AI is different • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is different

#451

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

jrvarela56 wrote: post #312

fmbb wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throughout this process society becomes wealthier, TVs get cheaper, we colonize Mars, etc. The force that keeps this going is human insatisfaction: once we get these things we’ll want whatever it is we don’t have. What makes you think the machines will both be smarter and better than us but also be our slaves to make human society better. Is equine society better now than before they started working with humans? (P…

The machine doesn’t suffer if you ask it to do things 24/7. In that sense, they are not slaves. As to why they’d do what we ask them to, the only reason they do anything is because some human made a request. In this long chain there will obv be machine to machine requests, but in the aggregate it’s like the economy right now but way more automated. Whenever I see arguments about AI changing society, I just replace AI…

Does that mean you just don’t believe we will make AGI, or it will arrive but then stop and never evolve past humans?

That’s not what the AI developers profess to believe, or the investors.

Re: AI is different

#452

Post by keiferski » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #431

jhbadger wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

Yeah if you look at many of the top content creators, their appeal often has very little to do with production value, and is deliberately low tech and informal.

I guess AI tools can eventually become more human-like in terms of demeanor, mood, facial expressions, personality, etc. but this is a long long way from a photorealistic video.

Re: AI is different

#453

Post by naveen99 » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:25 AM UTC

itsalotoffun wrote: post #136

> The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that. [Emphasis added] What a silly premise. Markets don't care . All markets do is express the collective opinion; in the short term as a voting machine, in the long term as a weighing machine. Seeing a real uptick of socio-policital prognostication from…

Voting, weighing, … trading machine ? You can hear or touch or weigh colors.

Re: AI is different

#454

Post by azan_ » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:25 AM UTC

torben-friis wrote: post #432

azan_ wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

Right now there are enough people willing to bend their back in the sun for hours that their salaries are much lower than these of engineers. Do you think that for some reason supply of these people will drop with higher wages and much lower employment opportunities in office jobs? I highly doubt it.

Re: AI is different

#455

Post by ThomPete » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:29 AM UTC

It's really very simple.

We used to have deterministic systems that required humans either through code, terminals or interfaces (ex GUI's) to change what they were capable of.

If we wanted to change something about the system we would have to create that new skill ourselves.

Now we have non-deterministic systems that can be used to create deterministic systems that can use non-deterministic systems to create more deterministic systems.

In other words deterministic systems can use LLMs and LLMs can use deterministic systems all via natural language.

This slight change in how we can use compute have incredible consequences for what we will be able to accomplish both regarding cleaning up old systems and creating completely new ones.

LLMs however will always be limited by exploring existing knowledge. They will not be able to create new knowledge. And so the AI winter we are entering is different because it's only limited to what we can train the AI to do, and that is limited to what new knowledge we can create.

Anyone who work with AI everyday know that any idea of autonomous agents is so beyond the capabilities of LLMs even in principle that any worry about doom or unemployment by AI is absurd.

Re: AI is different

#456

Post by netcan » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:30 AM UTC

Here's what I want.

A compilation of claims, takes, narratives, shills, expectations and predictions from the late 90s "information superhighway" era.

I wonder if LLMs can produce this.

A lot of the dotcom exuberance was famously "correct, but off by 7 years." But... most of it flat wrong. Right but early applies mostly to the meta investment case: "the internet business will be big."

One that stands out in my memory is "turning billion dollar industries into million dollar industries."

With ubiquitous networked computers, banking and financial services could become "mostly software." Banks and whatnot would all become hyper-efficient Vanguard-like companies.

We often starts with an observation that economies are efficiency seeking. Then we imagine the most efficient outcome given legible constraints of technology, geography and whatnot. Then we imagine dynamics and tensions in a world with that kind of efficiency.

This, incidentally, is also "historical materialism." Marx had a lot of awe for modern industry, the efficiency of capitalism and whatnot. Almost Adam Smith-like... at times.

Anyway... this never actually works out. The meta is a terrible predictor of where things will go.

Imagine law gets more efficient. Will we have more or less lawyers? It could go either way.

Re: AI is different

#457

Post by mrcincinnatus » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:31 AM UTC

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…

> I think the most sensible answer would be something like UBI.

What corporation will accept to pay dollars for members of society that are essentially "unproductive"? What will happen with the value of UBI in time, in this context, when the strongest lobby will be of the companies that have the means of producing AI? And, more essentially, how are humans able to negotiate for themselves when they lose their abilities to build things?

I'm not opposing the technology progress, I'm merely trying to unfold the reality of UBI being a thing, knowing human nature and the impetus for profit.

Re: AI is different

#458

Post by xpe » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:34 AM UTC

OneMorePerson wrote: post #220

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.

Yeah I agree, it's not about where it's at now, but whether where we are now leads to something with general intelligence and self improvement ability. I don't quite see that happening with the curve it's on, but again what the heck do I know.

What do you mean about the curve not leading to general intelligence? Even if transformer architectures by themselves don’t get there, there are multifarious other techniques, including hybrids.

As long as (1) there are incentives for controlling ever increasing intelligence; (2) the laws of physics don’t block us; and (3) enough people/orgs have the motivation and means, some people/orgs are going to press forward. This just becomes a matter of time and probability. In general, I do not bet against human ingenuity, but I often bet against human wisdom.

In my view, along with many others, it would be smarter for the whole world to slow down AI capabilities advancement until we could have very high certainty that doing so is worth the risk.

Re: AI is different

#459

Post by mgradowski » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:34 AM UTC

I wouldn't trust a taxi driver's predictions about the future of economics and society, why would I trust some database developer's? Actually, I take that back. I might trust the taxi driver.

Re: AI is different

#460

Post by amelius » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 11:37 AM UTC

thephotonsphere wrote: post #259

BoorishBears wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've ridden just under 1,000 miles in autonmous (no scare quotes) Waymos, so it's strange to see someone letting Tesla's abject failure inform their opinions on how much progress AVs have made. Tesla that got fired as a customer by Mobileye for abusing their L2 tech is your yardstick? Anyways, Waymo's DC launch is next year, I wonder what the new goalpost will be.

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...

The nice thing about LiDAR is that you can use it to train a model to simulate a LiDAR based on camera inputs only. And of course to verify how good that model is.