Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

andyljones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 663 posts

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#471

Post by cryptonector »

maciejzj wrote: post #459
cryptonector wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing [...] Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing about the automation / technology apocalypse…

Yeah, I am familiar with these works of art and probably most people are. However, they were mostly speculative. Now we are facing some of their premises in the real world. And the guys who push the technology in a reckless way seem to notice this, but just nod their heads and carry on. At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

Works of art, works of predictive programming, life imitating art -- what's the difference, if in the end the artistic predictions come true?

People have been thinking apocalyptic thoughts like these since.. at least Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). That's 227 years if you're keeping score. Probably longer; Malthus might only have been the first to write them down and publish them.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#472

Post by cryptonector »

palmotea wrote: post #461
cryptonector wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...] Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange? If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.

> If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing. I don't think that's right. The owners will still own everything . If or when that happens, I think the economy would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the whims of those "owners." There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_uni…

What would they get from the plebs? Suppose we went through The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then what? Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#473

Post by torben-friis »

Symmetry wrote: post #428
torben-friis wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. Yes, it’s a god of the gaps situation. We don’t know what the ceiling is. We might have hit it, there might be a giant leap forward ahead, we might leap back (if there is a rug pull). The most interesting questions are the ones that assume human…

> Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black box? When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you? For me, doing embedded development on an architecture without a mature compiler the answer is last Friday but I expect that the vast majority of readers here never look at their machine code. We have abstraction layers that we've come to trust because they work in pr…

>When was the last time you looked at the machine code your compiler was giving you?

You could rephrase that as “when was the last time your compiler didn’t work as expected?”. Never in my whole career in my case. Can we expect that level of reliability?

I’m not making the argument of “the LLM is not good enough”. that would brings us back to the boring dissuasion of “maybe it will be”.

The thing is that human langauge is ambiguous and subject to interpretation, so I think we will have occasionally wrong output even with perfect LLMs. That makes black box behavior dangerous.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#474

Post by constantcrying »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

It isn't just AI. So much of the US "Tech"/VC scene is doing outright evil stuff, with seemingly zero regard for any consequence or even a shred of self awareness.

So much money is spent on developing gambling, social media, crypto (fraud and crime enabler) and surveillance software. All of these are making people's lives worse, these companies aren't even shy about it. They want to track you, they want you to spend as much time as possible on their products, they want to make you addicted to gambling.

Just by how large these segments are, many of the people developing that software must be posting here, but I have never seen any actual reflection on it.

Sure, I guess developing software making people addicted to gambling pays the bills (and more than that), but I haven't seen even that. These industries just exist and people seem to work for them as if it was just a normal job, with zero moral implications.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#475

Post by torben-friis »

etherlord wrote: post #375
torben-friis wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. Yes, it’s a god of the gaps situation. We don’t know what the ceiling is. We might have hit it, there might be a giant leap forward ahead, we might leap back (if there is a rug pull). The most interesting questions are the ones that assume human…

I dont think it really matters if your or I or regular people are ok with it if the people with power are. There doesnt seem to be much any of us regular folks can do to stop it, especially as Ai eliminates more and more jobs thus further reducing the economic power of everyday people

I disagree. There are personal decisions to make:

Do you bet on keeping your technical skills sharpened, or stop and focus on product work and AI usage?

Do you work for companies that go full AI or try to find one that stays “manual”?

What advice do you offer as a technical lead when asked?

Leadership ignoring technical advice is nothing new, but there is still value in figuring out those questions.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#476

Post by _aavaa_ »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

The implication is very clearly about “killing” jobs, not killing people.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#477

Post by Herring »

hnfong wrote: post #467
Herring wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably depends on the society you start out with, eg a high trust culture like Finland will probably fare better here.

Doesn't matter. The countries with most chaos and internal strife gets a lot of practice fighting wars (civil war). Then the winner of the civil war, who's used to grabbing resources by force, and the one that has perfected war skills due to survival of the fittest, goes round looking for other countries to invade. Historically, advanced civilizations with better production capabilities don't necessarily do better in…

Yeah none of that fever dream is real. There's no "after" a civil war, conflicts persist for decades (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Colombia, Sudan).

Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is increasingly a miserable place to live in, and the worse it gets the more their people double down on being shitty.

Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone: Chinese dream.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#478

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

Oh, _now_ computer industry people are worried? Kind of late to the party.

Computerization, automation and robotics, document digitization, the telecoms and wireless revolution, etc. have been upending peoples' employment on a massive scale since before the 1970s. The reaction of the technologists has been a rather insensitive "adapt or die", "go and retrain", and analogies to buggy whip manufacturers when the automobile became popular. The only reason people here suddenly give a hoot is because they think the crosshairs are drifting towards them.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#479

Post by Rastonbury »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #24

How about we stop trying the analogy clothing on and just tell it like it is? AI is unlike any other technology to date. Just like predicting the weather, we don't know what it will be like in 20 months. Everything is a guesstimate.

Probably the point is to think whether the horse or chess engine analogy is a good one. The premise being there will come a certain point when technology reaches a level that makes the alternative obselete suddenly. I don't have good reasons to think that AI will not be able to automate simple jobs with an acceptable error rate eventually, once that happens whole categories of jobs will evaporate. Probably dealing with more people type job, making excel models, transactions based, same thing day in day out, those teams may be gone and only a person or two to do a final review

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#480

Post by listenallyall »

maciejzj wrote: post #385
pzo wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did. Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with OP that most likely those horses were not decimated (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from…

Yeah, I agree with what you said. It's not about the absolute number of people, but the social unrest. If you look at how poor we did our job at redistribution of wealth so far, I find it hard to believe that we will do well in the future. I am afraid of mass pauperisation and immiseration of societies followed by violence.

What's more important - "redistribution of wealth" or simply reducing the percentage of people living in abject poverty? And wouldn't you agree that by that measure, most of the world, including its largest countries, have done quite a good job?

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty

From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people moving out of that condition. The global poverty rate decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014.

Post reply on HN