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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

#501

Post by _DeadFred_ »

piekvorst wrote: post #253
frchalli wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made…

The crucial observation is the fact that automation has historically been a net creator of jobs, not destroyer.

'Because thing X happened in past it is guaranteed to happen in the future and we should bet society on it instead of trying to you know, plan for the future. Magic jobs will just appear, trust me'

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

#502

Post by LogicFailsMe »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #498
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

American tech leaders are just as bad, leading the charge straight into the abyss. But if you close your mind to the rest of the world, I can see why you'd see a 0 1 choice here. That's all the corporate media and influencers write these days, all the way from Paul Krugman to Corey Doctorow. And let's not even get started on the Three Men and an ASIC house of AI circle jerkers.

I mean if you're the sort that thinks Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky are agents of the Antichrist, it's long overdue to touch grass. And I don't think he believes that, but I think he thought people were stupid enough to buy it so he ran with it. Can't blame him for trying!

But given the right's hatred of renewables and the left thinks nuclear power plants can explode like atomic bombs, I'd be pushing for gas and nuclear to power my data centers too.

TLDR: you're being fed a false narrative that this is a 0 1 choice, but I guess it will take the rest of the world to demonstrate that not the US.

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

#503

Post by abustamam »

vidarh wrote: post #457
tokioyoyo wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles. So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.

I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything ...

Why? Google search kinda sucks. And I find it helpful to provide context that I can't otherwise provide to any standard search engine.

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

#504

Post by _DeadFred_ »

faidit wrote: post #255
jordwest wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I know it's an unrealistic ideal but it's fun to think about. That said my theory about power and privilege is that it's actually just a symptom of a deep fear of death. The reason gaining more money/power/status never lets up is because there's no amount of money/power/status that can satiate that fear, but somehow naively there's a belief that it can. I wouldn't be surprised if most people who have any amount…

Going off your earlier comment, what if instead of a revolution, the oligarchs just get hooked up to a simulation where they can pretend to rule over the rest of humanity forever? Or what if this already happened and we're just the peasants in the simulation

This would make a good black mirror episode. The character lives in a total dystopian world making f'd up moral choice. Their choices make the world worse. It seems nightmarish to us the viewer. Then towards then end they pull back, they unplug and are living in a utopia. They grab a snack, are greeted by people that love and care about them, then they plug back in and go back to being their dystopian tech bro ideal self in their dream/ideal world.

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

#505

Post by xlbuttplug2 »

pmg101 wrote: post #346
xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the turning point will be when AI assisted individuals or tiny companies are able to deliver comparable products/value as the goliaths.

Why hasn't this happened already? I'm willing to believe the hype on LLMs except that I don't see any tiny 1-senior-dev-plus-agents companies disrupting the market. Maybe it just hasn't happened "yet"... But I've been kind of wondering the same thing for most of 2025.

I think it has to get good enough to a point where humans are not the bottleneck for code review and course correction.

I guess the "velocity" multiplier is closer to 10x rather than the 1000x needed for true disruption capability.

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

#506

Post by vidarh »

abustamam wrote: post #503
vidarh wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything ...

Why? Google search kinda sucks. And I find it helpful to provide context that I can't otherwise provide to any standard search engine.

Because the responses are often distilled down from the same garbage Google serves up, but presented as the opinion of Claude, whom she increasingly trusts.

I use Claude a lot. I have the most expensive Claude Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at client sites, separately. I'm increasingly close to an AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against extensive use of these models.

But it's not quick enough to of its own accord resort to verifying things before giving answers to be suitable as a general purpose replacement for Google unless you specifically prompt it to search.

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

#507

Post by ForHackernews »

usrbinbash wrote: post #373
ForHackernews wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or customers will find other providers who don't annoy them.

Exactly why Comcast and Google went out of business with their abysmal customer support.

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

#508

Post by twodave »

bdangubic wrote: post #143
twodave wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not anti-AI; I use it every day. But I also think all this hand-wringing is overblown and unbalanced. LLMs, because of what they are, will never replace a thoughtful engineer. If you’re writing code for a living at the level of an LLM then your job was probably already expendable before LLMs showed up.

except you know, you had a job. and coming out of college could get one… if you were graduating right now in compsci you’ll find a wasteland with no end in sight…

You’re assuming a lot about me that isn’t true, but let’s just say we can’t really know, can we? And I think it’s a bit reductionist to attribute the current job market to LLMs. The market started to suck long before LLMs became useful.

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

#509

Post by oxag3n »

> I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic. ... > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

TL;DR If your work is answer questions, that can be retrieved from a corpus of data with inverted index + embedding, you'll be obsolete pretty fast.

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

#510

Post by oxag3n »

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…

> What the hell

It was always like this. Look at the history, and sometimes quite recent - people were always treated like a tool - for getting rich, for getting in power, to conquer other countries, to serve them.

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