8 ms·

We're not close and it probably doesn't really matter. I mean, yes I want a real world Jarvis but that's not really what's important. What's important is that

We're not close and it probably doesn't really matter. I mean, yes I want a real world Jarvis but that's not really what's important. What's important is that AI will quickly replace toil in white collar work. Unfortunately, a lot of people make entire careers of that kind of work. "Paper pusher" type jobs are the most at risk but so are the low end of lots of creative jobs like copywriting, graphic design and even script writing. We're going to have to reckon with the consequences of AI long before AGI becomes real.

kevingadd 3y ago
I won't soon forget how as a tools programmer at a game studio, I noticed a couple of the writers spent a big portion of their day churning text from the design team's word docs through excel macros to generate CSV files consumed by our build system. I looked at that and went "oh, I can just automate this", and replaced all that busywork with a tiny C# program that would just do it correctly all the time automatically so nobody had to do it by hand anymore. Only occurred to me much later that now they didn't have much work to do and were at a higher risk of being laid off! A good lesson to think about all the implications of the software I'm writing. We've seen AI-adjacent tooling getting leveraged to eliminate more of that category of work in games already, like automated generation of NPC "barks".
- chii 3y ago
  > A good lesson to think about all the implications of the software I'm writing. only in so far as not reaping the rewards for having done more work than the company paid you for. Efficiency improvements are always good for society as a whole, despite it hurting some people who originally was paid due to the inefficiency.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > Efficiency improvements are always good for society as a whole, despite it hurting some people who originally was paid due to the inefficiency. When the economic/capital/wealth 1% end up hoarding all the profitability gains, society as a whole loses. I have come to loathe the term "disruption" as it has always meant externalizing costs to make a quick buck: either by technology replacing actual, real humans with real families who now have to struggle to survive or by breaking laws and regulations like Uber and AirBnB did, with society paying the costs associated with that - in the case of Uber, society picked up the tab for underinsured drivers or for their pension/social security contributions which don't apply for "freelancers", and in the case of AirBnB all the neighbors affected by the noise and literal other disruptions an AirBnB brings with it.
    - droopyEyelids 3y ago
      This is a criticism of the USA's economic system, where we only give people money through _factor payments_ (exchanging money for labor) or _ownership of capital_. It isn't actually a criticism of technology/automation! In healthier countries, like the Nordics, they've organized their society so that automation, resource extraction, and really all success in business benefits their society as a whole rather than concentrating the wealth into the hands of the elite. Having written that, I feel like I'm picking a nit, because what you said is true in the USA and I don't see it changing in my lifetime.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        Norway is one of the very few democratic nations having a sizable sovereign wealth fund and a strong tradition of the responsibility of the state to take care of all of its citizens (partially because the natural conditions make survival without cooperation all but impossible). Out of all the top 20 SWFs [1], only four to six belong to healthy democracies, six if you count Turkey and the US as one - the rest are essentially grifting arms for the local rulers. Everyone else barely has a SWF worth the name and almost all Western and Western-allied countries have fallen into the neoliberal/"lean government" trap. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign_wealth_funds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign...
        droopyEyelids 3y ago
        Thats true but a sovereign wealth fund isn't the only way to link success of the country's businesses to the success of the people. Using tax revenue to fund a social safety net, public works, education, and housing achieves the goal. The sovereign wealth fund is more about what to do with the money between taxation and social works. If the country has a sovereign wealth fund without all the social spending then I'd say the success of the country's business hasn't been linked to the wellbeing of the people.
    - jschveibinz 3y ago
      The 1% do not get wealthy from “hoarding the profitability gains.” This is a common misconception on HN and society in general. Profits of businesses are typically in 10% range for small businesses and even lower on average for large businesses [1]. Wealth is not income. It’s the value of owned assets: money, property, etc. So where does the wealth come from? There are a couple of different answers-and I’m not going to discuss stealing, slavery, exploitation or other illegal and immoral practices-but generally the answer for lots of wealthy, legitimate people is it is CREATED from “deals.” Wherever one person (or group) can sell something to someone else at a multiple of its current value, wealth is created. The expectation that something of value will either generate income or grow in value in future years creates a higher price for that thing right now. That entices the buyer, and creates wealth for the seller. How much wealth? If you have a rock today that you can tell a story about being potentially worth 100x in 10 years, then you can probably sell that rock for 10x of its actual value today. That is wealth creation. This is related to the concept of “time value of money.” Real estate is one example. Selling a business is another. Art is yet another example. Have a great day. Edit: [1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-public-thinks-the-average-company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high-part-ii/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-public-thinks-the-average...
