17 ms·

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. > A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow hum

by tivert 3y ago

> 2. I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. This is a short-term positive and maybe a long-term negative. > A lot of stuff I used to delegate to fellow humans are now being delegated to ChatGPT. And I can get the results immediately and at any time I want. I agree that it cannot operate on its own. I still need to review and correct things. I have do that even when working with other humans. The only difference is that I can start trusting a human to improve, but I cannot expect ChatGPT to do so. Not that it is incapable, but because it is restricted by OpenAI. I think this point bears repeating. The threat of these models isn't that they'll go all Skynet and kill everyone, it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor. Then there will be a decision point: either the senior-level people who thought they were safe get replaced by a more-advanced model, or they don't and there's a future society-level shortage because the pipeline to produce more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing). The only people who will come out (relatively) unscathed are the ownership class, like always. Of course, this is inevitable because it's impossible to question or change our society's ideological assumptions. They must be played out until they utterly destroy society.

xnx 3y ago
You could've said this about calculators
JohnFen 3y ago
> The threat of these models isn't that they'll go all Skynet and kill everyone, it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living Yes. This is pretty much my only concern about these models, and I'm powerfully concerned about this. It's hard to see how this will lead to a good place. It seems more likely that this will lead to increased poverty and multiple socioeconomic crises. I am even more concerned that very few people are talking about this, and none of the power players in this space are, except for occasional mentions in passing of fantasies like UBI.
- Animats 3y ago
  I've been asking for years, if we have all these computers, why do we need so many people in offices? Now we seem to have passed "peak office", with much help from the pandemic. If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, be very afraid.
  - waffletower 3y ago
    From my vantage, short-term (3-5 year) fear seems unfounded. As a software engineer, I can clearly see what ChatGPT and its LLM ilk can and can't do that I can easily do myself. LLMs clearly accelerate my access to API documentation and provide excellent outline code. But hallucinations are omnipresent and can often necessitate additional iteration and rethinking of development approaches. I think the productivity boost due to LLM usage is smaller than many credit them for. The intensity of employment displacement fear comes from an illusion that LLMs have agency. AutoGPT is not much more than an experimental repo and there isn't a viable alternative yet. "WHEN YOU COMMAND AN LLM, YOU ARE THE AGENCY", LLMs are mere extensions. Don't sell yourself short, prompt crafting/engineering is where the agency lies and requires real knowledge and context to empower you effectively use them for successful software engineering.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > The intensity of employment displacement fear comes from an illusion that LLMs have agency. I don't think so. My concerns have nothing to do with agency, anyway. Nor are my concerns limited to (or even primarily about) impact on software engineering specifically. Even if LLMs perform worse, if using them will save companies money over employing people, then those people are gone.
      - Animats 3y ago
        LLMs have agency when given a goal and connected to an API that can do something. This is likely to be a problem now and then.
- bloppe 3y ago
Animats 3y ago
> I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. I hear that from a friend in the legal business. Less need for paralegals. Unclear yet if the need for new lawyers will be reduced.
- slt2021 3y ago
  maybe paralegals could be replaced by even cheaper clerks with ChatGPT ? why pay Law school graduate as paralegal, when you can hire associate degree grad with ChatGPT to do the same work?
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Then there will be a decision point: either the senior-level people who thought they were safe get replaced by a more-advanced model, or they don't and there's a future society-level shortage because the pipeline to produce more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing). Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t figure out how to effectively use LLMs across the experience spectrum, two will be hired in shops that can do those things, and, as with previous software dev productivity increases, greater productivity in the field will mean a broader range of viable applications and more total jobs across all experience levels.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t figure out how to effectively use LLMs across the experience spectrum, two will be hired in shops that can do those things And everybody also gets a pony! Win-win-win situation! Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a hanful of mainframes to one in every office, then at every desk, then a few in every home, and later one in every hand. Now it's at 100% or close. It also still required computer operators. LLM are not mere increased productivity of a human computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer). Moreover, all this "increased productivity" still left wage stagnant for 40 years (with basic costs like housing, education, healthcare skyrocketing). It's not like more of it, in the same old corporatism context, bodes better for the future...
