words that have definitions.

Indulging in the benefits of living in a society, knowingly breaking its laws, being appalled by entirely predictable consequences of those action, and finally resorting to incorrect usage of emotional language like "slavery" and "robbery" to deflect personal responsibility is childish.

Taxation is payment in exchange for services provided by the state and your opinion (or ignorance) of those services doesn't make it "robbery" nor "slavery". Your continued participation in society is entirely voluntary and you're free to move to a more ideologically suitable destination at any time.