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    In countries with no safety net like the USA, people do prefer to work at tedious soul-deadening tasks like manually copy pasting into a CSV than to lose their housing and starve. However, there is a benefit to the person who is no longer employed doing mindless toil! It gives them another chance to find healthier work. Again, in the USA this benefit is outweighed by the possibility of immiseration, but it is at least a small plus in the 'pros' column.
    - jschveibinz 3y ago
      Ok, but one issue with your comment: the U.S. has a huge safety net. Entitlements (social programs including social security, welfare, Medicare/Medicaid), etc.) compose 52% of the federal budget ($2 trillion). This equates to almost $10,000 per American. [1] In fact, the U.S. spends more per capita than the Nordic countries, as discussed in other comments. Norway is around $7,500 per person. [2] So what’s the difference? The U.S. is the “wild, Wild West” and Norway is not, according to [2]. [1] https://federalsafetynet.com/entitlement-programs/entitlement-spending/ https://federalsafetynet.com/entitlement-programs/entitlemen... [2] https://freakonomics.com/2010/05/who-spends-more-on-social-welfare-the-united-states-or-sweden/#:~:text=If%20we%20take%20into%20account,%245%2C800%2C%20and%20Finland%20at%20%244%2C900 https://freakonomics.com/2010/05/who-spends-more-on-social-w....
      - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
        Does any of this make a difference to the unemployed? I assure you, the unemployed in the US and norway have two very different experiences and I'd much rather be unemployed in a scandi country than in the US.
        chii 3y ago
        So why is it worse in the US, when the spending is ostensibly higher? What is the root cause of this inefficiency?
- byyyy 3y ago
  Do you see the irony? You wrote code that could have eliminated other people's jobs. Someone else "wrote" chatGPT and it very much looks like the precursor to the thing that could eliminate your job. I can almost imagine the people at openai having the same "Whoops" attitude as you.
- welshwelsh 3y ago
  Is eliminating jobs an unintended consequence, or is it the fundamental purpose of software development? Personally, I see job elimination as my goal and my purpose as a developer. Whenever my company is able to lay people off as a result of my work, that means I am doing a good job. I always try to keep track of how many people my software can replace and how much my company pays these people, so that I can take credit for these cost savings and claim a portion of their salaries for myself during salary negotiations.
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    For tools programmers at least, generally the work you do is meant to enable the work other people at the company do - they aren't able to do it without you. Eliminating their jobs entirely is a different matter, even if that can also be done by a tools programmer. For creative tasks like game development the applications for full automation are usually narrower, so you're typically doing 'force multiplier' sort of stuff, like creating powerful macros or error checkers etc. Hammers and nails don't eliminate carpenters. Most of what I did at that job was building a syntax highlighting editor w/autocomplete for game scripts, making builds faster, etc. Instead of eliminating jobs that mostly let us ship the same product faster.
dpflan 3y ago
Are you thinking there is a layer of management that will be AI or majority AI? What’re you envisioning? I think we may see the best at creative tasks further separating themselves from the pack, these AI systems are best used by experts who can filter and quality check the AI output. I can see software engineering/dev becoming one extremely skilled dev managing a fleet of LLMs weaving together their own work and AIs’ work.
md_ 3y ago
I agree that "AGI" and "labor transformation" are two different issues. I do want to pick on what I think is a bit of hype around the potential to eliminate whole classes of work, though. First, in the weeds: I keep seeing this reference to script writing, which I assume is a reference to the WGA strike. But as https://www.gq.com/story/writers-strike-2023-wga-explained https://www.gq.com/story/writers-strike-2023-wga-explained explains, the big technological transformation driving this dispute isn't the risk of generative AI; it's the changes in royalty payments created by streaming platforms. I'm pretty skeptical of claims that generative models can replace script writers. Like, maybe for some really, really crappy shows? But I think "My ChatGPT could write that" is the 21st century version of looking at a Rauschenberg and saying, "My 5 year old could paint that." Good luck, I guess? More generally: Labor productivity growth has remained fairly constant over the last 40 years or so. So anyone who thinks generative AI is going to totally upend productivity and the job market is implicitly suggesting it's a bigger technological change than the Internet--which didn't really do that! So...dunno. That's a bold claim!
- pixl97 3y ago
  We live in the era of bold claims. In 1820 if you said that 99% of farm labor will be replaced by machines in 100 years, you'd have been given the response of 'bullshit'. And yet a century later we had done just that. With that redistribution of labor came the largest wars the world had ever seen. We don't even have to eliminate 'whole classes of work' to destabilize the working world and economy. Just eliminating 25% of work and not coming up with something new for the now jobless to do will create a wave of populism that can cause problems.
  - md_ 3y ago
    I agree that people underestimate the impact of the first two industrial revolutions while overestimating the impact of the third, if that was your point. I'm not yet prepared to agree that the scale of bellicosity in the 20th century was the result of labor displacement (as opposed to, say, the results of the mechanization of violence). I mean, like, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe.
qudat 3y ago
This argument is so common and I don’t get it. It lacks any context to historical advancements of technology. This will only be good for our economy, any argument against is arguing against the entire trajectory of human technological advancements and its benefits to economic growth. As such, this argument requires a lot more evidence than the plainly obvious: that jobs will be lost. Seriously, who wants to work a job that a machine can do better, cheaper, and more efficiently? Work for the sake of work is not meaningful. This is creative destruction and it is the engine that drives economic growth. It can only be a good thing.
