[HN Gopher] Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is ...
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Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
Author : pbui
Score : 536 points
Date : 2025-12-09 00:26 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (andyljones.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (andyljones.com)
| barbazoo wrote:
| Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not
| like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels
| like it's little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough
| but I might be totally off here.
| GaggiX wrote:
| ChatGPT was released 3 years ago and that was complete ass
| compared to what we have today.
| dcre wrote:
| I think you are totally off. Individual benchmarks are not very
| useful on their own, but as far as I'm aware they all tell the
| same story of continual progress. I don't find this surprising
| since it matches my experience as well.
| raincole wrote:
| What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is
| getting better and better.
|
| Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real
| world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if
| not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Whenever I try and use a "state of the art" LLM to generate
| code it takes longer to get a worse result than if I just
| wrote the code myself from the start. That's the experience
| of every good dev I know. So that's my benchmark. AI
| benchmarks are BS marketing gimmicks designed to give the
| appearance of progress - there are tremendous perverse
| financial incentives.
|
| This will never change because you can only use an LLM to
| generate code (or any other type of output) you already know
| how to produce and are expert at - because you can never
| trust the output.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| Third party benchmarks like terminalbench exist.
|
| W.r.t code changes especially _small_ ones (say 50 lines
| spread across 5 files), if you can 't get an agent to make
| nearly exactly the code changes you want, just faster than
| you, that's a you problem at this point. If it maybe would
| take you 15 minutes, grok-code-fast-1 can do it in 2.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Right. With careful use of AIs, I can use it to gather
| information to help me make better designs (like giving me
| summaries of the current best available frameworks or
| libraries to choose for a given project), but as far as
| just generating an architecture and then generating the
| code and devops and so on for that? It's just not there,
| unless you're creating an app that effectively already
| exists, like some basic CRUD app.
|
| If you're creating basic CRUDs, what on earth are you
| doing? That kind of thing should have been automated a long
| time ago.
| whycombinetor wrote:
| What do you mean when you say building crud apps should
| be automated?
| beeflet wrote:
| conventionally, it should have been abstracted by a
| higher-level language.
| trollbridge wrote:
| CRUD apps are ridiculously simple and have been in
| existence my entire life. Yet it is surprisingly
| difficult to make a basic CRUD and host it somewhere. The
| bulk of useful but simple business apps are just a CRUD
| with a tiny bit of customisation and integration around
| them.
|
| It is true that LLMs make it easier to build these kind
| of things without having to become a competent programmer
| first.
| lomase wrote:
| I don't know what kind of CRUD apps you work on. The kind
| of CRUD apps people pay me to work on are not simple.
| machomaster wrote:
| E.g using Rails and generate scaffolding. Makes it real
| fast and easy to make a CRUD app.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > please name what metric you think is meaningful
|
| Job satisfaction and human flourishing
|
| By those metrics, AI is getting worse and worse
| machomaster wrote:
| AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it.
|
| AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more
| resources, to give the most important thing people have -
| time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or
| used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be
| like complaining that the objective positive of increased
| food production is actually a negative, because people are
| getting fatter.
| lomase wrote:
| Imagine anthropomorphing this hard.
| machomaster wrote:
| You misunderstood. This is how the conversation went:
|
| 1. Is there steady progress in AI?
|
| 2. What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI
| is getting better and better.
|
| 3. Job satisfaction and human flourishing.
|
| Hence my answer "AI is very satisfied in doing the job,
| just ask it". It came about because of the stupid comment
| 3, which tried to link and put a blame on unrelatable
| things (akin to refering to obesity when asked what
| metrics make him say that agriculture/transportation have
| not made progress in the last 100 years) and at the same
| time anthropomorphed AI. I only accepted the premise and
| continued answering on the same level in order to
| demonstrate stupidity of their answer.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it
|
| I could not care less about AI's satisfaction in anything
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| OpenAI net profit.
|
| The figures for cost are wildly off to start with.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| AI is getting better at every benchmark. Please ignore that
| we're not allowed to see these benchmarks and also ignore
| that the companies in question are creating the benchmarks
| that are being exceeded.
| azemetre wrote:
| What metrics, that aren't controlled by industry, show AI
| getting better? Generally curious because those "ranking
| sites" to me seem to be infested with venture capital, so
| hardly fair or unbiased. The only reports I hear from
| academia are those being overly negative on AI.
| Calamityjanitor wrote:
| The only 'line go up' graph they have left is money invested.
| I'm even dubious of the questions answered graph. It looks more
| like a feature added to internal wiki that went up in usage.
| Instead it's portrayed as a measure of quality or usefulness.
| tim333 wrote:
| Steady progress in the hardware for AI, lumpy progress in
| algorithms?
| personjerry wrote:
| I think it's a cool perspective, but the not-so-hidden assumption
| is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well
| above the alternative.
|
| And that really is the entire question at this point: Which
| domains will AI win in by a sufficient margin to be worth it?
| danpalmer wrote:
| > the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain,
| the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative
|
| This is an assumption for the best-case scenario, but I think
| you could also just take the marginal case. Steady progress
| builds until you get past the state of the art system, and then
| the switch becomes easy to justify.
| s17n wrote:
| This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't
| steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was
| the invention of the internal combustion engine.
| dcre wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the IC engine was invented around 1800
| and only started to get somewhere in the late 1800s. Sounds
| like the story doesn't change.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine
| pcrh wrote:
| Quite. For reference, the horse population of France didn't
| decline significantly until the late 1940's [0].
|
| [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/
| mkl wrote:
| Engines, not just steam engines.
| s17n wrote:
| Sure, but if you look at more complex picture of engine
| development you could just as easily support the proposition
| that programmers are currently not in any danger (by pointing
| out that the qualitative differences between IC and steam
| engines were decisive when it comes to replacing horses, and
| the correct analogy is that much like a steam engine could
| never replace a horse, a transformer model can never replace
| a human).
|
| Not detracting from the article, I think it's a fun way to
| shake your brain into the entirely appropriate space of
| "rapid change is possible"!
| ible wrote:
| People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes
| strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective
| of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of
| things for humans to do to provide value for each other.
|
| The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our
| various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what
| humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and
| balances of power shift rapidly.
|
| If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small
| number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can
| go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate
| the downsides and spread the upsides.
| traverseda wrote:
| I'd be more worried about the implicit power imbalance. It's
| not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can
| humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.
| jordwest wrote:
| Yeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are
| already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of
| us.
|
| But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the
| environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity
| and care, another human being who can provide those is
| priceless.
|
| I propose we break away and create our own new economy and
| the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimised machine
| dominated bunkers.
|
| Sure maybe we'll need to throw a few food rations and bags of
| youthful blood down there for them every once in a while, but
| otherwise we could live in an economy that works for humanity
| instead.
| vkou wrote:
| _The thing that the ultra-wealthy desire above all else is
| power and privilege_ , and they won't be getting either of
| that in those bunkers.
|
| They sure as shit won't be content to leave the rest of us
| alone.
| jordwest wrote:
| Yeah I know it's an unrealistic ideal but it's fun to
| think about.
|
| That said my theory about power and privilege is that
| it's actually just a symptom of a deep fear of death. The
| reason gaining more money/power/status never lets up is
| because there's no amount of money/power/status that can
| satiate that fear, but somehow naively there's a belief
| that it can. I wouldn't be surprised if most people who
| have any amount of wealth has a terrible fear of losing
| it all, and to somebody whose identity is tied to that
| wealth, that's as good as death.
| faidit wrote:
| Going off your earlier comment, what if instead of a
| revolution, the oligarchs just get hooked up to a
| simulation where they can pretend to rule over the rest
| of humanity forever? Or what if this already happened and
| we're just the peasants in the simulation
| jordwest wrote:
| I like this future, the Meta-verse has found its target
| market
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| This would make a good black mirror episode. The
| character lives in a total dystopian world making f'd up
| moral choice. Their choices make the world worse. It
| seems nightmarish to us the viewer. Then towards then end
| they pull back, they unplug and are living in a utopia.
| They grab a snack, are greeted by people that love and
| care about them, then they plug back in and go back to
| being their dystopian tech bro ideal self in their
| dream/ideal world.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Charlie Chaplin's speech is more relevant now than ever
| before:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20
| jordwest wrote:
| I first saw this about 15 years ago and it had a profound
| impact on me. It's stuck with me ever since
|
| "Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine
| men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not
| machines, you are not cattle, you are men. You have the
| love of humanity in your hearts."
|
| Spoken 85 years ago and even more relevant today
| visarga wrote:
| > It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what
| can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.
|
| You can definitely use AI and automation to help yourself and
| your family/community rather than the oligarchs. You set the
| prompts. If AI is smart enough to do your old job, it is also
| smart enough to support you be independent.
| jondwillis wrote:
| Workshopping this tortured metaphor:
|
| AI, at the limit, is a vampiric technology, sucking the
| differentiated economic value from those that can train it.
| What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more
| training-blood? This, to me, is a big problem, because a model
| will tend to drift from reality without more training-blood.
|
| The owners of the tech need to reinvest in the hosts.
| hephaes7us wrote:
| Realistically, at a certain point the training would likely
| involve interaction with reality (by sensors and actuators),
| rather than relying on secondhand knowledge available in
| textual form.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yeah I feel like the real ah ha moment is still coming once
| there is a GPT-like thing that has been trained on reality,
| not its shadow.
| qsera wrote:
| Look I think that is the whole difficulty. In reality,
| doing the wrong thing results in pain, and the right
| thing in relief/pleasure. A living thing will learn from
| that.
|
| But machines can experience neither pain nor pleasure.
| chongli wrote:
| Yes and reality is the hard part. Moravec's Paradox [1]
| continues to ring true. A billion years of evolution went
| into our training to be able to cope with the complexity
| of reality. Our language is a blink of an eye compared to
| that.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
| baq wrote:
| Reality cannot be perceived. A crisp shadow is all you
| can hope for.
|
| The problem for me is the point of the economy in the
| limit where robots are better, faster and cheaper than
| any human at any job. If the robots don't decide we're
| worth keeping around we might end up worse than horses.
| agos wrote:
| but that crisp shadow is exactly what we call perception
| scotty79 wrote:
| There's only so much you can learn from humans. AI didn't get
| superhuman in go (game) by financing more new good human go
| players. It just played with itself even discarding human
| source knowledge and achieved those levels.
| visarga wrote:
| > What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more
| training-blood?
|
| LLMs have over 1B users and exchange over 1T tokens with us
| per day. We put them through all conceivable tasks and
| provide support for completing those tasks, and push back
| when the model veers off. We test LLM ideas in reality (like
| experiment following hypothesis) and use that information to
| iterate. These logs are gold for training on how to apply AI
| in real world.
| ghssds wrote:
| People are animals.
| goatlover wrote:
| When horses develop technology and create all sorts of jobs
| for themselves, this will be a good metaphor.
| faidit wrote:
| Sounds like something a goat lover would say..
| d--b wrote:
| I was trying to phrase something like this, but you said it a
| lot better than I ever could.
|
| I can't help but smile at the possibility that you could be a
| bot.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm optimistic.
|
| Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did
| double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For
| most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank
| transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we
| replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of
| "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The
| cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became
| more responsive and served their customers better. And the
| people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got
| to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.
|
| There are a ton of current careers that are just email +
| meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.
| They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having
| humans do them makes administration slow and expensive.
| Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if
| "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this
| meeting never happened at all because the person making the
| decision just told the LLM and it did it".
|
| You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of
| this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen
| with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot
| of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this
| automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier
| and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we
| currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive,
| organisations that serve their customers better.
| visarga wrote:
| An ATM is a reliable machine with a bounded risk - the money
| inside - while an AI agent could steer your company into
| bankruptcy and have no liability for it. AI has no skin and
| depending on application, much higher upper bound for damage.
| A digit read wrong in a medical transcript, patient dies.
|
| > There are a ton of current careers that are just email +
| meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.
|
| Managing risks, can't automate it. Every project and task
| needs a responsibility sink.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.
|
| I don't disagree, though I'd put it more as "machines
| cannot take responsibility for decisions, so machines must
| not have authority to make decisions".
|
| But we've all been in meetings where there are too many
| people in the room, and only one person's opinion really
| counts. Replacing those other people with an LLM capable of
| acting on the decision would be a net positive for everyone
| involved.
| ipython wrote:
| You can bound risk on ai agents just like an atm. You just
| can't rely upon the ai itself to enforce those limits, of
| course. You need to place limits outside the ai's reach.
| But this is already documented best practice.
|
| The point about ai not having "skin" (I assume "skin in the
| game") is well taken. I say often that "if you've assigned
| an ai agent the 'a' in a raci matrix, you're doing it
| wrong". Very important lesson that some company will learn
| publicly soon enough.
| reeredfdfdf wrote:
| "I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we
| can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without
| employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then
| maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that
| serve their customers better."
|
| I'm not sure most of those organizations will have many
| customers left, if every white collar admin job has been
| automated away, and all those people are sitting unemployed
| with whatever little income their country's social safety net
| provides.
|
| Automating away all the "boring jobs" leads to an economic
| collapse, unless you find another way for those people to
| earn their living.
| nopinsight wrote:
| AI agents might be able to automate 80% of certain jobs in
| a few years but that would make the remaining 20% far more
| valuable. The challenge is to help people rapidly retrain
| for new roles.
|
| Humans will continue to have certain desires far
| outstripping the supply we have for a long time to come.
|
| We still don't have cures for all diseases, personal robot
| chefs & maids, and an ideal house for everyone, for
| example. Not all have the time to socialize as much as they
| wish with their family and friends.
|
| There will continue to be work for humans as long as humans
| provide value & deep connections beyond what automation
| can. The jobs could themselves become more desirable with
| machines automating the boring and dangerous parts, leaving
| humans to form deeper connections and be creatively human.
|
| The transition period can be painful. There should be
| sufficient preparation and support to minimize the
| suffering.
|
| Workers will need to have access to affordable and
| effective methods to _retrain for new roles_ that will
| emerge.
|
| "soft" skills such as empathetic communication and tact
| could surge in value.
| Covenant0028 wrote:
| > The jobs could themselves become more desirable with
| machines automating the boring and dangerous parts
|
| Or, as Cory Doctorow argues, the machines could become
| tools to extract "efficiency" by helping the employer
| make their workers lives miserable. An example of this is
| Amazon and the way it treats its drivers and warehouse
| workers.
| nopinsight wrote:
| That depends on the social contract we collectively
| decide (in a democracy at least). Many possibilities will
| emerge and people need to be aware and adapt much faster
| than most times in history.
| gverrilla wrote:
| "benefits" = shareholder profits ++
| sotix wrote:
| > Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually
| did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions.
| For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank
| transactions slow and expensive. > > And the people who had
| to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other,
| probably more interesting, jobs.
|
| I don't mean to pick on your example too much. However, when
| I worked in financial audit, reviewing journal entries spit
| out from SAP was _mind numbingly_ boring. I loved doing
| double-entry bookkeeping in my college courses. Modern public
| accounting is much, much more boring and worse work than it
| was before. Balancing entries is enjoyable to me. Interacting
| with the terrible software tools is horrific.
|
| I guess people that would have done accounting are doing
| other, hopefully more interesting jobs in the sense that
| absolute numbers of US accountants is on a large decline due
| to the low pay and the highly boring work. I myself am
| certainly one of them as a software engineer career switcher.
| But the actual work for a modern accountant has not been
| improved in terms of interesting tasks to do. It's also
| become the email + meetings + spreadsheet that you mentioned
| because there wasn't much else for it to evolve into.
| mrwrong wrote:
| > There are a ton of current careers that are just email +
| meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.
|
| it's interesting how it's never your job that will be
| automated away in this fantasy, it's always someone else's.
| burroisolator wrote:
| "In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25
| million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of
| progress in mechanical engines.
|
| And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had
| disappeared.
|
| I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."
|
| I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you
| might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically
| lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term.
| My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid
| that the short term destruction will not be something that can be
| recovered from even over the longer term.
| falcor84 wrote:
| My reading of tfa is exactly that - the author is hoping that
| we'll have at least a generation or so to adapt, like horses
| did, but is concerned that it might be significantly more
| rapid.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| To be clear though, the horses didn't adapt. Their populate
| was reduced by orders of a magnitude.
| sendes wrote:
| True, but the horses' population started (slightly) rising
| again when they went from economic tools to recreational
| tools for humans. What will happen to humans?
| Gigachad wrote:
| The horse population was being boosted beyond normal
| numbers by human intervention. When humans stopped
| breeding them the numbers dropped.
|
| At least currently humans do not need AI to reproduce.
| baq wrote:
| There were approximately zero horses in the wild, so it
| was all about what humans found useful.
|
| Pray it's still humans who ask these kinds of questions
| about AI, not the other way around.
| goatlover wrote:
| Did the population of work/service dogs decline? Horses
| were already a form of automation over human labor.
| defrost wrote:
| Bullocks.
|
| That's what Sandy over the road (born 1932, died last
| year), used to hitch up every morning at 4am, when he was
| ten, to sled a tank of water back to the farm from the
| local spring.
| burroisolator wrote:
| "You're absolutely right!" Thanks for pointing it out. I was
| expecting that kind of perspective when the author brought up
| horses, but found the conclusion to be odd. Turns out it was
| just my reading of it.
| nacozarina wrote:
| the stability of no govt faced risk over a 20% increase in
| horse unemployment
| mxfh wrote:
| I just have no idea how rigerously the data was reviewed. The
| 95% decline simply does no compute with
|
| 4,500,000 in 1959
|
| and even an increase to
|
| 7,000,000 in 1968
|
| largely due to increase in recreational horse population.
|
| https://time.com/archive/6632231/recreation-return-of-the-ho...
|
| So that recreational existence at the leisure of our own
| machinery seems like an optional future humans can hope for
| too.
|
| Turns out the chart is about farm horses only as counted by the
| USDA not including any recreational horses. So this is more
| about agricultural machinery vs. horses, not passenger cars.
|
| ---
|
| City horses (the ones replaced by cars and trucks) were nearly
| extinct by 1930 already.
|
| _City horses were formerly almost exclusively bred on farms
| but because of their practical disappearance such breeding is
| no longer necessary. They have declined in numbers from
| 3,500,000 in 1910 to a few hundred thousand in 1930._
|
| https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/...
| kangs wrote:
| hello faster horses
| narrator wrote:
| Wait till the robots arrive. That they will know how to do a vast
| range of human skills, some that people train their whole lives
| for, will surprise people the most. The future shock I get from
| Claude Code, knowing how long stuff takes the hard way,
| especially niche difficult to research topics like the alternate
| applicable designs of deep learning models to a modeling task, is
| a thing of wonder. Imagine now that a master marble carver shows
| up at an exhibition and some sci-fi author just had robots make a
| perfect beautiful equivalent of a character from his novel,
| equivalent in quality to Michaelangelo's David, but cyberpunk.
| sothatsit wrote:
| This tracks with my own AI usage over just this year. There have
| been two releases that caused step changes in how much I actually
| use AI:
|
| 1. The release of Claude Code in February
|
| 2. The release of Opus 4.5 two weeks ago
|
| In both of these cases, it felt like no big new unlocks were
| made. These releases aren't like OpenAI's o1, where they
| introduced reasoning models with entirely new capabilities, or
| their Pro offerings, which still feel like the smartest chatbots
| in the world to me.
|
| Instead, these releases just brought a new user interface, and
| improved reliability. And yet these two releases mark the biggest
| increases in my AI usage. These releases caused the utility of AI
| for my work to pass thresholds where Claude Code became my
| default way to get LLMs to read my code, and then Opus 4.5 became
| my default way to make code changes.
| AIorNot wrote:
| I would add Gemini Nano Banna Pro to that list - (its words
| with image ability) is amazing..
| wrs wrote:
| Point taken, but it's hard to take a talk seriously when it has a
| graph showing AI becoming 80% of GDP! What does the "P" even
| stand for then?
| baq wrote:
| It's called exponential growth and humans are well known to be
| almost comically bad at identifying and interpreting it.
