Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I wish GPT4 had never happened

chaudhry.notion.site

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

711–720 of 1001 posts

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#711

Post by jtode »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #646
qaq wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think people appreciate the mass disruption of a shift like this happening across so many industries all at the same time. This sort of professional shift works when automation comes for a subset of a single sector, but we're looking at an everywhere all at once situation. How many plumbers are we going to need, exactly? I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a res…

Indeed. One of two things is in our future: muscular socialism, or the guillotines.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#712

Post by ilyt »

buu700 wrote: post #669
pavlov wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grandparent comment does contain a definition: “A […] system that […] would make people welcome better AI because they could be confident it would make everyone wealthier” That would be a fair system regardless of the specifics of how it’s achieved.

Here's an idea: a UBI that's pegged to GDP and population. Make it comically small to start, like say 0.25% of GDP split evenly between all citizens. Based on 2021 US stats, that's $176 per person per year. That seems relatively unobjectionable regardless of your politics, even assuming that the % is likely to drift higher over time. With increasingly advanced AI and cheap energy, GDP would rise over the long run ind…

Here is even simpler idea to make that feasible: Start actually taxing the corporations in a way that can't be trivially avoided. And don't tax them less than your own citizens. Maybe tax a bit of income on top of revenue. Maybe tax a bit more if income per employee is on high side.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#713

Post by ilyt »

newaccount74 wrote: post #524
kofejnik wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define “fairly”

Everyone gets as much as they need, everyone contributes as much as they can.

Defined by man that have never worked honest day in his life and lived off family, repeated by people that don't know human nature well enough to know it doesn't work

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#714

Post by kypro »

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 .

Good luck trying to tax AGI companies 95% of profits. Perhaps you could strike but you'll be unemployed.

I guess we'll just have to cross our fingers that Sam Altman and friends will pity us enough to give us some pocket money to survive. That's assuming the AGI created is aligned with our values.

I mean, we can keep hoping that AGI will be a good thing with zero evidence or we can take action to slow progress now so we can proceed with caution.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#715

Post by dns_snek »

hunter-gatherer wrote: post #637
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> But as we lower that bar, the value a computer programmer has may begin to diminish.

As a developer, I feel like it's the opposite. If anything, it's going to raise the bar by replacing low skilled coders who are only good at cheaply producing piles of future tech debt, GPT4 will do that sort of work for 'free'. On the other hand it's going to empower non-programmers to write or debug low complexity scripts on their own, which is great.

I don't believe that any sort of "AI" short of AGI is going to replace developers doing "real work" on even medium complexity codebases. The reason for that is simple - GPT lacks logical reasoning capabilities. It can 'fake' them on the surface level, it might even fake them really well for extremely common problems, but as soon as you prod deeper or tack on an extra requirement or two, it starts spinning in circles indefinitely.

"Real" long-term software development is about taking (often poorly defined) requirements written in natural language, evaluating them in the scope of an existing software system, finding solutions that preserve behavior of the system (without introducing new bugs), and lastly implementing those changes in a way that follows the boundaries and abstractions defined in your system.

A single feature often touches many files at once. During this process you might spot a chance to introduce new abstractions or remove unnecessary ones. Unless you're planning on completely replacing developers with AI, the codebase must remain maintainable by mere mortals after you complete the next 50 revisions using AI that's mindlessly hacking away at your current codebase.

All of this requires logical reasoning capabilities that are, in my opinion, many orders of magnitude outside of GPT4's reach and you need those to maintain a software system for many years - decades even. That's before we get into the day to day communication and coordination effort required to sync with stakeholders, clarify requirements, and so on.

If I had to compare it to the security field, I believe that GPT will replace developers as much as automated vulnerability scanning tools have replaced pentesters. ;)

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#716

Post by ericmcer »

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.

Yeah it will ultimately lead to a better life for everyone but technological disruption has always been totally destructive to the generation it is replacing. Like the coal miners who Obama said should “learn to code”. Getting rid of coal is a huge net win but it sucks for them.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#717

Post by satvikpendem »

ehnto wrote: post #419
ricksunny wrote: post #148

"...has a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and works as biomedical data curator. Her job is to go through scientific papers that publish RNA sequencing data. She understands the design of the experiment and cleans and annotates the data accordingly... Her work requires just enough domain expertise that it is been non-trivial to automate (until now). I think you know where this is headed. The day I got off the GPT4…

That's currently the same issue it has for programming. It takes me longer to transcribe and factcheck the output than it would have for me to just write it from scratch. Writing the code stops being the bottleneck in software pretty quickly, and instead translating and merging business logic into existing software takes the most time.

It works well for statically typed languages though. I use it for Rust and simply copy paste, allowing the compiler to tell me where it's wrong.

For Python or something similar, I wouldn't use it at all.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#718

Post by HyperSane »

mertd wrote: post #655
bayarearefugee wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people appreciate the mass disruption of a shift like this happening across so many industries all at the same time. This sort of professional shift works when automation comes for a subset of a single sector, but we're looking at an everywhere all at once situation. How many plumbers are we going to need, exactly? I also don't think people appreciate the absolute social turmoil that will occur as a res…

People are very good at creating work. Every time tech creates a paradigm shift and people cry that there will be not enough work, the exact opposite happens.

In the US at least we have used every technology that increases productivity to keep hours of labor constant and make the rich richer. Millions of Wal-Mart workers have to do a year of hard labor just to earn the cost of a set of new tires for the CEO's 10th supercar.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#719

Post by dyno12345 »

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.

the beauty of systems that don't actually exist is you can always think through how they would actually work later

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#720

Post by vc8f6vVV »

throwaway8689 wrote: post #551
vc8f6vVV wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider as "productive"? Look at animals in a zoo, do they look productive to you? They have "a universal basic income", they simply don't need to be productive. Humans, just like animals, are productive when they are trying to achieve something (catch food, find mates, and for social animals to establish their position in a society which leads to food, mates etc.). E.g. you are developing OSS -- ask you…

A lot of people have to work two jobs just to afford food and shelter. Granted there are also people trying to live a Champaign lifestyle on a lemonade budget, but how do you address the first group?

This world is not fair, do you know how to fix it? I don't. There are different models with different degrees of fairness, but all have their downsides.
Post reply on HN