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AI is different

antirez.com

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Re: AI is different

#461

Post by antirez »

mgradowski wrote: post #459

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.

The point is that you don't have to "trust" me, you need to argue with me, we need to discuss about the future. This way, we can form ideas that we can use to understand if a given politician or the other will be right, when we will be called to vote. We can also form stronger ideas to try to influence other people that right now have a vague understanding of what AI is and what it could be. We will be the ones that will vote and choose our future.

Re: AI is different

#462

Post by torben-friis »

azan_ wrote: post #454
torben-friis wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My argument is not that those people’s salaries will go up until overtaking the engineers’.

It’s the opposite, that the value of office/intellectual work will tank, while manual work remains stable. Lower barrier of entry for intelectual work if a position even needs to be covered, work conditions much more comfortable.

Re: AI is different

#463

Post by pzo »

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…

I think UBI can only buy some time but won't solve the problem. We need fast improvement with AI robots that can be used for automation on mass scale: construction, farming maybe even cooking and food processing.

Right now AI is mostly focused on automating top levels of maslov pyramid hierarchy of needs rather than bottom physiological needs. Once things like shelter (housing), food, utilities (electricity, water, internet) are dirty cheap UBI is less needed.

Re: AI is different

#464

Post by DougBTX »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #440
boulos wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s one of the interesting things about innovation, you have to believe that things are possible before they have been done.

Re: AI is different

#465

Post by antirez »

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…

To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI progresses more in a short timeframe (the big "if" in my blog post), we will see a lot of things done exclusively (and even better 90% of the times, since most humans doing a given work are not excellence in what they do) by AI. This will be fine if governments immediately react and the system changes. Otherwise there will be a lot of people to feed without a job.

Re: AI is different

#466

Post by narrator »

I like to point out that ASI will allow us to do superhuman stuff that was previously beyond all human capability.

For example, one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is to ask it to design implants that would go into the legs that would be powered by light, or electric induction that would use ASI designed protein metabolic chains to electrically transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and ADP into ATP so to power humans with pure electricity. We are very energy efficient. We use about 3 kilowatt hours of power a day, so we could use this sort of technology to live in space pretty effortlessly. Your Space RV would not need a bathroom or a kitchen. You'd just live in a static nitrogen atmosphere and the whole thing could be powered by solar panels, or a small modular nuke reactor. I call this "The Electrobiological Age" and it will unlock whole new worlds for humanity.

Re: AI is different

#467

Post by ACCount37 »

latexr wrote: post #377
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 use only cameras. Not true. Humans also interpret the environment in 3D space. See a Tesla fail against a Wile E. Coyote-inspired mural which humans perceive: https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ?t=14m34s

This video proves nothing other than "a YouTuber found a funny viral video idea".

Teslas "interpret the environment in 3D space" too - by feeding all the sensor data into a massive ML sensor fusion pipeline, and then fusing that data across time too.

This is where the visualizers, both the default user screen one and the "Terminator" debugging visualizer, get their data from. They show plain and clear that the car operates in a 3D environment.

You could train those cars to recognize and avoid Wile E. Coyote traps too, but do you really want to? The expected amount of walls set in the middle of the road with tunnels painted onto them is very close to zero.

Re: AI is different

#468

Post by marstall »

ACCount37 wrote: post #255
andrewmutz wrote: post #201

Reading smart software people talk about AI in 2025 is basically just reading variations on the lump of labor fallacy. If you want to understand what AI can do, listen to computer scientists. If you want to understand it’s likely impact on society, listen to economists.

How does "lump of labor fallacy" fare when there is no job remaining that a human can do better or cheaper than a machine? The list of advantages human labor hold over machines is both finite and rapidly diminishing.

> no job remaining that a human can do better or cheaper than a machine this is the lump of labor fallacy. jobs machines do produce commodities. commodities don't have much value. humans crave value - its a core component of our psyche. therefore new things will be desired, expensive things ... and only humans can create expensive things, since robots dont get salaries

Re: AI is different

#469

Post by apwell23 »

antirez wrote: post #465
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…

To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI prog…

> Book and music album covers are often done with AI

These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product.

I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good.

All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.

Re: AI is different

#470

Post by AdieuToLogic »

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" -…

> I'm telling you right now, man - keep talking like this to people and you're going to make zero friends.

And I'm telling you right now, man - when you fire off an ad hominem attack such as:

  I think the real issue here is understanding _you_.
Don't expect the responder to engage in serious topical discussion with you, even if the response is formulated respectfully.
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