Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

kasava.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 608 posts

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

#531

Post by Lich »

overgard wrote: post #501
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 sourc…

Sometimes I seriously am flabbergasted at how many just take what CEOs say at face value. Like, the thought that CEOs need to hype and sell what they’re selling never enters their minds.

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

#532

Post by tovej »

danielbln wrote: post #300
tovej wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM's cannot synthesize text, they can only concatenate or mix statistically. Synthesis requires logical reasoning. That's not how LLMs work.

Yes it is, LLMs perform logical multi step reasoning all the time, see math proofs, coding etc. And whether you call it synthesis or statistical mixing is just semantics. Do LLMs truly understand? Who knows, probably not, but they do more than you make it out to be.

They do not. The "reasoning" is just adding more text in multiple steps, and then summarizing it. An LLM does not apply logic at any point, the "reasoning" features only use clever prompting to make these chains more likely to resemble logical reasoning.

This is still only possible if the prompts given by the user resembles what's in the corpus. And the same applies to the reasoning chain. For it to resemble actual logical reasoning, the same or extremely similar reasoning has to exist in the corpus.

This is not "just" semantics if your whole claim is that they are "synthesizing" new facts. This is your choice of misleading terminology which does not apply in the slightest.

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

#533

Post by tovej »

topocite wrote: post #346
tovej wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of those comments, just like the premise in this thread, is ridiculous and fantastical. The only way generative AI has changed the creative arts is that it's made it easier to produce low quality slop. I would not call that a true transformation. I'd call that saving costs at the expense of quality. The same is true of software. The difference is, unlike art, quality in software has very clear safety and…

I just don't understand this line of thinking. Gen AI is the opposite of crypto. The use is immediate, obvious and needs no explanation or philosophizing. You are basically showing your hand that you have zero intellectual curiosity or you are delusional in your own ability if you have never learned anything from gen AI.

I play with generative AI quite often. Mostly for shits and giggles. It's fun to try to make it hallucinate in the dumbest way possible. Or to make up context.

E.g. try to make any image generating model take an existing photo of a humanoid and change it so the character does a backflip.

It's also interesting to generate images in a long loop, because it usually reveals interesting patterns in the training data.

Outside these distractions I've never had generative AI be useful. And I'm currently working in AI research.

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

#534

Post by observationist »

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…

Robotics is solved. Software is solved. There is no task on the planet that cannot be automated, individually. The remaining challenge is exceeding the breadth of skills and the depth of problem solving available to human workers. Once the robots and AI can handle at least as many of the edge cases as humans can, they'll start being deployed alongside humans. Industries with a lot of capital will switch right away; mass layoffs, 2 week notice, robots will move in with no training or transition between humans.

Government, public sector, and union jobs will go last, but they'll go, too. If you can have a DMV Bot 9000 process people 100x faster than Brenda with fewer mistakes and less attitude, Brenda's gonna retire, and the taxpayers aren't going to want to pay Brenda's salary when the bot costs 1/10th her yearly wage, lasts for 5 years, and only consumes $400 in overhead a year.

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

#535

Post by majormajor »

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…

> 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how the total addressable market (TAM) for AI is the entirety of human labor market (i.e. your wage). 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. The value of your mental labor will continue to plummet in the coming years.

Seems like a TAM of near-0. Who's buying any of the product of that labor anymore? 1% of today's consumer base that has enough wealth to not have to work?

The end-game of "optimize away all costs until we get to keep all the revenue" approaches "no revenue." Circulation is key.

It seems like they have the same blind spot as anyone else: AI will disrupt everything—except for them, and they get that big TAM! Same for all the "entrepreneurs will be able to spin up tons of companies to solve problems for people more directly" takes. No they wouldn't, people would just have the problems solved for themselves by the AI, and ignore your sales call.

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

#536

Post by hparadiz »

Kon5ole wrote: post #527
kfichter wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs the money when you have an autonomous system to produce all the energy and resources you need? These systems simply do not need the construct of money as we know it at a certain point.

The star trek society is is a remote possibility here. One can hope.

I think we're going in that direction. The typical reader here I think can't see the forest for the trees. We're all in meat space. They call it real life. Most jobs aren't on the internet and ultimately deal with the physical. It doesn't matter what tech we have when there's boxes to move and shelves to stock. If AI empowers a small business owner to do things that were previously completely outside their budget I can only imagine that will increase opportunity.

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

#538

Post by indiestack »

The exoskeleton framing is useful but incomplete. In my experience, AI coding assistants are most valuable not when they write code, but when they search for existing solutions before writing code.

The real waste isn't developers typing slowly — it's developers spending a week building an auth system that already exists as a well-maintained library, or reimplementing invoicing logic that someone else has already debugged through 200 edge cases.

The gap right now is structured discovery. AI assistants are great at generating code but terrible at knowing what already exists. There's no equivalent of "have you checked if someone already solved this?" built into the workflow. That's where the actual leverage is — preventing unnecessary work, not just accelerating it.

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

#539

Post by hparadiz »

cyberpunk wrote: post #505
laichzeit0 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to sometimes get stuck on a problem for weeks and then get a budget pulled or get put on another project. Sometimes those issues never did get solved. Or have to tell someone sorry I don't have capacity to solve a problem for you. Now a lot of that anxiety has been replaced with a more can do attitude. Like wouldn't being able to pull off results create more opportunity?

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

#540

Post by [deleted] »

observationist wrote: post #534
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…

Robotics is solved. Software is solved. There is no task on the planet that cannot be automated, individually. The remaining challenge is exceeding the breadth of skills and the depth of problem solving available to human workers. Once the robots and AI can handle at least as many of the edge cases as humans can, they'll start being deployed alongside humans. Industries with a lot of capital will switch right away; m…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN