AI is different • Hacker News Board

Re: AI is different

#561

Post by essnine » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

CER10TY wrote: post #304

essnine wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption here that UBI "incentivizes non-productive behavior and disincentivizes productive activity" is the part that doesn't make sense. What do you think universal means? How does it disincentivize productive activity if it is provided to everyone regardless of their income/productivity/employment/whatever?

I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.

I see more people starting businesses because they now have less risk, more people not changing jobs just to get a pay hike. The sort of financial aid UBI would bring might even make people more productive on the whole, since people who are earning have spare income for quality of life, and people with financial risk are able to work without being worried half the day about paying rent and bills.

It's a bit of a dunk on people who see their position as employer/supervisor as a source of power because they can impose financial risk as punishment on people, which happens more often than any of us care to think, but isn't that a win? Or are we conceding that modern society is driven more by stick than carrot and we want it that way?

Re: AI is different

#562

Post by thefaux » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #504

jhbadger wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated videos are a mild amusement, not a replacement for video creators, because made by AI is becoming a negative label in a world where the presence of AI video is widely known. But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. Consider the history of CGI. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was common to complain about how the move away from practical s…

>But that's because, at present, AI generated video isn't very good. It isn't good, but that's not the reason. There's a paper about 10 years ago where people used some computer system to generate Bach-like music that even Bach experts couldn't reliably tell apart, but nobody listens to bot music. (or nobody except for engine programmers watches computer chess, despite superiority. Chess is thriving more now includin…

The wonder of Bach goes much deeper than just the aesthetic qualities of his music. His genius almost forces one to reckon with his historical context and wonder, how did he do it? Why did he do it? What made it all possible? Then there is the incredible influence that he had. It is easy to forget that music theory as we know it today was not formalized in his day. The computer programs that simulate the kind of music he made are based on that theory that he understood intuitively and wove into his music and was later revealed through diligent study. Everyone who studies Bach learns something profound and can feel both a kinship for his humanity and also an alienation from his seemingly impossible genius. He is one of the most mysterious figures in human history and one could easily spend their entire life primarily studying just his music (and that of his descendants). From that perspective, computer generated music in his style is just a leaf on the tree, but Bach himself is the seed.

> These people haven't suffered from the fact that mass production of media is cheap, they've benefited from it.

Maybe? This really depends on your value system. Every moment that you are focused on how you look on camera and trying to optimize an extractive algorithm is a moment you aren't focused on creating the best music that you can in that moment. If the goal is maximizing profit to ensure survival, perhaps they are thriving. Put another way, if these people were free to create music in any context, would they choose content creation on social media? I know I wouldn't, but I also am sympathetic to the economic imperatives.

Re: AI is different

#563

Post by johnecheck » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #555

danielvaughn wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another flaw is that humans won’t find other things to do. I don’t see the argument for that idea. If I had to bet, I’d say that if AI continues getting more powerful, then humans will transition to working on more ambitious things.

If it became magic smart, then I don’t see why we couldn’t use it to enhance ourselves and become Transhuman?

There are a number of reasons you might not be able to.

Most likely? It's ridiculously expensive and you're poor.

Re: AI is different

#564

Post by cobbzilla » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:37 PM UTC

zarzavat wrote: post #524

keiferski wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I’m sure they will at some point, but I don’t think that eliminates the actual usefulness of a talented writer. It just makes unique styles more valuable, raises the baseline acceptable copy to something better (in the way that Bootstrap increased website design quality), and shifts the role of writer to more of an editor. Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marke…

Why couldn't an AI do all of that? > And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones. In the early days of chess engines there were similar hopes for cyborg chess, whereby a human and engine would team up to be better than an engine alone. What actually happened was that the engines quickly got so good that the expected value of human intervention was negative - the engine crunching so…

no matter what you ask AI to do, it’s going to give you an “average“ answer. Even if you tell it to use a very distinct specific voice and write in a very specific tone, it’s going to give you the “average“ specific voice and tone you’ve asked for. AI is the antithesis of creativity and originality. This gives me hope.

