4 ms·

What puzzles me about all the skeptics (deniers, ever) is that they don't seem to be too forward thinking. Sure, these LLMs will not replace anyone right now, b

What puzzles me about all the skeptics (deniers, ever) is that they don't seem to be too forward thinking. Sure, these LLMs will not replace anyone right now, but damn look at the progression. Going back 5-10 years, we're doing stuff was seemingly impossible back then. Just imagine what things will look like in another 10-15-20 years? If you're a 14-15 year old computer enthusiast, planning on getting a BS or MS in CS, you'll likely first enter the workforce 7-10 years. The time you spend in University is a lifetime for certain fields of Machine Learning / AI, and who knows what entry jobs have been completely automated. Personally, I think this will be the death of entry-level jobs.

anonzzzies 4y ago
You are exactly right; people (strangely here) seem to me hammering on it is not good enough or means anything now. We are talking 10-20 years… if chatgpt ‘22 didn’t happen, I would’ve expected big changes more like 50 years away ; now I believe it’s 10 or less. All the ‘this means nothing’ is so naive and frankly weird for normally forward thinking people here.
- raydev 4y ago
  But The Thing that is going to cost us all our jobs has always been 10-20-50 years away.
  - anonzzzies 4y ago
    Well, I see it costing jobs today. It might not accelerate, even if the tech stays like this (which it won't, even if we 'only scale').
next_xibalba 4y ago
I tend to agree, but I think an interesting counter example is the hard wall self driving seems to have hit. There was a moment when even the experts in the field seemed convinced that we were only a year or two out from true Level 5 driving. But now everyone seems to be much more uncertain and conservative in their forecasts of the advent of L5. Perhaps we'll see similar difficulties with these LLMs. They are definitely not quite there yet. I'm currently trying to get ChatGPT to write some Python code that formats SQL statements according to my idiosyncratic preferences and it keeps getting very close but never gets it exactly correct.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I see it as 10% being 90% of work, but it might actually be 99% or more. Yes good enough for many many cases, but not nearly there when you truly need things right.
juujian 4y ago
It's because ten year ago, everybody already talked about AI making developer jobs etc. redundant within ten years. And now (or at least a year ago) we have more developers than ever. Somehow the breakthrough is always ten years away. Yes, the technology has improved immensely. I just have not seen any specific business models and product ideas that are thought out in detail, from customer input to final product.
layer8 4y ago
The progress came relatively sudden. It may also stop relatively suddenly. At this point we can’t really tell.
javajosh 4y ago
<scifi hat>Yes you might one day become a highly compensated technician paid by a billionaire to direct his army of LLMs. You'll be the IR (inhuman relations) director. It will be interesting to see how deep corruption gets and whether billionaires will start running their own energy generation and data-centers - but they'll always need an audio/visual nerd to build, rack and repair servers, and a programming nerd to navigate screens and load the code. </hat>
xboxnolifes 4y ago
This can only be the death of entry level jobs if you also expect all levels of jobs to disappear within the next few decades. Experienced workers don't just pop into existence.
sanderjd 4y ago
