Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by ehnto » Sun, Dec 14, 2025, 9:03 AM UTC

jack_pp wrote: post #586

ehnto wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Digital agencies often trust their developers to interface with their clients. These are tight, trusting relationships built between two technical or tech adjacent teams in most cases. To say they are a public face would misunderstand the relationship a bit, both teams have juniors and our juniors have high expectations of professionalism and execution.

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

#662

Post by piekvorst » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 7:37 AM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #501

piekvorst wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crucial observation is the fact that automation has historically been a net creator of jobs, not destroyer.

'Because thing X happened in past it is guaranteed to happen in the future and we should bet society on it instead of trying to you know, plan for the future. Magic jobs will just appear, trust me'

They won’t appear magically, they’d do it because the problem of production is never solved. What I’m trying to say is that AI takeover, if it happens, shouldn’t be feared. It’s appropriate to plan for the transition, not apocalypse.

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

#663

Post by seec » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 10:08 AM UTC

reeredfdfdf wrote: post #221

twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

"The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value." I wish corporations really acted this rationally. At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously handled by those secretaries, pre…

Disagreed. You need more doctors, not useless secretaries. Generating bureaucratic bullshit doesn't make any work go faster; it actually just creates more work at best and, in general, just slows everything down.

It is perfect that the primary stakeholder is responsible of his own bureaucratic impact. This way he'll learn to generate the minimum amount that is viable to be efficient. Otherwise they don't care and generate waste by the metric ton.

Because of the French hospital bureaucratic nightmare, for a simple 15-minute intervention (cyst removal), I had 2 appointments and received 4 different letters by post. Not only did they waste more of my time than necessary (every time you need to wait about 45 minutes before anything happens), but since the physician cannot be duplicated and I had to meet him each time, nothing of value was gained as well.

With modern technologies, secretaries should barely exist. They still do because it's all about the laws and compliance; everyone is protecting his ass first and foremost. Without this, a system without the bureaucracy would be much more efficient. It's how they do it outside the western world basically.