At this rate never. The performance of AI has been somewhere between bad and terrible, like a new but well meaning intern.
How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
51–60 of 87 posts
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#52The current HN submission title ("AGI timelines shift with whichever lab is dominant") is very bad. It is neither the title of the article nor is it the thrust of the content. The title of the article is "How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?" The main point of the article is summarized by its intro: "Recently, though, I noticed that many great researchers have now published two or more precise forecasts,…
You're right, just updated. Original title took one framing from the back half of the post (3 update cycles that can loosely be called the "ChatGPT era, then xAI/Meta/Gemini era, then Anthropic era"), but definitely not the point here. Thanks for flagging
Nice!
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#53Top researchers say AI will automate all cognitive labor by 2045 at the latest. 5 years ago I would've thought you're joking. Today, I think you're being serious, but I still think you're wrong.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#54One of my reports just sent me a giant design doc that Claude enthusiastically generated packed with plausible looking technical detail. Unfortunately the problem it's trying to solve is completely misguided and we shouldn't be doing it at all. So I'd say as answer to the question posed by this title: a while.
Your point of view is flawed. You should take the ratio of good / bad AI plans activity and compare it with the same ratio by human work.
My point is a lot of cognitive labor goes into deciding what is even worth doing, and an LLM will happily run with anything you give it.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#55Until the context window gets superceded with some groundbreaking new architecture, not ever.
Even if LLMs become incredibly, undeniably brilliant 1000000 IQ, they cannot keep track of what's going across long horizons. Imagine a supergenius, but in Memento.
No amount of MD scribbling or embeddings will remove that limitation, but it may obfuscate it further and make it seem like progress is being made.
At the end of the day, being fully autonomous means that something can keep track of context, goals, complex and shifting relationships, over LONG time horizons without drift. If you need to be there to prompt, it is not truly automating. Until the continuity becomes real instead of simulated, context no longer has to compact, and weights update on-demand, you will always need a prompt wrangler leading the effort. And prompt wrangling is cognitive labor.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#56"Most purely cognitive labor is automatable"
I cannot express how annoyed I am a researcher could use such a shitty definition.
It only makes sense to say "most" if you have a clear idea of what constitutes the majority. "Most people are male" yeah, fine..50% + epsilon of humans are males. That's more or less decidable (maybe a little vague because of intersex folks). I believe it's false because there are slightly more females but it's obviously measurable.
Now, most cognitive labor...what does that mean? Is it most of the time? Most of the tasks? Most of the value? Most of the job descriptions?
If I am a developer, and the majority of my code is written by AI, but I'm still in the driver's seat, is that most of my cognitive labor? Probably not. Ok, what if my company fires 60% of its developers, does that mean most development cognitive labor is automated? Well, it's most of the expense, and most of the butt in chair time, and it's most of the individual jobs, but it's not most of the job descriptions.
Of course, there's no way that all these researchers making pronouncements are giving consistent answers to what they mean by "most". They're probably not using his phrasing either.
Edit: The four options I threw out above: time, tasks, value, job descriptions are each interesting in their own way. My point is not that they're bad questions to be asking, it's that they're all separate questions that matter in different ways.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#57> The overlapping AGI definition I use here is "Most purely cognitive labor is automatable at better quality, speed, and cost than humans". For some of these researchers, saying they use this definitions is a bit of a stretch, but I included everyone who I judged as close enough to be informative. Seems "AGI" is on the same level as "art" or "love" in that everyone knows what we're talking about but no one can nail d…
I have no idea why this "AGI is not even well defined" meme gained so much traction recently. AGI is something that can do everything better than humans. Write a novel, seduce someone, prove a theorem, fix a pipe, whatever. And it's clear right now we don't have it.
>AGI is something that can do everything better than humans. Write a novel, seduce someone, prove a theorem, fix a pipe, whatever
That was never the concept (which predates LLMs).
AGI was something that can think like a human.
Not necessarily better, and not necessarily do everything any human can do.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#58One of my reports just sent me a giant design doc that Claude enthusiastically generated packed with plausible looking technical detail. Unfortunately the problem it's trying to solve is completely misguided and we shouldn't be doing it at all. So I'd say as answer to the question posed by this title: a while.
We should trust your assessment.. why?
Look, you might be the most knowledgeable person on this planet but we cannot verify. Your “report” might be brilliant and you are just a dinosaur. I mean, it’s impossible to tell.
Also, deciding on whether something is a good idea for the business is not a thing LLMs are currently trained for. We are busy automating development which will in turn accelerate all other automation. Deciding whether some line of thinking is a good idea does not strike me as particularly outside the range of capabilities we are witnessing them exhibiting today.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make a good point that not having it is easy to spot. But what precisely would flip the switch? Seducing someone for example, how often would that have to work? On all people? Maybe that was just thrown out as an example but it points to how subjective these goal posts are.
This problem was inherent even in the original turing test. Is it AI if it fools just one person? Or does it have to fool everybody?
It has to fool the average person. Fooling someone with low IQ/bad perception is not really a feat.
Re: How long until AI automates all cognitive labor?
#60On the point of the advent of artificial general intelligence it is worth considering the expected reduction in human intelligence which comes with the increased offloading of cognitive activities to thinking machines. My daughters both remarked on how many of their friends seem to use 'ChatGPT' for just about everything no matter how trivial. Just like unused muscles tend to waste away the same is true for unused cognitive circuits: use 'm or loose 'm. Those ChatGPT-ing girls are doing their part in advancing the advent of AGI by strengthening the botware while weakening the wetware.