I'm not really a skeptic about the potential of the technology, it's just that this sounds exactly the same as what a lot of people told me when I was a 14-15 year old computer enthusiast over 20 years ago. And what has happened since then? The amount any one person could achieve with code shot way up, but far from killing all the jobs, we just found more and more things that could be done cost effectively with computers. So it's hard for me to avoid seeing that as the base case here, having already seen it play out once. My confidence level in the prediction isn't super high or anything, but this is the starting point for me. But I am also sad, because I do think the "making useful things with computers" work will (and has) become less focused on the parts of it that are fun for me. I like to step through debuggers and reason from first principles about what's going on in cpus and memory chips and on the network think about how to structure blocks of code to be comprehensible; all the old school "programming" stuff, that's what's fun for me. I get some joy in working with groups of people to identify and build useful things, but honestly not as much as I get in the direct work with code I understand and appreciate. And I do think more and more of the work will shift away from that raw programming work and toward supervising AI tools in creating useful things conceptualized by humans.
jay_kyburz 4y ago
I don't understand why the pessimists don't see the unlimited amount of work stretching out before us! Why they can't imagine the utopia we could all be working towards. First there is going to be massive amounts of money being splashed around making sure everybody has access to an AI that they control. Both big companies, and on our computers at home. 10-20 years at least. Then we need to actually do the work of automating all the boring stuff like accounting, taxes, insurance etc. (At lets face it, governments are very slow to change and it will be 50 years till we work out the policy let alone the tech implementing the policy) Meanwhile, the tech folks need to turn the attention of the AI to saving our environment. We need massive scale carbon capture of some kind. We need renewable energy sources. AI is not going to just work it out and build it all itself. We need to tell it what we want. We need drones to fly around our forests looking after the bunnies and the squirrels, building a balanced ecosystem. Somebody needs to develop and AI that will monitor our own health, understand more deeply how our bodies work, how to navigate nanobots though our system zapping cancer cells and balancing our gut bacteria. It would be nice if AI could solve aging in the next 20 years. (better to reverse it in my case) Somebody needs to develop and AI and robots that can feed us. Micromanage greenhouses and livestock. Farming has a long way to go before its sustainable and ethical. There is massive amounts of work in just building better infrastructure around our cities. How to clean our water and get people from A to B as comfortably, cleanly, and efficiently as possible. Then once all that is done we can look to the stars, build the arc ships, figure out how much dirt we need to take with us to sustain us. All the while we need to be entertained with stories, games, music and more!
seydor 4y ago
> I think this will be the death of entry-level jobs. This had been said about everything AI related, but the evidence shows it is actually the "higher level", jobs which are being disrupted first. It is a matter of incentives, and the human tendency to assign blame to people. Everyone can blame their manager, but entry-levels are not blamed by anyone, because they are not supervising anyone. Technology is in the business of replacing in-betweens, middlemen, rent-seekers etc with systems that are less biased, more objective, more transparent (sometimes), less prone to corruption etc. That's why google became more trusted than webrings, and why people use yelp or google maps instead of asking the locals. Therefore, there are more people who want to replace their supervisors/managers/superiors with AI than the converse, and this will drive more entry-level people to work for companies that offer more automated , more transparent and trustable management processes. Humans are a point of friction
reportgunner 4y ago
What about you trying to be backwards thinking ? 5-10 years ago we had a boom in VR and AR, google glasses, snap glasses, boom in facial recognition. If you were forward thinking back then you probably thought 2023 is like Ready Player One. We still don't have flying cars and we are not going to have them.