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > LLM are not mere increased productivity or the computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer). Enabling the same production with fewer workers (or, equivalently, greater production with the same number of workers) is the definition of a productivity increase, not something that constitutes a difference in kind from a normal productivity increase. > Moreover, all this "increased productivity" still left wage stagnant for 40 years Not in computing it didn't. Same job category pay rose in real terms over almost any window you choose in the last 50 years, and in most cases the distribution of jobs also moved over time from lower-paid to higher-paid categories within computing. Also, even general real wages didn't really stagnate for 40 years, average (mean) wages dropped slowly for 20 — mid-70s to mid-90s, and mostly have slowly climbed since, crossing over about 30-ish years after the past peak, but the same effect isn't seen in median wages (though that also was low in the early 1980s and most of the 1990s, before mostly rising strongly) or median personal income (which, despite short drops around recessions, has been rising consistently strongly since the 1981 trough.)
cheschire 3y ago
You can witness this happening in the trades right now. A whole generation of people were told to goto college and to avoid the trades, and now here we are in possibly the most significant manpower drought the trades have ever experienced. And this has a ripple effect as the older generations retire out, and take their hard won experiences with them with nobody to pass their knowledge onto. Can't tell a carpenter to go type that shit into Confluence, let alone tell the kid to look in the knowledge base first.
- StevePerkins 3y ago
  And yet the trades still have uneven access (or none at all) to health coverage, retirement planning options, etc. As an American parent of young children, I keep being told that college is a scam and I should steer my kids toward the trades. 90+% of the time, I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating. When we reach a real crisis point, severe enough to actually consider granting skilled tradespeople access to a fraction of the privilege enjoyed by white-collar workers, then I might consider nudging my kids toward electrician or plumbing work. But under the current social caste system, of course I am going to do everything possible to give my kids access to college and steer them that way. I believe that virtually everyone, white-collar and blue-collar alike, quietly feels likewise. We make a pretense of giving contrary advice, but mostly just in hopes that other people will move in that direction for us. To take the bullet and help with this imbalance, and also to relieve the intense competition our own kids face.
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    > I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating. Exactly. When I talk to plumbers, electricians, etc. many of them express the desire to leave because the hours and environments are hellish. Meanwhile some full of themselves tech bro is babbling on about how everyone (not them of course) should go into the trades. Or they pull some vague anecdote out of their ass about how someone they know makes a gazllion dollars in the trades after 20 years and starting their own business, which is about as valid as telling someone to go into software development because they can become a billionaire, and throwing out some anecdote about a startup founder they know who got aquired.
obblekk 3y ago
I don't think so. Junior engineers will learn much much faster than the past (think about how much more effective GPT4 is as a learning tool than the "rubber ducky method" or manpages or even stackoverflow). And a part of their role will morph into prompting GPT4 (much like this senior engineer has started doing). If GPTx ends up in the narrow area where it's universally smarter than junior engs but definitely not capable of being a senior eng, then junior engs will just shift to the little remaining work for senior engs, shadow them for months to years like an apprenticeship. Of course in that case the total number of eng needed will also decrease (already only a small percent ever get good enough to be considered truly senior), so there will be selection bias toward more intelligent engineers who are a step above GPTx. If none are left, then the profession will be gone and there will be no problem.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  You think GPT4 is more effective than learning how to read a manual? Or some of the best SO answers?
  - duccinator 3y ago
    Yes, even GPT3.5 is better. I am in uni, and LLMs are probably the best teachers I have had the experience to learn from(and I have had some great teachers and professors). They work even better if you feed them the content of a book/manual/documentation as a reference. They do suck at solving problems correctly, however if you give them an incorrect solution and ask them to spot mistakes, or just ask for a general method to do a problem, it works out. However, they might not yet compare to the best of humans. The best SO answers probably represent 0.01% of the answers, which is a high bar. I am certain very amazing teachers and professors exist out there in the world whom LLMs can't beat yet but the average can't compete.
    - smcin 3y ago
      > Yes, even GPT3.5 is better. I am in uni, and LLMs are probably the best teachers... They do suck at solving problems correctly... The discussion was specifically about LLMs to write software. Not about university essays or articles or exams. Are you claiming GPT3.5 is better at writing bug-free software than the average software engineer?
Dalewyn 3y ago
>it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor. If a task can be completed satisfactorily by an automated computer program, was the task really "skilled labor"? I ask this sincerely, because some of the occupations being replaced/evicted (eg: copywriting) were clearly given more skill value than they should have.
FpUser 3y ago
I use ChatGPT very actively for programming among the other things and at no point feel threatened, rather empowered. No burnout either as I just work as usual. It just replaced Google Search and lots of typing.
sharts 3y ago
The only solution is to rapidly scale these up so that they can disrupt every aspect of everyone's life until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct. I'm surprised someone hasn't replace politicians with an LLM. Imagine not having to pay their salaries when ChatGPT can send "thoughts and prayers" to Maui over Twitter 24/7.
- bpye 3y ago
  This was a plot point in Avenue 5. The office of the other president.
- slg 3y ago