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| When people make forward looking statements using the term
| "exponential growth", you can always replace that with
| "S-curve".
|
| Remember when we had two weeks of data, and governments acted
| like Covid was projected to kill everyone by next Tuesday?
| lostmsu wrote:
| Pokens
| adventured wrote:
| It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past
| year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now
| pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.
|
| As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an
| interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the
| outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone
| on AI. They doth protest too much.
|
| I think it's a very clear case of personal bias. The machines are
| rapidly coming for the lucrative software jobs. So those with an
| interest in protecting lucrative tech jobs are talking their
| book. The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent, as other
| industrial areas before it. Maybe 10% of the existing software
| development jobs will remain. There's no time to form powerful
| unions to stop what's happening, it's already far too late.
| bwfan123 wrote:
| > The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent
|
| I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their
| limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who
| don't have their boots on the ground.
| trollbridge wrote:
| That's what I've observed. I currently have more work booked
| than I can reasonably get done in the next year, and my
| customers would be really delighted if I could deliver it to
| them sooner, and take on even more projects. But I have yet
| to find any way that just adding AI tools to the mix makes us
| orders-of-magnitude better. The most I've been able to
| squeeze out is a 5% to 10% increase.
| glitchc wrote:
| But they do have their hands on your budget, and they are
| responsible for creating and filling positions.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I don't think is the case; I think what's actually going on is
| that the HN crowd are the people who are stuck actually trying
| to use AI tools and aware of their limitations.
|
| I have noticed, however, that people who are either not
| programmers or who are not very good programmers report that
| they can derive a lot of benefit from AI tools, since now they
| can make simple programs and get them to work. The most common
| use case seems to be some kind of CRUD app. It's very
| understandable this seems revolutionary for people who formerly
| couldn't make programs at all.
|
| For those of us who are busy trying to deliver what we've
| promised customers we can do, I find I get far less use out of
| AI tools than I wish I did. In our business we really do not
| have the budget to add another senior software engineer, and we
| don't the spare management/mentor/team lead capacity to take on
| another intern or junior. So we're really positioned to be
| taking advantage of all these promises I keep hearing about AI,
| but in practical terms, it saves me at an architect or staff
| level maybe 10% of my time and for one of our seniors maybe 5%.
|
| So I end up being a _little_ dismissive when I hear that AI is
| going to become 80% of GDP and will be completely automating
| absolutely everything, when what I actually spend my day on is
| the same-old same-old of trying to get some vendor framework to
| do what I want to get some sensor data out of their equipment
| and deliver apps to end customers that use enough of my own
| infrastructure that they don 't require $2,000 a month of cloud
| hosting services per user. (I picked that example since at one
| customer, that's what we were brought in to replace: that kind
| of cost simply doesn't scale.)
| shermantanktop wrote:
| It's not subtle.
|
| But the temptation of easy ideas cuts both ways. "Oldsters hate
| change" is a blanket dismissal, and there are legitimate
| concerns in that body of comments.
| Lerc wrote:
| >It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past
| year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now
| pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.
|
| I don't think you can characterise it as a sentiment of the
| community as a whole. While every AI thread seems to have it's
| share of AI detractors, the usernames of the posters are
| becoming familiar. I think it might be more accurate to say
| that there is a very active subset of users with that opinion.
|
| This might hold true for the discourse in the wider community.
| You see a lot of coverage about artists outraged by AI, but
| when I speak to artists they have a much more moderate opinion.
| Cautious, but intrigued. A good number of them are looking
| forward to a world that embraces more ambitious creativity. If
| AI can replicate things within a standard deviation of the
| mean, the abundance of that content there will create an
| appetite for something further out.
| magarnicle wrote:
| I value this comment even though I don't really agree about how
| useful AI is. I recognise in myself that my aversion to AI is
| at least partly driven by fear of it taking my job.
| twodave wrote:
| I'm not anti-AI; I use it every day. But I also think all this
| hand-wringing is overblown and unbalanced. LLMs, because of
| what they are, will never replace a thoughtful engineer. If
| you're writing code for a living at the level of an LLM then
| your job was probably already expendable before LLMs showed up.
| bdangubic wrote:
| except you know, you had a job. and coming out of college
| could get one... if you were graduating right now in compsci
| you'll find a wasteland with no end in sight...
| twodave wrote:
| You're assuming a lot about me that isn't true, but let's
| just say we can't really know, can we? And I think it's a
| bit reductionist to attribute the current job market to
| LLMs. The market started to suck long before LLMs became
| useful.
| bdangubic wrote:
| my apologies, I did not mean you as YOU, just general
| "you"...
|
| and while we can't know we can also... kind of know or
| look at data etc...
|
| IntuitionLabs, "AI's Impact on Graduate Jobs: A 2025 Data
| Analysis" (2025) -
|
| https://intuitionlabs.ai/pdfs/ai-s-impact-on-graduate-
| jobs-a...
|
| Indeed Hiring Lab, "AI at Work Report 2025: How GenAI is
| Rewiring the DNA of Jobs" (September 2025) -
|
| https://www.hiringlab.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/09/Indeed-...
| fzeroracer wrote:
| I worked for a company that was starting to shove AI incentives
| down the throat of every engineer as our product got
| consistently worse and worse due to layoffs and the perceived
| benefits of AI which were never realized. When you look at the
| companies that have shifted to 'AI first' and see them
| shoveling out garbage that barely works, it should be no
| surprised that people both aware of how the sausage is made and
| not are starting to hate it.
| jsheard wrote:
| Cost per word is a bizarre metric to bring up. Since when is
| volume of words a measure of value or achievement?
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| It also puts a thumb on the scale for AI, which tends to emit
| pages of text to answer simple questions.
| jsheard wrote:
| The chart is actually words "thought or written" so I guess
| they are running up the numbers even more by counting Claudes
| entire inner monologue, on top of what it ultimately outputs.
| garciasn wrote:
| Sounds like any post-secondary, graduate student, or
| management consultant out there being there are, very often,
| page/word count or hours requirements. Considering the model
| corpora, wordiness wins out.
| bdangubic wrote:
| these are not just "words" but answers to questions from people
| who got a job at anthropic had...
| kashyapc wrote:
| It's not merely cost per word, but it is even more bizarre:
| "cost per word _thought_ ", whatever that is. Most of these
| "word thoughts" from LLMs of today are just auto-completed
| large dumps of text.
| sanex wrote:
| There was a time when these models were novel that if use it to
| write for me. After a year or so the verboseness and lack of
| personality got old. Now all I have is a decent proofreader.
| Maybe they'll take over my job but I'm finding the trend going
| the other way right now.
| websiteapi wrote:
| funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually
| matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive:
| health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem
| to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people.
|
| plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually
| any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks
| and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is
| cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by
| the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did
| was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will
| lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats.
|
| even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs
| to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting
| itself and have a little bit of discipline.
|
| so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what?
| chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be
| built.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Those are all expensive because of artificial barriers meant to
| keep their prices high. Go to any Asian country and houses,
| healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries.
|
| Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they're
| in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the
| point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the
| US.
| tyre wrote:
| If we had less regulation of insurance companies, do you
| think they'd be cheaper?
|
| (I pick this example because our regulation of insurance
| companies has (unintuitively) incentivized them to pay more
| for care. So it's an example of poor regulation imo)
| davidw wrote:
| Health care is the more complicated one of the examples
| cited, but housing definitely is an 'own goal' in how we
| made it too difficult to build in too many places -
| especially "up and in" rather than outward expansion.
|
| Stuff like this isn't Wall Street or Billionaires or
| whatever bogeyman - it's our neighbors:
| https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-
| housing...
| wyre wrote:
| Health care is complicated, but I don't think it would
| hard to understand how less regulations could lower
| prices. More insurers could enter markets, could compete
| across state lines, and compliance costs could be
| lowered.
|
| However regulation is helpful for those already sick or
| with pre-existing conditions. Developed countries with
| well-regulated systems also have better health outcomes
| than the US does.
| murderfs wrote:
| Well, they'd be more functional as insurance, at least! The
| way insurance is _supposed_ to work is that your insurance
| premium is proportional to the risk. You can 't go
| uninsured and then after discovering that your house is on
| fire and about to burn down, sign up for an insurance plan
| and expect it to be covered.
|
| We've blundered into a system that has the worst parts of
| socialized health care and private health insurance without
| any of the benefits.
| websiteapi wrote:
| you mean the same Asia that has the same problem? USA
| enjoying arbitrage is not actually a solution nor is it
| sustainable. not to mention that if you control for certain
| things, like house size for instance relative to inflation
| adjusted income it isn't actually much different despite
| popular belief.
| refactor_master wrote:
| > Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are
| priced like commodities, not luxuries.
|
| What do you mean? Several Asian cities have housing crises
| far worse than the US in local purchasing power, and I'd even
| argue that a "cheap" home in many Asian countries is going to
| be of a far lower quality than a "cheap" home in the US.
| jordwest wrote:
| It would be kinda funny if not so tragic how economists will
| argue both "[productive improvement] will make things cheaper"
| and then in the next breath "deflation is bad and must be
| avoided at all costs"
| actionfromafar wrote:
| But is it really, though? Dollars aren't meant to be held.
| jordwest wrote:
| I think the idea of dollars as purely a trading medium
| where absolute prices don't matter wouldn't be such an
| issue if wages weren't always the last thing to rise with
| inflation.
|
| As it is now anyone with assets is only barely affected by
| inflation while those who earn a living from wages have
| their livelihood eroded over time covertly.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Exactly as the current owners... ahem, _leaders_ of this
| country want it.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| Barely affected? They benefit massively from it. That is
| why the rich get richer.
| jordwest wrote:
| True, in terms of share of the pie for sure
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| To give backing i'm from Australia which has ~2.5x the median
| wealth per capita of US citizens but a lower average wealth.
| This shows through in the wealth of a typical citizen. Less
| homelessness, better living standards (hdi in australia is
| higher) etc.
|
| Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the
| issue;
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
|
| This is a recent development where the median wealth of
| citizens in progressively taxes nations has quickly overtaken
| the median wealth of USA citizens.
|
| All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening
| taxes on the middle class... seems obvious right? Yet things
| gave consistently been going the other way for along time in
| the USA.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think by the time the wealthy realize they're setting
| themselves up for the local equivalent of the French
| Revolution it will be a bit late. It's a really bad idea to
| create a large number of people with absolutely nothing to
| lose.
| tadfisher wrote:
| They already know, and do not care. Their plan is quite
| literally to retreat into bunkers with shock collars
| enforcing the loyalty of their guards.
|
| The richest of the rich have purchased islands where they
| can hole up.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Stripped of their infinite freedom out here to hide in a
| bunker? No chance
|
| The bunkers are in case of nuclear war or serious
| pandemics. Absolutely worst case last resort scenario,
| not just "oh I don't care if I end up there"
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Moreover when you acting absolutely relentlessly like
| certain car maker.
|
| People usually change their behavior after some pretty
| horrific events. So I would predict something like that in
| future. For both Europe and US too.
| overfeed wrote:
| I suspect the wealthy think they can shield themselves by
| exerting control over mass media, news outlets, the press,
| and domestic surveillance, all amplified by AI.
|
| If all that fails, they have their underground bunkers on
| faraway islands and/or backup citizenships.
| jordwest wrote:
| > I suspect the wealthy think they can shield themselves
| by exerting control over
|
| Agreed and I think this is a result of a naive belief
| that we humans tend to have that controlling thoughts can
| control reality. Politicians still live by this belief
| but eventually reality and lived experience does catch
| up. By that time all trust is long gone.
| awillowingmind wrote:
| Assuming that they are able to fully replace the
| workforce, and that technocracy is fully realized, the
| majority stakeholders of these corporations will rely on
| corporations akin to palantir & anduril for private
| security.
| baq wrote:
| That's what the bunkers in New Zealand are for, but if AI
| keeps its pace, it might not be enough anyway.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening
| taxes on the middle class... seems obvious right?
|
| You could tax 100% of all of the top 1%'s income (not
| progressively, just a flat 100% tax) and it'd cover less than
| double the federal government's budget deficit in the US.
| There would be just enough left over to pay for making the
| covid 19 ACA subsidies permanent and a few other pet
| projects.
|
| Of course, you can't actually tax 100% of their income. In
| fact, you'd need higher taxes on the top 10% than anywhere
| else in the West to cover the deficit, significantly expand
| social programs to have an impact, and lower taxes on the
| middle class.
|
| It should be pointed out that Australia has higher taxes on
| their middle class than the US does. It tops out at 45% (plus
| 2% for medicare) for anyone at $190k or above.
|
| If you live in New York City, and you're in the top 1% of
| income earners (taking cash salary rather than equity
| options) you're looking at a federal tax rate of 37%, a state
| tax rate of 10.9%, and a city income tax rate of 3.876% for a
| total of 51.77%. Some other states have similarly high tax
| brackets, others are less, and others yet use other schemes
| like no income tax but higher sales and property taxes.
|
| Not quite so obvious when you look closer at it.
| yulker wrote:
| The point isn't to just cover the tax bill, it's that by
| shifting the burden up the class ladder, there is more
| capital available to the classes that spend and circulate
| their money in the economy rather than merely accumulate it
| some_guy_nobel wrote:
| What are you responding to?
|
| How much of the current burden is shouldered by the middle
| class? How much by the 1%? How does that compare to other
| Western nations? What measurable effect would raising this
| on the 1% be? What about the middle class?
| deaux wrote:
| Paper income tax rates are completely and utterly
| meaningless. Bringing them up is just muddying the waters.
| Effective rates on total income (including from capital,
| wealth taxes etc.), post-loopholes, are the only thing that
| matters.
| naveen99 wrote:
| Without usa the way it is, Australia would be much less
| prosperous. From the perspective of employers and consumers,
| labor costs are the same. It's just that in Europe and
| Australia, taxes are a larger percentage of cost of labor.
| dzonga wrote:
| yeah that my question to the author too - if A.I is to really
| earn its keep it means A.I should help in getting more physical
| products into people's hands & helping with producing more
| energy.
|
| physical products & energy are the two things that are relevant
| to people's wellbeing.
|
| right now A.I is sucking up the energy & the RAM - so is it
| gonna translate into a net positive ?
| Avicebron wrote:
| That's the question though isn't it. If everyone got a
| subscription to claude-$Latest would they be able to pay
| their rent with it?
| twodave wrote:
| No, because they'd be waiting in the lengthy queues that
| would be necessary for anyone to use it. There are hard
| constraints to this tech that make what you're talking
| about infeasible.
| goatlover wrote:
| No because nurses, mechanics, and janitors are still
| needed.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Well, politically, housing becoming cheaper is considered a
| failure. And this is true for all ages. As an example, take
| Reddit. Skews younger, more Democrat-voting, etc. You'd think
| they'd be for lower housing prices. But not really. In fact,
| they make fun of states like Texas whose cities act to allow
| housing to become cheaper:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/1nw4ef9/...
|
| That's just an example, but the pattern will easily repeat. One
| thing that came out of the post-pandemic era is that the lowest
| deciles saw the biggest rises in income. Consequently, things
| like Doordash became more expensive, and stuff like McDonald's
| stopped staffing as much.
|
| This isn't some grand secret, but most Americans who post on
| Twitter, HN, or Reddit consider the results some kind of
| tragedy, though it is the natural thing that happens when
| people become much higher income: you can't hire many of them
| to do low-productivity jobs like bus a McD's table.
|
| That's what life looks like when others get richer relative to
| you. You can't consume the fruits of their labor for cheap. And
| they will compete for you with the things that you decided to
| place supply controls on. The highly-educated downwardly-mobile
| see this most acutely, which is why you see it commonly among
| the educated children of the past elite.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Thank you, I've replied too many times that if people want
| low priced housing, it's easily found in Texas. The replies
| are empty or stating that they don't want to live there
| because... it's Texas.
|
| So the young want cheap affordable housing, right in the
| middle of Manhattan, never going to happen.
| baq wrote:
| Don't blame people they want to live close to where the
| good jobs are.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing,
| cars.
|
| Think of it another way. It's not that these things are more
| expensive. It's that the average US worker simply doesn't
| provide anything of value. China provides the things of value
| now. How the government corrected for this was to flood the
| economy with cash. So it looks like things got more expensive,
| when really it's that wages reduced to match reality. US
| citizens selling each other lattes back and forth, producing
| nothing of actual value. US companies bleeding people dry with
| fees. The final straw was an old man uniting the world against
| the USA instead of against China.
|
| If you want to know where this is going, look at Britain: the
| previous world super power. Britain governed far more of the
| earth than the USA ever did, and now look at it. Now the only
| thing it produces is ASBOs. I suppose it also sells weapons to
| dictators and provides banking to them. That is the USA's
| future.
| copypaper wrote:
| Yep. My grandma bought her house in ~1962 for $20k working at
| a factory making $2/hr. Her mortgage was $100/m; about 1
| weeks worth of pay. $2/hr then is the equivalent of ~$21/hr
| today.
|
| If you were to buy that same house today, your mortgage would
| be about $5100/m-- about 6 weeks of pay.
|
| And the reason is exactly what you're saying: the average US
| worker doesn't provide as much value anymore. Just as her
| factory job got optimized/automated, AI is going to do the
| same for many. Tech workers were expensive for a while and
| now they're not. The problem is that there seems to be less
| and less opportunity where one can bring value. The only true
| winners are the factory owners and AI providers in this
| scenario. The only chance anybody has right now is to cut the
| middleman out, start their own business, and pray it takes
| off.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| But the us is China's market, so the ccp goes along even
| though they are the producer. Because a domestic consumer
| economy would mean sharing the profits of that manufacturing
| with the workers. But that would create a middle class not
| dependent on the party leading (at least in their minds, and
| perhaps not wrongly) to instability. It is a dance of two,
| and neither can afford to let go. And neither can keep
| dancing any longer. I think it will be very bad everywhere.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| It's interesting to see Cyberpunk 2077 became somehow relatable
| more and more.
| baq wrote:
| Sci fi works on this topic are about as old as sci fi. I'm
| terrified the stories started hitting close to home in the
| past few years.
| torginus wrote:
| I remember reading Burning Chrome, written in 1982, and one
| of the characters commented on late-stage capitalism.
| cal_dent wrote:
| Housing is a funny old one and speaks to it being a human
| problem. One thing a lot of people dont truly engage with with
| the housing issue is that its a massive issue of distribution.
| Too many people want to live in too few places. Yes, central
| banks & interest rates (being too low and also now being
| relatively too high), nimbyism, and rent seeking play an
| important role too but solving the "too many people live in too
| few places" issue actually fixes that problem (slowly, and
| possibly unpalatably slow for some, but a fix nonetheless)
|
| The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are
| concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism
| stimulating those places and making them further more
| attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave
| governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work
| to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden
| egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working
| more actively helps distribute people to other places with more
| affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places
| become more attractive because people now actually live there.
|
| Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow
| of their high house prices which only loses "real" value
| through inflation which people tend not to notice as much.
|
| But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well
| torginus wrote:
| I see the issue of housing is a combination of:
|
| - House prices increasing while wages are stagnant
|
| - Home loans and increasing prices mean the people going for
| huge leverages on their home purchases
|
| - Supply is essentially government controlled, and dependent,
| and building more housing is heavily politicized
|
| - A lot of dubious money is being created, which gets
| converted to good money by investing it in the housing market
|
| - Housing is genuinely difficult to build and labor and
| capital intensive
|
| > The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are
| concentrated in too few places
|
| This no longer is the case with remote work on the rise, If
| that were the case, housing prices would increase faster in
| trendy overpriced places, but the increase as of late was
| more uniform, with places like London growing slower (or even
| depreciating, relatively speaking) to less in-demand places.
| raldi wrote:
| Food and clothes are much cheaper. People used to have to walk
| or hitchhike a lot more. People died younger, or were trapped
| with abusive spouses and/or parents. Crime was high. There was
| little economic mobility. It really sucked if you weren't a
| straight white man. Houses had one bathroom. Power went out
| regularly. Travel was rare and expensive; people rarely flew
| anywhere. There was limited entertainment or opportunities to
| learn about the world.
| samdoesnothing wrote:
| It's inflation, simple as that. The US left the gold standard
| at the exact same time that productivity diverged from wages.
| Coincidence? No.
|
| Pretty much everything gets more expensive, with the outliers
| being tech which has gotten much cheaper, mostly because the
| rate at which it progresses is faster than the rate at which
| governments can print money. But everything we need to survive,
| like food, housing, etc, keeps getting more expensive. And the
| asset class get richer as a result.
| jameslk wrote:
| > _Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000
| new-hire questions a month._
|
| > _Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer
| some of those questions for us._
|
| > _... Six months later, 80% of the questions I 'd been being
| asked had disappeared._
|
| Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote
| company, or in general:
|
| > _We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback
| by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among
| less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human
| capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers
| write less code when sitting near colleagues._
|
| https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| How about we stop trying the analogy clothing on and just tell it
| like it is? AI is unlike any other technology to date. Just like
| predicting the weather, we don't know what it will be like in 20
| months. Everything is a guesstimate.
| stego-tech wrote:
| This is the correct take. We all have that "Come to Jesus"
| moment eventually, where something blows our minds so
| profoundly that we believe anything is possible in the
| immediate future. I respect that, it's a great take to have and
| promotes a lot of discussion, but now more than ever we need
| concretes and definitives instead of hype machines and their
| adjacent counterparts.
|
| Too much is on the line here regardless of what ultimately ends
| up being true or just hype.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's hard to filter the hot air from the realistic
| predictions. I've been hearing for over 10 years now that
| truck drivers are obsolete and that trucks will drive
| themselves. Yet today truck drivers are still very much in
| demand.
|
| While in the last year I've seen generated images go from
| complete slop to indistinguishable from real photos. It's
| hard to know what is right around the corner and what isn't
| even close.
| tim333 wrote:
| Against that you have the Moore's law like predictions that AI
| would be getting to around human levels around now from Moravec
| and the like that have proved fairly spot on. I think you may
| find it's more like the AI chess ranking graph than the
| weather.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Probably the point is to think whether the horse or chess
| engine analogy is a good one. The premise being there will come
| a certain point when technology reaches a level that makes the
| alternative obselete suddenly. I don't have good reasons to
| think that AI will not be able to automate simple jobs with an
| acceptable error rate eventually, once that happens whole
| categories of jobs will evaporate. Probably dealing with more
| people type job, making excel models, transactions based, same
| thing day in day out, those teams may be gone and only a person
| or two to do a final review
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I think that you're on to something here, though I agree more
| with your first sentence than the second.
|
| AI is not identical to, as the article compares, _mechanical
| power_.
|
| But your weather-forecasting comment suggests a possible
| similarity (though not the one you go to): for all the
| millions-fold increase in compute power, and the increased
| density and specificity of meterological measurements, our
| _accurate_ weather-forecasting window has only extended by a
| factor or so of two (roughly five days to ten). That is, there
| are applications for which _vastly_ more information-processing
| capacity provides fairly modest returns.
