I wish GPT4 had never happened • Hacker News Board

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#851

Post by esalman » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

I have an optimistic, almost desperate take on this.

The AI generated content will scale and proliferate so much that it will put a premium on verified, curated human-generated content.

Initially I was a ChatGPT skeptic. Then I started using it on a regular basis and unlocked more potential. Now I almost feel selfish in safeguarding my secret prompts that is helping me be productive and acquire new skills. I personally am quite confident that I will survive the AI apocalypse. But for the same reason, I am afraid for a lot of people who I know will perish.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#852

Post by Nifty3929 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

s__s wrote: post #764

Nifty3929 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly! Imagine as a thought experiment that we can produce everything we do today, but with zero labor due to automation. This would be a miracle for humanity! For one thing, we could use all our free time however we want, including working to produce still more stuff, or just go hiking. The real problem is how to distribute the goods and services produced - and there a UBI is probably the right answer. Machin…

As soon as you rely on UBI to live you’ve lost all control of your own life. Your a child with an allowance. The state has absolute authority over you. The government is already controlled and influenced primarily by nefarious interests. I can’t even begin to imagine how nasty it gets when the entire population relies on them for mere sustenance.

It doesn't have to be that way. For one thing, you don't need to means test it. Just give the same amount of money to everyone. Then if you work you still end up ahead. So no dis-incentive to work. For another, if implemented properly the amount would go down if production declined, or up if production increases. This way it's self-correcting in the aggregate. As people leave the workforce, the UBI goes down, nudging some people at the margin to go back to work.

But this still leaves people free to choose for themselves, without interference from the government.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#853

Post by akra » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

Entinel wrote: post #83

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 .

This is a nice thought that isn't going to happen. AI will eliminate jobs and rich people will get richer while also widening the moat so you can't use that same tech to compete.

Its really a function of who is paying for the tech, who owns it and what do they want to do with it.

The only reason the middle class was born was because trained workers could pull their labor and affect upper class wealth. They had power. AI takes that power away.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#854

Post by akra » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 10:43 PM UTC

safety1st wrote: post #146

Gud wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be working without it being your only source of income. If everybody was given let’s say ten million dollars in capital (and endless social security), those who wanted could work. The rest of us wouldn’t mind letting the machines do the work.

As any student who takes Econ 101, or reads history, (or has heard of a country called Argentina? or has opened a newspaper during the past year of post-Covid inflation?) will learn, this assumption is factually incorrect. If you give everyone ten million dollars, there will be a phenomenal and rapid increase in the price of goods, especially consumer staples (since everyone got that money, and everyone buys staples)…

The problem is often technology becomes a barrier to entry especially when it requires scale to operate. AI is the extreme example of this kind of technology - needs large compute, and large amounts of data, and requires a actor with enough capital to create it. In effect a lot of modern technology has helped create monopolies.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#855

Post by simonh » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC

ChatGTP wrote: post #842

zamnos wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that USA's brand of late-stage capitalism is even considered capitalism is an even more damning indictment of our education system. Somewhere between Feudalism and Karl Marx, Adam Smith is spinning in his grave. How much we don't have capitalism and are living, globally, under an oligopoly, replete with robber barons in tech clothes; one can only laugh at. The amount of misery under "capitalism" says there's…

I’d say this AI and all those that follow are children of capitalism. It’s all about consolidating power and wealth as quickly as possible. Now we’re in an AI arms race. Sounds terrifying? It is. America might tear itself apart if it doesn’t slow down a bit. Right now, there’s no one behind the wheel.

It actually seems to be about distributing power as much as possible. The effort right now with LLMs such as by Microsoft and Google is to rush to make them available to as many people as possible as cheaply as possible, even for free. That’s because this way they can create the maximum amount of value as efficiently as possible, with MS and Google skimming off the top of it all through advertising.

I’m sure premium private services will be a thing, but right now the sheer scale of the mass market seems to be a powerful democratising force. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#856

Post by RecycledEle » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 10:52 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #730

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.

Robotics will rapidly pick up improved capabilities. With so many people out of work and so much automation being consolidated, what do you think all the entrepreneurs and researchers will look to next? It will be breakthroughs and efficiency improvements in robotics . I think this "learn a trade" plan has maybe 5 years max. By then the trades will also be automated.

I think trades will be around for a century. The problem is dealing with crazy existing stuff, like houses that are not to code and have been repaired by the last 3 owners, all of whom made it up as they went. Good trades people are able to figure out what the last idiot was thinking, know how it is supposed to work, and can make it work (without callbacks) for a long time with minimal intervention.

I remember a college professor who cashed out his retirement in the mid-1990's to start his own online college. He went broke in less than a decade, and we still have not removed professors from the colleges.

As a teacher, I do think that ChatGPT will replace most textbooks and teachers, but I don't know how long that will take.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#857

Post by RecycledEle » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

I doubt the person the article is about will ever see this comment amount the hundreds of pages of economic and political gripes, but here is their solution anyway:

If your job is impacted by AI, do not give up. Learn to use the AI to do your job better. Become a 10x worker using AI.

In the early 1980's, spreadsheets displaced accountants. The average accountant lost their job. The ones who came out on top over that decade learned to use spreadsheets early, and made themselves more productive. If the IRS fired everyone who was spreadsheet friendly, the recently fired spreadsheet gurus started small businesses or got jobs quickly. Eventually productivity won out over dogma, even at the IRS.

