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I wish GPT4 had never happened

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Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#631

Post by visarga »

ericbarrett wrote: post #617
surgical_fire wrote: post #156

Funny thing - I've been using ChatGPT as a programming assistant. My experience with it is that the more knowledgeable I am at the domain, the more useful it is. It often generates code that won't compile or won't run correctly, but that sort of goes in the correct direction, enough that I can spot the blunders and refine my questions. Quite often I even learn a few new things when using it to explore libraries and f…

AI is a ratchet. It doesn't die, or retire, or change careers. Once it's good at something, it stays good. Once it gets better at something, it stays better. (If not, the model is disposed of without pity or remorse.) Right now, it may make you better at your job. But your very use of it is training it to do your job. It seems to me that if AI is currently helpful to you, it is likely to eventually replace you. And m…

Every 10 years the software paradigms change so much that you practically have to start over. Some skills carry over, but many don't. LLMs will do the same thing - they will force us to change our approaches.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#632

Post by ACV001 »

HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

This is a general statement withour any substance. Provide an example. Are you talking about communism?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#633

Post by HealthNeed »

ericbarrett wrote: post #617
surgical_fire wrote: post #156

Funny thing - I've been using ChatGPT as a programming assistant. My experience with it is that the more knowledgeable I am at the domain, the more useful it is. It often generates code that won't compile or won't run correctly, but that sort of goes in the correct direction, enough that I can spot the blunders and refine my questions. Quite often I even learn a few new things when using it to explore libraries and f…

AI is a ratchet. It doesn't die, or retire, or change careers. Once it's good at something, it stays good. Once it gets better at something, it stays better. (If not, the model is disposed of without pity or remorse.) Right now, it may make you better at your job. But your very use of it is training it to do your job. It seems to me that if AI is currently helpful to you, it is likely to eventually replace you. And m…

What does "take it seriously" mean? For me, taking it seriously means that I am trying to use it as multiplier to be better at my own job. Is there some better course of action you think we should be taking? I personally do not think it is going anywhere, so I figure I had better be the expert.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#634

Post by pclmulqdq »

fl7305 wrote: post #610
unreal37 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The changing demographics is what causes the retirement age to be increased. In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s. So a retirement age of 65 meant that around half of retirees would die before collecting retirement. Now the average lifespan is 80. And the median age of the population is older than ever. Not really much to do with an "unproductive" population. Except that retirees are unproductive I gues…

> In the 1960's, the average lifespan was in the 60s Yes. At birth. The remaining life expectancy at 30/40/50/60 has not increased nearly as much as you would think from the increase in average lifespan at birth.

It's gone from about 70 for average people in 1920 (when life expectancy was at a local minimum, probably due to pollutants and terrible diet) to about 80, not counting infant mortality. That still means tripling the years in which someone is retired.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#635

Post by nightski »

jerojero wrote: post #614
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I think that's with every system a problem. Not just ours. Wealth distribution has been a challenge since we've moved away from spending our day solely focused on gathering food / farming. Every shock to our current system will take time to adjust.

I wonder if people in Norway are as worried as people in America.

A large portion of Norway's exports and wealth are oil. If anything all the fossil fuels burned creating these AI models probably helps their economy.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#636

Post by famahar »

hparadiz wrote: post #93

I asked GPT4 to write me a simple document. Took like 9 tries and I had to proof read it and make adjustments. And that's with a simple paragraph in a written language. Forget about doing the header and the footer properly. It's silly that I have to spell it out on HN of all places. Writing code is much more complex. There's a reason we call the job "Software Engineer". GPT doesn't know what it doesn't know. It doesn…

I see comments like this a lot. GPT4 isn't very good at those things...yet. Think about the long term. 5 years from now all those things will likely be trivial for the AI to do. Especially as we actually properly integrate them into our codebase and tools. Right now it's in such a primitive state. People on hackernews love to dunk on the use of AI for coding. I think we all need to accept that a new software development paradigm is coming. Probably sooner than you think.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#637

Post by hunter-gatherer »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #616
HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

Personally as a noob programmer, I feel like a superhuman because of GPT-4. Feel like my creativity has been unleashed and I can compete with the big boys.

I think that is where the scare comes from though. It used to be that churning out good code really did take a lot of experience. But as we lower that bar, the value a computer programmer has may begin to diminish. If everyone can spit out 200 lines of code in a day, thrn hiw valuable are you, really?

I analyze malware for a living, and don't consider myself a strong developer, though I can write programs, obviously. As an example, this last week I had a task that I would normally have employed one of our developers to do because they do it better and faster. Instead, I used GPT. I effectively took a couple days of work from someone. This is all fone now becuase it is new, but after a few years managers may start to evaluate output of certain people and question the utility of having duplicative skills on payroll.

To be clear, I'm not actually entirely sure this will happen. I think there was a similar discourse back in the days when excel was making the rounds because it brought "computing" to everyone-and it did. However, it wasn't catastrophic to the developer community in terms of employment.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#638

Post by advael »

etrautmann wrote: post #65
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 .

While true, it seems less likely that we'll somehow solve the myriad political challenges to enable universal income than the possibility that AI tools will cause a further concentration of wealth in a small number of hands. while there's a case for idealism, without some degree of pragmatism we'll be lost on policy or regulation proposals.

Yes, policy needs to be pragmatic in how it ensures that trends toward greater inequality are reversed. In particular, anti-trust regulation, non-means-tested social safety nets (IE government services that allow humans to survive), and meaningful investment in real public infrastructure (Not public-private partnerships, as currently run the internet and the electric grid of most of the United States, for example) seem like good places to start. There is only so much concentration of power that can occur before bloodshed becomes inevitable, and proposals of this kind are attempts to solve problems for people on the ground without anyone needing to overthrow the extant society or perish. Attempts to frame such common-sense measures as attempts to overthrow society themselves are done out of profoundly myopic short-termism

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#639

Post by pydry »

htss2013 wrote: post #601
pydry wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could just stop being economically gaslighted it would help. The economic system can't be simultaneously unproductive enough to require us to keep raising the retirement age and so productive that job loss is a big problem. It is possible that a political war on labor is being waged at both ends.

It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously, because technology doesn't make everything abundant at the same time. That means certain types of labor are abundant and others scarce at the same time as well. There may be a war on certain kinds of labor but having to raise the retirement age and having job losses from tech aren't evidence of it.

>It's possible to have certain things be abundant and other things be scarce simultaneously

This is so obvious it barely merits saying.

>having to raise the retirement age

You do realize that raising the retirement age also doesn't make "everything more abundant at the same time", right?

Yet you internalized a belief that we have to do it when so much of the labor it would produce more of is already abundant.

Why?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#640

Post by spaceguillotine »

qaq wrote: post #629
HyperSane wrote: post #450

The fact that so many people fear loss of income as a result of better AI is a real indictment of our economic system. A better system that more fairly distributed economic productivity would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier instead of just a few people rich enough to be Goa'uld.

Well maybe shift to "real world" professions will occur resulting in us addressing abysmal infrastructure and housing situation. I am looking at picking up a trade because of this coming shift.

i did that, i got injured at work and now can't do physical labor. Trades are hell on the body and bosses will toss you aside without any care. Join a Union if you're gonna go into the trades, i would've had protection and better safety.

I took so many people to the ER for work injuries that were preventable but the bosses skimp on everything.

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