|
| And there are also those in which it's transformative. I'd put
| reusable rockets in that category, where we can now put
| sufficiently-reliable compute (and a whole bunch of rocket-
| related hardware) on a boost-phase rocket such that it can
| successfully soft-land.
|
| For some years I've been thinking of the notion of technology
| not as some general principle ("efficiency" is the classic
| economics formulation), but as a set of specific _mechanisms_
| each of which has specific capabilities and limitations.[1] I
| 've held pretty constant with nine of these:
|
| 1. Fuels. Applying more (or more useful) energy to a process.
|
| 2. Energy transmission and transformation.
|
| 3. Materials. Specific properties, abundance, costs, effects,
| limitations.
|
| 4. Process knowledge --- _how_ to do things. What 's generally
| described as "technical knowledge", here considered as a
| specific mechanism of technology.
|
| 5. Structural or causal knowledge --- _why_ things work. What
| 's generally described as "scientific knowledge".
|
| 6. Networks. Interactions between nodes via links, physical or
| virtual, over which matter, energy, information, or some mix
| flow. Transport, comms, power, information.
|
| 7. Systems. Constructs including sensing, processing, action,
| and feedback. Ranging from conceptual to mechanical to human
| and social.
|
| 8. Information. Sensing, perceiving, processing, storing,
| retrieving, and transmitting. Ranging from our natural senses
| to augmented ones, from symbolic systems (language, maths) to
| algorithms.
|
| 9. Hygiene. Sinks and unintended consequences, affecting the
| function and vitality of systems, and their mitigations or
| limits.
|
| AI / AGI falls into the 8th category: information, specifically
| information _processing_. And as such, getting back to my
| original point, we can compare it with other information-
| related technological innovations: speech, writing, maths,
| boolean logic, switches (valves, transistors, etc.),
| information storage /retrieval, etc. And, yes, human thought
| processes. We _do_ have some priors we can look at here, and
| they might help guide us in _what_ a true AGI might be able to
| accomplish, and what its limitations may be.
|
| It's often noted (including in this thread) that AGI would not
| _presently_ be able to persist without copious human
| assistance, in that it 's predicated on a vast technological
| infrastructure only a small portion of which it would be
| capable of substituting for. It's quite likely that AGI would
| be both competitive with and complementary to much human
| activity. In the horse analogy, it's worth noting that the
| _first_ stage of mechanised transport development, with steam
| shipping and rail technology, horses were strongly
| _complementary_ in that they fulfilled the last-mile delivery
| role which steamships and locomotives couldn 't furnish. Horse
| drayage populations actually _boomed_ during this period. It
| was development of ICE-powered lorries which finally out-
| competed the horse-drawn cart for intra-urban delivery. AGI-as-
| augmenting-humans is an already highly-utilised model, and will
| likely persist for some time. Experiments in AGI _replacing_
| humans will no doubt occur, some successful, others not. I 'd
| suggest that my 9th category, hygiene, and specifically failure
| modes of AGI, will likely prove highly interesting.
|
| Mechanised transport also relies heavily on fuels and/or energy
| storage. The past 200 or so years were predicated on
| nonrenewable fossil fuels, first coal then oil, and there were
| several points in that timeline where continued availability of
| cheap fuels was seriously in question. We're now reaching the
| point where _even given abundant supply_ , the relatively-clean
| byproducts of use are proving, at scales of current use,
| incompatible with climatic stability, possibly extending to
| incompatible with advanced technological civilisation or even
| advanced life on Earth (again, category 9).
|
| AGI relies on IC chip manufacture (the province of vanishingly
| few companies), on copious amounts of electricity, scarce
| physical resources, and various legal regimes concerning use of
| intellectual works, property, profit, and more (categories 1,
| 2, 3, and 7, at a minimum). Whether or not a world with
| pervasive AGI proves to be a stable or unstable point is
| another open question.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. A sampling of prior HN discussions may be found with this
| search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fa
| lse&qu...>.
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Humans design the world to our benefit, horses do not.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Most humans don't. Only the wealthy and powerful are able to do
| this
|
| And they often do it at the expense of the rest of us
| AstroBen wrote:
| Cool, now lets make a big list of technologies that _didn 't_
| take off like they were expected to
| echelon wrote:
| > And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had
| disappeared.
|
| > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
|
| > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think
| we're getting a lot less.
|
| This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out
| of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry.
|
| Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't
| need to be owned or controlled by a handful of companies. It
| makes me hope the Chinese and their open source models ultimately
| win.
|
| I've seen Anthropic and OpenAI employees leaning into this
| rhetoric on an almost daily basis since 2023. Less so OpenAI
| lately, but you see it all the time from these folks. Even the
| top leadership.
|
| Meanwhile Google, apart from perhaps Kilpatrick, is just silent.
| trollbridge wrote:
| At this point "we're going to make all office work obsolete"
| feels more like a marketing technique than anything actually
| connected to reality. It's sort of like how Coca-Cola implies
| that drinking their stuff will make you popular and well-liked
| by other attractive, popular people.
|
| Meanwhile, my own office is buried in busywork that there are
| currently no AI tools on the market that will do the work for
| us, and AI entering a space sometimes increases busywork
| workloads. For example, when writing descriptions of
| publications or listings for online sales, we have to put more
| effort now into not sounding like it was AI-generated or we
| will lose sales. The AI tools for writing descriptions /
| generating listings are not very helpful either. (An inaccurate
| listing/description is a nightmare.)
|
| I was able to help set up a client with AI tools to help him
| generate basically a faux website in a few hours that has lots
| of nice graphic design, images, etc. so that his new venture
| looks like a real company. Well, except for the "About Us" page
| that hallucinated an executive team plus a staff of half a
| dozen employees. So I guess work like that does get done faster
| now.
| glitchc wrote:
| Well, tbf the author was hired to answer newbie questions.
| Perhaps the position is that of an evangelist, not a scientist.
| baq wrote:
| I couldn't have made a worse take if I tried
| glitchc wrote:
| I understand that computer scientists are often wrong about
| things outside their expertise. Other scientists too.
| kazinator wrote:
| Ironically, you could use the sigmoid function instead of horses.
| The training stimulus slowly builds over multiple iteration and
| then suddenly, flip: the wrong prediction reverses.
| fizlebit wrote:
| yeah but machines don't produce horseshit, or do they? (said in
| the style of Vsauce)
| conartist6 wrote:
| I thought this was going to be about how much more intelligent
| horses are than AIs and I was disappointed
| billisonline wrote:
| An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a
| closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these
| new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help
| onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an
| engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by
| the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of
| change in LLMs slowed down, and those exciting exponentials
| started to look more like plateauing S-curves, executives
| conveniently stopped using the term "AGI," preferring weasel-
| words like "transformative AI" instead.
|
| I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself
| to new tasks as well as humans can, and something that can reason
| symbolically about novel domains as well as we can. I've seen
| about enough from LLMs, and I agree with the critique that som
| type of breakthrough neuro-symbolic reasoning architecture will
| be needed. The article is right about one thing: in that moment
| AI will overtake us suddenly! But I doubt we will make linear
| progress toward that goal. It could happen in one year, five,
| ten, fifty, or never. In 2023 I was deeply concerned about being
| made obsolete by AI, but now I sleep pretty soundly knowing the
| status quo will more or less continue until Judgment Day, which I
| can't influence anyway.
| rvz wrote:
| Remember, these companies (including the author) have an
| incentive to continue selling fear of job displacement not
| because of how disruptive LLMs are, but because of how
| profitable it is if you scare everyone into using your product
| to "survive".
|
| To companies like Anthropic, "AGI" really means: "Liquidity
| event for (AI company)" - IPO, tender offer or acquisition.
|
| Afterwards, you will see the same broken promises as the
| company will be subject to the expectations of Wall St and
| pension funds.
| rukuu001 wrote:
| I think a lot about how much we altered our environment to suit
| cars. They're not a perfect solution to transport, but they've
| been so useful we've built tons more road to accommodate them.
|
| So, while I don't think AGI will happen any time soon, I wonder
| what 'roads' we'll build to squeeze the most out of our current
| AI. Probably tons of power generation.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Customer service will be almost fully automated, and human
| customers will be forced to adapt to the bots.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Or customers will find other providers who don't annoy
| them.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Exactly why Comcast and Google went out of business with
| their abysmal customer support.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| History so far suggests this is a dim possibility.
| xtracto wrote:
| It already has with IVRs . I wonder if as a generalization,
| current technology will keep being used to provide layers
| and layers of "automation" for communication between
| people.
|
| SDR Agents will communicate with "Procurement" Agents.
| Customer Support Agents will communicate with Product
| Agents. Coffee Barista Agents will talk with Personal
| Assistant Agents.
|
| People will communicate less and less among each other.
| What will people talk about? Who will we talk to?
| sotix wrote:
| This is a really interesting observation! Cars don't have to
| dominate our city design, and yet they do in many places. In
| the USA, you basically only have NYC and a few less
| convenient cities to avoid a city designed for cars. Society
| has largely been reshaped with the assumption that cars will
| be used whether or not you'd like to use one.
|
| What would that look like for navigating life without AI?
| Living in a community similar to the Amish or Hasidic Jews
| that don't integrate technology in their lives as much as the
| average person does? That's a much more extreme lifestyle
| change than moving to NYC to get away from cars.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We didn't just build roads, we utterly changed land-use
| patterns to suit them.
|
| Cities, towns, and villages (and there were far more of the
| latter then) weren't walkable out of choice, but _necessity_.
| At _most_ , by the late 19th century, urban geography was
| walkable-from-the-streetcar, and suburbs walkable-from-
| railway-station. And that only in the comparatively few
| metros and metro regions which had well-developed streetcar
| and commuter-rail lines.
|
| With automobiles, housing spread out, became single-family,
| nuclear-family, often single-storey, and frequently on large
| lots. That's not viable when your only options to get
| someplace are by foot, or perhaps bicycle. Shopping moved
| from dense downtowns and city-centres (or perhaps shopping
| districts in larger cities) to strips and boulevards.
| Supermarkets and hypermarkets replaced corner grocery stores
| (which you could walk to _and from_ with your groceries in
| hand, or perhaps in a cart). Eventually shopping malls were
| created (virtually always _well away_ from any transit
| service, whether bus or rail), commercial islands in
| shopping-lot lakes. Big-box stores dittos.
|
| It's not just roads and car parks, it's the entire urban
| landscape.
|
| AI, should this current fad continue and succeed, will likely
| have similarly profound secondary effects.
| billisonline wrote:
| "Tons of power generation?" Perhaps we will go in that
| direction (as OpenAI projects), but it assumes the juice will
| be worth the squeeze, i.e., that scaling laws requiring much
| more power for LLM training and/or inference will deliver a
| qualitatively better product before they run out. The failure
| of GPT 4.5, while not a definitive end to scaling, was a
| pretty discouraging sign.
| creshal wrote:
| > executives conveniently stopped using the term "AGI,"
| preferring weasel-words like "transformative AI" instead.
|
| Remember when "AGI" was the weasel word because 1980s AI kept
| on not delivering?
| cubefox wrote:
| > I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt
| itself to new tasks as well as humans can
|
| That's highly irrelevant because if it were otherwise, we would
| already be replaced. The article was talking about the future.
| danw1979 wrote:
| The article was _speculating_ about the future.
| cubefox wrote:
| It was doing both.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > An engine performs a simple mechanical operation
|
| It only appears "simple" because you're used to see working
| engines everywhere without never having to maintain them, but
| neither the previous generations nor the engineers working on
| modern engines would agree with you on that.
|
| An engine performs "a simple mechanical operation" the same way
| an LLM performs a "simple computation".
| johnsmith1840 wrote:
| I mean it's hard to argue that if we invented a human in a box
| (AGI) human work would be irrelevent. But I don't know how we
| could watch current AI and anyone can say we have that.
|
| The big thing this AI boom has showed us that we can all be
| thankful to have seen is what a human in a box will eventually
| look like. The first generation of humans to be able to see that
| is a super lucky experience to have.
|
| Maybe it's one massive breakthrough away or maybe it's dozens
| away. But there is no way to predict when some massive
| breakthrough will occur Illya said 5-20 that really just means we
| don't know.
| goatlover wrote:
| Why a human in a box and not an android? A lot of jobs will
| require advanced robotics to fully automate. And then there are
| jobs where customer preference is for human interaction or
| human entertainment. It's like how superior chess engines have
| not reduced the profession of chess grandmasters, because
| people remain more interested in human chess competition.
| baq wrote:
| The assumption is superhuman AGI or a stronger ASI could
| invent anything it needed really fast, so ASI means
| intelligent robots within years or months, depending on
| manufacturing capabilities.
| namesbc wrote:
| Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code
| written was a poor metric for productivity...
|
| https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
| actionfromafar wrote:
| So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce
| not regular text, but patches which _shortens_ code while still
| keeping the code working the same.
| wyre wrote:
| gonna tell claude to write all my code in one line
| lomase wrote:
| Imagine you are a Perl programmer writing js...
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| They can already do that. A few months ago I played around
| with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50
| without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a
| piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex
| / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can
| give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites
| outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not).
|
| No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the
| capabilities are here.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| LLMs won't ever shut up. That seems unfixable. But a "hack"
| would perhaps be to train them to make longer patches but
| which actually _removes_ code.
| underyx wrote:
| Ctrl-F 'lines', 0 results
|
| Ctrl-F 'code', 0 results
|
| What is this comment about?
| kalkin wrote:
| Charitably I'm guessing it's supposed to be an allusion to
| the chart with cost per word? Which is measuring an input
| cost not an output value, so the criticism still doesn't
| quite make sense, but it's the best I can do...
| anon7000 wrote:
| Maybe it was edited. I count at least 6 instances of the word
| "code"
| Thorrez wrote:
| underyx was doing the ctrl+f on the original (horses)
| article, not the negative 2000 lines of code article.
|
| It's a confusing comment. I misinterpreted it myself too
| originally.
| pmg101 wrote:
| "The LLM can write lines of code, sure, but can it be
| productive?" is, I think, the implied question.
| chongli wrote:
| The linked short story is barely 5 paragraphs long. You could
| have just read it instead of writing an insubstantial remark
| like this. It's a fun anecdote about a famous programmer
| (Bill Atkinson).
| underyx wrote:
| I've read it multiple times before, it's irrelevant in this
| discussion.
| pbw wrote:
| This is food for thought, but horses were a commodity; people are
| very much not interchangeable with each other. The BLS tracks
| ~1,000 different occupations. Each will fall to AI at a slightly
| different rate, and within each, there will be variations as
| well. But this doesn't mean it won't still subjectively happen
| "fast".
| erichocean wrote:
| That looks to me like there are ~1000 interchangeable economic
| human roles for AI to replace.
|
| So I guess we should check to see if computers are good at
| scaling or doing things concurrently. If not, no worries!
| hnfong wrote:
| Whether people are interchangeable with each other isn't the
| point. The point is whether AI is interchangeable with jobs
| currently done by humans. Unless and until AI training requires
| 1000 different domain experts, the current projection is that
| at some point AI will be interchangeable with all kinds of
| humans...
| glitchc wrote:
| Conclusion: Soylent..?
| nextworddev wrote:
| damn
| leowoo91 wrote:
| We still have chess grandmasters if you have noticed..
| xlbuttplug2 wrote:
| Yes, and we'll continue to have human coding competitions for
| entertainment purpose. Good luck trying to live off the prize
| money though.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Hikaru makes good money streaming on Twitch tho
| hurturue wrote:
| so you're telling me there will be money for about 100 top
| streaming programmers
| byronic wrote:
| my favorite part was where the graphs are all unrelated to each
| other
| richardles wrote:
| I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up
| onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired
| mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first
| drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse
| analogy works.
|
| It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human
| when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster.
| Do ping a human for meaningful questions related to product
| directions / historical context.
|
| What LLMs are killing is:
|
| - noisy Slacks with junior folks questions. Those are now your
| Gemini / chat gpt sessions.
|
| - tedious implementation sessions.
|
| The vast majority of the work is still human led from what I can
| tell.
| 8note wrote:
| you still lose a bit from not having those juniors' questions
| around - where is your documentation sucking or your code is
| confusing?
| baq wrote:
| Both questions are getting scary good answers from the latest
| models. Yes, I tried, on a large proprietary code base which
| shouldn't be included in any training set.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| We are now at a point where the tech can help with both of
| those, today. You can have a cc session "in a loop" going
| through your docs / code and try to do x and y, and if it
| gets stuck, that's a pretty good signal that something sucks
| there. At least you can get a heatmap of what works ootb, and
| what needs more eyes.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| That sounds like a horrible onboarding experience. Human
| mentors provide a lot more than just answering questions, like
| providing context, comraderie or social skills, or even coping
| mechanisms. Starting a new job can be terrifying for juniors,
| and if their only friend is faceless chat bot...
| richardles wrote:
| You're right. We need to keep tabs on the culture for new
| hires for the reasons you mentioned. LLMs are really good at
| many onboarding tasks, but the social ones.
|
| I think done right it is a superior onboarding experience. As
| a new hire, you no longer have to wait for your mentor to be
| available to learn some badly documented tech things. This is
| really empowering some of them. The lack of building human
| context / connections etc is real, and I don't think LLMs can
| meaningfully help there. Hence my skepticism for the horse
| analogy.
| skywhopper wrote:
| If they're badly documented, how does the LLM help?
| lbreakjai wrote:
| This sounds horrible. Onboarding should ideally be marginally
| about the "what". After all, we already have a very precise and
| non ambiguous system to tell what the system does: the code.
|
| What I want to know when I join a company is "why" the system
| does what it does. Sure, give me pointers, some overview of how
| the code is structured, that always helps, but if you don't
| tell me why how am I supposed to work?
|
| $currentCompany has the best documentation I've seen in my
| career. It's been spun off from a larger company, from people
| collaborating asynchronously and remotely whenever they had
| some capacity.
|
| No matter how diligent we've been, as soon as the company
| started in earnest and we got people fully dedicated to it,
| there's been a ton of small decisions that happened during a
| quick call, or on a slack thread, or as a comment on a figma
| design.
|
| This is the sort of "you had to be there" context the
| onboarding should aim to explain, and I don't see how LLMs help
| with that.
| john-radio wrote:
| I've never visited this blog before but I really enjoy the
| synthesis of programming skill (at least enough skill to render
| quick graphs and serve them via a web blog) and writing skill
| here. It kind of reminds me of the way xkcd likes to drive home
| his ideas. For example, "Surpassed by a system that costs one
| thousand times less than I do... less, per word thought or
| written, than ... the cheapest human labor" could just be a
| throwaway thought, and wouldn't serve very well on its own,
| unsupported, in a serious essay, and of course the graph that
| accompanies that thought in Jones's post here is probably 99.9%
| napkin math / AI output, but I do feel like it adds to the
| argument without distracting from it.
|
| (A parenthetical comment explaining where he ballparked the
| measurements for himself, the "cheapest human labor," and Claude
| numbers would also have supported the argument, and some writers,
| especially web-focused nerd-type writers like Scott Alexander,
| are very good at this, but text explanations, even in
| parentheses, have a way of distracting readers from your main
| point. I only feel comfortable writing one now because my main
| point is completed.)
| blondie9x wrote:
| This post is kind of sad. It feels like he's advocating for human
| depopulation since the trajectory aligns with horse populations
| declining by 93% also.
| taneq wrote:
| Not advocating, just predicting. And not necessarily actual
| population, just population in paid employment.
| throw234234234 wrote:
| Indeed. I do wonder if the inventors of the "transformer
| architecture" knew all the potential Pandora's boxes they were
| opening when they invented it. Probably not.
|
| No one wants to say the scary potential logical conclusion of
| replacing the last value that humans have a competitive
| advantage in; that being intelligence and cognition. For
| example there is one future scenario of humanity where only the
| capital and resource holders survive; the middle and lower
| classes become surplus to requirements and lose any power. Its
| already happening slowly via inflation and higher asset prices
| after all - it is a very real possibility. I don't think a
| revolution will be possible in this scenario; with AI and
| robotics the rich could outnumber pretty much everyone.
| dsego wrote:
| Not advocating, just warning about things to come.
| cuttothechase wrote:
| >>This was a five-minute lightning talk given over the summer of
| 2025 to round out a small workshop.
|
| Glad I noticed that footnote.
|
| Article reeks of false equivalences and incorrect transitive
| dependencies.
| kgk9000 wrote:
| I think the author's point is that each type of job will
| basically disappear roughly at once, shortly after AI crosses the
| bar of "good enough" in that particular field.
| xlbuttplug2 wrote:
| I think the turning point will be when AI assisted individuals
| or tiny companies are able to deliver comparable products/value
| as the goliaths.
| esafak wrote:
| That would be the ideal scenario; when you can build a small
| business more easily.
| pmg101 wrote:
| Why hasn't this happened already?
|
| I'm willing to believe the hype on LLMs except that I don't
| see any tiny 1-senior-dev-plus-agents companies disrupting
| the market. Maybe it just hasn't happened "yet"... But I've
| been kind of wondering the same thing for most of 2025.
| xlbuttplug2 wrote:
| I think it has to get good enough to a point where humans
| are not the bottleneck for code review and course
| correction.
|
| I guess the "velocity" multiplier is closer to 10x rather
| than the 1000x needed for true disruption capability.
| COAGULOPATH wrote:
| > In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25
| million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of
| progress in mechanical engines.