- bbzealot 3y ago
  Unfortunately, in the current economic system having a bullshit job is way better than having no job (unless you're rich of course).
  - ganoushoreilly 3y ago
    I think this is the bigger problem. There are a lot of Bullshit jobs.. plenty of jobs where the tasks performed are menial for the sake of that's just how we do it. Do we need to actively engage an employee that's copying and pasting one excel sheet to another? What modern AI is going to do is pull back that veil and say, no you really shouldn't be doing it this way. That's going to be hard and hurt, but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone. You say this in a manner like you're ripping off a bandaid. Meanwhile we have no idea if this is tourniquet that if moved incorrectly will cause us to bleed to death. At the start of the 20th century there was massive technological change, and this growth of technology lead to two world wars. The big issue is humanity may not be able to survive any further wars along those lines. By the end of the war we created civilization ending weapons. Our capability for destruction has only grown since then. Attempting to move to a new economic paradigm without having war starting authoritarian fascist leaders destroy the world is, I feel, going to be a very difficult task to achieve.
byyyy 3y ago
>Unfortunately, a lot of people make entire careers of that kind of work. "Paper pusher" type jobs are the most at risk but so are the low end of lots of creative jobs like copywriting, graphic design and even script writing. Don't forget programming jobs. I wouldn't classify programmers as "low end" as that's sort of an offensive categorization. But among the set of careers you have chosen as a target for replacement... Programming is among that group. I mean LLMs are obviously translating English to code in a way that was never seen before. Given that you're a programmer on a site that is mostly made up of programmers I wonder why that specific career was not mentioned. Seems a little convenient to me. I'm not saying this is you, but I feel there is a lot of hostile defensiveness on the capabilities of AI because the AI potentially trivializes our abilities as programmers. If we are among the group of careers you labeled as "low level" then are we not "low level" ourselves? Do we have the fortitude and objectiveness to accept that? Probably not.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Programming en large requires reasoning and thinking, so it is definitely AGI territory. LLMs are good at spitting out code that looks like what it should, but besides trivial logic, or patterns that were explicit in its training set, I haven’t seen it solve anything what I would consider even remotely complex. Google could also spit out that leetcode tutorial page given the correct keywords 10 years ago (which it shamefully can’t do anymore.. am I the only one that can’t find anything non-trivial anymore with it?!), but that didn’t make anyone with access to the internet a programmer either.
  - byyyy 3y ago
    >I haven’t seen it solve anything what I would consider even remotely complex. Its solving things that was unthinkably impossible to solve by AI. Think of it logically. Before it could do 0% of our ability. With chatGPT it increases to 30%. With a domain specific LLM trained to target code... that increases to about 50%. A person with 50% of their brain is obviously mentally deficient. It's not even comparable to human intelligence. It's like a stupid assistant. Helpful, but still stupid. The issue here isn't really about the comparison between ai capabilities and human capabilities. It's about progress. That 30% to 50% trendline in LLMs and other areas of improvement in AI is the Same trendline as we see in say creative writing, art, etc. Etc. It points to the fact that coding is not inherently superior to other forms of creation because the trendline is exactly the same. In fact drawing really good art is actually harder then programming (no 6 months boot camps for art). We are unfortunately on target for replacement because the next data point on that trendline is obviously not 51%. It's wishful thinking and illogical to ignore the obvious trendline.
II2II 3y ago
> "Paper pusher" type jobs are the most at risk but so are the low end of lots of creative jobs like copywriting, graphic design and even script writing. Something tells me that the low end creatives have a lot more to worry about than the paper pushers. If the past fifty years are any indication, there is a lot more inertia when it comes to replacing existing jobs than there is replacing something you would contract out.
chaxor 3y ago
This type of thinking really needs to look beyond what the hype train is on with OpenAI right now and look at some of the more groundbreaking work going on. Deepmind has quite a bit of work outside the language area that has a lot of potential. Peter Velockovic, Matt Botvinick, Chelsea Finn, Taco Cohen, Micheal Bronstein, et al are all working completely outside the arena of NLP, but they have much more groundbreaking work than what everyone seems laser focused on right now. There are tons of examples really, but for instance: their agents that have emergent properties of teamwork, as well as their work on developing entirely new mathematics in some of the hardest fields (knot theory and representation theory). Creating new mathematics and proving theorems is probably the most creative form of human expression there is, so the fact that AI can achieve this is quite a big leap. Combining this with the deficits in LLMs can construct something that has much fewer flaws. While some of the hype around language models is fading now, we will probably see another resurgence of interest by the media when Deepmind releases a system with these capabilities underneath a LM. These LMs have been around for many years, and are just now getting mass attention. So it will likely take some more time of these much more sophisticated systems being solely in the academic arena before people become aware of what is really going on in AI (company products typically lag very far behind what academia is capable of). However, soon there will be products that have attached a linguistic interface to these types of systems, and will likely yield some really impressive capabilities.
aanya_dawkins 3y ago
[dead]

