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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#801

Post by rogerrogerr »

vlapec wrote: post #440
ericmcer wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is part of why I am not... too worried as an engineer? Like years of manually studying, fixing and reviewing code is experience that only pre ~2020 devs will have. The intuitive/tacit knowledge that lets you look at code and "feel" that something is off with it cannot really be gained when using Claude Code, it takes just 1000s of hours of tinkering. It will suck if the job shifts to reviewing and owning whateve…

> but I don't really know how effective new juniors are going to be. True. Pretty soon, pre-AI devs may be the COBOL/Fortran engineers of this era: niche and hard to replace.

And there are, like, six of them.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#802

Post by throwthrowuknow »

DavidPiper wrote: post #790
throwthrowuknow wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is understandable but not knowing makes it worse for purposes of discussion since we have to assume the most likely case rather than an exceptional one.

Who said AI taking your job is "the most likely" case? Even by those extreme estimates of 30% unemployment or whatever - that still leaves ~65% of jobs not lost to AI.

I was referring to the job

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#803

Post by Eisenstein »

econ wrote: post #779
Eisenstein wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have humans ever had a grand plan for society and succeeded in carrying it out such that the desired goal was reached? I'm not talking about something like the Marshall plan, which was a reaction to previous failed attempts and was created during an urgent need for such action, but a plan where a group of people figured out the best course of action, despite humanity existing in a different paradigm, and then enacted…

I never got to a full plan but over the decades I had many creative ideas that try to be good but might not be. The interesting pattern is that few people are curious enough to thing (or help think) about it. Best most can do is find flaws or state it will never happen. Never is a long time and grand plans need to be executed for their real flaws to appear. The kind of flaws that are never what we thought in advance,…

The point I was making was more that trying to proactively shape society for some goal will always miss something critical and fail in a spectacular way. Look at Communism or the neocons of Bush Jr era with the Iraq invasion. It sounds smart on paper but when you execute it then it falls apart with tremendous human cost, and the people who are doing it refuse to acknowledge it until they are physically removed from the levers of power.

Now that I think about it though, it is more to do with inflexibility of the plan, rather than having a plan itself. If you are working off of a ideological commitment, rather than setting an end goal with a fuzzy time frame and a loose path to get there, then that's when you land in trouble.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#804

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #612
munificent wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

> Blue collar jobs are already gone This isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

[deleted]

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#805

Post by sneak2 »

sneak wrote: post #612
munificent wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future. * They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse. * In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had. * Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before…

> Blue collar jobs are already gone This isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

Stop spam calling people you harasser

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#806

Post by koonsolo »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #800
koonsolo wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When kids learn calculation, they indeed are not allowed to use a calculator. Same is true for your field now. When kids learn things the AI already knows, it's clear they can't use the AI. If you want them to become smarter than the AI, they will have to pass through a period where they are dumber than the AI, and it's clear at that point they can't use it. AI raised the bar, that's all. But it's still a bar that ca…

> it's still a bar that can be passed with human intelligence Can you expand on this?

As a developer becomes better, they become better than an LLM, being able to deal with more complex things than what an LLM can handle. Some people will not be able to pass it, but others will.

When there will ever be AGI (I don't think this can be achieved with the current architecture, it needs another AI breakthrough), then we might not be able to surpass it, much like chess currently.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#807

Post by Saline9515 »

marxisttemp wrote: post #684
Saline9515 wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Primogeniture makes sense in a world where odds that you arrive at the adult age are rather low, due to the high risk of death from illness and injuries. The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.

Many discriminatory policies could be considered rational. It is rational for jobs to discriminate against handicapped people who require extra affordances to be able to do the same job (for example, wheelchair ramps). “Fair” is a much trickier beast! My favorite approach to conceptualizing fairness is Rawls’ veil of ignorance: if you were going to be placed as a random member of society, rather than your current pos…

Things like inclusion and other theories such as the one you describe are only possible in rich and technology-advanced societies. And are vulnerable to groups chosing to play against the whole society.

When you have to struggle for life, discriminating against some categories, such as disabled people is necessary for the whole group to survive. Animals do it, and humans in antiquity did it too, out of necessity. It's actually how evolution happens. Humans still do it to some extent when they choose how to mate : they discriminate.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#808

Post by Unai »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #498
Unai wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the other hand, shouldn't it be the objective of humanity to not HAVE to work for the most basic survival and to fit into society? Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.

It’s automating the wrong thing. I want my ai to do dishes and laundry so I can write, draw, do deep cognitive work. Not for it to do cognitive work and write and draw while I don dishes and laundry.

I don't want to be rude, but I find it ironic that your comment about cognitive work is a copypasted tweet that doesn't even make sense in this context.

I'm precisely talking about automating work so people can write, and draw, and whatever.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#809

Post by econ »

Eisenstein wrote: post #803
econ wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got to a full plan but over the decades I had many creative ideas that try to be good but might not be. The interesting pattern is that few people are curious enough to thing (or help think) about it. Best most can do is find flaws or state it will never happen. Never is a long time and grand plans need to be executed for their real flaws to appear. The kind of flaws that are never what we thought in advance,…

The point I was making was more that trying to proactively shape society for some goal will always miss something critical and fail in a spectacular way. Look at Communism or the neocons of Bush Jr era with the Iraq invasion. It sounds smart on paper but when you execute it then it falls apart with tremendous human cost, and the people who are doing it refuse to acknowledge it until they are physically removed from t…

Adaptation is good but it might turn reactionary if not populist. You also want to limit experimentation to measure results. Like when you change few or many lines of code and performance changes.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#810

Post by xnx »

armonster wrote: post #46
baal80spam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the cl…

Love the car. Hate the drivers. Soon we'll be able to get 100% of the benefit of cars (anytime anywhere private transportation), with almost none of the drawbacks (time waste, safety, cost, pollution, traffic, parking).
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