|
| But would you rather be a horse in 1920 or 2020? Wouldn't you
| rather have modern medicine, better animal welfare laws, less
| exposure to accidents, and so on?
|
| The only way horses conceivably have it worse is that there are
| fewer of them (a kind of "repugnant conclusion")...but what does
| that matter to an individual horse? No human regards it as a
| tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90
| billion. We care more about the welfare of the 9 billion.
| BeefySwain wrote:
| The equivalency here is not 9 billion versus 90 billion, it's 9
| billion versus 90 million, and the question is how does the
| decline look? Does it look like the standard of living for
| everyone increasing so high that the replacement rate is in the
| single digit percentage range, or does it look like some
| version of Elysium where millions have immense wealth and
| billions have nothing and die off?
| schoen wrote:
| > No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9
| billion of us instead of 90 billion.
|
| I have met some transhumanists and longtermists who would
| really like to see some orders of magnitude increase in the
| human population. Maybe they wouldn't say "tragedy", but they
| might say "burning imperative".
|
| I also don't think it's clearly better for more beings to exist
| rather than fewer, but I just want to assure you that the _full
| range_ of takes on population ethics definitely exists, and it
| 's not simply a matter of straightforward common sense how many
| people (or horses) there ought to be.
| ternus wrote:
| Regarding horses vs. engines, what changed the game was not
| engine efficiency, but the widespread availability of fuel (gas
| stations) and the broad diffusion of reliable, cheap cars.
| Analogies can be made to technologies like cell phones, MP3
| players, or electric cars: beyond just the quality of the core
| technology, what matters is a) the existence of supporting
| infrastructure and b) a watershed level of "good/cheap enough"
| where it displaces the previous best option.
| baq wrote:
| It's both. A steam engine at 2% efficiency is good only for
| digging up more coal for itself, and barely so. Completely
| different story at 20%. Every doubling is a step function in
| some area as it becomes energetically and economically rational
| to use it for something.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| And roads, and other auto-friendly (or auto-dependent)
| infrastructure and urban / national land-use.
|
| Cars went from a _luxury_ to a _necessity_ , though largely not
| until after WWII in the US, and somewhat later in other parts
| of the world.
|
| There remain areas where a car is _not_ required, or even a
| burden. NYC, and a few major metropolitan regions, as well as
| poorer parts of the world (though motorcycles and mopeds are
| often prevalent there).
| pansa2 wrote:
| > _90% of the horses in the US disappeared_
|
| Where did they go?
| xwolfi wrote:
| they grew old and died ?
| ekelsen wrote:
| sometimes not nearly so pleasant for them.
| dsego wrote:
| There is a TV movie In Pursuit of Honor (1995) claiming to be
| based on true events. My short search online states that such
| things were never really documented, but it's plausible that
| there were similar things happening.
|
| > In Pursuit of Honor is a 1995 American made-for-cable
| Western film directed by Ken Olin. Don Johnson stars as a
| member of a United States Cavalry detachment refusing to
| slaughter its horses after being ordered to do so by General
| Douglas MacArthur. The movie follows the plight of the
| officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no
| longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.
| 20after4 wrote:
| The glue factory.
| tomxor wrote:
| Terrible comparison.
|
| Horses and cars had a clearly defined, tangible, measurable
| purpose: transport... they were 100% comparable as a market good,
| and so predicting an inflection point is very reasonable. Same
| with Chess, a clearly defined problem in finite space with a
| binary, measurable outcome. Funny how Chess AI replacing humans
| in general was never considered as a serious possibility by most.
|
| Now LLMs, what is their purpose? What is the purpose of a human?
|
| I'm not denying some legitimate yet tedious human tasks are to
| regurgitate text... and a fuzzy text predictor can do a fairly
| good job of that at less cost. Some people also think and work in
| terms of text prediction more often than they should (that's
| called bullshitting - not a coincidence).
|
| They really are _just_ text predictors, ones trained on such a
| humanly incomprehensible quantity of information as to appear
| superficially intelligent, as far as correlation will allow. It's
| been 4 years now, we already knew this. The idea that LLMs are a
| path to AGI and will replace all human jobs is so far off the
| mark.
| twodave wrote:
| Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and
| progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena.
| Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren't
| the right kind of progress. LLMs aren't coming for your job any
| more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I'll list
| two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as
| productive, most companies will still have more work to do than
| resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce
| headcount is to remove people who already weren't providing much
| value. 2. Writing code continues to be a very late
| step of the overall software development process. Even if all my
| code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it
| written, I still have a full-time job.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of
| Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week
| following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed.
| And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he
| felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that
| much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and
| accomplishment.
|
| Instead our productivity went way above anything he could
| imagine, yet there was no radical shift in labor. We just
| instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon
| enough we can add trillionaires. He underestimated how many
| people were willing to designate the pursuit of wealth as the
| meaning of life itself.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics
| schmichael wrote:
| Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase
| margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it
| is to reduce work hours.
|
| At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably
| before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks
| is unions and worker protections. Not technology.
|
| Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but
| there's no guarantee what form that surplus will reach
| workers as, if it does at all.
| goatlover wrote:
| Failure of politics and the media then. Majority of voters
| have been fooled into voting against their economic
| interests.
| anon7000 wrote:
| > Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase
| margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then
| it is to reduce work hours
|
| I mean, that basically just sums up how capitalism works.
| Profit growth is literally (even legally!) the only thing a
| company can care about. Everything else, like product
| quality, pays service to that goal.
| tirant wrote:
| That's not a good summary of capitalism at all because
| you omit the part where interests of sellers and buyers
| align. Which is precisely what has made capitalism
| successful.
|
| Profit growth is based primarily on offering the product
| that best matches the consumer wish at the lowest price,
| and production cost possible. That benefits both the
| buyer and the seller. If the buyer does not care about
| product quality, then you will not have any company
| producing quality products.
|
| The market is just a reflection of that dinamica. And in
| the real world we can easily observed that: Many market
| niches are dominated by quality products (outdoor and
| safety gear, professional and industrial tools...) while
| others tend to be dominated by non-quality (low end
| fashion, toys).
|
| And that result is not imposed by profit growth but by
| the average consumer preference.
|
| You can of course disagree with those consumer
| preferences and don't buy low quality products, that's
| why you most probably also find high products in any
| market niche.
|
| But you cannot blame companies for that. What they sell
| is just the result of the aggregated buyers preferences
| and the result of free market decisions.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Armies and pinkertons made capitalism succesfull.
| timClicks wrote:
| Sorry if this is somewhat pedantic, but I believe that
| only US companies (and possibly only Delaware
| corporations?) are bound by the requirement to maximize
| shareholder value and then only by case law rather than
| statue. Other jurisdictions allow the directors more
| discretion, or place more weight on the company's
| constitution/charter.
| bloppe wrote:
| Margins require a competitive edge. If productivity gains
| are spread throughout a competitive industry, margins will
| not get bigger; prices will go down.
| LPisGood wrote:
| That feels optimistic. This kind of naive free market
| ideology seems to rarely manifest in lower prices.
| bloppe wrote:
| Then maybe you've never worked in a competitive industry.
| I have. Margins were very small.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Every competitive industry has tiny margins. High margin
| business exists because of lack of competition.
| degamad wrote:
| That's because free markets don't always result in
| competitive industries.
| machomaster wrote:
| > _We just instead started making billionaires by the
| thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires._
|
| We just instead started doing Bullshit Jobs.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| thedailymail wrote:
| In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our
| Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour
| workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would
| view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally
| insane.
|
| "There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect
| to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high
| social importance, there will be great changes in the code of
| morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the
| pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two
| hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most
| distasteful of human qualities into the position of the
| highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess
| the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a
| possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a
| means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be
| recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity,
| one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities
| which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in
| mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic
| practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of
| economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all
| costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in
| themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting
| the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last,
| to discard."
| somenameforme wrote:
| A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely
| informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming
| classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In
| 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very
| important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life",
| while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off
| financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped,
| with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important,
| and 82% viewing being financially well off as very
| important.
|
| It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I
| think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were
| able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards
| Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation
| increased, society seems to have trended in the exact
| opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a
| contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most,
| younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of
| disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves.
|
| In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally
| the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to
| predict what follows.
|
| [1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMono
| graph20...
| odo1242 wrote:
| Well, keep in mind students at UCLA at 1967 were probably
| among the most wealthy in the country. A lot more average
| people at UCLA nowadays. Of course being financially well
| off wouldn't be the most important thing if you were
| already financially well off.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Interesting question that the study can also answer,
| because it also asked about parental income!
|
| ---
|
| 1966 Median Household Income = $7400 [1].
|
| 51% of students in the $0-9999 bracket
|
| Largest chunk of students (33%) in $6k-$9999 bracket.
|
| Percent of students from families earning at least 2x
| median = 23%
|
| ---
|
| 2015 Median Household Income = $57k [1].
|
| 65% of students came from families earning more than
| $60k.
|
| Largest chunk of students (18%) in $100k-$150k bracket.
|
| Percent of students from families earning at least 2x
| median = 44%
|
| ---
|
| So I think it's fairly safe to say that the average
| student at UCLA today comes from a significantly
| wealthier family than in 1966.
|
| [1] - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1967/de
| mo/p60-05...
|
| [2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
| odo1242 wrote:
| Oh, I guess not then lol
| tirant wrote:
| I wonder what would be the proportion of answers between
| different society economic levels.
|
| What we know so far though is that many of the
| traditional values were bound to the old society
| structures, based on the traditional family.
|
| The advent of the sexual revolution, brought by the
| contraception pill, completely obliterated those
| structures, changing the family paradigm since then. Only
| accentuated in the last decade by social media and the
| change in the sexual marketplace due to dating apps.
|
| Probably today many young people would just prioritize
| reputation (eg followers) over wealth and life
| philosophy. As that seems to be the trend that dictates
| the sexual marketplace dinamics.
| imtringued wrote:
| The paradox is that the general principles of the market
| work, but the market is invisibly dysfunctional in its
| details.
|
| It is generally true that higher income jobs are
| allocated to higher productivity workers, but it does not
| follow that high incomes imply high productivity and vice
| versa for low incomes.
|
| If you combine the above with a disequilibrium market
| where supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor, then
| from a naive perspective it would appear as if the
| unemployed would deserve their unemployment.
|
| After all, the most productive members are all employed
| and rewarded for their efforts. The unemployed are just
| lazy (voluntarily unemployed) and incompetent (society is
| better off without them). Any form of punishment is seen
| as justified and not some structural failing of the
| system.
|
| The problem is that if there is a labor market
| disequilibrium, there will always be unemployed people
| and even if you think the productivity ranking is a good
| thing, it just means that if one of the "lazy" people
| suddenly becomes "hard working", they will just take the
| place of someone else and nothing has changed other than
| that the standard for laziness has risen.
|
| Even if people notice that the system is fundamentally
| broken, they realize that individually, they are either a
| beneficiary of the system and therefore don't see a
| reason to change it or they don't have the ability to
| change the system and rather focus on taking someone
| else's place.
|
| This will result in an artificial Darwinian rat race
| where people see each other as competitors to defeat.
|
| This is my explanation for why immigrants make a good
| scapegoat even though immigration doesn't affect the
| rules of the game at all.
|
| Here is an analogy via a game of musical chairs. There is
| the perception that more immigrants means more players
| competing for chairs. This is a naive interpretation that
| looks obvious. What is being forgotten is that each
| player is bringing a new chair and the number of missing
| chairs is a percentage of the number of players. The
| truth is that having more immigrants means you can take
| their chair away for yourself. So immigration is not
| causative here. The problem is that there were never
| enough chairs to begin with no matter how many people are
| playing the game.
| refactor_master wrote:
| > We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-
| moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred
| years
|
| Still haven't gotten rid of work for work's sake being a
| virtue, which explains everything else. Welfare? You don't
| "deserve" it. Until we solve this problem, we're not or
| less heading straight for feudalism.
| azan_ wrote:
| > We just instead started making billionaires by the
| thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires.
|
| Didn't we also get standards of living much higher than he
| would ever imagine? I think blaming everything on
| billionaires is really misguided and shallow.
| enduser wrote:
| This is a very insightful take. People forget that there is
| competition between corporations and nations that drives an
| arms race. The humans at risk of job displacement are the ones
| who lack the skill and experience to oversee the robots. But if
| one company/nation has a workforce that is effectively 1000x,
| then the next company/nation needs to compete. The
| companies/countries that retire their humans and try to
| automate everything will be out-competed by companies/countries
| that use humans and robots together to maximum effect.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I think you've missed the point. Cars replaced horses - it
| wasn't cars+horses that won. Computers replaced humans as the
| best chess players, not computers with human oversight. If
| successful, the end state is full automation because it's
| strictly superhuman and scales way more easily.
| baq wrote:
| Humans still play chess and horses are still around as a
| species.
|
| (Disclaimer: this is me trying to be optimistic in a very
| grim and depressing situation)
| skissane wrote:
| B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs,
| then most of the population-minus the small minority who
| are independently wealthy and can live off their
| investments-go broke, and can't afford to buy anything
| any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all
| the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers
| and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the
| independently wealthy lose all their investments and go
| broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills
| any more, so the AIs get turned off.
|
| And that's why across-the-board AI-induced job losses
| aren't going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of
| cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren't stupid enough
| to blow everything up because they don't want to be blown
| up in the process. And if they actually are stupid
| enough, politicians will intervene with human
| protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans
| in the loop of major business processes.
|
| The horse comparison ultimately doesn't work because
| horses don't vote.
| baq wrote:
| This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of
| countries which don't care about votes, indeed there are
| dictators that don't care about their subjects, they only
| care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument
| only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that's
| assuming money is worth anything anymore.
| skissane wrote:
| The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social
| stability. Do you think they'll allow AI to take all the
| jobs, destroying China's domestic economy in the process?
| Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What
| Would Xi Jinping Do?
| ben_w wrote:
| > Do you think they'll allow AI to take all the jobs,
| destroying China's domestic economy in the process?
|
| If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away
| for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess),
| the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing
| whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this
| case the Chinese government) want it to do.
|
| That can be all the social stability stuff they want.
| Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the
| Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family
| in a big detached house with a white picket fence,
| everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people
| supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc.
|
| I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP
| and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I
| don't know what their equivalents to any of those things
| would be.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Look at what China does to protect its citizens against
| social media. You see China enacting many of the social
| media protections that many HN enthusiasts demand, yet
| Sinophobia makes them reframe it as a negative. "Children
| shouldn't have access to social media, except when China
| does it then it's bad!"
| 9rx wrote:
| _> B2C businesses need consumers_
|
| Businesses need consumers when those consumers are
| necessary to provide something in return (e.g. labor). If
| I want beef and only have grass, my grass business needs
| people with cattle wanting my grass so that we can trade
| grass for beef, certainly. But if technology can provide
| me beef (and anything else I desire) without involving
| any other people, I don't need a business anymore.
| Businesses is just a tool to facilitate trade. No need
| for trade, no need for business.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The independently wealthy still need the economies of
| scale provided by a normal society.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Can the process be similar to a sudden collapse of USSR's
| economic system? The leaders weren't stupid and tried to
| keep it afloat but with underlying systemic issues
| everything just cratered.
|
| Can the process be modelled using game theory where the
| actors are greedy corporate leaders and hungry populace?
| twoodfin wrote:
| The USSR's political system collapsed fairly suddenly.
| Its economic system had been rotten for decades.
| plufz wrote:
| I try to be optimistic as well. But obviously horses are
| almost exclusively a hobby today. The work horse is gone.
| I think the problem is political to a part, if we manage
| to spread the wealth AI can create we are fine. If we let
| it concentrate power even more it looks very grim.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| I am somewhat confident that horses are going to replace
| cars and tractors pretty soon, possibly within my
| lifetime and quite likely with my son's.
|
| He's going to learn how to drive (and repair) a tractor
| but he's also going to learn how to ride a horse.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| Perhaps you have missed the essential point. Who drives the
| cars? It's not the horses, is it? And a chess computer is
| just as unlikely to start a game of chess on its own as a
| horse is to put on its harness and pull a plow across a
| field. I'm not entirely sure what impact all this will have
| on the job market, but your comparisons are flawed.
| Covenant0028 wrote:
| In the case of horses and cars, you need the same number
| of people to drive both (exactly one per vehicle). In the
| case of AI and automation, the entire economic bet is
| that agents will be able to replace X humans with Y
| humans. Ideally for employers Y=0, but they'll settle for
| Y<<X.
|
| People seem to think this discussion is a binary where
| either agents replace everybody or they don't. It's not
| that simple. In aggregate, what's more likely to happen
| (if the promises of AI companies hold good) is large
| scale job losses and the remaining employees becoming the
| accountability sinks to bear the blame when the agent
| makes a mistake. AI doesn't have to replace everybody to
| cause widespread misery.
| ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote:
| Yes, I understand that it's about saving on labor costs.
| Depending on how successful this is, it could lead to
| major changes in the labor market in economies where
| skilled workers have been doing quite well up to now.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Computers replaced humans as the best chess players, not
| computers with human oversight._
|
| Oh? I sat down for a game of chess against a computer and
| it never showed up. I was certain it didn't show up because
| computers are unable to without human oversight, but tell
| me why I'm wrong.
| p-e-w wrote:
| Apparently human chess grandmasters also need "oversight"
| from airplanes, because without those, essentially none
| of them would show up at elite tournaments.
| 9rx wrote:
| Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess
| grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and
| perform while there, without airplanes. Computer chess
| systems, on the other hand, cannot do anything without
| human oversight.
| fsflover wrote:
| Yes, a computer chess system replacing a thousand chess
| players requires a couple of developers for the
| oversight.
| 9rx wrote:
| Computer chess systems don't need developer oversight.
| They do, however, require oversight from, let's call
| them, IT people.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Things like trains, boats, and cars exist. Human chess
| grandmasters can show up to elite tournaments, and
| perform while there, without airplanes.
|
| Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes for
| the point being made.
|
| I (not that I'm even as good as "mediocre" at chess)
| cannot legally get from my current location to the USA
| without some other human being involved. This is because
| I'm not an American and would need my entry to be OKed by
| the humans managing the border.
|
| I also doubt that I would be able to construct a vessel
| capable of crossing the Atlantic safely, possibly not
| even a small river. I don't even know enough to enumerate
| how hard that would be, would need help making a list.
| Even if knew all that I needed to, it would be much
| harder to do it from raw materials rather than buying
| pre-cut timber, steel, cloth (for a sail), etc. Even if I
| did it that way, I can't generate cloth fibres and wood
| from by body like plants do. Even if I did extrude and
| secrete raw materials, plants photosynthesise and I eat,
| living things don't spontaneously generate these products
| from their souls.
|
| For arguments like this, consider the AI like you
| consider treat Stephen Hawking: lack of motor skills
| aren't relevant to the rest of what they can do.
|
| When AI gets good enough to control the robots needed to
| automate everything from mining the raw materials all the
| way up to making more robots to mine the raw materials,
| then not only are all jobs obsolete, we're also half a
| human lifetime away from a Dyson swarm.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Those modes of transport are all equivalent to planes
| for the point being made._
|
| The point is that even those things require oversight
| from humans. Everything humans do requires oversight from
| humans. How you missed it, nobody knows.
|
| Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans
| can be exterminated from life and computers can continue
| to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the
| human oversight and those computers will soon turn into
| lumps of scrap unable to do anything.
|
| Sad state of affairs when not even the HN crowd
| understands such basic concepts about computing anymore.
| I guess that's what happens when one comes to tech by way
| of "Learn to code" movements promising a good job instead
| of by way of having an interest in technology.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Everything humans do requires oversight from humans.
| How you missed it, nobody knows.
|
| 'cause you said: Computer chess systems,
| on the other hand, cannot do anything without human
| oversight.
|
| The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast,
| suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it
| ("chess grandmasters") are different with regard to the
| task ("show up to elite tournaments"), and thus can
| manage without the stated limitation ("anything without
| human oversight").
|
| > Maybe someday we'll have a robot uprising where humans
| can be exterminated from life and computers can continue
| to play chess, but that day is not today. Remove the
| human oversight and those computers will soon turn into
| lumps of scrap unable to do anything.
|
| OK, and? Nobody's claiming "today" is that day. Even Musk
| despite his implausible denials regarding Optimus being
| remote controlled isn't claiming that today is that day.
|
| The message you replied to was this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46201604
|
| The chess-playing example there was an existing example
| of software beating humans in a specific domain in order
| to demonstrate that human oversight is not a long-term
| solution, you can tell by the use of the words "end
| state", and even then hypothetical (due to "if"), as in:
| If successful, the end state is full automation
|
| There was a period where a chess AI that was in fact
| playing a game of chess could beat any human opponent,
| and yet would still lose to the combination of a human-AI
| team. This era has ended and now the humans just hold
| back the AI, we don't add anything (beyond switching it
| on).
|
| Furthermore, there's nothing at all that says that an
| insufficiently competent AI won't wipe us out:
|
| And as we can already observe, there's clearly nothing
| stopping real humans from using insufficiently competent
| AI due to some combination of being lazy and/or the
| vendors over-promising what can be delivered.
|
| Also, we've been in a situation where the automation we
| have can trigger WW3 and kill 90% of the human population
| _despite_ the fact that the very same automation would be
| imminently destroyed along with it since the peak of the
| Cold War, with near-misses on both US and USSR systems.
