481–490 of 663 posts
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I wish the author had had the courage of their convictions to extend the analogy all the way to the glue factory. It’s what we are all thinking.
I have a modest proposal for dealing with future unemployment.
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In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane. "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals.…
A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life phil…
It is generally true that higher income jobs are allocated to higher productivity workers, but it does not follow that high incomes imply high productivity and vice versa for low incomes.
If you combine the above with a disequilibrium market where supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor, then from a naive perspective it would appear as if the unemployed would deserve their unemployment.
After all, the most productive members are all employed and rewarded for their efforts. The unemployed are just lazy (voluntarily unemployed) and incompetent (society is better off without them). Any form of punishment is seen as justified and not some structural failing of the system.
The problem is that if there is a labor market disequilibrium, there will always be unemployed people and even if you think the productivity ranking is a good thing, it just means that if one of the "lazy" people suddenly becomes "hard working", they will just take the place of someone else and nothing has changed other than that the standard for laziness has risen.
Even if people notice that the system is fundamentally broken, they realize that individually, they are either a beneficiary of the system and therefore don't see a reason to change it or they don't have the ability to change the system and rather focus on taking someone else's place.
This will result in an artificial Darwinian rat race where people see each other as competitors to defeat.
This is my explanation for why immigrants make a good scapegoat even though immigration doesn't affect the rules of the game at all.
Here is an analogy via a game of musical chairs. There is the perception that more immigrants means more players competing for chairs. This is a naive interpretation that looks obvious. What is being forgotten is that each player is bringing a new chair and the number of missing chairs is a percentage of the number of players. The truth is that having more immigrants means you can take their chair away for yourself. So immigration is not causative here. The problem is that there were never enough chairs to begin with no matter how many people are playing the game.
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…
And low information business leaders will attempt to do all the awful things described here and the free market will eliminate them from the game grid one horrible boss at a time. But if you surround yourself with the AI doomers and bubblers, how will you ever encounter or even consider positive uses of the technology? What an awful place to work Anthropic must be if they truly believe they are working on the metaphorical equivalent of the Alpha Omega bomb. Spoilers: they're not.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, many look forward to harnessing AI to ameliorate hunger, take care of the elderly, and perform the more dangerous and tedious jobs out there. Anthropic guy needs to go get a room with Eliezer Yudkowsky. I guess the US is about get horsed by the other 96% of the planet.
Go ahead, compare me to a horse, a gasoline engine, or even call me a meatbag. Have we become little more than Eloi snowflakes to be so offended by that?
But I guess as long as an electoral majority here continues to cheer on one man draining the juice of this country down to a bitter husk, the fun and games will continue.
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Humans don’t learn to write messy complex code. Messy, complex code is the default, writing clean code takes skill. You’re assuming the LLM produces extra complexity because it’s mimicking human code. I think it’s more likely that LLMs output complex code because it requires less thought and planning, and LLMs are still bad at planning.
Totally agree with the first observation. The default human state seems to be confusion. I've seen this over and over in junior coders. It's often very creative how junior devs approach problems. It's like they don't fully understand what they're doing and the code itself is part of the exploration and brainstorming process trying to find the solution as they write... Very different from how senior engineers approach…
This is really only true about base models that haven’t undergone post training. The big difference between ChatGPT and GPT3 was OpenAI’s instruct fine tuning. Out of the box, language models behave how you describe. Ask them a question and half the time they generate a list of questions instead of an answer. The primary goal of post training is to coerce the model into a state in which it’s more likely to output things as if it were a helpful assistant. The simplest version is text at the start of your context window like: “the following is code was written by a meticulous senior engineer”. After a prompt like that the most likely next tokens will never be the models imitation of a sloppy code. Instruct fine tuning does the same thing but as permanent modifications to the weights of the model.
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Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job. 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. I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and…
>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…
When calculators were first introduced I'm sure some people such as scientists and accountants did exactly that. Calculators were new, people likely had to be slowly convinced that these magic devices could be totally accurate.
But you and I were born well after the invention of calculators, our entire lives nobody has doubted that even a $2 calculator can immediately determine the square root of an 8-digit number and be totally accurate. So nobody verifies, and also, a lot of people can't do basic math.
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…
I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…
Yeah, I see a bleak future ahead. Guess that's life, after all.
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Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building robot has a finite horizon. Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs already see the horizon or are at sunset. Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile mills or computers, drove job creation as well as replacement. This time around some component of progress are visibile, because end of the day people can use this tech to creat…
> because end of the day people can use this tech to create wealth at unprecedented scale _Where?_ so far the only technology to have come out widespread for this is to shove a chatbot interface into every UI that never needed it. Nothing has been improved, no revelatory tech has come out (tools to let you chatbot faster don’t count).
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> please name what metric you think is meaningful Job satisfaction and human flourishing By those metrics, AI is getting worse and worse
AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it. AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more resources, to give the most important thing people have - time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be like complaining that the objective positive of increased food production is actually a negative, because people are getting fatter.
I could not care less about AI's satisfaction in anything
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You can kind of separate the technical side of what will likely happen - AI get smarter and can do the jobs - with how we deal with that. Could be heaven like with abundance and no one needs to work, or post apocalyptic dystopia or likely somewhere in the middle. We collectively have a lot of choice on the how we deal with it part. I'm personally optimistic that people will vote in people friendly policies when it co…
Not seeing any horse heavens, do you have reason to believe humans (i.e. those not among the ruling class) are going to have a different fate from the horses? I agree we can kinda make the argument that abundance is soon upon us, and humanity as a whole embraces the ideas of equality and harmony etc etc... but still there's a kinda uncanny dissociation if you're happily talking about horses disappearing and humans be…