751–760 of 920 posts
Humans Need Not Apply - Posted exactly 11 years ago this week. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
Coincidentally, I'm reading your comment while wearing my CGP Grey t-shirt
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I guess the thinking goes like this: Why start a business, get a higher paying job etc if you're getting ~2k€/mo in UBI and can live off of that? Since more people will decide against starting a business or increasing their income, productive activity decreases.
If everyone has 2k/mo then nobody has 2k/mo.
In a sense everybody does have "2k" a month, because we all have the same amount of time to do productive things and exchange with others.
> Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence Why not? This seems to be exactly where we're headed right now, and the current administration seems to be perfectly fine with that trend. If you follow the current logic of AI proponents, you get essentially: (1) Almost all white-collar jobs will be done better or at least faster by AI. (2) The "repugnant concl…
I find it extremely hard to believe that ASI will still require enormous investments in a post-ASI world. The initial investment? Likely. But there have to be more efficient ways to build intelligence, and ASI will figure it out. It did not take trillions of dollars to produce you and I.
Indeed, an alien ethnographer might be forgiven for boggling at the speed and enthusiasm with which we are trading a wealth of the most advanced technology in the known universe for a primitive, wasteful, fragile facsimile of it.
AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…
1. When(if) AGI will arrive. It's likely going to be smeared out over a couple months to years, but relative to everything else, it's a historical blip. This really is the most contention belief with the most variability. It is currently predicted to be 8 years[1].
2. What percentage of jobs will be replaceable with AGI? Current estimates between 80-95% of professions. The remaining professions "culturally require" humans. Think live performance, artisanal goods, in-person care.
3. How quickly will AGI supplant human labor? What is the duration of replacement from inception to saturation? Replacement won't happen evenly, some professions are much easier to replace with AGI, some much more difficult. Let's estimate a 20-30 years horizon for the most stubborn to replace professions.
What we have is a ticking time bomb of labor change at least an order of magnitude greater than the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy or from an industrial economy to a service economy.
Those happened over the course of several generations. Society: culture, education, the legal system, the economy, where able to absorb the changes over 100-200 years. Yet we're talking about a change on the same scale happening 10 times faster - within the timeline of one's professional career. And still, with previous revolutions we had incredible unrest, and social change. Taken as a whole, we'll have possibly the majority of the economy operating outside the territory of society, the legal system, and the existing economy. A kid born on the the "day" AGI arrives will become an adult in a profoundly different world as if born on a farm in 1850 and reaching adulthood in a city in 2000.
1. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...
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I do see this a lot. It's hard to have a reasonable conversation about AI amidst, on the one hand, hype-mongers and boosters talking about how we'll have AGI in 2027 and all jobs are just about to be automated away, and on the other hand, a chorus of people who hate AI so much they have invested their identify in it failing and haven't really updated their priors since ChatGPT came out. Both groups repeat the same se…
> But they're not just "stochastic parrots." They can model the world and reason about it, albeit imperfectly and not like humans do. I've not seen anything from a model to persuade me they're not just stochastic parrots. Maybe I just have higher expectations of stochastic parrots than you do. I agree with you that AI will have a big impact. We're talking about somewhere between "invention of the internet" and "inven…
Early LLMs were like that. That's not what they are now. An LLM got Gold on the Mathematical Olympiad - very difficult math problems that it hadn't seen in advance. You don't do that without some kind of working internal model of mathematics. There is just no way you can get to the right answer by spouting out plausible-sounding sentence completions without understanding what they mean. (If you don't believe me, have a look at the questions.)
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If tier 2 amounts to 95% of the population, then the amount of power currently held by tier 1 is meaningless. It is only power so long as the 95% remain cooperative.
> the amount of power currently held by tier 1 is meaningless. It's happening right now with rich people and lobbies. > It is only power so long as the 95% remain cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption#Contemp... I rest my case.
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I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.
I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these su…
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I do see this a lot. It's hard to have a reasonable conversation about AI amidst, on the one hand, hype-mongers and boosters talking about how we'll have AGI in 2027 and all jobs are just about to be automated away, and on the other hand, a chorus of people who hate AI so much they have invested their identify in it failing and haven't really updated their priors since ChatGPT came out. Both groups repeat the same se…
> But they're not just "stochastic parrots." They can model the world and reason about it, albeit imperfectly and not like humans do. I've not seen anything from a model to persuade me they're not just stochastic parrots. Maybe I just have higher expectations of stochastic parrots than you do. I agree with you that AI will have a big impact. We're talking about somewhere between "invention of the internet" and "inven…
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There are also a bunch of us who do kick the tires very often and are consistently underwhelmed. There are also those of us who have used them substantially, and seen the damage that causes to a codebase in the long run (in part due to the missing gains of having someone who understands the codebase). There are also those of us who just don’t like the interface of chatting with a robot instead of just solving the pro…
There’s really three points mixed up in here. 1) LLMs are controlled by BigCorps who don’t have user’s best interests at heart. 2) I don’t like LLMs and don’t use them because they spoil my feeling of craftsmanship. 3) LLMs can’t be useful to anyone because I “kick the tires” every so often and am underwhelmed. (But what did you actually try? Do tell.) #1 is obviously true and is a problem, but it’s just capitalism.…
After all, I can always pick up LLMs in the future. If a few weeks is long enough for all my priors to become stale, why should I have to start now? Everything I learn will be out of date in a few weeks. Things will only be easier to learn 6, 12, 18 months from now.
Also no where in my post did I say that LLMs can’t be useful to anyone. In fact I said the opposite. If you like LLMs or benefit from them, then you’re probably already using them, in which case I’m not advocating anyone stop. However there are many segments of people who LLMs are not for. No tool is a panacea. I’m just trying to nip and FUD in the butt.
There are so many demands for our attention in the modern world to stay looped in and up to date on everything; I’m just here saying don’t fret. Do what you enjoy. LLMs will be here in 12 months. And again in 24. And 36. You don’t need to care now.
And yes I mentor several juniors (designers and engineers). I do not let them use LLMs for anything and actively discourage them from using LLMs. That is not what I’m trying to do in this post, but for those whose success I am invested in, who ask me for advice, I quite confidently advise against it. At least for now. But that is a separate matter.
EDIT: My exact words from another comment in this thread prior to your comment:
> I’m open to programming with LLMs, and I’m entirely fine with people using them and I’m glad people are happy.
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I don't understand people who say AI isn't useful for coding. Claude Code improved my productivity 10x. I used to put solid 8 hours a day in my remote software engineering job. Now I finish everything in 2 hours and go play with my kids. And my performance is better than before.
I don't understand people who say this. My knee jerk reaction (which I rein in because it's incredibly rude) is always "wow, that person must really suck at programming then". And I try to hold to the conviction that there's another explanation. For me, the vast, vast majority of the time I try to use it, AI slows my work down, it doesn't speed it up. As a result it's incredibly difficult to understand where these su…
Personally I've found that it struggles if you're using a language that is off the beaten path. The more content on the public internet that the model could have consumed, the better it will be.