  >until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct. In my opinion this is the most optimistic of the realistic possible outcomes. In the past when automation put a factory worker out of a job, they were just told to go back to school or "learn to code" which isn't actually a solution for most people. These LLMs disproportionately impact people further up the socioeconomic ladder than prior waves of automation. Maybe our uneven society means that this wave of distribution of a more powerful group of people will be more likely to cause an actual change to how we organize society.
- tsunamifury 3y ago
  I am absurdly and instinctually confident that LLM personas will replace at least the public face of politicians almost instantly. The problem is the back end work.
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  "The privileged will risk absolute destruction over the surrender of any advantage"
- over_bridge 3y ago
  Politicians are just a perfect role to disrupt. Problem is of course they are a monopoly so can't be competed with and are protected by law/constitution so can't be changed directly. Their whole job is to 'represent' their constituents. A LLM can poll the sentiments of the people far more effectively than they can. I'm sure it could be programmed to accept bribes too to weigh rich people's opinions higher. I'd love to see votes done by 100 different LLMs instead of Senators (a hyperbolic, non literal statement but interesting as a thought experiment I hope) Politicians should still propose new and altered legislation but actually voting, and being informed to vote, could be massively improved.
sircastor 3y ago
>> it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor. Occasionally I would see clips from or read reactions to Idiocracy, and be left scratching my head, because somehow, somewhere, there have to be the people who are thinking. The whole conceit of the film is that there are no smart, curious people because it's being bred out of the population. That never made sense to me because you still have to have some smart, curious, creative people somewhere to keep things moving. Our society is quite dependent on the people who silently keep things running in the background. I can however envision a world where early curiosity is discouraged, and supplanted by a technology that can fill the holes of the entry-level smart people. When everyone is discouraged from starting, and the existing participants age out, then maybe you can get a world where there are no new smart, curious people.
- tivert 3y ago
  > That never made sense to me because you still have to have some smart, curious, creative people somewhere to keep things moving. Our society is quite dependent on the people who silently keep things running in the background. Regarding Idiocracy, once of the background conceits of the film is those kinds of people set up automation to keep things going before they died out (for the reasons clearly explained at the start of the movie). If you pay attention everything in that world is automated: a diagnostic machine with a playskool interface (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUVo0xVAqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUVo0xVAqE) is what's actually doing the doctor's job, a major company is run by a computer the CEO doesn't understand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBFREFtFEgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBFREFtFEgs), etc.
guluarte 3y ago
> more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing). I am already seeing this, companies are desperate for senior developers but at the same time they don't want to hire juniors.
bawolff 3y ago
Computers have been putting people out of jobs since back when "computer" was a human job title and not a machine. Its always ended up creating more jobs than it eliminated in the end, i don't see why the future will be any different than the past.
- jstx1 3y ago
  Seems like a logical fallacy to assume that the past extrapolates cleanly into the future. "It was okay last time" isn't a good enough argument.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Well i mean unless someone comes up with a theory why this time is different from last time, then isn't my argument just modus tollens? That's pretty much the opposite of a logical fallacy. This time may very well be different, but there would have to be some additional factor and nobody has given a compelling answer as to what that might be.
    - tivert 3y ago
      > Well i mean unless someone comes up with a theory why this time is different from last time, then isn't my argument just modus tollens? That's pretty much the opposite of a logical fallacy. History isn't math, dude. This time is always different from last time. The fallacy is making the claim that it's the same (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different). Another mistake is taking an aloof perspective. A lot of changes that "turned out OK" from that perspective were pretty terrible for the people who actually had to live through them.
      - bawolff 3y ago
        > (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different) If someone wants to bring up some of those differences by all means. The reason i am unconvinced is because nobody ever does. > Another mistake is taking an aloof perspective. A lot of changes that "turned out OK" from that perspective were pretty terrible for the people who actually had to live through them. Sure, i'd agree. But this is moving goal posts quite a bit. If the claim was simply that some industries might experience some levels of short term disruption due to an emerging technology like AI and it will probably suck for the individuals being disrupted - I don't think anybody would disagree. It also wouldn't make AI exactly unique - short term disruptions in various industries due to changing conditions happen all the time.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
It is endgame when AGI comes to fruition (which it will, it is just a matter of time, either in 10 years, 50 years, etc...), robots with AGI will be the ultimate life form in the universe and the final evolution of "life" on earth. It is laughable to think something so much more intelligent than people will somehow become a slave to us and do our bidding.