| Human oversight stopped it, but like I said, we can
| already observe lazy humans deferring to AI, so how long
| will that remain true?
|
| And it doesn't even need to be that dramatic; never mind
| global defence stuff, just correlated risks, all the
| companies outsourcing all their decisions to the same
| models, even when the models' creators win a Nobel prize
| for creating them, is a description of how the Black-
| Scholes formula and its involvement in the 2008 financial
| crisis -- and sure, didn't kill us all, but this is just
| an illustration of a failure mode rather than
| consequences.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> The words "on the other hand" draws a contrast,
| suggesting that the subject of the sentence before it_
|
| I know it can be hard for programmers stuck in a
| programming language mindset, especially where one
| learned about software from "Learn to code" movements,
| but as this is natural language, technically it only
| draws what I intended for it to draw. If you wish to
| interpret it another way, cool. Much like as in told in
| the Carly Simon song of similar nature, it makes no
| difference to me.
| saberience wrote:
| What planet are you on? What relevance does this have at
| all? Computers don't need to go and fly somewhere, they
| can just be accessed over a network. Also, the location
| and traveling is irrelevant to the main point, that is,
| that computers far exceeded our capacity in Chess and Go
| many years ago and are now so much better we cannot even
| really understand their moves or why they do them and
| have no hope to ever compete.
|
| The same will be true of every other intellectual
| discipline with time. It's already happening with maths
| and science and coding.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> What planet are you on?_
|
| The one where computers don't magically run all by
| themselves. It's amazing how out of touch HN has become
| with technology. Thinking that you can throw something up
| into the cloud, or whatever was imagined, needing no
| human oversight to operate it... Unfortunately, that's
| not how things work in this world. "The cloud" isn't
| heaven, despite religious imagery suggesting otherwise.
| It requires legions of people to make it work.
|
| This is the outcome of that whole "Learn to code"
| movement from a number of years ago, I suppose. Everyone
| thinks they're an expert in everything when they reach
| the mastery of being able to write a "Hello, World"
| program in their bedroom.
|
| But do tell us what planet you are on as it sounds
| wonderful.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The amount of people it takes to maintain a server rack
| is minimal and low cost labor. Most of the money is spent
| on hardware and paying people to right software for that
| hardware.
|
| Writing that software is becoming automated and it's not
| hard to imagine that buying will as well. So you're left
| with the equivalent of a plumber running your data center
| based on what automated systems flag as issues and other
| automated systems explain you the troubleshooting to go
| do. There might be a specialist they fly in for an insane
| rate (in the shorter term) if none of that works but
| we're talking about a drastic reduction in workforce
| needed, and this is for the data center maintenance which
| not many companies have anymore since the cloud migration
| 9rx wrote:
| _> The amount of people it takes to maintain a server
| rack is minimal and low cost labor._
|
| So what you're saying is that it requires human
| oversight. Got it.
|
| Glad you finally caught up to where the rest of us were
| many comments ago. But why did it take so long? Inquiring
| minds want to know.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > Computers replaced humans as the best chess players
|
| Computers can't play chess.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Unless the state of the art has advanced, it was the case
| that grandmasters playing with computer assistance
| ("centaur chess") played better than either computers or
| humans alone.
| avereveard wrote:
| Overseeing robot is a time limited activity. Even building
| robot has a finite horizon.
|
| Current tech can't yet replace everything but many jobs
| already see the horizon or are at sunset.
|
| Last few time this happened the new tech, whether textile
| mills or computers, drove job creation as well as
| replacement.
|
| This time around some component of progress are visibile,
| because end of the day people can use this tech to create
| wealth at unprecedented scale, but other arent as the tech is
| run with small teams at large scale and has virtually no
| related ondustries is depends on like idk cars would. It's
| energy and gpus.
|
| Maybe we will be all working on gpu related industries? But
| seems another small team high scale job. Maybe few tens of
| million can be employed there?
|
| Meanwhile I just dont see the designer + AI job role
| materializing, I see corpos using AI and cutting the
| middleman, while designers + AI get mostly ostracized, unable
| to raise, like a cran in a bucket of crabs.
| misnome wrote:
| > because end of the day people can use this tech to create
| wealth at unprecedented scale
|
| _Where?_ so far the only technology to have come out
| widespread for this is to shove a chatbot interface into
| every UI that never needed it.
|
| Nothing has been improved, no revelatory tech has come out
| (tools to let you chatbot faster don't count).
| avereveard wrote:
| In the backend, not directly customer facing. Coca cola
| is two years in running ai ads. Lovable is cash positive,
| and many of the builder there are too. A few creators are
| earning a living with suno songs. Not millions mind but
| they can live off their ai works.
|
| If you dont see it happening around you, you're just not
| looking.
| misnome wrote:
| So, a company cutting costs, a tool to let you chatbot
| faster, and musical slop at scale.
|
| This doesn't sound like "creating wealth at unprecedented
| scale"
| listenallyall wrote:
| Honestly, this comment sounds like someone dismissing the
| internet in 1992 when the web was all text-based and
| CompuServe was leading-edge. No "revelatory tech" just
| yet, but it was right around the corner.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| I think the big problem here though, is that humans go from
| being mandatory to being optional, and this changes the
| competitive landscape between employers and workers.
|
| In the past a strike mattered. With robots, it may have to go
| on for years to matter.
| baq wrote:
| A strike going long enough and becoming big enough becomes
| a political matter. In the limit, if politicians don't find
| a solution, blood gets spilled. If military and police
| robots are in place by that time, you can ask yourself
| what's the point of those unproductive human leeching
| freeriders at all.
| simgt wrote:
| In this scenario wages will have been driven down so much
| that there will be barely anyone left to buy the products
| made by these fully automated corps. A strike won't work,
| but a revolt may and is more likely to happen.
| shaka-bear-tree wrote:
| Funny the original post doesn't mention AI replacing the coding
| part of his job.
|
| There seems to be a running theme of "okay but what about" in
| every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a
| little time goes by and "poof" AI is handling it.
|
| I want to be be optimistic. But it's hard to ignore what I'm
| doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven't hit serious
| unemployment yet because of momentum and slow adoption.
|
| I'm not replying to argue, I hope you are right. But I look
| around and can't shake the feeling of Wile E. Coyote hanging in
| midair waiting for gravity to kick in.
| zwnow wrote:
| > There seems to be a running theme of "okay but what about"
| in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs.
| Meanwhile a little time goes by and "poof" AI is handling it.
|
| Any sources on that? Except for some big tech companies I
| dont see that happening at all. While not empirical most devs
| I know try to avoid it like the plague. I cant imagine that
| many devs actually jumped on the hype train to replace
| themselves...
| tormeh wrote:
| This is what I also see. AI is used sparingly. Mostly for
| information lookup and autocomplete. It's just not good
| enough for other things. I could use it to write code if I
| really babysit it and triple check everything it does? Cool
| cool, maybe sometime later.
| kakacik wrote:
| Who does typical code sweat shops churning out one
| smallish app at a time and quickly moving on? Certainly
| not your typical company-hired permanent dev, they (us)
| drown in tons of complex legacy code that keeps working
| for past 10-20 years and company sees no reason to throw
| it away.
|
| Those folks that do churn out such apps, for them its
| great & horrible long term. For folks like me development
| is maybe 10% of my work, and by far the best part -
| creative, problem-solving, stimulating, actually learning
| myself. Why would I want to mildly optimize that 10% and
| loose all the good stuff, while speed wouldn't visibly
| even improve?
|
| To really improve speed in bigger orgs, the change would
| have to happen in processes, office politics, management
| priorities and so on. No help of llms there, if anything
| trend-chasing managers just introduce more chaos with
| negative consequences.
| torginus wrote:
| I predict by March 2026, AI will be better at writing doomer
| articles about humans being replaced than top human experts.
| ben_w wrote:
| You mean it hasn't already?
| jakewins wrote:
| I'm deeply sceptical. Every time a major announcement comes
| out saying so-and-so model is now a triple Ph.D programming
| triathlon winner, I try using it. Every time it's the same -
| super fast code generation, until suddenly staggering
| hallucinations.
|
| If anything the quality has gotten worse, because the models
| are now so good at lying when they don't know it's really
| hard to review. Is this a safe way to make that syscall? Is
| the lock structuring here really deadlock safe? The model
| will tell you with complete confidence its code is perfect,
| and it'll either be right or lying, it never says "I don't
| know".
|
| Every time OpenAI or Anthropic or Google announce a
| "stratospheric leap forward" and I go back and try and find
| it's the same, I become more convinced that the lying is
| structural somehow, that the architecture they have is not
| fundamentally able to capture "I need to solve the problem
| I'm being asked to solve" instead of "I need to produce
| tokens that are likely to come after these other tokens".
|
| The tool is incredible, I use it constantly, but only for
| things where truth is irrelevant, or where I can easily
| verify the answer. So far I have found programming, other
| than trivial tasks and greenfield "write some code that does
| x", much faster without LLMs
| NotOscarWilde wrote:
| > Is the lock structuring here really deadlock safe? The
| model will tell you with complete confidence its code is
| perfect
|
| Fully agree, in fact, this has literally happened to me a
| week ago -- ChatGPT was confidently incorrect about its
| simple lock structure for my multithreaded C++ program, and
| wrote paragraphs upon paragraphs about how it works, until
| I pressed it twice about a (real) possibility of some
| operations deadlocking, and then it folded.
|
| > Every time a major announcement comes out saying so-and-
| so model is now a triple Ph.D programming triathlon winner,
| I try using it. Every time it's the same - super fast code
| generation, until suddenly staggering hallucinations.
|
| As an university assistant professor trying to keep up with
| AI while doing research/teaching as before, this also
| happens to me and I am dismayed by that. I am certain there
| are models out there that can solve IMO and generate
| research-grade papers, but the ones I can get easy access
| to as a customer routinely mess up stuff, including:
|
| * Adding extra simplifications to a given combinatorial
| optimization problem, so that its dynamic programming
| approach works.
|
| * Claiming some inequality is true but upon reflection it
| derived A >= B from A <= C and C <= B.
|
| (This is all ChatGPT 5, thinking mode.)
|
| You could fairly counterclaim that I need to get more
| funding (tough) or invest much more of my time and energy
| to get access to models closer to what Terrence Tao and
| other top people trying to apply AI in CS theory are
| currently using. But at least the models cheap enough for
| me to get access as a private person are not on par with
| what the same companies claim to achieve.
| empiricus wrote:
| I agree that the current models are far from perfect. But I
| am curious how you see the future. Do you really think/feel
| they will stop here?
| jakewins wrote:
| I mean, I'm just some guy, but in my mind:
|
| - They are not making progress, currently. The elephant-
| in-the-room problem of hallucinations is exactly the same
| or, as I said above, worse as it was 3 years ago
|
| - It's clearly _possible_ to solve this, since we humans
| exist and our brains don 't have this problem
|
| There's then two possible paths: Either the
| hallucinations are fundamental to the current
| architecture of LLMs, and there's some other aspect about
| the human brains configuration that they've yet to
| replicate. Or the hallucinations will go away with better
| and more training.
|
| The latter seems to be the bet everyone is making, that's
| why there's all these data centers being built right? So,
| either larger training will solve the problem, _and_
| there 's enough training data, silica molecules and
| electricity on earth to perform that "scale" of training.
|
| There's 86B neurons in the human brain. Each one is a
| stand-alone living organism, like a biological
| microcontroller. It has constantly-mutating state,
| memory: short term through RNA and protein presence or
| lack thereof, long term through chromatin formation,
| enabling and disabling it's own DNA over time, in theory
| also permanent through DNA rewriting via TEs. Each one
| has a vast array of input modes - direct electrical
| stimulation, chemical signalling through a wide array of
| signaling molecules and electrical field effects from
| adjacent cells.
|
| Meanwhile, GPT-4 has 1.1T floats. No billions of
| interacting microcontrollers, just static floating points
| describing a network topology.
|
| The complexity of the neural networks that run our minds
| is spectacularly higher than the simulated neural
| networks we're training on silicon.
|
| That's my personal bet. I think the 88B interconnected
| stateful microcontrollers is so much more capable than
| the 1T static floating points, and the 1T static floating
| points is already nearly impossibly expensive to run. So
| I'm bearish, but of course, I don't actually know. We
| will see. For now all I can conclude is the frontier
| model developers lie incessantly in every press release,
| just like their LLMs.
| empiricus wrote:
| Thanks, that's a reasonable argument. Some critique:
| based on this argument it is very surprising that LLM
| work so well, or at all. The fact that even small LLM do
| something suggests that the human substrate is quite
| inefficient for thinking. Compared to LLMs, it seems to
| me that 1. some humans are more aware of what they know;
| 2. humans have very tight feedback loops to regulate and
| correct. So I imagine we do not need much more scaling,
| just slightly better AI architectures. I guess we will
| see how it goes.
| kace91 wrote:
| >There seems to be a running theme of "okay but what about"
| in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs.
| Meanwhile a little time goes by and "poof" AI is handling it.
|
| Yes, it's a god of the gaps situation. We don't know what the
| ceiling is. We might have hit it, there might be a giant leap
| forward ahead, we might leap back (if there is a rug pull).
|
| The most interesting questions are the ones that assume human
| equivalency.
|
| Suppose an AI can produce like a human.
|
| Are you ok with merging that code without human review?
|
| Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a black
| box?
|
| Are you ok with no human being responsible for how the
| codebase works, or able to take the reins if something
| changes?
|
| Are you ok with being dependent on the company providing this
| code generation?
|
| Are we collectively ok with the eventual loss of human
| skills, as our talents rust and the new generation doesn't
| learn them?
|
| Will we be ok if the well of public technical discussion LLMs
| are feeding from dries up?
|
| Those are the interesting debates I think.
| etherlord wrote:
| I dont think it really matters if your or I or regular
| people are ok with it if the people with power are. There
| doesnt seem to be much any of us regular folks can do to
| stop it, especially as Ai eliminates more and more jobs
| thus further reducing the economic power of everyday people
| kace91 wrote:
| I disagree. There are personal decisions to make:
|
| Do you bet on keeping your technical skills sharpened, or
| stop and focus on product work and AI usage?
|
| Do you work for companies that go full AI or try to find
| one that stays "manual"?
|
| What advice do you offer as a technical lead when asked?
|
| Leadership ignoring technical advice is nothing new, but
| there is still value in figuring out those questions.
| Symmetry wrote:
| > Are you ok with having a codebase that is effectively a
| black box?
|
| When was the last time you looked at the machine code your
| compiler was giving you? For me, doing embedded development
| on an architecture without a mature compiler the answer is
| last Friday but I expect that the vast majority of readers
| here never look at their machine code. We have abstraction
| layers that we've come to trust because they work in
| practice. To do our work we're dependent on the companies
| that develop our compilers where we can at least see the
| output, but also companies that make our CPUs which we
| couldn't debug without a huge amount of specialized
| equipment. So I expect that mostly people will be ok with
| it.
| kace91 wrote:
| >When was the last time you looked at the machine code
| your compiler was giving you?
|
| You could rephrase that as "when was the last time your
| compiler didn't work as expected?". Never in my whole
| career in my case. Can we expect that level of
| reliability?
|
| I'm not making the argument of "the LLM is not good
| enough". that would brings us back to the boring
| dissuasion of "maybe it will be".
|
| The thing is that human langauge is ambiguous and subject
| to interpretation, so I think we will have occasionally
| wrong output even with perfect LLMs. That makes black box
| behavior dangerous.
| Symmetry wrote:
| We certainly can't expect that with LLMs now but neither
| could compiler users back in the 1970s. I do agree that
| we probably won't ever have them generating code without
| more back and forth where the LLM complains that its
| instructions were ambiguous and then testing afterwards.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Have you ever double-checked (in human fashion, not just
| using another calculator) the output from a calculator?
|
| When calculators were first introduced I'm sure some people
| such as scientists and accountants did exactly that.
| Calculators were new, people likely had to be slowly
| convinced that these magic devices could be totally
| accurate.
|
| But you and I were born well after the invention of
| calculators, our entire lives nobody has doubted that even
| a $2 calculator can immediately determine the square root
| of an 8-digit number and be totally accurate. So nobody
| verifies, and also, a lot of people can't do basic math.
| botanrice wrote:
| idk man, I work at a big consultant company and all I'm
| hearing is dozens of people coming out of their project teams
| like, "yea im dying to work with AI, all we're doing is
| talking about with clients"
|
| It's like everyone knows it is super cool but nobody has
| really cracked the code for what it's economic value truly,
| truly is yet
| twodave wrote:
| Well, I would just say to take into account the fact that
| we're starting to see LLMs be responsible for substantial
| electricity use, to the point that AI companies are lobbying
| for (significant) added capacity. And remember that we're all
| getting these sub-optimal toys at such a steep discount that
| it would be price gouging if everyone weren't doing it.
|
| Basically, there's an upper limit even to how much we can get
| out of the LLMs we have, and it's more expensive than it
| seems to be.
|
| Not to mention, poorly-functioning software companies won't
| be made any better by AI. Right now there's a lot of hype
| behind AI, but IMO it's very much an "emperor has no clothes"
| sort of situation. We're all just waiting for someone
| important enough to admit it.
| frchalli wrote:
| > The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who
| already weren't providing much value.
|
| There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that
| took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or
| from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos.
| At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph
| machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines
| made that faster, then printers reduced the need for the manual
| copying, then email reduced the need to print something out,
| and now instant messaging reduces email clutter and keep
| messages shorter.
|
| All along that timeline there were fewer and fewer people
| involved, all for the valuable task of communication. While
| they may not have held these people in high esteem, they were
| critical for getting things done and scaling.
|
| I'm not saying LLMs are perfect or will replace every job. They
| make mistakes, and they always will; it's part of what they
| are. But, as useful as people are today, the roles we serve in
| will go away and be replaced by something else, even if it's
| just to indicate at various times during the day what is or
| isn't pleasing.
| kalterdev wrote:
| The crucial observation is the fact that automation has
| historically been a net _creator_ of jobs, not destroyer.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Sure, if you're content to stack shelves.
|
| AI isn't automation. It's _thinking_. It automates the
| brain out of human jobs.
|
| You can still get a job that requires a body. My job
| doesn't require a body, so I'm screwed. If you're say, a
| surgeon or a plumber, you're in a better place.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Yes, AI is automation. It automates the implementation.
| It doesn't (yet?) automate the hard parts around figuring
| out what work needs to be done and how to do it.
|
| The sad thing is that for many software devs, the
| implementation is the fun bit.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Sure, if you're content to stack shelves.
|
| Why this example? One of the things automation has done
| is reduce and replace stevedores, the shipping equivalent
| of stacking shelves.
|
| Amazon warehouses are heavily automated, almost self-
| stacking-shelves. At least, according to the various
| videos I see, I've not actually worked there myself. Yet.
| There's time.
|
| > AI isn't automation. It's thinking. It automates the
| brain out of human jobs. You can still get a job that
| requires a body. My job doesn't require a body, so I'm
| screwed. If you're say, a surgeon or a plumber, you're in
| a better place.
|
| Right up until the AI is good enough to control the robot
| that can do that job. Which may or may not be humanoid.
| (Plus side: look how long it's taking for self-driving
| cars, how often people think a personal anecdote of
| "works for me" is a valid response to "doesn't work for
| me").
|
| Even before the AI gets that good, a nice boring remote-
| control android doing whatever manual labour could
| outsource the "controller" position to a human anywhere
| on the planet. Mental image: all the unemployed Americans
| protesting outside Tesla's factories when they realise
| the Optimus robots within are controlled remotely from
| people in 3rd world countries getting paid $5/day.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Except it isn't _thinking_. It is applying a model of
| statistical likelihood. The real issue is that it 's been
| _sold_ as _thinking_ , and laypeople believe that it's
| _thinking_ , so it is very likely that jobs will be
| eliminated before it's feasible to replace them.
|
| People that actually care about the quality of their
| output are a dying breed, and that death is being
| accelerated by this machine that produces somewhat
| plausible-looking output, because we're optimizing around
| "plausible-looking" and not "correct"
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'Because thing X happened in past it is guaranteed to
| happen in the future and we should bet society on it
| instead of trying to you know, plan for the future. Magic
| jobs will just appear, trust me'
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| That observation is only useful if you can point at a
| capability that humans have that we haven't automated.
|
| Hunter-Gatherers were replaced by the technology of
| Agriculture. Humans still are needed to provide the power
| to plow the earth and reap the crops.
|
| Human power was replaced by work animals pulling plows, but
| you only humans can make decisions about when to harvest.
|
| Jump forward a good long time,
|
| Computers can run algorithms to indicate when best to
| harvest. Humans are still uniquely flexible and creative in
| their ability to deal with unanticipated issues.
|
| AI is intended to make "flexible and creative" no longer a
| bastion of human uniquness. What's left? The only obvious
| one I can think of is accountability: as long as computers
| aren't seen as people, you need _someone_ to be responsible
| for the fully automated farm.
| belorn wrote:
| The thing that replaces the old memos is not email, its
| meetings. It not uncommon for meetings with hundreds of
| participants that in the past would be a simple memo.
|
| It would be amazing if LLMs could replace the role that
| meetings has in communication, but somehow I strongly doubt
| that will happens. It is a fun idea to have my AI talk with
| your AI so no one need to actually communicate, but the
| result is more likely to create barriers for communication
| than to help it.
| jstanley wrote:
| > At first, there were many people typing, then later [...]
|
| There were more people typing than ever before? Look around
| you, we're all typing all day long.