Re: AI is different

#565

Post by griffzhowl » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:42 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #474

antirez wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To understand why this is too optimistic, you have to look at things where AI is already almost human-level. Translations are more and more done exclusively with AI or with a massive AI help (with the effect of destroying many jobs anyway) at this point. Now ebook reading is switching to AI. Book and music album covers are often done with AI (even if this is most of the times NOT advertised), and so forth. If AI prog…

I can buy the idea that simple specific tasks like translation will be dramatically cut down by AI. But even then – any serious legal situation (like a contract) is going to want a human in the loop to verify that the translation is actually correct. This will require actual translator skills. AI art seems to basically only be viable when it can’t be identified as AI art. Which might not matter if the intention is to…

You might still need humans in the loop for many things, but it can still have a profound effect if the work that used to be done by ten people can now be done by two or three. In the sectors that you mention, legal, graphic design, translation, that might be a conservative estimate.

There are bound to be all kinds of complicated sociopolitical effects, and as you say there is a backlash against obvious AI slop, but what about when teams of humans working with AI become more skillful at hiding that?

Re: AI is different

#566

Post by crims0n » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #16

We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. There will be fewer very large companies in terms of human size. There will be many more companies that are much smaller because you don't need as many workers to do the s…

I am not sure it will scale like that... every company needs a competitive advantage in the market to stay solvent, the people may scale but what makes each company unique won't.

Re: AI is different

#567

Post by cindyllm » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:46 PM UTC

throwaway314155 wrote: post #441

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the real issue here is understanding _you_. My apologies for being unclear and/or insufficiently explaining my position. Thank you for bringing this to my attention and giving me an opportunity to clarify. The original post stated: Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood ... To which I asserted: This is demonstrably wrong. And provided a link to what I thought to be an approachable tutor…

I'm telling you right now, man - keep talking like this to people and you're going to make zero friends. However good your intentions are, you come across as both condescending and overconfident. And, for what it's worth - your position is clear, your evidence less-so. Deep learning is filled with mystery and if you don't realize that's what people are talking about when they say "we don't understand deep learning" -…

[dead]

Re: AI is different

#568

Post by johnecheck » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #542

keiferski wrote: post #411

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

Another flaw is that humans won’t find other things to do. I don’t see the argument for that idea. If I had to bet, I’d say that if AI continues getting more powerful, then humans will transition to working on more ambitious things.

This is very similar to the 'machines will do all the work, we'll just get to be artists and philosophers' idea.

It sounds nice. But to have that, you need resources. Whoever controls the resources will get to decide whether you get them. If AI/machines are our entire economy, the people that control the machines control the resources. I have little faith in their benevolence. If they also control the political system?

You'll win your bet. A few humans will work on more ambitious things. It might not go so well for the rest of us.

Re: AI is different

#569

Post by ajmurmann » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

drooby wrote: post #53

btilly wrote: post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

Carpenters, landscapers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, elderly care, nurses, cooks, servers, bakers, musicians, actors, artists... Those jobs are probably still a couple decades plus off from displacement. some possibly never, And we will need them in higher numbers.. and perhaps it's ironic because these are some of the oldest professions. Everything we do is in service of paying for our housing, transportation,…

That healthcare jobs will be safe is nice on the surface but also means that while other jobs become more scarce cost of healthcare will continue to go up.

Re: AI is different

#570

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Aug 16, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

jaynetics wrote: post #517

keiferski wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to…

As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Transla…

I think this is a key point, and one that we've seen in a number of other markets (eg. computer programming, art, question-answering, UX design, trip planning, resume writing, job postings, etc.). AI eats the low end, the portion that is one step above bullshit, but it turns out that in a lot of industries the customer just wants the job done and doesn't care or can't tell how well it is done. It's related to Terence Tao's point about AI being more useful as a "red team" member [1].

This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high.

But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306