I'm a teacher. I can see GPTs replacing text books and most teachers. I'm going to be a 10x teacher when I go back to school in August. I will have certifications I got by studying with a GPT. I will have class modules and web sites I built using GPTs. I will be more ready than ever to help the kids. Then I'm going to show them how a GPT can answer their questions, so they rarely need me.

Don't wait for an AI to take your job. Become a 10x whatever you are using AI. Priya (the person the article is about) should become a 10x biotech girl.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#858

Post by robomartin » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 11:08 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #759

robomartin wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience with it is that the more knowledgeable I am at the domain, the more useful it is. Exactly right. I made this argument in an unrelated thread: I gave an example of testing ChatGPT by asking it to write CRC calculation code in ARM assembler. The code worked. It wasn’t as good as mine (slower, inefficient), yet, as you said, as a starting point, it would have been fine. “This is today, mid 2023. Give it…

But if we find any web page or document that has your knowledge of what makes ARM code fast and feed that into GPT4 (up to say 80kb of assembly with short comments) along with the task then we don't need you to do that anymore. AI in fact can use any tool, including AI tools, to deliver value in almost any domain. So the problem with the comments here in this thread is that the obvious conclusion is that we need some…

> In fact due to the short-sightedness of comments like yours I am tempted to use the AI programming tool I am developing to try to build an ARM assembler expert business and sell it as Robo Martin the Master ARM Assembly Bot.

First rule of having a conversation between humans: You can't have a conversation if you resort to insults. Not only insults, but some sort of weird expression of vindictive intent? Pipe down. OK?

Evolution is what got humanity here. And, yes, evolution will produce AI that will be far more capable than us at many levels and across a wide range of domains. That is inevitable.

However, there will be boundaries for quite some time. Areas where AI will have trouble inserting itself into. Don't ask me what these areas might be. I have some ideas and thoughts on this, yet, I don't really know. In other words, I feel like that conversation would be pointless...just like trying to predict the future.

There might also be lots of areas where AI will not be trusted for a range of reasons.

As a general statement, I will still hold to the belief that one of the key differentiators as AI becomes more widely useful will be the experience and knowledge of the humans wielding it. We might also see an advantage in the realm of creativity. Today? Absolutely. Ten years from now? Don't know.

Can someone create a better ARM assembler writer, one that might beat most experienced programmers across a range of criteria? Sure. Of course. These are mechanical things in the end. There are books, tons of them, written about how to write better code in assembler. If someone did, it better not be a commercial enterprise, making money from writing assembler code isn't likely to be a thing, particularly when one can already do a decent job of it for free.

My prediction is that the divide will have experienced and widely knowledgeable people on one side and everyone else on the other. Part of engineering is knowing what questions to ask, when to ask them and when they might be relevant. This becomes particularly complex the more multidisciplinary a project might be. This is where, for now, experience wins.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#859

Post by akra » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 11:15 PM UTC

brigadier132 wrote: post #216

GPT4 is scary, it portends a future that many of us thought would never happen a year or two ago. We all think about the potential risks, about the kind of power this kind of mechanical intelligence can grant evil individuals or just the everyday people that will be "left behind". But even so I think we can't afford NOT to have this kind of development if we want to survive as a species. If we want our lives to impro…

> And I think the risks from AI are overblown, is AI really more dangerous than the invention of gunpowder, electricity, and of course the nuclear bomb? I don't think so.

It might just be. Those inventions did destabilize society quite significantly. On the nuclear bomb I'm not sure we've seen how that one plays out quite yet. Mutually assured destruction kinda stalling that one. Maybe AI can be more selective as a weapon and easier to employ? In the next war we could be living the next AI sci-fi movie.

Unintended consequences are hard to predict in advance. Who would of ever thought the first professions to be at risk of software automators were going to be the software professionals themselves 10 years back? People were predicting the end of menial blue collar jobs and replacement with robots and automation. "Jobs of the future" were white collar, at least that was the narrative a decade or so ago. Now more than one comment on this forum (and I believe given human nature and the nature of power they are correct) thinking they need to change into blue collar jobs or become teachers, etc.

Sadly my personal opinion as I've gotten older is that technologists (I was one) are often the most idealistic naive of them all. The trades people I know when I talk to them laugh at ChatGPT - serves them right is the general reaction. Its that quality that often leads them to deny what an average human with power/wealth will do with AI.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#860

Post by pb7 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 11:29 PM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #569

vc8f6vVV wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I your work is not producing anything valuable for other people it's void and you will get bored pretty fast, it's a human nature. If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need. No, it doesn't have to be a work "for a company", but if you can't "make money off of this" it probably means your "work" is only relevant to you, or somebody els…

> If it does you can always find a way to monetize it as people need it and ready to share their wealth for something they need I disagree with this entirely. If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc... We ask what the moat is around it. There are many useful things you can do that you won…

>If this was true, the main question we would ask in a business is whether or not the output was useful. We don't ask that, we ask if it's "sustainable", "profitable", etc...

To be fair, we do ask that: if you have no revenue, then you don't have a business, because the output is not useful. An output can be both useful and not sustainable. Giving away $100 to everyone that high fives you is not sustainable, for example, even though it's very useful to the recipient. It's certainly not profitable.