by tivert 3y ago

xnx 3y ago

You could've said this about calculators

JohnFen 3y ago

> The threat of these models isn't that they'll go all Skynet and kill everyone, it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living Yes. This is pretty much my only concern about these models, and I'm powerfully concerned about this. It's hard to see how this will lead to a good place. It seems more likely that this will lead to increased poverty and multiple socioeconomic crises. I am even more concerned that very few people are talking about this, and none of the power players in this space are, except for occasional mentions in passing of fantasies like UBI.

Animats 3y ago
I've been asking for years, if we have all these computers, why do we need so many people in offices? Now we seem to have passed "peak office", with much help from the pandemic. If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, be very afraid.
- waffletower 3y ago
  From my vantage, short-term (3-5 year) fear seems unfounded. As a software engineer, I can clearly see what ChatGPT and its LLM ilk can and can't do that I can easily do myself. LLMs clearly accelerate my access to API documentation and provide excellent outline code. But hallucinations are omnipresent and can often necessitate additional iteration and rethinking of development approaches. I think the productivity boost due to LLM usage is smaller than many credit them for. The intensity of employment displacement fear comes from an illusion that LLMs have agency. AutoGPT is not much more than an experimental repo and there isn't a viable alternative yet. "WHEN YOU COMMAND AN LLM, YOU ARE THE AGENCY", LLMs are mere extensions. Don't sell yourself short, prompt crafting/engineering is where the agency lies and requires real knowledge and context to empower you effectively use them for successful software engineering.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > The intensity of employment displacement fear comes from an illusion that LLMs have agency. I don't think so. My concerns have nothing to do with agency, anyway. Nor are my concerns limited to (or even primarily about) impact on software engineering specifically. Even if LLMs perform worse, if using them will save companies money over employing people, then those people are gone.
    - Animats 3y ago
      LLMs have agency when given a goal and connected to an API that can do something. This is likely to be a problem now and then.
bloppe 3y ago

Animats 3y ago

> I no longer feel the need to hire juniors. I hear that from a friend in the legal business. Less need for paralegals. Unclear yet if the need for new lawyers will be reduced.

slt2021 3y ago
maybe paralegals could be replaced by even cheaper clerks with ChatGPT ? why pay Law school graduate as paralegal, when you can hire associate degree grad with ChatGPT to do the same work?

