[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Does AI progress also fill you with dread?
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Ask HN: Does AI progress also fill you with dread?
I don't think I've felt hopeful a single time since I saw what
ChatGPT was capable of. Make no mistake, I find the technology
incredible and fascinating - it's a monumental achievement. I grew
up dreaming that I'd get to see AGI, and I feel like now we're
close, if not already there. But when I think about the world that
this tech is coming out to, whose hands it will end up in, and the
rhetoric from those people (e.g. this Paul Graham tweet from a few
days ago [0]), I'm filled with nothing but dread. I have
essentially zero faith that this will lead to better outcomes for
most people. Instead I expect a massive new consolidation of
wealth, and a lot of new misery for many people put out of work by
AI. Less work for humans should mean good news, but we haven't yet
built a world that can safely handle that reduction in work
humanely. Do you feel the same way? I especially want to hear from
you if you don't - I would be more than happy to be dissuaded from
this frankly quite apocalyptic view. [0]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33879690
Author : dejawu
Score : 18 points
Date : 2022-12-08 20:46 UTC (2 hours ago)
| willio58 wrote:
| It's easy to feel dread from it. I totally resonate with that. I
| do think that PG's tweet there is pretty weird and disconnected
| from reality too. He claims that founders deserve to be rich. And
| his proof comes from AI making employees obsolete.
|
| The thing I'm hoping for is that as we as a society lose the need
| for people to work through automation, the vast majority will
| begin to recognize that the top 1% of earners in fact do not
| inherently deserve to hoard wealth and that the only true
| solution to so many of society's issues is to spread the wealth
| by closing loopholes and upping taxes massively.
|
| In other words, being born to the right parents with the right
| genes and the right social standing and being at the right place
| at the right time with the right product does not mean that you
| deserve to keep all of the value from the company you create in
| perpetuity. AI advancements don't mean that you have any more
| claim to that.
|
| Eventually, we need to detach ourselves from money and status as
| a society. That is the only way we will become happy.
| ldh0011 wrote:
| I have huge respect for PG as an engineer but his political
| views sometimes seem pretty questionable. Moral desert is a
| complicated concept and I'm not sure that arguing the people
| who created Instagram, possibly a net negative for society,
| _deserve_ be worth hundreds of millions just because they could
| sell their company for a billion is the best argument. Likewise
| this current wave of AI depends on a monumental amount of labor
| from mostly uncredited artists, programmers, authors, etc. To
| say that someone does _all the work_ in prompting an AI to
| "create company" seems ridiculous.
| facorreia wrote:
| Like any other technology before it, these ML models for
| generating derivative content will create benefits, and they will
| also be abused in the most dystopian ways possible to make the
| rich richer.
| crashmurphy wrote:
| The future is truly dark here. I've seen lots of workflows
| showing some truly effective ways to use AI like this, especially
| in data, db, programming. But the the downside, for me, is not
| worth any of the positives.
|
| AI like this will become popular since it allows people to not
| make an effort. It is inevitable. You can already generate
| art/painting NOT made by someone. You can write articles, mainly
| using AI.
|
| Soon, content sites will be full of articles not written by a
| human, but generated by human. There will be no irony, humour or
| clever use of words or phrases. This use of AI is an insult to
| the creative human mind. The AI has the potential to make people
| even more lazy and stupid as they start to trust the output
| blindly.
| bombcar wrote:
| No, because what I do and what people I know do can't be done by
| this, but they could perhaps be assisted by it.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I don't think we are close to AGI but I dread what tools like
| this mean for bad actors. The internet is going to become more
| polluted with garbage.
| wruza wrote:
| If the hypothesis on ever increasing rate of technology is
| correct, then it's probably just a first of a multitude of
| advancements that will change the "world" much faster than it can
| adapt or retain control.
|
| Personally I don't think that slow growing incongruously
| preprogrammed meatsacks can have any sensible place in the
| future. I dislike to be one and I (hopelessly) wait for some sort
| of upload.
|
| We'll suffer for a while, rich will get richer for a while, then
| one day all this meaty nonsense will become irrelevant for good.
