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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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

#561

Post by ndarray »

nubg wrote: post #553
xprnio wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would we just be splitting society in two in that case? Seeing as the poor would have nothing to give to the rich, nor the rich to the poor, wouldn’t the poor 99% just create their own new society with their own units of value?

Unless the poor cause global warming with their bonfires and that inconveniences the rich. In that case...they will kill the poor.

I think it would be too depressing to have all these ghost towns and stuff - how would you explain that to your kids? That they're robot towns? Unaliving 50-80% under tragic circumstances like plagues and wars on the other hand...

And as an aside, the naturally rebalancing effect after the black death which killed 1/3 of Europe was that workers were suddenly in higher demand and could negotiate much improved workers' rights, ending serfdom. Such an effect won't be possible when there's something replacing the workers...

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

#562

Post by gaigalas »

credit_guy wrote: post #479
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…

Let's pursue your idea a bit further. Up to a certain ELO level, the combination between a human and a chess bot has a higher ELO than both the human and the bot. But at some point, when the bot has an ELO vastly superior to the human, then whatever the human has to add will only subtract value, so the combination has an ELO higher than the human's but lower than the bot's. Now, let's say that 10 or 20 years down the…

This comparison is very typical. I've seen a lot of people trying to correlate performance in chess with performance in other tasks.

Chess is a closed, small system. Full of possibilities, sure, but still very small compared to the wide range of human abilities. The same applies to Go, StarCraft or any other system. Those were chosen as AI playgrounds specifically because they're very small, limited scenarios.

People are too caught up trying to predict the future. And there are several competing visions, each one absolutely sure they nailed it. To me, that's a sign of uncertainty in the technology. If it was that decided (like smartphones became from 2007->2010), we would have coalesced into a single vision by now.

Essentially, we're witnessing an ongoing unwillingly quagmarization of AI tech. At each bold prediction that fails, it looks worse.

That could easily be solved by taking the tech realistically (we know it's useful, just not a demigod), but people (especially AI companies) don't do that. That smells like fear.

It's an exoskeleton. A bicycle for the mind. "People spirits". A copilot. A trusted companion. A very smart PhD that fails sometimes, etc. We don't need any of those predictions of "what it is", they are only detrimental. It sounds like people cargo culting Steve Jobs (and perhaps it is exactly that).

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

#563

Post by ehnto »

leoedin wrote: post #304
ehnto wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs. LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.

It's really not "good" for many people. It's the sort of high-persuasion marketing speak that used to be limited to the blogs of glossy but shallow startups. Now it's been sucked up by LLMs and it's everywhere. If you want good writing, go and read a New Yorker.

I was specifically talking about structure, less content, because yes an LLMs content is usually the airy corporate cleansed speaking I can't stand.

I don't see that in the comment we are talking about mind you.

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

#564

Post by hun3 »

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…

eke*

(yes, I'm dying on this hill)

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

#565

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

robocat wrote: post #476
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the proportion of new software that is novel has absolutely plummeted after the advent of AI. In my experience, generative AI will easily reproduce code for which there are a multitude of examples on GitHub, like TODO CRUD React Apps. And many business problems can be solved with TODO CRUD React Apps (just look at Excel’s success), but not every business problem can be solved by TODO CRUD React Apps. As an an…

> I think the proportion of new software that is novel has absolutely plummeted after the advent of AI. We were not awash in novel software before AI (say last decade in 2019). I can only assume what you're really trying to say is "AI bad".

> I can only assume what you're really trying to say is "AI bad".

Lmao rarely have I seen a strawman so clearly announced.

No, if you want me to be more precise, it’s that generative AI is limited by its (1) its training corpus and (2) the amount of effort put into its prompts. I don’t think either of those statements are controversial to even the biggest AI bull, but let me know otherwise.

Following from (1) and (2), it takes little effort for even the most milquetoast vibe coder to produce something that there are millions of training examples of, and require very little specification in terms of prompting: TODO CRUD React Apps.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible to create compelling content or code with AI, it’s just why go through the effort if all you need is a TODO CRUD React App to e.g. make a grocery list or create a “Show HN”.

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

#566

Post by esafak »

croisillon wrote: post #356
eCa wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game Not saying that this comment is ai written, but this phrasing is the em-dash of 2026.

"the real shift" is another telltale

At least they've stopped delving.

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

#567

Post by danny_codes »

9rx wrote: post #214
danny_codes wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you till like a month ago. Now I’m not so sure..

Current generation "AI" has already largely solved cheaper, faster, and more reliable. But it hasn't figured out how to curb demand. So far, the more software we build, the more people want even more software. Much like is told in the lump of labor fallacy, it appears that there is no end to finding productive uses for software. And certainly that has been the "common wisdom" for at least the last couple of decades;…

I agree the pie can grow, but I don’t know that the profession survives in its current form. Whether the next form is personally profitable for those of us who’ve sunk a decade+ into the SWE skillset remains to be seen.

I selfishly hope it is, but imo it’s simply to early to tell.

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

#568

Post by esafak »

recursive wrote: post #130
whyenot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs aren’t built around truth as a first-class primitive. neither are humans > They optimize for next-token probability and human approval, not factual verification. while there are outliers, most humans also tend to tell people what they want to hear and to fit in. > factuality is emergent and contingent, not enforced by architecture. like humans; as far as we know, there is no "factuality" gene, and we lie to ou…

If an employee repeatedly makes factually incorrect statements, we will (or could) hold them accountable. That seems to be one difference.

You can cancel your AI subscription too.

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

#569

Post by dwohnitmok »

runarberg wrote: post #470
dwohnitmok wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The two illegal moves = forfeit is an odd rule which the authors of the benchmarks (which in this case was Claude Code) added[1] for mysterious reasons. In competitive play if you play an illegal move you forfeit the game. This is not true. This is clearly spelled out in FIDE rules and is upheld at tournaments. First illegal move is a warning and reset. Second illegal move is forfeit. See here https://rcc.fide.com/…

Replying in a split thread to clearly separate where I was wrong. If Gemini is so good at chess because of a non-LLM feature of the model, then it is kind of disingenuous to rate it as an LLM and claim that LLMs are approaching 2000 ELO. But the fact it still plays illegal moves sometimes, is biased towards popular moves, etc. makes me think that chess is still handled by an LLM, and makes me suspect benchmaxxing. Bu…

Gemini is an LLM. It playing chess is not relying on a non-LLM module of some sort. I'm just saying that as an LLM, Gemini has a peculiar profile compared to other LLMs (likely an artifact of its post-training process). In particular Gemini is very capable, but also quite misaligned (it will more often actively sabotage users).

> then all we can conclude is that Gemini can play chess well, and we cannot generalize to other LLMs who play about the level of random bot

That's overly reductive. That would be true if we didn't see improvement over time from the other LLMs but we clearly do. In particular, even if Gemini is benchmarkmaxxing, this means that LLMs from other labs will eventually get there as well. Benchmarkmaxxing can be thought of as "premature" reaching of benchmarks. But I can't think of a single benchmark that was benchmarkmaxxed that wasn't eventually saturated by every single LLM provider (because being able to benchmarkmaxx serves as an existence proof that there is an LLM capable of it and as more training gets done on the LLMs the other ones get there).

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