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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#501

Post by overgard »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

Ok, I'll try to talk you out of it!

> AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste

I think AI will do all these things faster, but I don't think it's going to be better. Inevitably these things know what we teach them, so, their improvement comes from our improvement. These things would not be good at generating code if they hadn't ingested like the entirety of the internet and all the open source libraries. They didn't learn coding from first principles, they didn't invent their own computer science, they aren't developing new ideas on how to make software better, all they're doing is what we've taught them to do.

> Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about ..

I would HIGHLY suggest not listening to a word Dario says. That guy is the most annoying AI scaremonger in existence and I don't think he's saying these words because he's actually scared, I think he's saying these words because he knows fear will drive money to his company and he needs that money.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#502

Post by theshrike79 »

Gud wrote: post #442
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

I love this optimistic take. Unfortunately, I believe the following will happen: By positioning themselves close to law makers, the AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software. They will slowly erode their terms of service, as happens to most internet software, step by step, until they claim total ownership. The point is to license the code.

> AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software.

(X) Doubt

Copyright law is WEEEEEEIRRRDD and our in-house lawyer is very much into that, personally and professionally. An example they gave us during a presentation:

A monkey took a selfie of itself in 2011. We still don't know who has the copyright to that image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

IIRC the latest resolution is "it's not the monkey", but nobody has ruled the photographer has copyright either. =)

Copyright law has this thing called "human authorship" that's required to apply copyright to a work. Animals and machines can't have a copyright to anything.

A second example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_of_the_Dawn

A comic generated with Midjourney had its copyright revoked when it was discovered all of the art was done with Generative AI.

AI companies have absolutely mindboggling amounts of money, but removing the human authorship requirement from copyright is beyond even them in my non-lawyer opinion. It would bring the whole system crashing down and not in a fun way for anyone.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#503

Post by overgard »

mossTechnician wrote: post #326
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence. - Jensen Huang, February 2024 https://www.techradar.com/pro/nvidia-ceo-predicts-the-death-...

Remember when Visual Basic was making everyone a programmer too?

(btw, warm fuzzies for VB since that's what I learned on! But ultimately, those VB tools business people were making were:

1) Useful, actually!

2) Didn't replace professional software. Usually it'd hit a point where if it needed to evolve past its initial functionality it probably required an actual software developer. (IE, not using Access as a database and all the other eccentricities of VB apps at that time)

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#504

Post by cyberpunk »

emp17344 wrote: post #458
elar_verole wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to sound rude - but you polluted the context, pointing to the fact you would like A, and then found it annoying it tried to do A ?

Oh, please. There’s always a way to blame the user, it’s a catch-22. The fact is that coding agents aren’t perfect and it’s quite common for them to fail. Refer to the recent C-compiler nonsense Anthropic tried to pull for proof.

It fails far less often than I do at the cookie cutter parts of my job, and it’s much faster and cheaper than I am.

Being honest; I probably have to write some properly clever code or do some actual design as a dev lead like… 2% of my time? At most? The rest of the code related work I do, it’s outperforming me.

Now, maybe you’re somehow different to me, but I find it hard to believe that the majority of devs out there are balancing binary trees and coming up with shithot unique algorithms all day rather than mangling some formatting and dealing with improving db performance, picking the right pattern for some backend and so on style tasks day to day.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#505

Post by cyberpunk »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #386
Tade0 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI. Not this generation of AI though. It's a text predictor, not a logic engine - it can't find actual flaws in your code, it's just really good at saying things which sound plausible.

Absolutely nuts, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I could list several anecdotes here where Claude has solved issues for me in an autonomous way that (for someone with 17 years of software development, from embedded devices to enterprise software) would have taken me hours if not days. To the nay sayers... good luck. No group of people's opinions matter at all. The market will decide.

I think it’s just fear, I sure know that after 25 years as a developer with a great salary and throughout all that time never even considering the chance of ever being unemployable I’m feeling it too.

I think some of us come to terms with it in different ways.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#506

Post by AshishGautam »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

I pay for pro max 20x usage and for something that is like even little open ended its not good it doesnt understand the context or edge cases or anything. i will say it writes codes chunks of codes but sometimes errors out and i use opus 4.6 only, not even sonnet but for simple tasks like write a basic crud i.e. the things that happen extremely higly in codebases its perfect. So, i think what will happen is developer get very efficient but problem solving remains with us dirrection remains with us and small implementation is outsourced in small atomic ways, which is good cause who likes boilerplate code writing anyways.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#507

Post by Kon5ole »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

>First is the replacement of white-collar labor, then blue-collar labor once robotics is solved. On the road to AGI, your employment, and the ability to feed your family, is a minor nuisance.

My attempt to talk you out of it:

If nobody has a job then nobody can pay to make the robot and AI companies rich.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#508

Post by mrbungie »

emp17344 wrote: post #463
ACCount37 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern ML is old school mad science. The lifeblood of the field is proof-of-concept pre-prints built on top of other proof-of-concept pre-prints.

Sounds like you agree this “evidence” lacks any semblance of scientific rigor?

(Not GP) There was a well recognized reproducibility problem in the ML field before LLM-mania, and that's considering published papers with proper peer-reviews. The current state of afairs in some ways is even less rigourous than that, and then some people in the field feel free to overextend their conclusions into other fields like neurosciences.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#509

Post by overgard »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #167
cesarvarela wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but 1800 FIDE players don't make illegal moves, and Gemini does.

1800 FIDE players do make illegal moves. I believe they make about one to two orders of magnitude less illegal moves than Gemini 3 does here. IIRC the usual statistic for expert chess play is about 0.02% of expert chess games have an illegal move (I can look that up later if there's interest to be sure), but that is only the ones that made it into the final game notation (and weren't e.g. corrected at the board by an…

I think LLM's are just fundamentally the wrong AI technique for games like this. You don't want a prediction for the next move, you want the best move given knowledge of how things would play out 18 moves ahead if both players played the optimal move. Outside of an academic interest/curiosity, there isn't really a reason to use LLMs for chess other than thinking LLMs will turn into AGI (I doubt it)

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#510

Post by jameslk »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

1. Consumption is endless. The more we can consume, the more we will. That's why automation hasn't led to more free time. We spend the money on better things and more things

2. Businesses operate in an (imperfect) zero-sum game, which means if they can all use AI, there's no advantage they have. If having human resources means one business has a slight advantage over another, they will have human resources

Consumption leads to more spending, businesses must stay competitive so they hire humans, and paying humans leads to more consumption.

I don't think it's likely we will see the end of employment, just disruption to the type of work humans do

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