kevingadd 3y ago

I won't soon forget how as a tools programmer at a game studio, I noticed a couple of the writers spent a big portion of their day churning text from the design team's word docs through excel macros to generate CSV files consumed by our build system. I looked at that and went "oh, I can just automate this", and replaced all that busywork with a tiny C# program that would just do it correctly all the time automatically so nobody had to do it by hand anymore. Only occurred to me much later that now they didn't have much work to do and were at a higher risk of being laid off! A good lesson to think about all the implications of the software I'm writing. We've seen AI-adjacent tooling getting leveraged to eliminate more of that category of work in games already, like automated generation of NPC "barks".

chii 3y ago
> A good lesson to think about all the implications of the software I'm writing. only in so far as not reaping the rewards for having done more work than the company paid you for. Efficiency improvements are always good for society as a whole, despite it hurting some people who originally was paid due to the inefficiency.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Efficiency improvements are always good for society as a whole, despite it hurting some people who originally was paid due to the inefficiency. When the economic/capital/wealth 1% end up hoarding all the profitability gains, society as a whole loses. I have come to loathe the term "disruption" as it has always meant externalizing costs to make a quick buck: either by technology replacing actual, real humans with real families who now have to struggle to survive or by breaking laws and regulations like Uber and AirBnB did, with society paying the costs associated with that - in the case of Uber, society picked up the tab for underinsured drivers or for their pension/social security contributions which don't apply for "freelancers", and in the case of AirBnB all the neighbors affected by the noise and literal other disruptions an AirBnB brings with it.
  - droopyEyelids 3y ago
    This is a criticism of the USA's economic system, where we only give people money through _factor payments_ (exchanging money for labor) or _ownership of capital_. It isn't actually a criticism of technology/automation! In healthier countries, like the Nordics, they've organized their society so that automation, resource extraction, and really all success in business benefits their society as a whole rather than concentrating the wealth into the hands of the elite. Having written that, I feel like I'm picking a nit, because what you said is true in the USA and I don't see it changing in my lifetime.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Norway is one of the very few democratic nations having a sizable sovereign wealth fund and a strong tradition of the responsibility of the state to take care of all of its citizens (partially because the natural conditions make survival without cooperation all but impossible). Out of all the top 20 SWFs [1], only four to six belong to healthy democracies, six if you count Turkey and the US as one - the rest are essentially grifting arms for the local rulers. Everyone else barely has a SWF worth the name and almost all Western and Western-allied countries have fallen into the neoliberal/"lean government" trap. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign_wealth_funds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sovereign...
      - droopyEyelids 3y ago
        Thats true but a sovereign wealth fund isn't the only way to link success of the country's businesses to the success of the people. Using tax revenue to fund a social safety net, public works, education, and housing achieves the goal. The sovereign wealth fund is more about what to do with the money between taxation and social works. If the country has a sovereign wealth fund without all the social spending then I'd say the success of the country's business hasn't been linked to the wellbeing of the people.
  - jschveibinz 3y ago