| kllamnjro wrote:
| I think they meant that there was a time when people's jobs
| were:
|
| 1. either reading notes in shorthand, or reading something
| from a sheet that was already fully typed using a
| typewriter, or listening to recorded or live dictation
|
| 2. then typing that content out into a typewriter.
|
| People were essentially human copying machines.
| Den_VR wrote:
| If there's more work than resources, then is that low value
| work or is there a reason the business is unable to increase
| resources? AI as a race to the bottom may be productive but not
| sure it will be societally good.
| twodave wrote:
| Not low-value or it just wouldn't be on the board. Lower
| value? Maybe, but there are many, many reasons things get
| pushed down the backlog. As many reasons as there are kinds
| of companies. Most people don't work at one of the big tech
| companies where work priorities and business value are so
| stratified. There are businesses that experience seasonality,
| so many of the R&D activities get put on the backburner until
| the busy season is over. There are businesses that have high
| correctness standards, where bigger changes require more
| scrutiny, are harder to fit into a sprint, and end up getting
| passed over for smaller tasks. And some businesses just
| require a lot of contextual knowledge. I wouldn't trust an AI
| to do a payroll calculation or tabulate votes, for instance,
| any more than I would trust a brand new employee to dive into
| the deep end on those tasks.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I feel like this sort of misses the point. I didn't think the
| primary thrust of his article was so much about the specific
| details of AI, or what kind of tasks AI can now surpass humans
| on. I think it was more of a general analysis (and very well
| written IMO) that even when new technologies advance in a slow,
| linear progression, the point at which they overtake an earlier
| technology (or "horses" in this case), happens very quickly -
| it's the tipping point at which the old tech surpasses the new.
| For some reason I thought of Hemingway's old adage "How did you
| go bankrupt? - Slowly at first, then all at once."
|
| I agree with all the limitations you've written about the
| current state of AI and LLMs. But the fact is that the tech
| behind AI and LLMs never really gets _worse_. I also agree that
| just scaling and more compute will probably be a dead end, but
| that doesn 't mean that I don't think that progress will still
| happen even when/if those barriers are broadly realized.
|
| Unless you really believe human brains have some sort of
| "secret special sauce" (and, FWIW, I think it's possible - the
| ability of consciousness/sentience to arise from "dumb matter"
| is something that I don't think scientists have adequately
| explained or even really theorized), the steady progress of AI
| should, eventually, surpass human capabilities, and when it
| does, it will happen "all at once".
| pcrh wrote:
| For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was much
| slower than you might expect. The model T Ford motor car
| reached peak production in 1925 [0], and for an inexact
| comparison (I couldn't find numbers for the US) the horse
| population of France started to decline in 1935, but didn't
| drop below 80% of its historical peak until the late 1940's
| down to 10% of its peak by the 1970's [1].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T#Mass_production
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/
| throw9384940 wrote:
| Frech eat horse meat. Cattle is still present in US...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > For what it's worth, the decline in use of horses was
| much slower than you might expect.
|
| Not really, given that the article goes into detail about
| this in the first paragraph, with US data and graphs:
| "Then, between 1930 and 1950, 90% of the horses in the US
| disappeared."
| pcrh wrote:
| Eyeballing the chart in the OP and the French data shows
| them to have a comparable pattern. While OP's data is
| horses per person, and the French is total number of
| horses, both show a decline in horse numbers starting
| about 10 years after widespread adoption of the motor
| vehicle and falling to 50% of their peak in the mid- to
| late-1950's, with the French data being perhaps a bit
| over 5 years delayed compared to the US data. That is, it
| took 25 to 30 years after mass production of automobiles
| was started by Ford for 50% of "horsepower" to be
| replaced.
|
| The point isn't to claim that motor vehicles did not
| replace horses, they obviously did, but that the
| replacement was less "sudden" than claimed.
| reeredfdfdf wrote:
| "The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who
| already weren't providing much value."
|
| I wish corporations really acted this rationally.
|
| At least where I live hospitals fired most secretaries and
| assistants to doctors a long time ago. The end result? High-
| paid doctors spending significant portion of their time on
| administrative and bureaucratic tasks that were previously
| handled by those secretaries, preventing them from seeing as
| many patients as they otherwise would. Cost savings may look
| good on spreadsheet, but really the overall efficiency of the
| system suffered.
| kylinhacker wrote:
| I'm a full-stack developer, Recently i find that almost 90%
| of my work deadlines have been brought forward, and the
| bosses' scheduling has become stricter. the coworker who is
| particularly good at pair programming with AI prefers to
| reduce his/her scheduling(kind of unconsciously). Work is
| sudden,but salary remains steady. what a bummer
| ehnto wrote:
| That's what I see when companies cut juniors as well. AI
| cannot replace a junior because a junior has full and
| complete agency, accountability, and purpose. They retain
| learning and become a sharper bespoke resource for the
| business as time goes on. The PM tells them what to do and I
| give them guidance.
|
| If you take away the juniors, you are now asking your seniors
| to do that work instead which is more expensive and wasteful.
| The PM cannot tell the AI junior what to do for they don't
| know how. Then you say, hey we also want you to babysit the
| LLM to increase productivity, well I can't leave a task with
| the LLM and come back to it tomorrow. Now I am wasting two
| types of time.
| jack_pp wrote:
| > well I can't leave a task with the LLM and come back to
| it tomorrow
|
| You could actually just do that, leave an agent on a
| problem you would give a junior, go back on your main task
| and whenever you feel like it check the agent's work.
| htrp wrote:
| that sounds like a pm problem
| listenallyall wrote:
| But wouldnt these spreadsheets be tracking something like
| total revenue? If a doctor is spending time on admin tasks
| instead of revenue-generating procedures, obviously the
| hospital has accountants and analysts who will notice this,
| yes?
|
| I'll contrast your experience with a well-run (from a
| profitability standpoint) dentist's office, they have tons of
| assistants and hygienists and the dentist just goes from
| room-to-room performing high-dollar procedures, and very
| little "patient care." If small dentist offices have this all
| figured out it seems a little strange that a massive hospital
| does not.
| gwd wrote:
| First of all, it's not unlikely that the dentist is the
| owner. And in any case, when you have a small system of
| less than 150 people, it's easy enough for a handful of
| people to see what's actually going on.
|
| Once you get to something in the thousands or tens of
| thousands, you just have spreadsheets; and anything that
| doesn't show up in that spreadsheet might as well not
| exist. Furthermore, you have competing business units, each
| of which want to externalize their costs to other business
| units.
|
| Very similar to what GP described -- when I was in a small
| start-up, we had an admin assistant who did most of the
| receipt entry and what-not for our expense reports; and we
| were allowed to tell the company travel agent our travel
| constrants and give us options for flights. When we were
| acquired by a larger company, we had to do our own expense
| reports, and do our own flight searches. That was almost
| certainly a false economy.
|
| And then when we became a major conglomerate, at some point
| they merged a bunch of IT functions; so the folks in
| California would make a change and go home, and those of us
| in Europe or the UK would come in to find all the networks
| broken, with no way to fix it until the people in
| California started coming in at 4pm.
|
| In all cases, the dollars saved is clearly visible in the
| spreadsheet, while the "development velocity" lost is
| noisy, diffuse, and hard to quantify or pin down to any
| particular cause.
|
| I suppose one way to quantify that would be to have the
| Engineering function track time spent doing admin work and
| charge that to the Finance function; and time spent idle
| due to IT outages and charge that to the IT department. But
| that has its own pitfalls, no doubt.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Problem with this analogy is that software development !=
| revenue. The developers and IT are a cost center. So yea
| in a huge org one of the goals is to reduce costs (admin)
| spent on supporting a cost center.
|
| Doctors generate revenue directly and it can all be
| traced, so even an extra 20 minutes out of their day
| doing admin stuff instead of one more patient or
| procedure is easily noticeable, and affects revenue
| directly.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > If a doctor is spending time on admin tasks instead of
| revenue-generating procedures, obviously the hospital has
| accountants and analysts who will notice this, yes?
|
| I am going to assume that the Doctors are just working
| longer hours and/or aren't as attentive as they could be
| and so care quality declines but revenue doesn't.
| Overworking existing staff in order to make up for less
| staff is a tried and true play.
|
| > I'll contrast your experience with a well-run (from a
| profitability standpoint) dentist's office, they have tons
| of assistants and hygienists and the dentist just goes from
| room-to-room performing high-dollar procedures, and very
| little "patient care." If small dentist offices have this
| all figured out it seems a little strange that a massive
| hospital does not.
|
| By conflating 'Doctors' and 'Dentists' you are basically
| saying the equivalent of 'all Doctors' and 'Doctors of a
| certain specialty'. Dentists are 'Doctors for teeth' like a
| pediatrician is a 'Doctor for children' or an Ortho is a
| 'Doctor for bones'.
|
| Teeth need maintenance, which is the time consuming part of
| most visits, and the Dentist has staff to do that part of
| it. That in itself makes the specialty not really that
| comparable to a lot of others.
| htrp wrote:
| I feel like that's how you get Microsoft where each
| division has a gun pointed at the other division
| retinaros wrote:
| Most of corporate people dont provide direct value...
| gniv wrote:
| > most companies will still have more work to do than resources
| to assign to those tasks
|
| This is very important yet rarely talked about. Having worked
| in a well-run group on a very successful product I could see
| that no matter how many people would be on a project there was
| alway too much work. And always too many projects. I am no
| longer with the company but I can see some of the ideas talked
| about back then being launched now, many years later. For a
| complex product there is always more to do and AI would simply
| accelerate development.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most
| companies will still have more work to do than resources to
| assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is
| to remove people who already weren't providing much value.
|
| They have more work to do until they don't.
|
| The number of bank tellers went up for a while after the
| invention of the ATM, but then it went down, because all the
| demand was saturated.
|
| We still need food, farming hasn't stopped being a thing,
| nevertheless we went from 80-95% of us working in agriculture
| and fishing to about 1-5%, and even with just those percentages
| working in that sector we have more people over-eating than
| under-eating.
|
| As this transition happened, people were unemployed, they did
| move to cities to find work, there were real social problems
| caused by this. It happened at the same time that cottage
| industries were getting automated, hand looms becoming power-
| looms, weaving becoming programmable with punch cards. This is
| why communism was invented when it was invented, why it became
| popular when it did.
|
| And now we have fast-fashion, with clothes so fragile that they
| might not last one wash, and yet still spend a lower percentage
| of our incomes on clothes than the pre-industrial age did. Even
| when demand is boosted by having clothes that don't last, we
| still make enough to supply demand.
|
| Lumberjacks still exist despite chainsaws, and are so efficient
| with them that the problem is we may run out of rainforests.
|
| Are there any switchboard operators around any more, in the
| original sense? If I read this right, the BLS groups them
| together with "Answering Service", and I'm not sure how this
| other group then differs from a customer support line:
| https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes432011.htm
|
| > 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the
| overall software development process. Even if all my code was
| written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it
| written, I still have a full-time job.
|
| This would be absolutely correct -- I've made the analogy to
| Amdahl's law myself previously -- if LLMs didn't also do so
| many of the other things. I mean, the linked blog post is about
| answering new-starter questions, which is also not the only
| thing people get paid to do.
|
| Now, don't get me wrong, I accept the limitations of all the
| current models. I'm currently fairly skeptical that the line
| will continue to go up as it has been for very much longer...
| but "very much longer" in this case is 1-2 years, room for 2-4
| doublings on the METR metric.
|
| Also, I expect LLMs to be worse at project management than at
| writing code, because code quality can be improved by self-play
| and reading compiler errors, whereas PM has slower feedback. So
| I do expect "manage the AI" to be a job for much longer than
| "write code by hand".
|
| But at the same time, you absolutely can use an LLM to be a PM.
| I bet all the PMs will be able to supply anecdotes about LLMs
| screwing up just like all the rest of us can, but it's still a
| job task that this generation of AI is still automating at the
| same time as all the other bits.
| twodave wrote:
| I agree mostly, though personally I expect LLMs to basically
| give me whitewashing. They don't innovate. They don't push
| back enough or take a step back to reset the conversation.
| They can't even remember something I told them not to do 2
| messages ago unless I twist their arm. This is what they are,
| as a technology. They'll get better. I think there's some
| impact associated with this, but it's not a doomsday scenario
| like people are pretending.
|
| We are talking about trying to build a thing we don't even
| truly understand ourselves. It reminds me of _That Hideous
| Strength_ where the scientists are trying to imitate life by
| pumping blood into the post-guillotine head of a famous
| scientist. Like, we can make LLMs do things where we point
| and say, "See! It's alive!" But in the end people are still
| pulling all the strings, and there's no evidence that this is
| going to change.
| mark242 wrote:
| Someone who makes horseshoes then learns how to make carburetors,
| because the demand is 10x.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| dominicrose wrote:
| > Governments have typically expected efficiency gains to lower
| resource consumption, rather than anticipating possible
| increases due to the Jevons paradox
|
| I think that it's true that governments want the efficiency
| gains but it's false that they don't anticipate the consumption
| increases. Nobody is spending trillions on datacenters without
| knowing that demand will increase, that doesn't mean we
| shouldn't make them efficient.
| Tzt wrote:
| In that analogy "someone" is an AI, who of course switches from
| answering questions from humans, to answering questions from
| other AIs, because the demand is 10x.
| florilegiumson wrote:
| If AI is really likely to cause a mass extinction event, then
| non-proliferation becomes critical as it was in the case with
| nuclear weapons. Otherwise, what does it really mean for AI to
| "replace people" outside of people needing to retool or socially
| awkward people having to learn to talk to people better? AI
| surely will change a lot, but I don't understand the steps needed
| to get to the highly existential threat that has become a cliche
| in every "Learn CLAUDE/MCP" ad I see. A period of serious
| unemployment, sure, but this article is talking about population
| collapse, as if we are all only being kept alive and fed to
| increase shareholder value for people several orders of magnitude
| more intelligent than us, and with more opposable thumbs. Do
| people think 1.2B people are going to die because of AI? What is
| the economy but people?
| baq wrote:
| Capitalism gives, capitalism takes. Regulation will be critical
| so it doesn't take too much, but tech is moving so fast even
| technologists, enthusiasts and domain researchers don't know
| what to expect.
| tim333 wrote:
| I don't think the people will die, just have AI do the jobs.
| The people will probably still be there giving instructions.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| 4000 questions a month from new hireds. How many of those were
| repeated many times. A lot. So if they'd built a wiki?
|
| I am not an AI sceptic.. I use it for coding. But this article is
| not compelling.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| LLMs can _only_ hallucinate and cannot reason or provide answers
| outside of their training set distribution. The architecture
| needs to fundamentally change in order to reach human
| equivalence, no matter how many benchmarks they appear to hit.
| baq wrote:
| The sometimes stumble and hallucinate out of distribution. It's
| rare, it's more rare that is actually a good hallucination, but
| we've figured out how to enrich uranium, after all.
| themafia wrote:
| > Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000
| new-hire questions a month.
|
| > Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some
| of those questions for us.
|
| What getting high on your own supply actually looks like. These
| are not the types of questions most people have or need answered.
| It's unique to the hiring process and the nascent status of the
| technology. It seems insane to stretch this logic to literally
| any other arena.
|
| On top of that horses were initially replaced with _stationary_
| gasoline engines. Horses:Cars is an invalid view into the
| historical scenario.
| tills13 wrote:
| Person whose job it is to sell AI selling AI is what I got from
| this post.
| hurturue wrote:
| person whose job is to not be replaced by AI saying AI is hype
| is what I get from your comment
| lomase wrote:
| I does not work buddy. Nobody gets paid to not buy AI.
| hurturue wrote:
| "it's difficult to make someone understand a thing when his
| job depends on him not understanding it"
| agos wrote:
| in Italy we have a saying for this - "innkeeper, how is the
| wine?"
| socketcluster wrote:
| I think my software engineering job will be safe so long as big
| companies keep using average code as their training set. This is
| because the average developer creates unnecessary complexity
| which creates more work for me.
|
| The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x
| the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time
| to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like
| interest on normal debt.
|
| Whenever I join a new project, within 6 months, I
| control/maintain all the core modules of the system and
| everything ends up hooked up to my config files, running
| according to the architecture I designed. Happened at multiple
| companies. The code looks for the shortest path to production and
| creates a moat around engineers who can make their team members'
| jobs easier.
|
| IMO, it's not so different to how entrepreneurship works. But
| with code and processes instead of money and people as your moat.
| I think once AI can replace top software engineers, it will be
| able to replace top entrepreneurs. Scary combination. We'll
| probably have different things to worry about then.
| retrac98 wrote:
| Unnecessary complexity isn't much of a problem when the code is
| virtually free to maintain or throw away and replace.
| socketcluster wrote:
| Depends on the size and complexity of the problem that the
| system is solving. For very complex problems, even the most
| succinct solution will be complex and not all parts of the
| code can be throwaway code. You have to start stacking the
| layers of abstractions and some code becomes critical. Like
| think of the Linux Kernel, you can't throw away the Linux
| Kernel. You can't throw away Chromium or the V8 engine...
| Millions of systems depend on those. If they had issues or
| vulnerabilities and nobody to maintain, it would be a major
| problem for the global economy.
| gjvc wrote:
| companies have been abandoning products for decades, and
| shuffling ongoing support onto other entities. nothing has
| to be "thrown away" as you keep suggesting.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Even if a throw away and replace strategy is used, eventually
| a system's complexity will overrun any intelligence's ability
| to work effectively with it. Poor engineering will cause that
| development velocity drop off to happen earlier.
| valine wrote:
| Humans don't learn to write messy complex code. Messy, complex
| code is the default, writing clean code takes skill.
|
| You're assuming the LLM produces extra complexity because it's
| mimicking human code. I think it's more likely that LLMs output
| complex code because it requires less thought and planning, and
| LLMs are still bad at planning.
| socketcluster wrote:
| Totally agree with the first observation. The default human
| state seems to be confusion. I've seen this over and over in
| junior coders.
|
| It's often very creative how junior devs approach problems.
| It's like they don't fully understand what they're doing and
| the code itself is part of the exploration and brainstorming
| process trying to find the solution as they write... Very
| different from how senior engineers approach coding when it's
| like you don't even write your first line until you have a
| clear high level picture of all the parts and how they will
| fit together.
|
| About the second point, I've been under the impression that
| because LLMs are trained on average code, they infer that the
| bugs and architectural flaws are desirable... So if it sees
| your code is poorly architected, it will generate more of
| that poorly architected code on top. If it sees hacks in your
| codebase, it will assume hacks are OK and give you more
| hacks.
|
| When I use an LLM on a poorly written codebase, it does very
| poorly and it's hard to solve any problem or implement any
| feature and it keeps trying to come up with nasty hacks...
| Very frustrating trial and error process; eats up so many
| tokens.
|
| But when I use the same LLM on one of my carefully
| architected side projects, it usually works extremely well,
| never tries to hack around a problem. It's like having good
| code lets you tap into a different part of its training set.
| It's not just because your architecture is easier to build on
| top, but also it follows existing coding conventions better
| and always addresses root causes, no hacks. Its code style
| looks more like that of a senior dev. You need to keep the
| feature requests specific and short though.
| valine wrote:
| > About the second point, I've been under the impression
| that because LLMs are trained on average code, they infer
| that the bugs and architectural flaws are desirable
|
| This is really only true about base models that haven't
| undergone post training. The big difference between ChatGPT
| and GPT3 was OpenAI's instruct fine tuning. Out of the box,
| language models behave how you describe. Ask them a
| question and half the time they generate a list of
| questions instead of an answer. The primary goal of post
| training is to coerce the model into a state in which it's
| more likely to output things as if it were a helpful
| assistant. The simplest version is text at the start of
| your context window like: "the following is code was
| written by a meticulous senior engineer". After a prompt
| like that the most likely next tokens will never be the
| models imitation of a sloppy code. Instruct fine tuning
| does the same thing but as permanent modifications to the
| weights of the model.
| bad_username wrote:
| > Whenever I join a new project, within 6 months, I
| control/maintain all the core modules of the system and
| everything ends up hooked up to my config files, running
| according to the architecture I designed. Happened at multiple
| companies
|
| I am regularly tempted to do this (I have done this a few
| times), but unless I truly own the project (being the tech lead
| or something), I stop myself. One of the reasons is reluctance
| to trespass uninvited on someone's else territory of
| responsibility, even if they do a worse job than I could. The
| human cost of such a situation (to the project and ultimately
| to myself) is usually worse than the cost of living with status
| quo. I wonder what your thoughts are on this.
| hatch_q wrote:
| You're just very opinionated. Other software engineers just
| give you space because they don't want to confront you and they
| don't want any conflict with you as it's just waste of time.
|
| 6 months is also average time it takes people like you to burn
| out on a project. Usually starting with relatively simple
| change/addition requested by customer that turns into 3 month
| long refactor - "because architecture is wrong". And we just
| let you do it, because we know fighting windmills is futile.
| exfalso wrote:
| Although it's sad, I have to agree with what you're alluding
| to. I think there is _huge_ overhead and waste (in terms of
| money, compute resources and time) hidden in the software
| industry, and at the end of the day it just comes down to
| people not knowing how to write software.
|
| There is a strange dynamic currently at play in the software
| labour market where the demand is so huge that the market can
| bear completely inefficient coders. Even though the difference
| between a good and a bad software engineer is literally _orders
| of magnitude_.
|
| Quite a few times I encountered programmers "in the wild" - in
| a sauna, on the bus etc, and overheard them talking about their
| "stack". You know the type, node.js in a docker container. I
| cannot fathom the amount of money wasted at places that employ
| these people.
