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AI and the Automation of Work

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Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#71

Post by lazystar »

dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

"as long as"

three simple words that are key here. as long as nothing changes, the algorithms that look to the past to predict the future will remain accurate. as long as.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#72

Post by danmaz74 »

dsign wrote: post #50

It's not ChatGPT what we should be putting in our forecasts, but its successors. And, from what I have been reading, our AI folk are coming with better performers all the time by chaining multiple neural networks, "making modular brains", so to speak. Any argument that starts by saying "ChatGPT is very bad at X, humans will always do X," is flawed IMO. So I think that any job that can be done by a non-human is up for…

"A security guard at an airport can be a a machine gun on wheels" - are you serious? That is a job which is 99.99% about understanding human intentions in confusing and ambiguous situations, and where making a mistake will literally kill people. It's the last job you want to automate with "AI".

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#73

Post by TapWaterBandit »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #69
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be quite surprised if AI (as we've seen so far) threatens manual jobs as these have already been under quite intense pressures to automate for well over a century. The low-hanging fruit IMO are most likely to be anything that is done entirely via/inside a computer. Because interacting in the digital world is much less of an issue than having to deal with digital + physical world like manual jobs do. That's not to…

An autonomous robot cleaning the dishes on its own in an unfamiliar kitchen without breaking anything: how many years? What's your bet?

So you mean like something you can wheel in and install or a humanoid style robot you could use in any kitchen? Cause in theory you're just talking about a dishwasher lol.

If you mean a robot that could clean in any kitchen without breaking anything, I'd say at least 20 years. As in you could move it from kitchen to kitchen with no install needs.

I suppose another way to look at it is this: how many businesses use robot cleaners to vacuum/mop their floors? Because as far as I can tell that is already solved (basically) but it isn't done because the cost/benefit/efficacy just doesn't add up.

What do you think?

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#74

Post by pinkcan »

ChatGTP wrote: post #62
shaunkoh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been incredibly helpful to me. It helped me figure out how to get docker containers setup. It’s even helped me figure out how to run data analysis on graph data. It’s not just made things simpler – it’s made things possible .

[flagged]

anything before a "but" is bullshit

someone just offered feedback on their development experience for free, and all you can say is, "...are you so dumb you need an AI to help you with Docker?"

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#75

Post by IanCal »

climatologist wrote: post #30
pulvinar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to your source, or particular examples, since they (or at least GPT-4) seem to me to be rather decent at planning. E.g., for writing code.

Ask it to write a backtracking sudoku solver with coroutines and/or fibers and let me know how it performs in your language of choice. We are nowhere near generally intelligent software systems.

I have strongly believed the best way of evaluating the state of AI is to look at what people complain it can't do.

It's taken a few short years to go from "keep a coherent story over more than a sentence" to "write a multithreaded sudoku solver in one shot".

Many programmers would fail to do this. I'm not even sure a randomly selected human would understand the question. And I'm wondering if you've setup any loops letting it write tests, search the internet, inspect and debug? If not what you see as an output is essentially it whiteboarding off the top of its "head". Programmers routinely fail to solve simpler things in interviews, and their skills are much narrower than current llms (you can easily argue deeper, but I feel comfortable saying broader).

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#76

Post by js8 »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #39
satisfice wrote: post #32

No one who claims to automate testing ever seems to have a sophisticated understanding of testing. I suspect the urge people have for automating anything comes not from the love and skill they possess for that activity, but rather for the imagined fruits of it. Software testing is easy to fake, which means it’s particularly easy to claim automation accomplished. Therefore, all these people thinking they are going to…

What's the gap between a Co-pilot written test and a human-written test? Are tests written by co-pilot better than no tests? Developers generally hate writing tests, so I suspect more and more unit tests will be generated. I've worked with someone who does this and it seems insane to me, although I never got to see the generated tests they were referring to, so I can't give specifics.

> What's the gap between a Co-pilot written test and a human-written test?

IMHO the gap is that human-written test understands the (unwritten) specification (which might be as simple as "program doesn't crash"), and tests the program against it.

I am of the (pretty radical, it seems) opinion that the (especially unit) tests that just take the code as the specification, instead of having specification coming from elsewhere to test against, are useless. So you cannot build a useful test just out of the code, because you always need to test an implementation against a specification, or, two implementations against each other.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#77

Post by rushingcreek »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64
abhaynayar wrote: post #55

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to g…

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

Founder of Phind here. Hearing something like this really touches me and the team and this is exactly why we do what we do.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#78

Post by jillesvangurp »

The main fallacy with this article is assuming that generative AI is just another tool that we use. But what happens when the tool becomes far more capable intellectually than the person wielding the tool? Why have that person around? What would they do that the AI can't do? We're not there yet of course and short term this dynamic plays out of tools enhancing productivity and lowering cost. But at some point it flips around to the point where an AI can now do anything that we do faster, better, and cheaper.

Of course that kind of thinking is also a bit of a fallacy because there is a third way of some people enhancing themselves with AI to level up their own capabilities. These hybrid/enhanced individuals would be able to complement each other and be able to interface with both the real world and the digital world far more efficiently. We'll be competing with our enhanced future selves. Maybe they'll ditch the wetware at some point but the near future is a hybrid of hardware and wetware.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#79

Post by rahimnathwani »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #78

The main fallacy with this article is assuming that generative AI is just another tool that we use. But what happens when the tool becomes far more capable intellectually than the person wielding the tool? Why have that person around? What would they do that the AI can't do? We're not there yet of course and short term this dynamic plays out of tools enhancing productivity and lowering cost. But at some point it flip…

The article already mentions this objection:

  The really fundamental objection to everything I’ve just said is to ask what would happen if we had a system that didn’t have an error rate, didn’t hallucinate, and really could do anything that people can do. If we had that, then you might not have one accountant using Excel to get the output of ten accountants: you might just have the machine. This time, it really would be be different. Where previous waves of automation meant one person could do more, now you don’t need the person.

Re: AI and the Automation of Work

#80

Post by rahimnathwani »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #64
abhaynayar wrote: post #55

I had bought into the GPT-4 hype. I used GPT-4 on ChatGPT Plus for two months, but then I unsubscribed because I wasn't using it as much as I thought I would. It's certainly a very interesting technology. But in it's current form, I just don't see it replacing most jobs. Will it replace jobs if we scale further? I don't know, but my intuition says no. I feel that we will need some other major breakthroughs in AI to g…

The combination of ChatGPT and Phind helped me, a noob with 8 months of coding knowledge, build an app with real paying users and revenue. I would have never accomplished this on my own, and now I have a working prototype to find co-founders and possible investors.

Please write a blog post about your journey!
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