    The 1% do not get wealthy from “hoarding the profitability gains.” This is a common misconception on HN and society in general. Profits of businesses are typically in 10% range for small businesses and even lower on average for large businesses [1]. Wealth is not income. It’s the value of owned assets: money, property, etc. So where does the wealth come from? There are a couple of different answers-and I’m not going to discuss stealing, slavery, exploitation or other illegal and immoral practices-but generally the answer for lots of wealthy, legitimate people is it is CREATED from “deals.” Wherever one person (or group) can sell something to someone else at a multiple of its current value, wealth is created. The expectation that something of value will either generate income or grow in value in future years creates a higher price for that thing right now. That entices the buyer, and creates wealth for the seller. How much wealth? If you have a rock today that you can tell a story about being potentially worth 100x in 10 years, then you can probably sell that rock for 10x of its actual value today. That is wealth creation. This is related to the concept of “time value of money.” Real estate is one example. Selling a business is another. Art is yet another example. Have a great day. Edit: [1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-public-thinks-the-average-company-makes-a-36-profit-margin-which-is-about-5x-too-high-part-ii/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-public-thinks-the-average...
- droopyEyelids 3y ago
  In countries with no safety net like the USA, people do prefer to work at tedious soul-deadening tasks like manually copy pasting into a CSV than to lose their housing and starve. However, there is a benefit to the person who is no longer employed doing mindless toil! It gives them another chance to find healthier work. Again, in the USA this benefit is outweighed by the possibility of immiseration, but it is at least a small plus in the 'pros' column.
  - jschveibinz 3y ago
    Ok, but one issue with your comment: the U.S. has a huge safety net. Entitlements (social programs including social security, welfare, Medicare/Medicaid), etc.) compose 52% of the federal budget ($2 trillion). This equates to almost $10,000 per American. [1] In fact, the U.S. spends more per capita than the Nordic countries, as discussed in other comments. Norway is around $7,500 per person. [2] So what’s the difference? The U.S. is the “wild, Wild West” and Norway is not, according to [2]. [1] https://federalsafetynet.com/entitlement-programs/entitlement-spending/ https://federalsafetynet.com/entitlement-programs/entitlemen... [2] https://freakonomics.com/2010/05/who-spends-more-on-social-welfare-the-united-states-or-sweden/#:~:text=If%20we%20take%20into%20account,%245%2C800%2C%20and%20Finland%20at%20%244%2C900 https://freakonomics.com/2010/05/who-spends-more-on-social-w....
    - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
      Does any of this make a difference to the unemployed? I assure you, the unemployed in the US and norway have two very different experiences and I'd much rather be unemployed in a scandi country than in the US.
      - chii 3y ago
        So why is it worse in the US, when the spending is ostensibly higher? What is the root cause of this inefficiency?
byyyy 3y ago
Do you see the irony? You wrote code that could have eliminated other people's jobs. Someone else "wrote" chatGPT and it very much looks like the precursor to the thing that could eliminate your job. I can almost imagine the people at openai having the same "Whoops" attitude as you.
welshwelsh 3y ago
Is eliminating jobs an unintended consequence, or is it the fundamental purpose of software development? Personally, I see job elimination as my goal and my purpose as a developer. Whenever my company is able to lay people off as a result of my work, that means I am doing a good job. I always try to keep track of how many people my software can replace and how much my company pays these people, so that I can take credit for these cost savings and claim a portion of their salaries for myself during salary negotiations.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  For tools programmers at least, generally the work you do is meant to enable the work other people at the company do - they aren't able to do it without you. Eliminating their jobs entirely is a different matter, even if that can also be done by a tools programmer. For creative tasks like game development the applications for full automation are usually narrower, so you're typically doing 'force multiplier' sort of stuff, like creating powerful macros or error checkers etc. Hammers and nails don't eliminate carpenters. Most of what I did at that job was building a syntax highlighting editor w/autocomplete for game scripts, making builds faster, etc. Instead of eliminating jobs that mostly let us ship the same product faster.