|
| I also project that actually, if we adopt LLMs correctly, these
| engineers (which I would say constitute a _large_ percentage)
| will disappear. The age of useless coding and infinite demand
| is about to come to an end. What will remain is specialist
| engineer positions (base infra layer, systems, hpc, games,
| quirky hardware, cryptographers etc). I 'm actually kind of
| curious what the effect on salary will be for these engineers,
| I can see it going both ways.
| alex_duf wrote:
| The majority of drivers believe they're better than average [1]
|
| 1: https://www.lbec-law.com/blog/2025/04/the-majority-of-
| driver...
| tuesdaynight wrote:
| If they became big companies with that "unnecessary
| complexity", maybe code quality does not matter as much as you
| want to believe. Furthermore, even the fastest or well behaved
| horses were replaced.
| anshulbhide wrote:
| Yet, this applies for only three industries so far - coding,
| marketing and customer support.
|
| I don't think applies for general human intelligence - yet.
| Mawr wrote:
| What is this _horseshit_.
|
| What exactly does specifically engine efficiency have to do with
| horse usage? Cars like the Ford Model T entered mass production
| somewhere around 1908. Oh, and would you look at the horse usage
| graph around that date! _sigh_
|
| The chess ranking graph seems to be just a linear relationship?
|
| > This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job.
| Answer technical questions for new hires.
|
| >
|
| > Claude, meanwhile, was now answering 30,000 questions a month;
| eight times as many questions as me & mine ever did.
|
| So more == better. _sigh_. Ran any, you know, _studies_ to see
| the _quality_ of those answers? I too can consult /dev/random
| for answers at a rate of gigabytes per second!
|
| > I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic.
|
| Yeah. I can tell. Somebody's high on their own supply here.
| empiricus wrote:
| Well, for some reason horse numbers and horse usage dropped
| sharply at a moment in time. Probably there was some horse
| pandemic I forgot about.
| globular-toast wrote:
| And what happened to human population? It skyrocketed. So humans
| are going to get replaced by AI and human population will
| skyrocket again? This analogy doesn't work.
| tim333 wrote:
| Virtual humans?
| gaigalas wrote:
| People back then were primarily improving engines, not making
| articles about engines being better than horses. That's why it's
| different now.
| bad_username wrote:
| AI currently lacks the following to really gain a "G" and
| reliably be able to replace humans at scale:
|
| - Radical massive multimodality. We perceive the world through
| many wide-band high-def channels of information. Computer
| perception is nowhere near. Same for ability to "mutate" the
| physical world, not just "read" it.
|
| - Being able to be fine-tuned constantly (learn things, remember
| things) without "collapsing". Generally having a smooth
| transition between the context window and the weights, rather
| than fundamental irreconcilable difference.
|
| These are very difficult problems. But I agree with the author
| that the engine is in the works and the horses should stay
| vigilant.
| palmotea wrote:
| Aren't you guys looking forward to the day when we get the
| opportunity to go the way of all those horses? You should! I'm
| optimistic; I think I'd make a fine pot of glue.
|
| AI, faster please!
| burnto wrote:
| The 1220s horse bubble was a wild time. People walked everywhere
| all slow and then BAM guys on horses shooting arrows at you.
|
| AI is like that, but instead with dudes in slim fitting vests
| blogging about alignment
| YmiYugy wrote:
| To stay within the engine analogy. We have engines that are more
| powerful than horses, but
|
| 1. we aren't good at building cars yet,
|
| 2. they break down so often that using horses often still ends up
| faster,
|
| 3. we have dirt tracks and feed stations for horses but have few
| paved roads and are not producing enough gasoline.
| dominicrose wrote:
| yes and the question is do horses have 20 years or less i.e. 5
| years?
| d4rkn0d3z wrote:
| It might be better to think about what a horse is to a human,
| mostly a horse is an energy slave. The history of humanity is a
| story about how many energy slaves are available to the average
| human.
|
| In times past, the only people on earth who had their standard of
| living raised to a level that allowed them to cast there gaze
| upon the stars were the Kings and there courts, vassals, and
| noblemen. As time passed we have learned to make technologies
| that provide enough energy slaves to the common man that everyone
| lives a life that a king would have envied in times past.
|
| So the question arises as to whether AI or the pursuit of AGI
| provides more or less energy slaves to the common man?
| nicbou wrote:
| Since AI is using my work without permission and capturing the
| value on behalf of tech companies, I feel like I am an energy
| slave to AI.
| zwnow wrote:
| The goal is to eradicate the common man. Turns out you dont
| need a lot of energy, food, water, space if there aren't 8
| billion humans to supply. It's the tech billionaires dream,
| replacing humans with robotic servants. Corporations do not
| care about the common man.
| dominicrose wrote:
| Full robotic servants are very costly, only AI servants are
| cheap enough. But I do think we're going to see more wars and
| robotic use in wars.
| myrmidon wrote:
| The big problem I see with AI is that it undermines
| redistribution mechanisms in a novel and dangerous way; despite
| industrialization, human labor was always needed to actually
| _do_ anything with capital, and even people born in poverty
| could do _work_ to get their share of the growing economical
| pie.
|
| AI kinda breaks this; there is a real risk that human labor is
| going to become almost worthless this century, and this might
| mean that the common man ends up _worse_ off despite nominal
| economic growth.
| torginus wrote:
| Oh no, it's the lowercase people again.
| gniv wrote:
| This makes me think of another domain where it could happen:
| electricity generation and distribution. If solar+battery becomes
| cheap enough we could see the demise of the country-scale grid.
| Gud wrote:
| I work in the energy sector. I test high voltage gas insulated
| switchgear for a living.
|
| With this setup, you would need batteries that can sustain load
| for weeks on end, in many parts of the world.
| zkmon wrote:
| The work done by horses was not the only work out there. Games
| played by chess masters was not the only sport on the planet.
| Answering questions and generating content is not the only work
| that happens at work places.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| > A system that costs less, per word thought or written, than
| it'd cost to hire the cheapest human labor on the face of the
| planet.
|
| Is it really possible to make this claim given the vast sums of
| money that have gone in to AI/LLM training?
| agos wrote:
| it's coming from an extremely biased source, that's why nobody
| else would make that claim
| myrmidon wrote:
| I'd say yes, because AI training is mostly fixed-cost and not
| that expensive when you compare it to raising/educating human
| labor.
|
| Early factories were expensive, too (compared to the price of a
| horse), but that was never a show-stopper.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Horses pull carts. Chessbots play chess. Humans do lots of
| things. Equivalence in one thing is not equivalence in the vast
| collection of things we do.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| AI seems capable of doing lots of things, particularly in
| comparison to domain-specific programming or even domain-
| specific AI. Your critique doesn't seem so powerful as you
| might suppose.
| leg100 wrote:
| > In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25
| million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of
| progress in mechanical engines.
|
| I really doubt horses would be _ambivalent_ about this, let alone
| about anything. Or maybe I 'm wrong, they were in two minds: oh
| dear I'm at risk of being put to sleep, or maybe it could lead to
| a nice long retirement out on a grassy meadow. But they're in all
| likelihood blissfully unaware.
| bgwalter wrote:
| "I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic."
|
| The article is a Misanthropic advertisement. The "AI" mafia feels
| that no one wants their products and doubles down.
|
| They are so desperate that Pichai is now talking about data
| centers in space on Fox News. Next up are "AI" space lasers.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Maybe I can get a job programming for the Amish.
| maciejzj wrote:
| I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently,
| but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever
| thought that you would see a chart showing how population of
| horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient
| engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to
| human population? And the article is not written in any kind of
| cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather from perspective of
| some kind of economic determinism? Have you ever thought that you
| would be compared to a gasoline engine and everyone would discuss
| this juxtaposition from purely economic perspective? And barely
| anyone shares a thought like "technology should be warranted by
| the populace, not the other way around?". And the guy writing
| this works at Anthropic? The very guy who makes this thing
| happen, but is only able to conclude this with "I very much hope
| we'll get the two decades that horses did". What the hell.
| barrkel wrote:
| Incentives rule everything.
|
| For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite
| prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning
| more wars.
|
| Today, the stock market and material wealth dominates. If elite
| dominance of the means of production requires the immiseration
| of most of the public, that's what we'll get.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite
| prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning
| more wars.
|
| That's almost 100% backwards. The Republic expanded. The
| Empire, not so much.
| classified wrote:
| Isn't that burying the lede on a technicality?
| majewsky wrote:
| GP appears to be using "empire" as in "imperalistic"
| instead of as in "emperor".
| netsharc wrote:
| I think, like the Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking
| about reducing the rate of birth in Africa as wanting to kill
| Africans, you're interpreting it wrong.
|
| The graph says horse ownership per person. People probably
| stopped buying horses, they let theirs retire (well, to be
| honest, probably also sent to the glue factory), and when they
| stopped buying new horses, horse breeding programs slowed down.
| bgwalter wrote:
| Well, in this case corporations stop buying people and just
| fire them instead of letting them retire. Or an army of Tesla
| Optimi will send people to the glue factory.
|
| That at least is the fantasy of these people. Fortunately.
| LLMs don't really work, Tesla cars are still built by KUKA
| robots (while KUKA has a fraction of Tesla's P/E) and data
| centers in space are a cocaine fueled dream.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I don't think you're realizing that the OP understands this,
| and that in this analogy, the horses are human beings
| bambax wrote:
| In this analogy, horses are jobs, not humans; you could
| argue there's not much of a difference between the two,
| because people without jobs will starve, etc., but still,
| they're not the same.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| There is, at least, a way to avoid people without jobs
| starving. Whether or not we'll do it is anyone's guess. I
| think I'll live to see UBI but I am perphaps an optimist.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| You'd have to time something like UBI with us actually
| being able to replace the workforce -- The current LLM
| parlor tricks are simply not what they're sold to be, and
| if we rely on them too early we (humanity) is very much
| screwed.
| snarfy wrote:
| It's here today - it's owning stock that produces
| dividends. That's capitalism.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| One would argue in a capitalist society like ours,
| fucking with someone's job at industrial scale isn't
| awfully dissimilar from threatening their life, it's just
| less direct. Plenty more people currently are feeling the
| effects of worsening job markets than have been involved
| in a hostage situation, but the negative end results are
| still the same.
|
| One would argue also if you don't see this, it's because
| you'd prefer not to.
|
| If we had at least a somewhat functioning safety net, or
| UBI, or both, you'd at least have an argument to be made,
| but we don't. AI and it's associated companies' business
| model is, if not killing people, certainly attempting to
| make lots of lives worse at scale. I wouldn't work for
| one for all the money in the world.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| UBI will not save you from economic irrelevance. The only
| difference between you and someone starving in a 3rd
| world slum is economic opportunity and the means to
| exchange what you have for what someone else needs. UBI
| is inflation in a wig and dark glasses.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| Why make the analogy at all if not for the implied
| slaughter. It is a visceral reminder of our own brutal
| history. Of what humans do given the right set of
| circumstances.
| arowthway wrote:
| How is decreasing the number of horses killed every year
| brutal?
| pas wrote:
| population projections they already predict that prosperity
| reduces population
|
| and even if AI becomes good enough to replace most humans
| the economic surplus does not disappear
|
| it's a coordination problem
|
| in many places on Earth social safety nets are pretty
| robust, and if AI helps to reduce cost of providing basic
| services then it won't be a problem to expand those safety
| nets
|
| ...
|
| there's already a pretty serious anti-inequality (or at
| least anti-billionaire) storm brewing, the question is can
| it motivate the necessary structural changes or just fuels
| yet another dumb populist movement
| bee_rider wrote:
| Somebody should try a smart populist movement instead. My
| least favorite thing about my favored (or rather least
| disfavored) party is that we seem to believe "we must win
| without appealing to the populace _too_ directly, that
| would simply be uncouth."
| glenstein wrote:
| I think the concerns with UBI are (1) it takes away the
| leverage of a labor force to organize and strike for
| better benefits or economic conditions, and (2) following
| the block grant model, can be a trojan horse "benefit"
| that sets the stage for effectively deleting systems of
| welfare support that have been historically resilient due
| to institutional support and being strongly identified
| with specific constituencies. When the benefit is
| abstracted away from a constituency it's easier to chop
| over time.
|
| I don't exactly know how I feel about those, but I
| respect those criticisms. I think the grand synthesis is
| that UBI exists on top of existing safety nets.
| gota wrote:
| Point (2) seems wrong intuitively. "Chopping" away UBI
| would be much more difficult _because_ it is not
| associated to a specific constituency.
|
| Not only would there be more people on the streets
| protesting against real or perceived cuts;
|
| there also would be fewer movements based on exclusivist
| ideologies protesting _in favour of cuts_*
|
| * e.g. racist groups in favour of cutting some kinds of
| welfare because of racial associations
| maciejzj wrote:
| We don't know what the author had in mind, but one has to
| really be tone deaf to let the weirdness of the discussion go
| unnoticed. Take a look at the last paragraphs in the text
| again:
|
| > And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had
| disappeared.
|
| > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did.
|
| > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I
| think we're getting a lot less.
|
| While most of the text is written from cold economic(ish)
| standpoint it is really hard not to get bleak impression from
| it. And the last three sentences express that in vague way
| too. Some ambiguity is left on purpose so you can interpret
| the daunting impression your way.
|
| The article presents you with crushing juxtaposition,
| implicates insane dangers, and leaves you with the feeling of
| inevitability. Then back to work, I guess.
| pzo wrote:
| > And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had
| disappeared.
|
| > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses
| did.
|
| Horses typically live between 25 to 30 years. I agree with
| OP that most likely those horses were not decimated
| (killed) but just died out and people stopped mass breeding
| them. Also as other noticed chart shows 'horses PER person
| in US'. Population between 1900 and 1950 increased from
| 1.5B to 2.5B (globally but probably similarly almost 70%
| increase in US).
|
| I think depends what do you worry about:
|
| 1) `that human population decrease 50-80%`?
|
| I don't worry about it even if that happen. 200 years ago
| human population was ~1 B today is ~8 B. At year 0 AD human
| population was ~0.250 B. Did we 200 years ago worry about
| it like "omg human population is only 1 B" ?
|
| I doubt human population decrease 80% because of no demand
| for human as workforce but I don't see problem if it
| decrease by 50%. There will short transition period with
| surplus of retired people and work needed to keep the
| infrastructure but if robots can help with this then I
| don't see the problem.
|
| 2) `That we will not be needed and we will loose jobs?`
|
| I don't see work like something in demand. Most people hate
| their jobs or do crappy jobs. What do people actually worry
| about that they will won't get any income. And actually not
| even about that - they worry that they will not be able to
| survive or be homeless. If there is improvement in
| production that food, shelter, transportation, healtcare is
| dirty cheap (all stuff from bottom maslov piramid) and fair
| distribution on social level then I also see a way this can
| be no problem.
|
| 3) `That we will all die because of AI`
|
| This I find more plausable and maybe not even by AGI but
| earlier because of big social unrests during transition
| period.
| maciejzj wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with what you said. It's not about the
| absolute number of people, but the social unrest. If you
| look at how poor we did our job at redistribution of
| wealth so far, I find it hard to believe that we will do
| well in the future. I am afraid of mass pauperisation and
| immiseration of societies followed by violence.
| listenallyall wrote:
| What's more important - "redistribution of wealth" or
| simply reducing the percentage of people living in abject
| poverty? And wouldn't you agree that by that measure,
| most of the world, including its largest countries, have
| done quite a good job?
|
| https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/ending-poverty
|
| _From 1990 to 2014, the world made remarkable progress
| in reducing extreme poverty, with over one billion people
| moving out of that condition. The global poverty rate
| decreased by an average of 1.1 percentage points each
| year, from 37.8 percent to 11.2 percent in 2014._
| rindalir wrote:
| As someone who raises horses and other animals, I can say
| with pretty high certainty that most of the horses were
| not allowed to "retire". Horses are expensive and time-
| consuming to care for, and with no practical use, most
| horses would have been sent not to the glue factory but
| (at that time) to the butcher and their non-meat parts
| used for fertilizer.
| techdmn wrote:
| I think the phrase "fair distribution on social level" is
| doing a lot of work in this comment. Do you consider this
| to be a common occurrence, or something our existing
| social structures do competently?
|
| I see quite the opposite, and have very little hope that
| reduced reliance on labor will increase the equability of
| distribution of wealth.
| Herring wrote:
| It probably depends on the society you start out with, eg
| a high trust culture like Finland will probably fare
| better here.
| hnfong wrote:
| Doesn't matter. The countries with most chaos and
| internal strife gets a lot of practice fighting wars
| (civil war). Then the winner of the civil war, who's used
| to grabbing resources by force, and the one that has
| perfected war skills due to survival of the fittest, goes
| round looking for other countries to invade.
|
| Historically, advanced civilizations with better
| production capabilities don't necessarily do better in
| war if they lack "practice". Sad but true. Maybe not in
| 21st century, but who knows.
| Herring wrote:
| Yeah none of that fever dream is real. There's no "after"
| a civil war, conflicts persist for decades (Iraq,
| Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Colombia, Sudan).
|
| Check this out -
| https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart. The US is
| increasingly a miserable place to live in, and the worse
| it gets the more their people double down on being
| shitty.
|
| Fun fact: Fit 2 lines on that data and you can
| extrapolate by ~2030 China will be a better place to
| live. That's really not that far off. Set a reminder on
| your phone: Chinese dream.
| danw1979 wrote:
| I wish the author had had the courage of their convictions to
| extend the analogy all the way to the glue factory. It's what
| we are all thinking.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I have a modest proposal for dealing with future
| unemployment.
| xg15 wrote:
| There are too many people in power right now who I
| wouldn't put it past to take that proposal seriously.
| sherr wrote:
| Ha ha, yes. You should write that up as a pamplet
| somewhere.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Sending all the useless horses to glue factories in that
| time was so prevalent it was a cartoon trope. The other
| trope being men living in flop houses, and towns having
| entire sections for unemployable people called skid row.
|
| The AI people point to post 1950s style employment and say
| 'people recovered after industrial advance' and ignore the
| 1880s through the 1940s. We actually have zero idea if the
| buggy whip manufacturer ever recovered or just lasted a
| year in skid row before giving up completely, or lived
| through the 2 world wars spurred by mechanisation.
| tyre wrote:
| Horses were killed more often for meat that was used in
| dog food than for glue.
|
| I did a deep research into the decline of horses and it
| was consistent with fewer births, not mass slaughter. The
| US Department of Agriculture has great records during
| this time, though they're not fully digitized.
| everdrive wrote:
| > Bill Gates haters who interpret him talking about reducing
| the rate of birth in Africa
|
| I'm not up to speed here -- is Bill Gates doing work to
| reduce the birth rates in Africa?
| netsharc wrote:
| For example, interview from 2018:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMifQvuN08
|
| When the Covid-truther geniuses "figured out" that "Bill
| Gates was behind Covid", they pulled out things like this
| as "proof" that his master plan is to reduce the world's
| population. Not to reduce the rate of increase, but to kill
| them (because of course these geniuses don't understand
| derivatives)...
| everdrive wrote:
| Ah, got it. This sounds like more of a "repugnant
| conclusion" sort of problem where if you care about the
| well being of people who exist, then it is possible to
| have too large of a population.
| abixb wrote:
| One could argue that the quality of life per horse went up,
| even if the total number of horses went down. Lots more
| horses now get raised in farms and are trained to participate
| in events like dressage and other equestrian sports.
| netsharc wrote:
| Someone said during the hype of "self-driving cars is the
| future!" that ICE/driver-driven cars will go the way of the
| horse: they'll be well-cared, kept in stables, and taken
| out in the weekends for recreation, on circuits but not on
| public roads..