| dejawu wrote:
| I mean, I for one can't wait to be free of my meat prison, and
| a future where all of us can be sure seems nice. But we have no
| guarantee that all of us are going to be brought along for the
| ride. Who's to say that the rich (who are going to be the ones
| in control of who gets uploaded) won't just upload the people
| who can pay them and leave the rest of us behind to suffer?
| akiselev wrote:
| I have mixed feelings on AI: on the one hand I'm afraid for many
| industries like copy writing, graphic design, etc but on the
| other hand, I'm slowly watching some of the most annoying parts
| of being a software engineer evaporate.
|
| Developers will be fine because software engineering is an arms
| race - a rather unique position to be in as a professional. I saw
| this play out during the 2000s offshoring scare when many of us
| thought we'd get outsourced to India. Instead of getting
| outsourced, the industry exploded in size globally and everything
| that made engineers more productive also made them a bigger
| threat to competitors, forcing everyone to hire or die.
|
| Businesses only need so much copy or graphic design, but the
| second a competitors gains a competitive advantage via software
| they have to respond in kind - even if it's a marginal advantage
| - because software costs so little to scale out. As the tech debt
| and the revenue that depends on it grows, the baseline number of
| staff required for maintenance and upkeep grows because our job
| is to manage the complexity.
|
| I think software is going to continue eating the world at an
| accelerated pace because AI opens up the uncanny valley: software
| that is too difficult to implement using human developers writing
| heuristics but not so difficult it requires artificial general
| intelligence. This is just the beginning and there is still a
| _lot_ of work to do - all the lumberyards in my area still use
| DOS computers!
| dflock wrote:
| I feel rather nervous about the bar for software development
| being raised over my head by ML - something that has already
| happened to human language translators, where the entire industry
| went away, more or less. All the lower paying customers just
| switched to Google Translate almost overnight, taking away almost
| all the business - the lower tiers of the pyramid of customers.
|
| This is currently happening to digital artists and writers. I
| think that the only real barrier to this happening in software is
| that problem specification is hard, deployment is hard &
| maintenance is hard. But look at chatgpt - I can see a very short
| line between that and a system that can produce software systems
| on demand like stable diffusion produces images - then auto-
| deploy the winner to the cloud.
|
| And it's probably cloud providers who will end up owning all this
| - AWS & GCP will integrate this and have it deploy to your cloud
| account. There will be plenty of edge cases where it doesn't work
| and plenty of screw-ups, but cheaper & easier almost always wins.
|
| You're a founder with an idea. Do you need a technical co-
| founder? No - you just chat with AWS AutoCode until it makes you
| a prototype that matches what you wanted and works - and off you
| go. You get some ML thing to write your SEO & marketing copy,
| paste it into the box.
|
| Like most tech, there are lots of advantages to this, but also
| lots of disadvantages. If you haven't read this, you should:
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 - it's not happening as
| described here, but quite a bit of that stuff has started
| happening, one way or another.
|
| So, short term, white collar, creative, developers slowly/rapidly
| have the bar raised above their heads - or the cost dropped below
| their feet and are left out to dry.
|
| Longer term, what happens when Capital doesn't need Labour any
| more? Is it worth teaching my kid to code? Is it worth teaching
| them _anything_?
|
| I don't know, but I do know that it fills me with foreboding.
| dejawu wrote:
| As it happens, a friend recommended me the Manna story almost a
| decade ago! It's been on my mind for the last couple weeks, and
| I definitely think if we're not careful and deliberate about
| how we shape our future, we will definitely end up like the
| first half of that story. Unfortunately, it seems to me like
| that is exactly what the powerful want. When capital doesn't
| need labor anymore, they will happily let the rest of us
| starve.
| wruza wrote:
| _you just chat with AWS AutoCode until it makes you a prototype
| that matches what you wanted and works - and off you go. You
| get some ML thing to write your SEO & marketing copy, paste it
| into the box_
|
| Honestly this sounds like a sci-fi object synthesizer used by a
| peasant to make better horseshoes. Ask (naively, just for
| starters) why AWS AutoBusiness can't just parse the internet
| and create all services it needs without you, using direct user
| feedback.