dpflan 3y ago

Are you thinking there is a layer of management that will be AI or majority AI? What’re you envisioning? I think we may see the best at creative tasks further separating themselves from the pack, these AI systems are best used by experts who can filter and quality check the AI output. I can see software engineering/dev becoming one extremely skilled dev managing a fleet of LLMs weaving together their own work and AIs’ work.

md_ 3y ago

I agree that "AGI" and "labor transformation" are two different issues. I do want to pick on what I think is a bit of hype around the potential to eliminate whole classes of work, though. First, in the weeds: I keep seeing this reference to script writing, which I assume is a reference to the WGA strike. But as https://www.gq.com/story/writers-strike-2023-wga-explained https://www.gq.com/story/writers-strike-2023-wga-explained explains, the big technological transformation driving this dispute isn't the risk of generative AI; it's the changes in royalty payments created by streaming platforms. I'm pretty skeptical of claims that generative models can replace script writers. Like, maybe for some really, really crappy shows? But I think "My ChatGPT could write that" is the 21st century version of looking at a Rauschenberg and saying, "My 5 year old could paint that." Good luck, I guess? More generally: Labor productivity growth has remained fairly constant over the last 40 years or so. So anyone who thinks generative AI is going to totally upend productivity and the job market is implicitly suggesting it's a bigger technological change than the Internet--which didn't really do that! So...dunno. That's a bold claim!

pixl97 3y ago
We live in the era of bold claims. In 1820 if you said that 99% of farm labor will be replaced by machines in 100 years, you'd have been given the response of 'bullshit'. And yet a century later we had done just that. With that redistribution of labor came the largest wars the world had ever seen. We don't even have to eliminate 'whole classes of work' to destabilize the working world and economy. Just eliminating 25% of work and not coming up with something new for the now jobless to do will create a wave of populism that can cause problems.
- md_ 3y ago
  I agree that people underestimate the impact of the first two industrial revolutions while overestimating the impact of the third, if that was your point. I'm not yet prepared to agree that the scale of bellicosity in the 20th century was the result of labor displacement (as opposed to, say, the results of the mechanization of violence). I mean, like, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe.

qudat 3y ago

This argument is so common and I don’t get it. It lacks any context to historical advancements of technology. This will only be good for our economy, any argument against is arguing against the entire trajectory of human technological advancements and its benefits to economic growth. As such, this argument requires a lot more evidence than the plainly obvious: that jobs will be lost. Seriously, who wants to work a job that a machine can do better, cheaper, and more efficiently? Work for the sake of work is not meaningful. This is creative destruction and it is the engine that drives economic growth. It can only be a good thing.

bbzealot 3y ago
Unfortunately, in the current economic system having a bullshit job is way better than having no job (unless you're rich of course).
- ganoushoreilly 3y ago
  I think this is the bigger problem. There are a lot of Bullshit jobs.. plenty of jobs where the tasks performed are menial for the sake of that's just how we do it. Do we need to actively engage an employee that's copying and pasting one excel sheet to another? What modern AI is going to do is pull back that veil and say, no you really shouldn't be doing it this way. That's going to be hard and hurt, but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >but it's necessary to force reallocation of human capital and hopefully improve conditions for everyone. You say this in a manner like you're ripping off a bandaid. Meanwhile we have no idea if this is tourniquet that if moved incorrectly will cause us to bleed to death. At the start of the 20th century there was massive technological change, and this growth of technology lead to two world wars. The big issue is humanity may not be able to survive any further wars along those lines. By the end of the war we created civilization ending weapons. Our capability for destruction has only grown since then. Attempting to move to a new economic paradigm without having war starting authoritarian fascist leaders destroy the world is, I feel, going to be a very difficult task to achieve.

