[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you think LLMs will affect society me...
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Ask HN: How do you think LLMs will affect society medium/long term?
I know obviously there is a ton of discussion about GPT-4 in the
main announcement post, and while I'm blown away by a lot of these
capabilities, I honestly don't understand how our capitalist system
will survive this, long term. I'm not a Luddite, but it's pretty
easy for me to see how this will get rid of the need for tons of
jobs. People always love to say "technology replacing people has
been happening since the beginning of time", but the change here
(at least to me) is that the _rate_ by which AI can fill jobs will
(or has?) hit a tipping point where it will be faster than new jobs
will pop up. How do other people feel about this? I've discounted
tons of hype cycles in the past (crypto/Blockchain, Metaverse,
etc.), even in cases where I was wrong (e.g. the importance of
mobile), but this feels at least as consequential as the Internet
to me.
Author : hn_throwaway_99
Score : 23 points
Date : 2023-03-14 22:23 UTC (38 minutes ago)
| [deleted]
| lampshades wrote:
| I spent 20 minutes riding around contemplating my life today
| because I don't see how my current skillset will be relevant by
| the time GPT-10 comes around in the next 10 years.
|
| Maybe I'll go to plumbing school or become an electrician. I
| don't know.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| That's what I'm telling to my young nephews, learn a useful and
| practical trade. Electricians, carpenters, plumbers, HVAC and
| many other similar technicians are difficult to find.
|
| Returning back on topic, for sure the current LLM era is
| exciting and moving at an exponential rate. We're going to see
| many changes on how various tasks are being performed, but I
| don't see human jobs disappearing, it's just that they're going
| to be different and smaller. Take for example text translation,
| subtitles creation, audio transcription where the bulk of the
| work will be done by "intelligent" software, but the control
| and verification needs a human.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Can anyone name an actual job replaced by LLMs yet?
| olalonde wrote:
| I had ChatGPT write the "Privacy Policy" and "Terms of Service"
| pages on my website. I guess it took the job of the person I
| would have hired to write them.
| lampshades wrote:
| They're always hypothetical, until they're not.
|
| I really don't understand how anyone can sit here and act like
| what's being created isn't a big deal and will have no impact.
| Is it denial or actual lack of foresight?
|
| edit: OP originally mentioned that it's always hypothetical,
| which is where my first statement comes from.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is how humans have worked for pretty much ever... Oh,
| the enemy is still a long way away and they'll have to come
| by a slow boat... Oh, we'll never fly... Oh, that plane is
| slow... Oh, they plane is faster but still useless... Oh,
| they are dropping bombs out of the plane, but they are not
| very big.... Oh no, planes have bombed an entire city flat.
| Oh no, one bomb in a plane can take out an entire city. Oh
| no, the bombs can end all mankind.
|
| And here we are 100 years later doing it again.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yes, I posted this comment a couple weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34862450
|
| But ChatGPT, which really changed the conversation on this
| topic, was only released 3 months ago. It's not hard to see
| tons of "analyst" like jobs being replaced by this. I honestly
| can hardly imagine "paralegal" being a job in a couple years.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I can't name any, but a few people have spoken about how the
| currently use LLMs to augment their workflows. I think it might
| be easy to reason how those could affect some jobs when they're
| scaled up.
| aynyc wrote:
| Maybe I'm underestimating it, but it feels like the outsourcing
| wave 20 years ago. I'm not talking about just outsourcing
| developers, but support call centers, like what Dell did by
| moving everything to India, etc.. Almost 20 years ago, I remember
| my 50 year old boss was saying how developers are overpaid and we
| (young grads) will need new career soon. 20 years later, I'm
| still here. I heard similar sentiment in robotics and
| manufacturing. AFAIK, there are more jobs than skilled people
| applying.
|
| Do I think some of the jobs will get replaced? Certainly. As far
| as human being and people, I suspect code camp grads will suffer
| the initial blow, but eventually, it'll even it out and tech job
| will be in full swing.
|
| I'm optimist by nature, after 20 years in development, I still
| feel we are still at the beginning of the technology (IT)
| revolution, not the end.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| My prediction: this is going to replace a lot of "lower tier"
| jobs quite quickly. It'll also obliviate the need for a lot of
| outsourced knowledge workers.
|
| That said, I remain skeptical about how truly useful LLMs will
| be. Even with the latest GPT4 they still suffer from the same
| fundamental flaws as any LLM: being confidently wrong in a
| nuanced way. Nor do they understand mathematics, etc. I think
| narrowly scoped work (tightly scoped software developer work,
| data entry, transcription, etc.) is likely ripe for replacement.
|
| The problem is I totally see them exacerbating income inequality
| significantly as a result. It's going to cause serious
| conversations about when this technology can be used and
| conversations about protectionism and worker rights will suddenly
| have more mainstream appeal.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Nor do they understand mathematics
|
| Eh, you might be looking too closely at GPT-3/4 and not some of
| the splitoff models that are trained around math itself. They
| seem to have much higher success rates than pure language
| models, and because we have success there already, I don't see
| it being a long term issue before it's incorporated into
| something like gpt-5.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| I've been following the work on MathPrompter
| (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.05398.pdf) for example. These
| approaches certainly increase the quality of basic results
| but without a true semantic model of mathematics we're a
| looooooong way from replacing a computer algebra system.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| GPT4 got 5s on the ap calc tests. ChatGPT was getting 1s. Won't
| be long until LLMs are doing upper level undergrad math.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I fear similar, tech work will regress back to the domain of
| being led by those wealthy enough to be credentialled.