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Then there will be a decision point: either the senior-level people who thought they were safe get replaced by a more-advanced model, or they don't and there's a future society-level shortage because the pipeline to produce more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing). Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t figure out how to effectively use LLMs across the experience spectrum, two will be hired in shops that can do those things, and, as with previous software dev productivity increases, greater productivity in the field will mean a broader range of viable applications and more total jobs across all experience levels.

coldtea 3y ago
>Or, for every junior that isn't hired by a business that can't expand its portfolio to exploit greater productivity or can’t figure out how to effectively use LLMs across the experience spectrum, two will be hired in shops that can do those things And everybody also gets a pony! Win-win-win situation! Previous "software dev productivity increases" happened as computing saturation itself increased from a hanful of mainframes to one in every office, then at every desk, then a few in every home, and later one in every hand. Now it's at 100% or close. It also still required computer operators. LLM are not mere increased productivity of a human computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer). Moreover, all this "increased productivity" still left wage stagnant for 40 years (with basic costs like housing, education, healthcare skyrocketing). It's not like more of it, in the same old corporatism context, bodes better for the future...
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > LLM are not mere increased productivity or the computer operator, but automation of productivity so that it can happen without an operator (or with much fewer). Enabling the same production with fewer workers (or, equivalently, greater production with the same number of workers) is the definition of a productivity increase, not something that constitutes a difference in kind from a normal productivity increase. > Moreover, all this "increased productivity" still left wage stagnant for 40 years Not in computing it didn't. Same job category pay rose in real terms over almost any window you choose in the last 50 years, and in most cases the distribution of jobs also moved over time from lower-paid to higher-paid categories within computing. Also, even general real wages didn't really stagnate for 40 years, average (mean) wages dropped slowly for 20 — mid-70s to mid-90s, and mostly have slowly climbed since, crossing over about 30-ish years after the past peak, but the same effect isn't seen in median wages (though that also was low in the early 1980s and most of the 1990s, before mostly rising strongly) or median personal income (which, despite short drops around recessions, has been rising consistently strongly since the 1981 trough.)

cheschire 3y ago

You can witness this happening in the trades right now. A whole generation of people were told to goto college and to avoid the trades, and now here we are in possibly the most significant manpower drought the trades have ever experienced. And this has a ripple effect as the older generations retire out, and take their hard won experiences with them with nobody to pass their knowledge onto. Can't tell a carpenter to go type that shit into Confluence, let alone tell the kid to look in the knowledge base first.

StevePerkins 3y ago
And yet the trades still have uneven access (or none at all) to health coverage, retirement planning options, etc. As an American parent of young children, I keep being told that college is a scam and I should steer my kids toward the trades. 90+% of the time, I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating. When we reach a real crisis point, severe enough to actually consider granting skilled tradespeople access to a fraction of the privilege enjoyed by white-collar workers, then I might consider nudging my kids toward electrician or plumbing work. But under the current social caste system, of course I am going to do everything possible to give my kids access to college and steer them that way. I believe that virtually everyone, white-collar and blue-collar alike, quietly feels likewise. We make a pretense of giving contrary advice, but mostly just in hopes that other people will move in that direction for us. To take the bullet and help with this imbalance, and also to relieve the intense competition our own kids face.
- the_only_law 3y ago
  > I am being told this by a white-collar worker who went to college themselves, and is just bloviating. Exactly. When I talk to plumbers, electricians, etc. many of them express the desire to leave because the hours and environments are hellish. Meanwhile some full of themselves tech bro is babbling on about how everyone (not them of course) should go into the trades. Or they pull some vague anecdote out of their ass about how someone they know makes a gazllion dollars in the trades after 20 years and starting their own business, which is about as valid as telling someone to go into software development because they can become a billionaire, and throwing out some anecdote about a startup founder they know who got aquired.

obblekk 3y ago

I don't think so. Junior engineers will learn much much faster than the past (think about how much more effective GPT4 is as a learning tool than the "rubber ducky method" or manpages or even stackoverflow). And a part of their role will morph into prompting GPT4 (much like this senior engineer has started doing). If GPTx ends up in the narrow area where it's universally smarter than junior engs but definitely not capable of being a senior eng, then junior engs will just shift to the little remaining work for senior engs, shadow them for months to years like an apprenticeship. Of course in that case the total number of eng needed will also decrease (already only a small percent ever get good enough to be considered truly senior), so there will be selection bias toward more intelligent engineers who are a step above GPTx. If none are left, then the profession will be gone and there will be no problem.

