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"AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

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Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#81

Post by bluefirebrand »

eranation wrote: post #73
bluefirebrand wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI Ok, what about an Average doctor with an AI? Or how about a Bad doctor with an AI? AI assisted medcare will be good if it catches some amount of misdiagnoses AI will be terrible if it winds up reinforcing misdiagnoses My suspicion is that AI will act as a force multiplier to some extent, more than a safety net Yes,…

I believe that AI will help close the gap (e.g. a bad doctor with AI will be in average, better than just a bad doctor)

Maybe one day, but not right now

My experience with the current stuff on the market is you get out what you put in

If you put in a very detailed and high quality, precisely defined question and also provide a framework for how you would like it to reason and execute a task, then you can get out a pretty good response

But the less effort you put in the less accurate the outcome is

If a bad doctor is someone who puts in less effort, is less precise, and less detail oriented, it's difficult to see how AI improves on the situation at all

Especially current iterations of AI that don't really prompt the users for more details or recognize when users need to be more precise

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#82

Post by saubeidl »

lenerdenator wrote: post #24

It's also a great example of why tech executives shouldn't be trusted, at all. "My thing will break our entire economy. I'm still gonna build it, though." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

Capitalism is a doomsday cult and these people are its prophets.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#83

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

theSherwood wrote: post #60

The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technol…

Let me give my two cents. I remember when people used to think ai models are all the rage and one day we are gonna get super intelligence.

I am not sure If we can call the current sota models that. Maybe, maybe not. But a little disappointing.

Now everyones saying that ai agents are the hype and the productivity gains are in that, the Darwin Gödel paper which was recently released for example.

On the same day (yesterday), hn top page had an ai blog by some fly.io and the top comment was worried about ai excelling and that as devs we should do something as he was concerned what if companies reach the intelligence hype that they are saying.

On the same day, builder.ai turned out to be actually Indians.

The companies are most likely giving us hype because we are giving them valuation. The hype seems not worth it. Everyones saying that all models are really good and now all that matters are vibes.

So in all of this, I have taken this.

Trust noone. Or atleast not take things at face value of ai hype companies. I genuinely believe that ai is gonna reach a plateau of sorts at such moment like ours and as someone who tinkers with it. I am genuinely happy at its current scale and I kind of don't want it to grow more I guess, and I kind of think that a plateau might come soon. But maybe not.

I don't think that its analogous to species but maybe that's me being optimistic about future but I genuinely don't want to think too much as it stresses my brain too much and makes evene my present... Well not a present(gift)

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#84

Post by AstroBen »

lz400 wrote: post #32

not all of them, but that's not the issue, the issue is 100 engineers + AI replacing 500 engineers

This assumes the amount of work available is static. If the cost to produce software reduces by 80% then suddenly many more projects are viable, needing more engineers

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#85

Post by uludag »

eranation wrote: post #16

My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…

I've grown to believe the following more extreme (or maybe reasonable) version of what you said:

- A good lawyer with or without AI will likely win in court against a mediocre lawyer with AI

- A good SWE with or without AI will likely ship features faster/safer than a mediocre engineer with AI

- A good doctor with or without AI will save more lives than a mediocre doctor with AI.

I've experimented with this personally, stopping all my usage of AI coding tools for a time, including the autocomplete stuff. I by no means found myself barely treading water, soon to be overtaken by my cybernetically enhanced colleagues. In fact, quite the opposite, nothing really changed.

  - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI
I find even entertaining the opposite conclusion comical. Think of, for example, a world acclaimed heart surgeon. Are people seriously entertaining the idea that a rando with some agentic AI setup could outperform such a surgeon in said field, saving more lives? Is this the level of delusion that some people are at now?

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#86

Post by DSMan195276 »

eranation wrote: post #73
bluefirebrand wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI Ok, what about an Average doctor with an AI? Or how about a Bad doctor with an AI? AI assisted medcare will be good if it catches some amount of misdiagnoses AI will be terrible if it winds up reinforcing misdiagnoses My suspicion is that AI will act as a force multiplier to some extent, more than a safety net Yes,…

I believe that AI will help close the gap (e.g. a bad doctor with AI will be in average, better than just a bad doctor)

IMO the problem is that, at least right now, the AI can't examine the patient itself, it has to be fed information from the doctor. This step means bad doctors are likely to provide the AI with bad information and reduce it's effectiveness (or cause the AI to re-enforce the biases of the doctor by only feeding it the information they see as relevant).

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#87

Post by spacemadness »

some_random wrote: post #58
lenerdenator wrote: post #24

It's also a great example of why tech executives shouldn't be trusted, at all. "My thing will break our entire economy. I'm still gonna build it, though." - statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged

If you believe that breaking the economy is good you're obviously going to do it. If you believe that if you don't break the economy one of your many competitors will, you're obviously going to do it.

At this point it’s going to break the economy anyway if it doesn’t end up breaking the economy as investors are going to retreat and pop the bubble.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#88

Post by mattgreenrocks »

eranation wrote: post #16

My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…

In theory, I agree with this.

However, one constant I've observed over my career: the quality and speed of the work I produce has not significantly contributed to career advancement. I know I'm appreciated for the fact that I don't cause more problems, and I usually make the total number of problems go down. I mention this because if quality/speed was truly valued, I believe I'd see more career-related growth (titles, etc) from it at some point in the last 20 years of my career.

This isn't to say AI won't be helpful. It is, and I use it some. But the whole schtick around, "SWEs must adopt AI or they'll be left behind," reeks of thought-terminating influencer BS. If people had great ways of assessing programmer productivity, we wouldn't need the ceremony-ridden promo culture that we have in some places.

(Arguably most of my career advancement in the last 5 years or so has come mainly from therapy: emotional regulation, holding onto problems that cannot be fixed easily w/o being consumed with trying to fix them or disengaging completely, and applying all that and more to various types of leadership.)

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#89

Post by freedomben »

eranation wrote: post #16

My personal thoughts on this are - A good lawyer + AI will likely win in court against a non lawyer with AI who would likely win in court against just an AI - A good software engineer + AI will ship features faster / safer vs a non engineer with AI, who will beat just AI - A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI As long as a human has a marginal boost to AI…

I think you're missing the spectrum between no jobs being lost and all jobs being lost. I think your first points are correct, but to me that points to some job losses as the good lawyers/doctors/SWEs get more efficient and better, and the lower tier aren't needed anymore and/or aren't worth the salary to employers.

Re: "AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing

#90

Post by ilaksh »

The biggest reason there is such a difference of opinion on this is that people have fundamentally different worldviews. If you have bought into the singularity concept and exponential acceleration of computing performance, then you are likely to believe that we are right on track to shortly have smarter-than-human AI. This is also related to just having a technology-positive versus negative worldview. Many people like to blame technology for humanity's failings when in reality it's a neutral lever. But that comes down to the way people look at the world.

People who don't "believe" in the exponential of computing (even though I find the charts pretty convincing) seem to always assume that AI progress will stop near where it is. With that assumption, the skepticism is reasonable. But it's a poorly informed assumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity#Expo...

I think that some of that gets into somewhat religious territory, but the increasing power and efficiency of compute seems fairly objective. And also the intelligence of LLMs seems to track roughly with their size and amount of training. So this does look like it's about scale. And we continue to increase the scale with innovations and new paradigms. There will likely be a new memory-centric computing paradigm (or maybe multiple) within the next five years that increases efficiency by another two orders of magnitude.

Why can I just throw out a prediction about orders of magnitude? Because we have increased the efficiency and performance by orders of magnitude over and over again throughout the entire history of computing.

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