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'now instead of being work animals a few of you will be
| kept like pets by the tech bros'
| netsharc wrote:
| "But only if you're a superior breed..."
|
| Epstein was ahead of his times...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Imagine it now, your future descendants existing solely to
| be part of some rich kid's harem.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Horses are pretty and won't try to kill you for "your" food.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| it's a con job and strawman take. if we collectively think
| token generators can replace humans completely, well then we've
| already lost the plot as a global society
| andai wrote:
| Is it good when number of human go up? Is bad when go down?
| maciejzj wrote:
| I would say that it is bad when it has large derivative
| (positive or negative). However, the problem is not about
| >number of human beings< but about making agency that
| existing people have obsolete.
| gcanyon wrote:
| It's bad if it goes down by more than about 1.2% per year.
| That would mean zero births, present-day natural deaths. Of
| course zero births isn't presently realistic, and we should
| expect the next 10-30 years to significantly increase human
| lifespan. If we assume continued births at the lowest rates
| seen anywhere on the planet, and humans _just_ maxing out the
| present human lifespan limit, then anything more than about a
| 0.5% decrease means someone is getting murked.
| j-bos wrote:
| > Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how
| population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of
| efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a
| parallel to human population?
|
| Yes, here's a youtube classic that put forth the same argument
| over a decade ago, originally titled "Humans need not apply":
| https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU
| trymas wrote:
| > Have you ever thought that you would be compared to a
| gasoline engine and everyone would discuss this juxtaposition
| from purely economic perspective?
|
| Not sure if by accident or not, but that's what we are
| according today's "tech elite". Therefore, the
| most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is
| to convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni
| buses
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/55660903-patchwork-a-p...
| classified wrote:
| > And barely anyone shares a thought like "technology should be
| warranted by the populace, not the other way around?"
|
| It shines through that the most fervent AI Believers are also
| Haters of Humans.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I have been completely shocked by the number of people in the
| tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on humanity
| and so many of its outputs. I see it in the writing of leaders
| within VC firms and AI companies but I also see it in ordinary
| conversations on the caltrain or in coffee shops.
|
| Friendship, love, sex, art, even faith and childrearing are
| opportunities for substitution with AI. Ask an AI to create a
| joke for you at a party. Ask an AI to write a heartfelt letter
| to somebody you respect. Have an AI make a digital likeness of
| your grandmother so you can spend time with her forever. Have
| an AI tell you what you should say to your child when they are
| sad.
|
| Hell. Hell on earth.
| M95D wrote:
| > no value on humanity
|
| It's practically the definition of psychopathy.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I can't say I'm shocked. Disappointed, maybe, but it's hardly
| surprising to see the sociopathic nature in the people
| fighting tooth and nail for the validation of venture
| capitalists who will not be happy until they own every single
| cent on earth.
|
| There are good people everywhere, but bring good and ethical
| stands in the way of making money, so most of the good people
| lose out in the end.
|
| AI is the perfect technology for those who see people as
| complaining cogs in an economic machine. The current AI
| bubble is the first major advancement where these people go
| mask off; when people unapologetically started trying to
| replace basic art and culture with "efficient" machines,
| people started noticing.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| If you want another side data point, most people I know both
| in Japan and Canada use some sort of an AI as a replacement
| for any kind of query. Almost nobody in my circles are in
| tech or tech-adjacent circles.
|
| So yeah, it's just everyone collectively devaluing human
| interaction.
| vidarh wrote:
| I love AI, but I'm exasperated by the extent to which my
| fiancee uses Claude instead of search, and for
| _everything_...
| throw-the-towel wrote:
| With what Google has become, I can't blame her.
| abustamam wrote:
| Why? Google search kinda sucks. And I find it helpful to
| provide context that I can't otherwise provide to any
| standard search engine.
| vidarh wrote:
| Because the responses are often distilled down from the
| same garbage Google serves up, but presented as the
| opinion of Claude, whom she increasingly trusts.
|
| I use Claude _a lot_. I have the most expensive Claude
| Max subscription both for my own consultancy and at
| client sites, separately. I 'm increasingly close to an
| AI maximalist on many issues, so I'm not at all against
| extensive use of these models.
|
| But it's not quick enough to of its own accord resort to
| verifying things before giving answers to be suitable as
| a general purpose replacement for Google _unless you
| specifically prompt it to search_.
| abustamam wrote:
| > unless you specifically prompt it to search.
|
| Ah, that's a good call-out. I don't use Claude aside from
| in Cursor; I use ChatGPT for normal queries and it's
| pretty good about doing searches when it doesn't think it
| knows the answer. Of course it'll search when prompted,
| but it'll often search without prompting too. I just
| mistakenly assumed that your fiancee's usage of Claude
| implied Claude was actually searching as well.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| Google search sucks now because it's been targeted by the
| spammers and content farms. Before that happened it was
| pretty good. LLMs will eventually be poisoned the same
| way, whether by humans or other LLMs.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Garbage in, garbage out + chat bots will be monetized
| which means they will show you things their ad partners
| want you to see vs what you actually want.
| exe34 wrote:
| frankly I've found even chat gpt free to be more useful
| when looking for something - I'd describe what I'm
| looking for, what are must-have features, what I
| definitely don't mean, etc and it'll suggest a few
| things. This has rarely led to not finding what I'm
| looking for. it's absolutely superior to Google search
| these days for things that have been around a while. I
| wouldn't check the news with it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > I have been completely shocked by the number of people in
| the tech industry who seem to genuinely place no value on
| humanity [...]
|
| Who do they think will make their ventures profitable? Who do
| they think will take their dollars and provide goods and
| services in exchange?
|
| If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add no
| value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own nothing.
| palmotea wrote:
| > If automation reaches the point where 99% of humans add
| no value to the "owners" then the "owners" will own
| nothing.
|
| I don't think that's right. The owners will still own
| _everything_. If or when that happens, I think the economy
| would morph into a new thing completely focused on serving
| the whims of those "owners."
|
| There's an old Isaac Asimov book with something similar:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_universe#Solaria
| (though accomplished more peacefully and with less pain
| than I think is realistic).
| cryptonector wrote:
| What would they get from the plebs? Suppose we went
| through The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated,
| then what? Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics,
| but only for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner",
| then.
| palmotea wrote:
| > What would they get from the plebs?
|
| I think the right question is: what would they _want_
| from the plebs? And the answer will be nothing.
|
| Right now they want the plebs' labor, which is why things
| work the way they do.
|
| > The Phools and so the plebs were exterminated, then
| what?
|
| Is that a reference to this? https://press.princeton.edu/
| books/hardcover/9780691168319/ph...
|
| > Perhaps we'd finally have Star Trek economics, but only
| for them, the "owners". Better be an "owner", then.
|
| I don't think we'll have Star Trek economics, because
| that would be fundamentally fair and egalitarian and
| plentiful. There will still be resource constraints like
| energy production and raw materials. I think it will be
| more like B2B economics, international trade, with a
| small number relevant owners each controlling vast
| amounts of resources and productive capacity and
| occasionally trading basics amongst themselves. It could
| also end up like empires-at-war (which actually may be
| more likely, since war would give the owners something
| seemingly important to do, vs just building monuments to
| themselves and other types of jerking off).
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Consider being a significant shareholder in the future as
| analogous to citizenship as it exists today. Non-owners
| will be persona non gratae, if they're allowed to live at
| all.
| sp527 wrote:
| > If or when that happens, I think the economy would
| morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the
| whims of those "owners."
|
| I think you might be a little behind on economic news,
| because that's _already_ happening. And it 's also
| rapidly reshaping business models and strategic thinking.
| The forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower
| and middle classes out of the narrative.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-
| sp50...
| palmotea wrote:
| >> If or when that happens, I think the economy would
| morph into a new thing completely focused on serving the
| whims of those "owners."
|
| > I think you might be a little behind on economic news,
| because that's already happening. And it's also rapidly
| reshaping business models and strategic thinking. The
| forces of capitalism are happily writing the lower and
| middle classes out of the narrative.
|
| No, that doesn't surprise me at all. I'm basically just
| applying the logic of capitalism and automation to a new
| technology, and the same thing has played out a thousand
| times before. The only difference with AI is that; unlike
| previous, more limited automation; it's likely there will
| be no roles for displaced workers to move into (just like
| when engines got good enough there were no roles for
| horses to move into).
|
| It's important to remember that capitalism isn't about
| providing for people. It's about providing for people
| _with wealth to exchange_. That works OK when you have
| full employment and wealth gets spread around by paying
| workers, but if most jobs disappear due to automation
| there 's no mechanism to spread wealth to the vast
| majority of people, so under capitalism they'll
| eventually die of want.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| See also: Citigroup's plutonomy thesis[1] from 2006
|
| tldr: the formal economy will shift to serving plutocrats
| instead of consumers, it's much more profitable to do so
| and there are diminishing returns serving the latter
|
| [1] https://www.sourcewatch.org/images/b/bc/CITIGROUP-
| MARCH-5-20...
| Faark wrote:
| Making predictions on how it will turn out VS designing how
| it should be. Up til now, powerful people needed lots and
| lots of other humans to sustain their power&life. Thus that
| dependency gave the masses leverage. Now I'd like a society
| we're everyone is valued for being human and stuff. With
| democracies we got quite far in that direction. Attempts to
| go even further... Let's just say "didn't work out". And
| right now, especially in the US, the societal system seems to
| go back to "power" instead rules.
|
| Yeah, I see a bleak future ahead. Guess that's life, after
| all.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| > didn't work out
|
| In the "learn to love democracy and freedom" sense, sure,
| but in the economic sense? "Didn't work out" feels like a
| talking point stuck in 1991. Time has passed, China is the
| #2 economy in the world, #1 if you pick a metric that
| emphasizes material or looks to the future. How did they
| get there? By paying the private owners of our economy to
| sell our manufacturing base to them piece by piece -- which
| the private owners were both entitled and incentivized to
| do by the fundamental principles of capitalism. The ending
| hasn't been written, but it smells like the lead-up to a
| reversal in fortune.
|
| As for our internal balance of power, we've been here
| before, and the timeline conveniently lines up to almost
| exactly 100 years ago. I'm hoping for another Roosevelt. It
| wasn't easy then, it won't be easy now, but I do think it's
| fundamentally possible.
| Herring wrote:
| American culture actively punishes compassion, then gaslights
| you about it.
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/te...
| Look at all the professions on the bottom right: Teachers,
| therapists, clergy, social workers, etc. It's not a coincidence
| that cruel people take top positions.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| It's been a decade or so but I'm mostly called "resource" at
| work, as in Human Resource. Barely collegue, comrade, co-
| worker... just a resource, a plug in the machine that needs to
| be replaced by an external resource to improve profit margins.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| The threat isn't to population, it's to jobs (at least so far)
| but yeah.
| stared wrote:
| > the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me
|
| It reminds me of "You maniacs! You blew it up! Goddamn you all
| to hell!" from the original Planet of the Apes (1968),
| https://youtu.be/mDLS12_a-fk?t=71
|
| Quite ironically, the scene features a horse.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Honestly, the answer for me is yes. I had expected it. The
| signs were in all the comments that take the market forces for
| granted. All the comments that take capitalism as a given and
| immutable law of nature. They were in all the tech bros that
| never ever wanted to change anything but the number of zeros in
| their bank account after a successful exit. So yes, I had that
| thought you are finally having too.
| entropyneur wrote:
| My experience so far has been that the knowledge of what should
| and shouldn't be, while important, bears no predictive power
| whatsoever as to what actually ends up happening.
|
| In this instance, in particular, I wouldn't expect our
| preferences to bear any relevance.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| > knowledge of what should and shouldn't be, while important,
| bears no predictive power whatsoever as to what actually ends
| up happening.
|
| I don't know if you are intentionally being vague and
| existential here. However, context matters, and the
| predictive power is zero sounds unreasonable in the face of
| history.
|
| I think humans learning that diseases were affecting us and
| thus leading to solutions like antibiotics and vaccines. It
| was not guaranteed, but I'm skeptical of the predictive power
| being zero.
| glenstein wrote:
| Honestly I can't tell if your incredulity is at the method of
| analysis for being tragically mistaken or superficial in some
| way, at the seemingly dehumanizing comparison of beloved human
| demonstrations of skill (chess, writing) to lowest common
| denominator labor, or the tone of passive indifference to
| computers taking over everything.
|
| I think the comparisons are useful enough as metaphors, though
| I wonder at analysis, because it sounds like if someone took a
| Yudkowsky idea and talked about it like a human, which might
| make a bad assumption go down more smooth than it should. But I
| don't know.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing
| [...]
|
| Yes, actually, because this has been a deep vein of writing for
| the past 100 or more years. There's The Phools, by Stanislav
| Lem. There's the novels written by Boris Johnson's father that
| are all about depopulation. There's Aldous Huxley's Brave New
| World. How about Logan's Run? There has been so much writing
| about the automation / technology apocalypse for humans in the
| past 100 years that it's hard to catalog it -- much of what I
| have read or seen go by in the vein I've totally forgotten.
|
| It's not remotely a surprise to see this amp up with AI.
| maciejzj wrote:
| Yeah, I am familiar with these works of art and probably most
| people are. However, they were mostly speculative. Now we are
| facing some of their premises in the real world. And the guys
| who push the technology in a reckless way seem to notice
| this, but just nod their heads and carry on.
|
| At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic
| sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Works of art, works of predictive programming, life
| imitating art -- what's the difference, if in the end the
| artistic predictions come true?
|
| People have been thinking apocalyptic thoughts like these
| since.. at least Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of
| Population (1798). That's 227 years if you're keeping
| score. Probably longer; Malthus might only have been the
| first to write them down and publish them.
| tuyiown wrote:
| > I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN
| recently
|
| My comments being downvoted, pretty rare lately, were about
| never discussed but legitimate points about AI that I validated
| IRL. I have no resonance about the way AI is discussed on HN
| and IRL, to the point that I can't rule out more or less subtle
| manipulation on the discussions.
| maciejzj wrote:
| I don't think that bots have taken over HN. I meant that the
| frontier of the tech research brags about their recklessness
| here and the rest of us have become bystanders to this
| process. Gives me goosebumps.
| tim333 wrote:
| You can kind of separate the technical side of what will likely
| happen - AI get smarter and can do the jobs - with how we deal
| with that. Could be heaven like with abundance and no one needs
| to work, or post apocalyptic dystopia or likely somewhere in
| the middle.
|
| We collectively have a lot of choice on the how we deal with it
| part. I'm personally optimistic that people will vote in people
| friendly policies when it comes to it.
| hnfong wrote:
| Not seeing any horse heavens, do you have reason to believe
| humans (i.e. those not among the ruling class) are going to
| have a different fate from the horses?
|
| I agree we can kinda make the argument that abundance is soon
| upon us, and humanity as a whole embraces the ideas of
| equality and harmony etc etc... but still there's a kinda
| uncanny dissociation if you're happily talking about horses
| disappearing and humans being next while you work on the
| product that directly causes your prediction to come true and
| happen earlier...
| tim333 wrote:
| We are in control (for now). The horses were not. The whole
| alignment debate is basically about keeping us in control.
| palmotea wrote:
| > And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary
| humanitarian approach, but rather from perspective of some kind
| of economic determinism? Have you ever thought that you would
| be compared to a gasoline engine and everyone would discuss
| this juxtaposition from purely economic perspective?
|
| One of the _many_ terrible things about software engineers
| their the tendency to think and speak as if they were some kind
| of aloof galaxy-brain, passively observing humanity from afar.
| I think that 's at least partially the result of 1) identifying
| as an "intelligent person" and 2) computers and the internet
| allowing them to in-large-part become disconnected from the
| rest of humanity. I think they see that aloofness as being a
| "more intelligent" way to engage with the world, so they do it
| to act out their "intelligence."
| KitN wrote:
| isn't this literally swift's laputa?
| constantcrying wrote:
| It isn't just AI. So much of the US "Tech"/VC scene is doing
| outright evil stuff, with seemingly zero regard for any
| consequence or even a shred of self awareness.
|
| So much money is spent on developing gambling, social media,
| crypto (fraud and crime enabler) and surveillance software. All
| of these are making people's lives worse, these companies
| aren't even shy about it. They want to track you, they want you
| to spend as much time as possible on their products, they want
| to make you addicted to gambling.
|
| Just by how large these segments are, many of the people
| developing that software must be posting here, but I have never
| seen any actual reflection on it.
|
| Sure, I guess developing software making people addicted to
| gambling pays the bills (and more than that), but I haven't
| seen even that. These industries just exist and people seem to
| work for them as if it was just a normal job, with zero moral
| implications.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| The implication is very clearly about "killing" jobs, not
| killing people.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Oh, _now_ computer industry people are worried? Kind of late to
| the party.
|
| Computerization, automation and robotics, document
| digitization, the telecoms and wireless revolution, etc. have
| been upending peoples' employment on a massive scale since
| before the 1970s. The reaction of the technologists has been a
| rather insensitive "adapt or die", "go and retrain", and
| analogies to buggy whip manufacturers when the automobile
| became popular. The only reason people here suddenly give a
| hoot is because they think the crosshairs are drifting towards
| them.
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| I think we have a bunch of people in the United States who see
| what we elected for leadership and the choices he made to
| advise him, and they have given up all hope. That despondent
| attitude is infusing their opinions on everything. But chin up,
| he's really old, and he doesn't seem very healthy or he'd be
| out there leading the charge throwing those rallies every
| weekend of which he used to be so fond.
|
| And low information business leaders will attempt to do all the
| awful things described here and the free market will eliminate
| them from the game grid one horrible boss at a time. But if you
| surround yourself with the AI doomers and bubblers, how will
| you ever encounter or even consider positive uses of the
| technology? What an awful place to work Anthropic must be if
| they truly believe they are working on the metaphorical
| equivalent of the Alpha Omega bomb. Spoilers: they're not.
|
| Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, many look forward to
| harnessing AI to ameliorate hunger, take care of the elderly,
| and perform the more dangerous and tedious jobs out there.
| Anthropic guy needs to go get a room with Eliezer Yudkowsky. I
| guess the US is about get horsed by the other 96% of the
| planet.
|
| Go ahead, compare me to a horse, a gasoline engine, or even
| call me a meatbag. Have we become little more than Eloi
| snowflakes to be so offended by that?
|
| But I guess as long as an electoral majority here continues to
| cheer on one man draining the juice of this country down to a
| bitter husk, the fun and games will continue.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Yes. Follow in the path of the tech leaders. They are
| optimists. They totally aren't building doomsday bunkers or
| trying to build their data centers with their own nuclear
| power plants to remove them from society and create self
| contained systems. Oh wait. Crap...
| LogicFailsMe wrote:
| American tech leaders are just as bad, leading the charge
| straight into the abyss. But if you close your mind to the
| rest of the world, I can see why you'd see a 0 1 choice
| here. That's all the corporate media and influencers write
| these days, all the way from Paul Krugman to Corey
| Doctorow. And let's not even get started on the Three Men
| and an ASIC house of AI circle jerkers.
|
| I mean if you're the sort that thinks Greta Thunberg and
| Eliezer Yudkowsky are agents of the Antichrist, it's long
| overdue to touch grass. And I don't think he believes that,
| but I think he thought people were stupid enough to buy it
| so he ran with it. Can't blame him for trying!
|
| But given the right's hatred of renewables and the left
| thinks nuclear power plants can explode like atomic bombs,
| I'd be pushing for gas and nuclear to power my data centers
| too.
|
| TLDR: you're being fed a false narrative that this is a 0 1
| choice, but I guess it will take the rest of the world to
| demonstrate that not the US.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _But chin up, he 's really old, and he doesn't seem very
| healthy or he'd be out there leading the charge throwing
| those rallies every weekend of which he used to be so fond._
|
| At this point in time, his whimsy is the only thing holding
| back younger, more extreme acolytes from doing what they
| want. Once he's gone, lol.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I took the article as meaning white collar tech jobs that will
| go away, so those people will need to pivot their career, not
| humans.
|
| However, it does seem like time for humanity to collectively
| think hard about our values and goals, and what type of world
| and lives we want to have in an age where human thought, and
| perhaps even human physical labor are economically worthless.
| Unfortunately this could not come at a worse time with humanity
| seemingly experiencing a widespread rejection of ideals like
| ethics, human rights, and integrity and embracing fascism and
| ruthless blind financial self interest as if they were high
| minded ideals.
|
| Ironically, I think tech people could learn a lot here from
| groups like the Amish- they have clearly decided what their
| values and goals are, and ruthlessly make tech serve them,
| instead of the other way around. Despite stereotypes, Amish are
| often actually heavy users of, and competent with modern tech
| in service of making a living, but in a way that enforces firm
| boundaries about not letting the tech usurp their values and
| chosen way of life.
| oxag3n wrote:
| > What the hell
|
| It was always like this. Look at the history, and sometimes
| quite recent - people were always treated like a tool - for
| getting rich, for getting in power, to conquer other countries,
| to serve them.
| xg15 wrote:
| It's interesting though how the narrative is all bright-eyed
| idealism, make the world a better place, progress, etc until
| at some point the masks go off and suddenly it's "always has
| been, move along, nothing to see here"...
| j-krieger wrote:
| Even scarier when you consider that this entire technology has
| reached the public only three years ago.
| andai wrote:
| "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said
| faster humans!"
| emsign wrote:
| Wow! That is highly unscientific and speculative. Wow!
| skywhopper wrote:
| Truly depressing to see blase predictions of AI infra spending
| approaching WW2 levels of GDP as if that were remotely desirable.
| One, that's never going to happen, but if it does, it'll mean a
| complete failure to address actual human needs. The amount of
| money wasted by Facebook on the Metaverse could have ended
| homelessness in the US, or provided universal college. Now here
| we are watching multiple times that much money get thrown by
| Meta, Google, et al into datacenters that are mostly generating
| slop that's ruining what's left of the Internet.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of
| progress in mechanical engines.
|
| Ambivalent??
| cryptonector wrote:
| This is another one of those apocalyptic posts about AI. It might
| actually be true. I recommend reading The Phools, by Stanislav
| Lem -- it's a very short story, and you can find free copies of
| it online.
|
| Also maybe go out for some fresh air. Maybe knowledge work will
| go down for humans, but plumbing and such will take much longer
| since we'll need dextrous robots.
| nateburke wrote:
| Horses never figured out how to get government bailouts.
| oidar wrote:
| I think AI is probably closer to jet engines than it is to
| horses.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Howso?
| oxag3n wrote:
| > I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic. ... >
| But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think
| we're getting a lot less.
|
| TL;DR If your work is answer questions, that can be retrieved
| from a corpus of data with inverted index + embedding, you'll be
| obsolete pretty fast.
| LanceWinslow wrote:
| You know, this whole conversation reminds me of that old critique
| on Communism; Once the government becomes so large and
| encompassing, it reaches a point where it no longer needs to the
| people to exist, thus, people are culled by the millions, as they
| are simply no longer needed.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Great post.
|
| This is the context wherein the valuation of AI companies makes
| sense, particularly those that already got a head start and have
| captured a large swath of that market.
| eigencoder wrote:
| I'm confused. Isn't the sharp decline in the graph due to the
| population boom?
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