| dflock wrote:
| One step at a time.
| mdolon wrote:
| The recent progress is truly something else. My friends who are
| in tech and/or are founders have been talking about this a lot --
| it feels palpable, as if there's something in the air.
|
| I don't feel dread but I do feel slight unease. I also feel
| excitement because I am still optimistic about the future, and
| feel that if we are lucky, we may get to witness something
| special.
|
| EDIT: To all of those arguing GPT or ChatGPT answers are not
| great, try using it to write some code before you make any
| judgement.
| TillE wrote:
| As I've said before, it's a language processor, not a magic box.
| I'm extremely skeptical of claims that we'll see radical
| improvements in the near future, I've seen no basis for that.
|
| It can do some really cool things for sure, but it can't do work
| of any real complexity. Try to make it do your actual work, not a
| toy problem. The best I've gotten is a basic starting point,
| variations on common templates.
| dflock wrote:
| Right, but these are general language models, just big ones -
| and they seem to be progressing quickly. People have started
| working on more specific systems:
| https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-a...
|
| Once you have something, you can iterate on it, raising the
| bar. It seems to be accelerating and doesn't feel like it'll be
| that long before the bar get's raised over our heads.
| mdolon wrote:
| Github Copilot writes 50% of the code I write now, perhaps
| more. I'd say that's actual work.
| maxilevi wrote:
| What type of work do you do?
| vonsydov wrote:
| vonsydov wrote:
| dqpb wrote:
| From a programmers perspective, I just don't see how AI will make
| us run out of work. You can always just step up one layer of
| abstraction and have a whole new field of work available to you.
| anyonecancode wrote:
| This. For instance, in my many years of programming, I've never
| had to manually allocate memory. There are still plenty of
| areas of programming where you have to do that, but I've had a
| pretty successful career so far without needing to. Thank you
| higher level programming languages.
|
| If AI works out, there's all kinds of things future programmers
| won't generally have to do (and all kinds of new programming
| paradigms that will be created), even as some of the types of
| programming we do now still be relevant in some cases (tuning
| the model like tuning the JVM?). If AI doesn't work out quite
| like that -- unable to truly lever up up the abstraction ladder
| -- well auto-suggest github copilot stuff will give us nicer,
| more powerful IDEs even if they don't end up allowing new
| programming paradigms.
| bluepoint wrote:
| Not really. I saw so many posts on ChatGPT these days that I went
| to try it out.
|
| Input> There are 3 events, A, B and C. They happen at different
| times. Event A happens after event B. Can you give me all the
| possible orderings of the three events?
|
| Output> Sure! There are six possible orderings of the three
| events, A, B, and C. These are:
|
| A, B, C
|
| B, A, C
|
| B, C, A
|
| C, B, A
|
| A, C, B
|
| C, A, B
|
| In each of these orderings, event A happens after event B. It is
| worth noting that the orderings are different depending on
| whether event C happens before or after event A. In order, the
| possible orderings where event C happens before event A are:
|
| B, C, A
|
| C, B, A
|
| C, A, B
|
| And the possible orderings where event C happens after event A
| are:
|
| A, B, C
|
| B, A, C
|
| A, C, B
|
| I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
|
| Like someone here said: it is the plausible idiot. It is nice
| that it can produce text, but I am not sure I can trust it much
| or worry that it will replace even mindless jobs.
| jacknobody wrote:
| :) a pity it's a little bit hard to see where the output ends
| and your post-output comments begin. I do suppose you noticed
| that the output is in error! Obviously too plausible - some
| poor idiot might trust this "intelligence".
| nharada wrote:
| I agree that it's almost certain that AI will just concentrate
| wealth and power. I observed years ago that the reason
| billionaires were so scared of A(G)I is that it was basically the
| only thing on the horizon that could disrupt their wealth/power
| in any meaningful way.
|
| Now that those same billionaires have invested enough of a stake
| into AI, they seem a lot less concerned.
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