|
| Arguably the two month React bootcamp to $200k web dev pipeline
| was kinda trite, as well, but I much prefer the social mobility
| it offers than CS jobs being limited to a small subset of those
| rich or studious enough to hack through Galois theory.
| p1necone wrote:
| Efficiency improvements have never caused humans to do less work
| before, I'm not sure why it be any different now. If some jobs
| get replaced by AI I'm sure we'll invent new work to do with the
| now spare labor.
|
| It's going to temporarily upend some peoples careers, but I don't
| see long lasting impact.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| The question I ask is, why do you need a boss when you have an
| LLM ? People seem to have this image of themselves being fired
| and just going home to die while the LLMs are being promoted and
| going out for dinner with their new boss.
|
| As an engineer, if I can outsource the coding part of my job, I
| don't need a manger anymore as I can use LLMs to build my own
| Microsoft. It goes both ways.
|
| I might even be able to use the LLM to replace the need for
| working ?
|
| We understand how to build LLMs Open AI has months before
| competition springs up and begins costs down and more people have
| access to this technology.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I'm excited and scared at the same time. Breathless, actually. My
| first long hard look at gen AI was just last Saturday evening.
| Since then, LLaMA was leaked and made easy to run on consumer
| hardware, folks from Stanford hosted a fine-tuned version of the
| least sophisticated LLaMA model, and GPT-4 has been announced.
|
| One specific thing I can imagine is that a lot more will be
| expected of the individual knowledge worker. I'm a software
| engineer. I guess with amazing code gen and testing tools, I will
| be expected to deliver much more than I can at the moment,
| because of all the high tech help LLMs can offer.
|
| Just thinking about how much I depend on tooling to make life
| easier... yeah, I can point to that.
|
| As a writer, prompting is going to be even more fascinating.
| Shameless plug, but I tried out Alpaca and wrote about the
| results [0]. I wish the "gigglepotamus" was a thing! My little
| experiment was meant to see how much creativity I could get out
| of the fine-tuned 7B LLaMA model. It was hit or miss, but
| impressive when it worked.
|
| Prompt engineering is already becoming a thing, because people
| will need people who can get the best out of an LLM. Kind of like
| how today people are hired to lead teams and get the best out of
| their individuals.
|
| This kind of commoditizing of cognitive function might open up a
| few new spaces for "authentic natural intelligence". Not unlike
| the niche world of bespoke, hand-made good crafted by humans and
| not pushed out on the factory line.
|
| TLDR - I'm trembling. With excitement and a bit of fear. There so
| much that can change so quickly.
|
| [0] https://medium.com/sort-of-like-a-tech-diary/speculative-
| fic...
| mellosouls wrote:
| White collar:
|
| 1-5 years: significant disruption for the go-with-the-flow
| majority but opportunity for the inquisitive and enterprising.
|
| Blue collar:
|
| Pressure on employment from incoming from the above.
|
| 5-10 years:
|
| Significant ingress into low-skill blue-collar trades by AI as
| physical capabilities (accelerated by current tech) increase.
| Socio-cultural consternation as the caring, sex and other "human"
| professions are disrupted.
|
| 10-20 years: Campaigns for AI rights, which the current AI
| ethicists forgot about in their rush to get us to a robot slave
| society. Slothful, unemployed masses turn against the elites
| controlling AI who turn the latter into police and armies for
| protection.
|
| 20+ years: only human jobs left are in John Connor's rebel army.
| basch wrote:
| I see it playing out well for onboarding. It can interview your
| customer and put the information in a database. Sort of like
| branching forms that change and evolve as you give it info, but
| more complex.
| user-extended wrote:
| My two cents as someone who's not in IT and not doing well in
| life.
|
| Whatever happens, happens. Nothing I do will change anything
| about this. If it's as disruptive as you've described, I know my
| Government will do something to prevent massive job losses.
|
| I don't see this as the end of the world, and frankly, my life is
| shitty enough without Chat-GPT.
|
| Again, what can I do about it? This reminds me of listening to
| TWIV, a podcast about virology, about COVID before it hit my
| country and being like "it's going to be bad, but there's nothing
| I can do about it".
|
| Once it hits, we'll see from there.
| MildlySerious wrote:
| A few years ago the general opinion was still that artists were
| going to be safe from being replaced by AI for the longest time
| compared to other jobs. Today I think it is valid to say that
| artists were among the first people to get a direct feel for how
| much an entire occupation can be stirred up by AI.
|
| The time span is just a few short years and our predictions were
| already off by so much. There is no telling where we will be five
| years from now, let alone 20 or even further beyond.
|
| That being said, I think you're right in that it is a turning
| point, and that there is a great deal of changes needed for us to
| adopt to what's ahead of us. The best way I can describe my take
| is that we will have a lot of growing up to do as a society. Lots
| of the systems that our modern world is built on are very
| fragile. We've rediscovered that during the lockdowns. The
| biggest ones to worry about being politics and the general
| political climate, the news cycle and how we deal with
| information. If we can't figure those out soon we will drown in
| an ocean of AI content where any semblance of truth is lost.
|
| What I think we need is politicians that aren't stuck in time 30,
| 40 or 50 years in the past, that understand the world we live in
| today and can move accordingly. The information age hasn't caught
| up with the powers that be. At the pace that AI is moving, and
| the pace that politics is moving, what I think will happen is a
| trial by fire. Tech will move faster than the world around it
| can, and we will get burned before things get better. What
| exactly that will look like, who knows?
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(page generated 2023-03-14 23:02 UTC)