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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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

#491

Post by vlovich123 »

9rx wrote: post #390
saberience wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is, that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even really understand their moves or why they do them and have no hope to ever compet…

> What planet are you on? The one where computers don't magically run all by themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise. It requires…

The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent on hardware and paying people to right software for that hardware.

Writing that software is becoming automated and it’s not hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you’re left with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center based on what automated systems flag as issues and other automated systems explain you the troubleshooting to go do. There might be a specialist they fly in for an insane rate (in the shorter term) if none of that works but we’re talking about a drastic reduction in workforce needed, and this is for the data center maintenance which not many companies have anymore since the cloud migration

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

#492

Post by xtracto »

ForHackernews wrote: post #307
rukuu001 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot about how much we altered our environment to suit cars. They're not a perfect solution to transport, but they've been so useful we've built tons more road to accommodate them. So, while I don't think AGI will happen any time soon, I wonder what 'roads' we'll build to squeeze the most out of our current AI. Probably tons of power generation.

Customer service will be almost fully automated, and human customers will be forced to adapt to the bots.

It already has with IVRs . I wonder if as a generalization, current technology will keep being used to provide layers and layers of "automation" for communication between people.

SDR Agents will communicate with "Procurement" Agents. Customer Support Agents will communicate with Product Agents. Coffee Barista Agents will talk with Personal Assistant Agents.

People will communicate less and less among each other. What will people talk about? Who will we talk to?

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

#493

Post by _yb2s »

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…

I took the article as meaning white collar tech jobs that will go away, so those people will need to pivot their career, not humans.

However, it does seem like time for humanity to collectively think hard about our values and goals, and what type of world and lives we want to have in an age where human thought, and perhaps even human physical labor are economically worthless. Unfortunately this could not come at a worse time with humanity seemingly experiencing a widespread rejection of ideals like ethics, human rights, and integrity and embracing fascism and ruthless blind financial self interest as if they were high minded ideals.

Ironically, I think tech people could learn a lot here from groups like the Amish- they have clearly decided what their values and goals are, and ruthlessly make tech serve them, instead of the other way around. Despite stereotypes, Amish are often actually heavy users of, and competent with modern tech in service of making a living, but in a way that enforces firm boundaries about not letting the tech usurp their values and chosen way of life.

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

#494

Post by _DeadFred_ »

danw1979 wrote: post #378
netsharc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.

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.

Sending all the useless horses to glue factories in that time was so prevalent it was a cartoon trope. The other trope being men living in flop houses, and towns having entire sections for unemployable people called skid row.

The AI people point to post 1950s style employment and say 'people recovered after industrial advance' and ignore the 1880s through the 1940s. We actually have zero idea if the buggy whip manufacturer ever recovered or just lasted a year in skid row before giving up completely, or lived through the 2 world wars spurred by mechanisation.

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

#495

Post by sherr »

jjmarr wrote: post #406
danw1979 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha ha, yes. You should write that up as a pamplet somewhere.

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

#496

Post by rogerrogerr »

baq wrote: post #216
wrs wrote: post #15

Point taken, but it's hard to take a talk seriously when it has a graph showing AI becoming 80% of GDP! What does the "P" even stand for then?

It’s called exponential growth and humans are well known to be almost comically bad at identifying and interpreting it.

When people make forward looking statements using the term “exponential growth”, you can always replace that with “S-curve”.

Remember when we had two weeks of data, and governments acted like Covid was projected to kill everyone by next Tuesday?

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

#497

Post by _DeadFred_ »

abixb wrote: post #443
netsharc wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill Africans, you're interpreting it wrong. The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.

One could argue that the quality of life per horse went up, even if the total number of horses went down. Lots more horses now get raised in farms and are trained to participate in events like dressage and other equestrian sports.

'now instead of being work animals a few of you will be kept like pets by the tech bros'

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

#498

Post by _DeadFred_ »

LogicFailsMe wrote: post #483
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…

I think we have a bunch of people in the United States who see what we elected for leadership and the choices he made to advise him, and they have given up all hope. That despondent attitude is infusing their opinions on everything. But chin up, he's really old, and he doesn't seem very healthy or he'd be out there leading the charge throwing those rallies every weekend of which he used to be so fond. And low informa…

Yes. Follow in the path of the tech leaders. They are optimists. They totally aren't building doomsday bunkers or trying to build their data centers with their own nuclear power plants to remove them from society and create self contained systems. Oh wait. Crap...

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

#499

Post by smallmancontrov »

Faark wrote: post #487
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

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 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…

Making predictions on how it will turn out VS designing how it should be. Up til now, powerful people needed lots and lots of other humans to sustain their power&life. Thus that dependency gave the masses leverage. Now I'd like a society we're everyone is valued for being human and stuff. With democracies we got quite far in that direction. Attempts to go even further... Let's just say "didn't work out". And right no…

> didn't work out

In the "learn to love democracy and freedom" sense, sure, but in the economic sense? "Didn't work out" feels like a talking point stuck in 1991. Time has passed, China is the #2 economy in the world, #1 if you pick a metric that emphasizes material or looks to the future. How did they get there? By paying the private owners of our economy to sell our manufacturing base to them piece by piece -- which the private owners were both entitled and incentivized to do by the fundamental principles of capitalism. The ending hasn't been written, but it smells like the lead-up to a reversal in fortune.

As for our internal balance of power, we've been here before, and the timeline conveniently lines up to almost exactly 100 years ago. I'm hoping for another Roosevelt. It wasn't easy then, it won't be easy now, but I do think it's fundamentally possible.

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

#500

Post by Symmetry »

torben-friis wrote: post #473
Symmetry wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 langau…

We certainly can't expect that with LLMs now but neither could compiler users back in the 1970s. I do agree that we probably won't ever have them generating code without more back and forth where the LLM complains that its instructions were ambiguous and then testing afterwards.
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