byyyy 3y ago

>Unfortunately, a lot of people make entire careers of that kind of work. "Paper pusher" type jobs are the most at risk but so are the low end of lots of creative jobs like copywriting, graphic design and even script writing. Don't forget programming jobs. I wouldn't classify programmers as "low end" as that's sort of an offensive categorization. But among the set of careers you have chosen as a target for replacement... Programming is among that group. I mean LLMs are obviously translating English to code in a way that was never seen before. Given that you're a programmer on a site that is mostly made up of programmers I wonder why that specific career was not mentioned. Seems a little convenient to me. I'm not saying this is you, but I feel there is a lot of hostile defensiveness on the capabilities of AI because the AI potentially trivializes our abilities as programmers. If we are among the group of careers you labeled as "low level" then are we not "low level" ourselves? Do we have the fortitude and objectiveness to accept that? Probably not.

kaba0 3y ago
Programming en large requires reasoning and thinking, so it is definitely AGI territory. LLMs are good at spitting out code that looks like what it should, but besides trivial logic, or patterns that were explicit in its training set, I haven’t seen it solve anything what I would consider even remotely complex. Google could also spit out that leetcode tutorial page given the correct keywords 10 years ago (which it shamefully can’t do anymore.. am I the only one that can’t find anything non-trivial anymore with it?!), but that didn’t make anyone with access to the internet a programmer either.
- byyyy 3y ago
  >I haven’t seen it solve anything what I would consider even remotely complex. Its solving things that was unthinkably impossible to solve by AI. Think of it logically. Before it could do 0% of our ability. With chatGPT it increases to 30%. With a domain specific LLM trained to target code... that increases to about 50%. A person with 50% of their brain is obviously mentally deficient. It's not even comparable to human intelligence. It's like a stupid assistant. Helpful, but still stupid. The issue here isn't really about the comparison between ai capabilities and human capabilities. It's about progress. That 30% to 50% trendline in LLMs and other areas of improvement in AI is the Same trendline as we see in say creative writing, art, etc. Etc. It points to the fact that coding is not inherently superior to other forms of creation because the trendline is exactly the same. In fact drawing really good art is actually harder then programming (no 6 months boot camps for art). We are unfortunately on target for replacement because the next data point on that trendline is obviously not 51%. It's wishful thinking and illogical to ignore the obvious trendline.

II2II 3y ago

> "Paper pusher" type jobs are the most at risk but so are the low end of lots of creative jobs like copywriting, graphic design and even script writing. Something tells me that the low end creatives have a lot more to worry about than the paper pushers. If the past fifty years are any indication, there is a lot more inertia when it comes to replacing existing jobs than there is replacing something you would contract out.

chaxor 3y ago

This type of thinking really needs to look beyond what the hype train is on with OpenAI right now and look at some of the more groundbreaking work going on. Deepmind has quite a bit of work outside the language area that has a lot of potential. Peter Velockovic, Matt Botvinick, Chelsea Finn, Taco Cohen, Micheal Bronstein, et al are all working completely outside the arena of NLP, but they have much more groundbreaking work than what everyone seems laser focused on right now. There are tons of examples really, but for instance: their agents that have emergent properties of teamwork, as well as their work on developing entirely new mathematics in some of the hardest fields (knot theory and representation theory). Creating new mathematics and proving theorems is probably the most creative form of human expression there is, so the fact that AI can achieve this is quite a big leap. Combining this with the deficits in LLMs can construct something that has much fewer flaws. While some of the hype around language models is fading now, we will probably see another resurgence of interest by the media when Deepmind releases a system with these capabilities underneath a LM. These LMs have been around for many years, and are just now getting mass attention. So it will likely take some more time of these much more sophisticated systems being solely in the academic arena before people become aware of what is really going on in AI (company products typically lag very far behind what academia is capable of). However, soon there will be products that have attached a linguistic interface to these types of systems, and will likely yield some really impressive capabilities.

aanya_dawkins 3y ago

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