Ripping off Yuval in big style.
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
651–660 of 663 posts
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#652Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the backend, not directly customer facing. Coca cola is two years in running ai ads. Lovable is cash positive, and many of the builder there are too. A few creators are earning a living with suno songs. Not millions mind but they can live off their ai works. If you dont see it happening around you, you're just not looking.
So, a company cutting costs, a tool to let you chatbot faster, and musical slop at scale. This doesn't sound like "creating wealth at unprecedented scale"
imagine how unimaginative one must be to reduce lovable at a chatbot. that or you're not making an argument in good faith.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want another side data point, most people I know both in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in tech or tech-adjacent circles. So yeah, it’s just everyone collectively devaluing human interaction.
I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for everything ...
Just replacing one software with another... That's not really the issue, unless you're talking about hallucinations.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the very least , it takes generations to build up shared traditions and values across a society. If you want an atheistic version of that, you would need to start now and it’s going to take a long time to build.
> If you want an atheistic version of that, you would need to start now and it’s going to take a long time to build. Why do you think we would have to start from zero? Even in highly religious countries not all traditions and values are tied to religion, and even those that are can be disconnected from their religious roots.
I would just say the success rate hasn't been very high so far.
The current evidence suggests that as people have become less religious, society has become more fragmented and individualistic, with less shared values and less sense of community or family.
Shared religious community has been replaced by quality time with screens, not meeting in person in some alternative atheistic community.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you want an atheistic version of that, you would need to start now and it’s going to take a long time to build. Why do you think we would have to start from zero? Even in highly religious countries not all traditions and values are tied to religion, and even those that are can be disconnected from their religious roots.
I would just say the success rate hasn't been very high so far. The current evidence suggests that as people have become less religious, society has become more fragmented and individualistic, with less shared values and less sense of community or family. Shared religious community has been replaced by quality time with screens, not meeting in person in some alternative atheistic community.
I'd say you're mistaking correlation with causation.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#656Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that’s part of the gaslighting. It takes 2 seconds to realize it’s wrong, but people parrot it like Fox News talking points. Every profession attracts people who enjoy it, eg lawyers tend to enjoy adversarial debate. Lots of countries don’t treat their teachers like shit. It’s a choice.
Yeah I'm sure that felt good to say but it's fucking bullshit. I'm not a software dev because it's my calling, I'm a software dev because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't make any money doing anything else. I only briefly considered teaching as a profession (knowing I'd be functionally poor as a result) despite being quite sure I'd enjoy it (I tutored and instructed all through high school and college) because the desire t…
There's an affordability crisis hitting the whole country and getting worse (inflation). It's like a guy who has been stabbed saying "I am ABLE to walk". Not for much longer!
Check this out - https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. Data shows the whole US is increasingly a miserable place to live in. And -- here's the best part -- the worse it gets, the more Americans double down on being shitty selfish evil fucks. Look at you trying very hard not to understand "teachers should be able to afford housing".
Of course it backfires. Crappy educational system => Americans don't understand tariffs => They vote for a guy who trashes the whole economy. That's called karma.
Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on your phone.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the concerns with UBI are (1) it takes away the leverage of a labor force to organize and strike for better benefits or economic conditions, and (2) following the block grant model, can be a trojan horse "benefit" that sets the stage for effectively deleting systems of welfare support that have been historically resilient due to institutional support and being strongly identified with specific constituencies.…
But if you have true UBI you don’t need the rest.
... maybe? it depends on how it's implemented. (and that depends on the legislative purpose.) the usual equality vs equity thing comes to mind. (negative income tax has probably the most desirable properties for this as far as I know.)
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#658Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. > > And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs. I don't mean to pick on your example too much. However, when I worked in financial…
I did qualify it with "most people" because of people like you who enjoy that kind of work :). I would hate that work, but luckily we have all sorts of different people in the world who enjoy different things. I hope you find something that you really enjoy doing.
That's fair enough! Most accountants I crossed paths with dislike the modern type of busy work. Lots of marking up spreadsheets and PDFs rather than crafting journal entries. Luckily for me, I switched into software engineering, and system design scratches that same exact itch. Now I build software for financial auditors to make their work less dreadful, and it's very popular with them because they don't have to do as much of the terrible, modern tasks that have befallen them with advances in accounting tech.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#659Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity... https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
Ctrl-F 'lines', 0 results Ctrl-F 'code', 0 results What is this comment about?
Measuring productivity by number of words written per day is as useless of a measure as number of lines of code written per day
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on what you think jobs and the economy are for, generally. If you think the purpose of the economy is for the economy to be good then it doesn't matter. If you think it exists to serve humanity then... You really wouldn't need to ask the question, I imagine.
The number of humans doesn't exactly serve humanity though either. Both of those variables are mostly irrelevant to actual human happiness and flourishing. In fact as far as I can tell they are actively harmful, for several different reasons.
Unless you live in our current reality where we don't give the money to the people they need to flourish without their having jobs. I don't see us changing that fact any time soon.