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Really? I just see it as a huge productivity booster, especially for small teams where you can't have experts in every area. I don't foresee an AI being able t

Really? I just see it as a huge productivity booster, especially for small teams where you can't have experts in every area. I don't foresee an AI being able to replace an engineer for real production-grade custom software for a long time

vouaobrasil 3y ago
For how long a time? At the beginning of the devlopment of computer chess, people said it would NEVER beat a reasonable player. Then it did. Then they said it would NEVER beat a seasoned tournament player, and it did. They said it would NEVER beat an international master or grandmaster...but it did. People keep saying never. Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time. You might be safe in your job, but what about your children or grandchildren?
- webdood90 3y ago
  I don't see value in worrying about it. We definitely can't stop it from happening. Yeah, it's gonna suck for us, but it's gonna suck more for a lot of other jobs a lot sooner.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time I guess the modern answer from a globalist is that back in the day, societies weren't as entangled as they are today, so they could go into freefall relatively easily with little impact by other societies, so they let them fall, especially if it was beneficial for them. But today everything is so interconnected that if one fall, it would heavily impact a large part of the rest of the societies, that we cannot let it happen. Just look at how unimportant most people would consider Ukraine to be, before the invasion. But it has a huge impact on large sectors, and most countries would have this impact. Some areas of the world, like the Eurozone, even purposefully lock themselves in with their partners so if Greece gets impacted by something, member states have to help them as it'll impact them greatly if they don't. So I guess my end argument is that there isn't really "societies" anymore, we're just part of a global one where the decentralized nature is so strong that we cannot really fail (globally) anymore unless there is something really big impacting all of us (like COVID).
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Well, as technology progresses, we will become even more tightly coupled than before. Not sure if we could measure that, but if there is a coupling factor F, then it's proportional to the level of advancement of our technology, and the square F^2 is proportional to the level of hurt that will ensue if it breaks down.
- xk_id 3y ago
  I’m not sure how to put this gently, but if you think computer chess is the same thing as LLMs, you’re not qualified to have an opinion on the future of technology.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Chess was clearly just an analogy, and of a specific (old fashioned) AI doing what was widely believed (before we solved it) to be a uniquely human indicator of intelligence; it's not like anyone can accurately list the things that we will actually invent over the next 5-50 years. Worse: thanks to psychology, even if a time traveller came back to now with such a list (and proof of being a time traveler), their examples would not feel real to most until they could be experienced directly — I knew that GPT-3 could code simple web pages just over two years[0] before ChatGPT came out, but it still didn't hit me emotionally until we were all able to play with it ourselves. [0] August 8, 2020: https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE
    - xk_id 3y ago
      An analogy is only useful if it is meaningful. IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. The other day I heard someone argue that being skeptical about the inevitable "blockchain rennaissence" is like being skeptical about smart phones, back in the day (in this case, the category was just "technology", which is even more vague). Statements like this are not grounded in reality, they are just abuses of logic, useful to influencers in fabricating trends.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        > IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. Yes, and? I mean, you clearly get what you put in the next sentence: > "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. But, there's also no requirement for future chat bots to be Transformer models like GPT. All we know for sure is that this blob of weights seems to be pretty good at a lot of different things that used to be things that only humans could do. Thus, I think as another demonstration of "we used to use this as a proxy for intelligence and now we can't" it's fine to use chess as an analogy because it demonstrates exactly that thing. No idea what comes next, nor when — it's still possible that "solving" general intelligence is beyond human capacity.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

For how long a time? At the beginning of the devlopment of computer chess, people said it would NEVER beat a reasonable player. Then it did. Then they said it would NEVER beat a seasoned tournament player, and it did. They said it would NEVER beat an international master or grandmaster...but it did. People keep saying never. Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time. You might be safe in your job, but what about your children or grandchildren?

webdood90 3y ago
I don't see value in worrying about it. We definitely can't stop it from happening. Yeah, it's gonna suck for us, but it's gonna suck more for a lot of other jobs a lot sooner.
capableweb 3y ago
> Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time I guess the modern answer from a globalist is that back in the day, societies weren't as entangled as they are today, so they could go into freefall relatively easily with little impact by other societies, so they let them fall, especially if it was beneficial for them. But today everything is so interconnected that if one fall, it would heavily impact a large part of the rest of the societies, that we cannot let it happen. Just look at how unimportant most people would consider Ukraine to be, before the invasion. But it has a huge impact on large sectors, and most countries would have this impact. Some areas of the world, like the Eurozone, even purposefully lock themselves in with their partners so if Greece gets impacted by something, member states have to help them as it'll impact them greatly if they don't. So I guess my end argument is that there isn't really "societies" anymore, we're just part of a global one where the decentralized nature is so strong that we cannot really fail (globally) anymore unless there is something really big impacting all of us (like COVID).
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Well, as technology progresses, we will become even more tightly coupled than before. Not sure if we could measure that, but if there is a coupling factor F, then it's proportional to the level of advancement of our technology, and the square F^2 is proportional to the level of hurt that will ensue if it breaks down.
xk_id 3y ago
I’m not sure how to put this gently, but if you think computer chess is the same thing as LLMs, you’re not qualified to have an opinion on the future of technology.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Chess was clearly just an analogy, and of a specific (old fashioned) AI doing what was widely believed (before we solved it) to be a uniquely human indicator of intelligence; it's not like anyone can accurately list the things that we will actually invent over the next 5-50 years. Worse: thanks to psychology, even if a time traveller came back to now with such a list (and proof of being a time traveler), their examples would not feel real to most until they could be experienced directly — I knew that GPT-3 could code simple web pages just over two years[0] before ChatGPT came out, but it still didn't hit me emotionally until we were all able to play with it ourselves. [0] August 8, 2020: https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE https://youtu.be/_x9AwxfjxvE
  - xk_id 3y ago
    An analogy is only useful if it is meaningful. IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. The other day I heard someone argue that being skeptical about the inevitable "blockchain rennaissence" is like being skeptical about smart phones, back in the day (in this case, the category was just "technology", which is even more vague). Statements like this are not grounded in reality, they are just abuses of logic, useful to influencers in fabricating trends.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      > IBM's Deep Blue had a fundamentally different design than LLMs. Yes, and? I mean, you clearly get what you put in the next sentence: > "AI" is just a broad, abstract category that they both happen to share. But, there's also no requirement for future chat bots to be Transformer models like GPT. All we know for sure is that this blob of weights seems to be pretty good at a lot of different things that used to be things that only humans could do. Thus, I think as another demonstration of "we used to use this as a proxy for intelligence and now we can't" it's fine to use chess as an analogy because it demonstrates exactly that thing. No idea what comes next, nor when — it's still possible that "solving" general intelligence is beyond human capacity.