I wish GPT4 had never happened • Hacker News Board

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#581

Post by carapace » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:00 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #174

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #29

The big oversight here is that Priya does not want a job , what Priya wants is an income . The point of life is not working, the point of life is to enjoy it. We should strive to eliminate as many jobs as we possibly can, the less we have to work the better it is. To make this possible we need to find a way to a new system that doesn't directly link labour with income .

The big issue is the transition. What happens when we still need around 30% employment to keep things going. Neither enough automation for everyone to take permanent holiday nor enough labour to go around for everyone to make the current way sustainable. I have no good answer for how to address this middle point.

I think you start with a kind of non-profit member-owned "general automation corp." that supplies a level of basic QoL: clean water, food, shelter, clothing, energy, internet, medical, etc. per-member, at a set rate, say US$300 per month. That is, you pay in $300/mo. and that covers your rent, food, utilities, health insurance, etc. Over time the rate you pay falls to zero and remains there for the rest of your life.

The task of the corporation is to supply the above goods and services efficiently, in environmentally regenerative ways, while meeting or exceeding minimum quality standards.

- - - -

It's kind of like a new economic regime developing within the old one, the way a crystal precipitates out of a saturated solution, eh? A sort of phase change?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#582

Post by mirsadm » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #419

ricksunny wrote: post #148

"...has a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and works as biomedical data curator. Her job is to go through scientific papers that publish RNA sequencing data. She understands the design of the experiment and cleans and annotates the data accordingly... Her work requires just enough domain expertise that it is been non-trivial to automate (until now). I think you know where this is headed. The day I got off the GPT4…

That's currently the same issue it has for programming. It takes me longer to transcribe and factcheck the output than it would have for me to just write it from scratch. Writing the code stops being the bottleneck in software pretty quickly, and instead translating and merging business logic into existing software takes the most time.

For me, even if it were able to never make a mistake it would still be more annoying asking it questions over and over again to refine the output. Why would I use English (or whatever language) which is ambiguous compared to writing the code myself. I don't know I'm not buying the hype anymore. It is a cool tool but the idea that it would replace just writing code seems crazy to me.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#583

Post by tharne » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

Kapura wrote: post #565

tharne wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Have you ever considered that this may be due to the fact that our brains evolved to exist in a world where our day is largely focused on gathering food? We're not well-equipped to exist in other modes.

[citation needed] primates don't spend the majority of their day gathering food; there's not reason to believe early humans were different.

I said, "majority of the day focused on gathering food, not "spent gathering food". If this seems like an arbitrary distinction, allow me to provide an analogy. Most teenage boys spend the majority of their day focused on having sex, but very few of them spend the majority of their day actually having sex (if they're even having sex at all).

As for a citation, ask anyone who's spent any amount of their life with not enough food available. If you ask them how much of their time is spent focused on getting food or thinking about food, or worrying about food, they'll probably tell you "most of it".

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#584

Post by danShumway » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

jwagenet wrote: post #482

vc8f6vVV wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature. If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need. No, it doesn't have to be a work "for a company", but if you can't "make money off of this" it probably means your "work" is only relevant to you, or somebody els…

> I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature I think this is plain wrong. There are plenty of pursuits that are “work” on the mental or physical side, but do not produce economic value. Developing artistry by mastering a medium or an instrument, climbing mountains, running ultra marathons, tending to a garden or bonsai, modifying a…

Good to bring up.

People are very attached to the idea that humans don't want to master things unless they're the best at them, and I feel like that philosophy was pretty solidly disproved right about the time that video games were invented. People master skills in non-competitive, solo settings.

Learning a skill can be inherently satisfying on its own. Personal development is satisfying regardless of where the people around you are. Or at least, it should be.

And it's also kind of a bad approach to value as well -- what I've found is that you can actually be pretty average at things and still provide a lot of value to the people around you, because of ignoring economies of scale and because of how much stuff there is to do in the world to begin with.

There are software niches that are underserved where genuinely earnest programmers who look to help could do tremendous good even if they're kind of average/bad programmers. In fact, as one example that's close to HN, that's how the majority of Open Source programming happens. Open Source is not a meritocracy, it's a Do-ocracy, and a ton of the most valuable stuff is built by average programmers who look at underserved niches and say, "but what if there was a non-predatory solution for them?"

A lot of what makes a good Open Source solution is just that it was built by someone who cares and who isn't trying to maneuver you into a predatory relationship. And sometimes it turns out that there are only a few people available in a niche that have both the resources to do that and the inclination. So they're not competing with anyone, they're just the people who happened to be available and willing to do the work.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#585

Post by ativzzz » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

ImHereToVote wrote: post #499

Nifty3929 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does blocking Uber make people's lives easier? Or did you just mean easier for the taxi drivers because they can extract political rents using the government as their tool, at the expense of broader society?

I think having stronger conditions for the working class will be great for society since there will be more consumers for all that added productivity.

Spain has the highest unemployment rate in Western Europe. Let's hope their weather doesn't change much and continues to attract tourists so they can continue to support their unworking populace through regulation instead of innovation

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#586

Post by ihateyouall123 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #293

ryanackley wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that would be great but history has shown this is a beautiful but naive pipe dream. It doesn't take into account the ambition and greed of humans and their capacity to exploit others.

> It doesn't take into account the ambition and greed of humans and their capacity to exploit others. The talking computers will rapidly become perfect therapists and perfect salesmen. They can talk us "down off the ledge".

Which means they could also push us over the edge. If the weak-minded are currently influenced by today's bots, it's a matter of time until some are testing humans by "pushing limits" if you will

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#587

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

logicalmonster wrote: post #138

1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs…

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

[deleted]

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#588

Post by oh_sigh » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

heartbreak wrote: post #231

surgical_fire wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should come here and find some meaning painting my fence. While you are at it, the toilet in the basement is clogged, there is shit water all over the place. You could find meaning there too.

I know many people in my circles who would find literal religious meaning in the work of painting your fence.

Why does it cost money to get your fence painted then?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#589

Post by dicriseg » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

babyshake wrote: post #513

simonw wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is currently one of the biggest impacts it's had on me: I no longer fear programming languages and DSLs that I'm not completely fluent in. I've use ChatGPT to confidently produce jq programs, and Bash, and zsh, and ffmpeg scripts, and AppleScript - all tech I've mostly avoided in the past because I hadn't climbed the learning curve far enough to be confident with them.

To me it's an extension of that great feeling when you need to do something in an area you're not as fluent in and you find an SO thread that perfectly addresses your use-case, or at least gets you 90% of the way there. But with copilot you can do it from right within your IDE, or use ChatGPT to iterate on the results.

I’ve been using RubberDuck to have chatgpt in my ide. Its not perfect but it is pretty great.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#590

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

manmal wrote: post #514

throw__away7391 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shell scripting and JavaScript are strengths, any kind of server-side language like Scala or C# it really falls apart quite quickly. I think that integrating into existing APIs is the Achilles' heel, GPT-4 doesn't seem to do any better here either. It makes me wonder if someday we might not get better results completely eschewing libraries altogether and letting the transformers generate literally everything--perhaps…

I think it will be quite the opposite. Generating a lot of code means generating a lot of bugs. LMMs should get the (battle tested) libs they have to use as part of the prompt, and they should just use those APIs.

[deleted]