anonzzzies 4y ago

You are exactly right; people (strangely here) seem to me hammering on it is not good enough or means anything now. We are talking 10-20 years… if chatgpt ‘22 didn’t happen, I would’ve expected big changes more like 50 years away ; now I believe it’s 10 or less. All the ‘this means nothing’ is so naive and frankly weird for normally forward thinking people here.

raydev 4y ago
But The Thing that is going to cost us all our jobs has always been 10-20-50 years away.
- anonzzzies 4y ago
  Well, I see it costing jobs today. It might not accelerate, even if the tech stays like this (which it won't, even if we 'only scale').

next_xibalba 4y ago

I tend to agree, but I think an interesting counter example is the hard wall self driving seems to have hit. There was a moment when even the experts in the field seemed convinced that we were only a year or two out from true Level 5 driving. But now everyone seems to be much more uncertain and conservative in their forecasts of the advent of L5. Perhaps we'll see similar difficulties with these LLMs. They are definitely not quite there yet. I'm currently trying to get ChatGPT to write some Python code that formats SQL statements according to my idiosyncratic preferences and it keeps getting very close but never gets it exactly correct.

Ekaros 4y ago
I see it as 10% being 90% of work, but it might actually be 99% or more. Yes good enough for many many cases, but not nearly there when you truly need things right.

juujian 4y ago

It's because ten year ago, everybody already talked about AI making developer jobs etc. redundant within ten years. And now (or at least a year ago) we have more developers than ever. Somehow the breakthrough is always ten years away. Yes, the technology has improved immensely. I just have not seen any specific business models and product ideas that are thought out in detail, from customer input to final product.

layer8 4y ago

The progress came relatively sudden. It may also stop relatively suddenly. At this point we can’t really tell.

javajosh 4y ago

<scifi hat>Yes you might one day become a highly compensated technician paid by a billionaire to direct his army of LLMs. You'll be the IR (inhuman relations) director. It will be interesting to see how deep corruption gets and whether billionaires will start running their own energy generation and data-centers - but they'll always need an audio/visual nerd to build, rack and repair servers, and a programming nerd to navigate screens and load the code. </hat>

xboxnolifes 4y ago

This can only be the death of entry level jobs if you also expect all levels of jobs to disappear within the next few decades. Experienced workers don't just pop into existence.

sanderjd 4y ago

I'm not really a skeptic about the potential of the technology, it's just that this sounds exactly the same as what a lot of people told me when I was a 14-15 year old computer enthusiast over 20 years ago. And what has happened since then? The amount any one person could achieve with code shot way up, but far from killing all the jobs, we just found more and more things that could be done cost effectively with computers. So it's hard for me to avoid seeing that as the base case here, having already seen it play out once. My confidence level in the prediction isn't super high or anything, but this is the starting point for me. But I am also sad, because I do think the "making useful things with computers" work will (and has) become less focused on the parts of it that are fun for me. I like to step through debuggers and reason from first principles about what's going on in cpus and memory chips and on the network think about how to structure blocks of code to be comprehensible; all the old school "programming" stuff, that's what's fun for me. I get some joy in working with groups of people to identify and build useful things, but honestly not as much as I get in the direct work with code I understand and appreciate. And I do think more and more of the work will shift away from that raw programming work and toward supervising AI tools in creating useful things conceptualized by humans.

jay_kyburz 4y ago

I don't understand why the pessimists don't see the unlimited amount of work stretching out before us! Why they can't imagine the utopia we could all be working towards. First there is going to be massive amounts of money being splashed around making sure everybody has access to an AI that they control. Both big companies, and on our computers at home. 10-20 years at least. Then we need to actually do the work of automating all the boring stuff like accounting, taxes, insurance etc. (At lets face it, governments are very slow to change and it will be 50 years till we work out the policy let alone the tech implementing the policy) Meanwhile, the tech folks need to turn the attention of the AI to saving our environment. We need massive scale carbon capture of some kind. We need renewable energy sources. AI is not going to just work it out and build it all itself. We need to tell it what we want. We need drones to fly around our forests looking after the bunnies and the squirrels, building a balanced ecosystem. Somebody needs to develop and AI that will monitor our own health, understand more deeply how our bodies work, how to navigate nanobots though our system zapping cancer cells and balancing our gut bacteria. It would be nice if AI could solve aging in the next 20 years. (better to reverse it in my case) Somebody needs to develop and AI and robots that can feed us. Micromanage greenhouses and livestock. Farming has a long way to go before its sustainable and ethical. There is massive amounts of work in just building better infrastructure around our cities. How to clean our water and get people from A to B as comfortably, cleanly, and efficiently as possible. Then once all that is done we can look to the stars, build the arc ships, figure out how much dirt we need to take with us to sustain us. All the while we need to be entertained with stories, games, music and more!

seydor 4y ago

> I think this will be the death of entry-level jobs. This had been said about everything AI related, but the evidence shows it is actually the "higher level", jobs which are being disrupted first. It is a matter of incentives, and the human tendency to assign blame to people. Everyone can blame their manager, but entry-levels are not blamed by anyone, because they are not supervising anyone. Technology is in the business of replacing in-betweens, middlemen, rent-seekers etc with systems that are less biased, more objective, more transparent (sometimes), less prone to corruption etc. That's why google became more trusted than webrings, and why people use yelp or google maps instead of asking the locals. Therefore, there are more people who want to replace their supervisors/managers/superiors with AI than the converse, and this will drive more entry-level people to work for companies that offer more automated , more transparent and trustable management processes. Humans are a point of friction

reportgunner 4y ago

What about you trying to be backwards thinking ? 5-10 years ago we had a boom in VR and AR, google glasses, snap glasses, boom in facial recognition. If you were forward thinking back then you probably thought 2023 is like Ready Player One. We still don't have flying cars and we are not going to have them.