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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#591

Post by pasquinelli »

aduty wrote: post #488
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical —but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least co…

> Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? My 40-some-odd years on this planet tells me the answer is yes.

you might be right but 40-some-odd years is a tiny amount of time.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#592

Post by klabb3 »

noisy_boy wrote: post #589
klabb3 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. It’s actually worse than that: the AI will not stop and say ”too complex, try in a month with the next SOTA model”. Rather, it will give Bob a plausible looking solution that Bob cannot identify as right or wrong. If Bob is working on an instant feedback problem, it’s ok: he can flag it, try again, ask for help. But if the…

How is that Bob's problem? When he said we need more time to do this properly, he was labelled slow. They pushed him to use AI all day long and told at the all hands that there will be programmers who use AI and those who don't will be left behind. So he said fuck doing it right for the project, let me do it right for myself. Now he got his promotion, they will hire 3 people in a cheaper location to handle various is…

> How is that Bob's problem?

It isn’t. Bob has a different problem: that there are millions of Bobs with access to the same tools, meaning the value of Bobs labor is commodity priced. That may be good for some Bobs and bad for others.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#595

Post by itmitica »

ergl wrote: post #481
itmitica wrote: post #223

Contrarian just for the sake of it. Get on board or stay behind. Whatever good or bad AI brings to the table, it's here to stay. The cat's out of the bag. Might as well enjoy it. Evolution will not stay on your whimsical made-up reality. It will run you over.

Do you have any more platitudes to add so I can fill my dismissive HN comment bingo card?

Heh?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#596

Post by benlivengood »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #353
jnovek wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people who cook professionally are gourmet chefs? I think it ends up that gourmet cooking is so infrequently needed that we don’t require everyone who makes food to do it, just a small group of professionally trained people. Most people who make food for a living work somewhere like McDonald’s and Applebee’s where a high level of skill is not required. There will still be programming specialists in the futur…

That's the problem though: programmers who become the equivalent of McDonald's workers will be paid poorly like McDonald's workers and be treated as disposable like McDonald's workers.

The problem is that mcdonalds workers are treated as disposable.

Countries with proper human rights and labor laws don't do that.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#597

Post by stephbook »

AlexWilkins12 wrote: post #72

Ironically, this article reeks of AI-generated phrases. Lot's of "It's not X, it's Y". eg: - "The failure mode isn't malice. It's convenience", - "You haven't saved time. You've forfeited the experience that the time was supposed to give you." - "But the real threat isn't either of those things. It's quieter, and more boring, and therefore more dangerous. The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not unders…

But here it is, on the front page of HackerNews. It produced exactly the result he wanted.

Maybe he won't be able to blog himself out of a wet paper bag tomorrow, but people seem to think he's a great thinker today. Isn't that all that matters?

(I tried faking some AI style.)

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#598

Post by satvikpendem »

irishcoffee wrote: post #579
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to agree with his precise solution, and in fact I'm not sure whether I do. However, I found the article useful because it got me thinking about the universe of things we could be considering, if we really do think AI is poised to destroy education as we know it.

I don’t know about anyone else here, but college was not educating because I was at college. I did all of the reading and studying on my own. The classes weren’t very interesting, most of my TAs didn’t speak the native language well at all, nor did half the professors. I enjoyed my time, I made a lot of lifelong friends, and figured out how to live on my own. My buddies that enrolled in boot camp instead of college l…

Sounds like you just had terrible professors because most of mine were good and we learned quite a bit in classes, at least I did. I distinctly remember one professor who, every class, would meander discussion over many topics then find a way to bring them all together at the very end, crystalizing all of these disparate thoughts into one cohesive theory. And he did that every single class that semester. It was a marvel to behold.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#600

Post by mcmoor »

maplethorpe wrote: post #226
steveBK123 wrote: post #211

For the people arguing that the output is the code and the faster we generate it the better.. I do wonder where all the novel products produced by 10x devs who are now 100x with LLMs, the “idea guys” who can now produce products from whole clothe without having to hire pesky engineers.. where is the one-man 10 billion dollar startups, etc? We are 3-4 years into this mania and all I see on the other end of it is the L…

I'm waiting for Anthropic to realise they can just set a few thousand agents loose to do just that, and monopolize the entire software market overnight. I'm not sure why they haven't done this yet.

Ive heard someone saying that, Microsoft or Oracle already has hundreds of those 10x engineers for decades now, and what they produce is... current Microsoft and Oracle.
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