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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

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Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#581

Post by rerdavies »

cryptonector wrote: post #447
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

> I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity [...] Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do they think will take their dollars and provide goods and services in exchange? If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.

... then the "owners" will own EVERYTHING. Fixed that for u.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#582

Post by somenameforme »

azan_ wrote: post #349
somenameforme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. Didn’t we also get standards of living much higher than he would ever imagine? I think blaming everything on billionaires is really misguided and shallow.

It depends on how you value things. I'd prefer to have a surplus of time and a scarcity of gizmos, rather than a surplus of gizmos and a scarcity of time. Obviously basic needs being met is very important, but we've moved way beyond that as a goal, while somehow also kind of simultaneously missing it.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#583

Post by ehnto »

jack_pp wrote: post #357
ehnto wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I see when companies cut juniors as well. AI cannot replace a junior because a junior has full and complete agency, accountability, and purpose. They retain learning and become a sharper bespoke resource for the business as time goes on. The PM tells them what to do and I give them guidance. If you take away the juniors, you are now asking your seniors to do that work instead which is more expensive and w…

> well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow You could actually just do that, leave an agent on a problem you would give a junior, go back on your main task and whenever you feel like it check the agent's work.

It lacks the ability to self correct and do all the adjacent tasks like client comms etc. So if I come back to it in the afternoon I may have wasted a day in business terms, because I will need to try again tomorrow. What do I tell the client, sorry the LLM failed the simple task so we will have to try again tomorrow? Worse, lie and say sorry this 2 hour task could not be achieved by our developers today. Either way we look incompetent (because realistically, we were not competent, relying on a tool that fails frequently)

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#584

Post by trabant00 »

Yawn, another article which hand picks success stories. What about the failures? Where's the graph of flying cars? Humanoid house servant robots? 3D TVs? Crypto decentralized banking for everyone? Etc.

Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is shoveling shit in his mouth then smiling brown teeth at the audience. 10 years from now there's a real possibility of "AI" being remembered as that "stuff that almost got to a single 9 reliability but stopped there".

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#585

Post by martin82 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #388
maciejzj wrote: post #353

I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather…

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

[flagged]

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#586

Post by jack_pp »

ehnto wrote: post #583
jack_pp wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to it tomorrow You could actually just do that, leave an agent on a problem you would give a junior, go back on your main task and whenever you feel like it check the agent's work.

It lacks the ability to self correct and do all the adjacent tasks like client comms etc. So if I come back to it in the afternoon I may have wasted a day in business terms, because I will need to try again tomorrow. What do I tell the client, sorry the LLM failed the simple task so we will have to try again tomorrow? Worse, lie and say sorry this 2 hour task could not be achieved by our developers today. Either way…

I'm sorry but I'm not familiar with the context you mention, have not worked in a job where I had to communicate with clients and I find it hard to imagine a job where a junior would have to communicate with a client on a 2 hour task. Why would you want a junior to be the public face of your company?

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#587

Post by fooblaster »

martin82 wrote: post #585
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

[flagged]

why exactly do you need a deity to tell you to love your fellow man? Do you need god in your life to want to love your children? I think this is not quite right. I don't expect that the desire to create these tools independent of outcome in the valley is simply about greed , and for companies like anthropic, the ability to use AGI fear as a means to drive investment in themselves from VC class that lives the idea of obliterating human labor. We need less money in tech - we'll probably get it soon enough.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#588

Post by gwd »

listenallyall wrote: post #553
gwd wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, it's not unlikely that the dentist is the owner. And in any case, when you have a small system of less than 150 people, it's easy enough for a handful of people to see what's actually going on. Once you get to something in the thousands or tens of thousands, you just have spreadsheets; and anything that doesn't show up in that spreadsheet might as well not exist. Furthermore, you have competing business…

Problem with this analogy is that software development != revenue. The developers and IT are a cost center. So yea in a huge org one of the goals is to reduce costs (admin) spent on supporting a cost center. Doctors generate revenue directly and it can all be traced, so even an extra 20 minutes out of their day doing admin stuff instead of one more patient or procedure is easily noticeable, and affects revenue direct…

You mean, there's a 1-1 correlation between the amount of pointless admin a doctor has to do and the number of patients he sees (and thus the revenue of the clinic). It should be visible on the spreadsheet. Whereas, there's not a 1-1 correlation between the pointless admin a software engineer has to do and the number of paying customers a company gets.

But then, why do large orgs try to "save costs" by having doctors do admin work? Somehow the wrong numbers get onto the spreadsheet. Size of the organization -- distance between the person looking at the spreadsheet and the reality of people doing the work -- likely plays a big part in that.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#589

Post by haritha-j »

dredmorbius wrote: post #524
haritha-j wrote: post #326

Horses pull carts. Chessbots play chess. Humans do lots of things. Equivalence in one thing is not equivalence in the vast collection of things we do.

AI seems capable of doing lots of things, particularly in comparison to domain-specific programming or even domain-specific AI. Your critique doesn't seem so powerful as you might suppose.

Capable yes, but human equivalence comes at different times, which means AI human equivalnce to humans in general will be staggered, and not a sudden cliff as the author claims. But in all fairness I don't imagine this to be a powerful critique, I wouldn't be at all shocked if I'm wrong.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#590

Post by stuaxo »

martin82 wrote: post #585
UncleMeat wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops. Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create…

[flagged]

We don't need religion for that, humanism exists a way of living for instance.

I don't think (most) people treat science "as a religion".

Some tech leaders seem to have swap Ayn Rand (who if you look at the early days definitely acted like a cult leader), to this AI doomer cult, and as a result seem to be acting terribly.

Religion was much wider spread in the 1800s, but that didn't stop industrialists acting terribly.

I don't think the theory holds water at all.

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