CameronNemo 3y ago
You think GPT4 is more effective than learning how to read a manual? Or some of the best SO answers?
- duccinator 3y ago
  Yes, even GPT3.5 is better. I am in uni, and LLMs are probably the best teachers I have had the experience to learn from(and I have had some great teachers and professors). They work even better if you feed them the content of a book/manual/documentation as a reference. They do suck at solving problems correctly, however if you give them an incorrect solution and ask them to spot mistakes, or just ask for a general method to do a problem, it works out. However, they might not yet compare to the best of humans. The best SO answers probably represent 0.01% of the answers, which is a high bar. I am certain very amazing teachers and professors exist out there in the world whom LLMs can't beat yet but the average can't compete.
  - smcin 3y ago
    > Yes, even GPT3.5 is better. I am in uni, and LLMs are probably the best teachers... They do suck at solving problems correctly... The discussion was specifically about LLMs to write software. Not about university essays or articles or exams. Are you claiming GPT3.5 is better at writing bug-free software than the average software engineer?

Dalewyn 3y ago

>it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor. If a task can be completed satisfactorily by an automated computer program, was the task really "skilled labor"? I ask this sincerely, because some of the occupations being replaced/evicted (eg: copywriting) were clearly given more skill value than they should have.

FpUser 3y ago

I use ChatGPT very actively for programming among the other things and at no point feel threatened, rather empowered. No burnout either as I just work as usual. It just replaced Google Search and lots of typing.

sharts 3y ago

The only solution is to rapidly scale these up so that they can disrupt every aspect of everyone's life until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct. I'm surprised someone hasn't replace politicians with an LLM. Imagine not having to pay their salaries when ChatGPT can send "thoughts and prayers" to Maui over Twitter 24/7.

bpye 3y ago
This was a plot point in Avenue 5. The office of the other president.
slg 3y ago
>until we all decide to throw our hands up and decide it's time for a new social construct. In my opinion this is the most optimistic of the realistic possible outcomes. In the past when automation put a factory worker out of a job, they were just told to go back to school or "learn to code" which isn't actually a solution for most people. These LLMs disproportionately impact people further up the socioeconomic ladder than prior waves of automation. Maybe our uneven society means that this wave of distribution of a more powerful group of people will be more likely to cause an actual change to how we organize society.
tsunamifury 3y ago
I am absurdly and instinctually confident that LLM personas will replace at least the public face of politicians almost instantly. The problem is the back end work.
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
"The privileged will risk absolute destruction over the surrender of any advantage"
over_bridge 3y ago
Politicians are just a perfect role to disrupt. Problem is of course they are a monopoly so can't be competed with and are protected by law/constitution so can't be changed directly. Their whole job is to 'represent' their constituents. A LLM can poll the sentiments of the people far more effectively than they can. I'm sure it could be programmed to accept bribes too to weigh rich people's opinions higher. I'd love to see votes done by 100 different LLMs instead of Senators (a hyperbolic, non literal statement but interesting as a thought experiment I hope) Politicians should still propose new and altered legislation but actually voting, and being informed to vote, could be massively improved.

sircastor 3y ago

>> it's that they'll cause a lot of economic devastation to people who make a living through labor requiring skill and knowledge, especially future generations of skilled labor. Occasionally I would see clips from or read reactions to Idiocracy, and be left scratching my head, because somehow, somewhere, there have to be the people who are thinking. The whole conceit of the film is that there are no smart, curious people because it's being bred out of the population. That never made sense to me because you still have to have some smart, curious, creative people somewhere to keep things moving. Our society is quite dependent on the people who silently keep things running in the background. I can however envision a world where early curiosity is discouraged, and supplanted by a technology that can fill the holes of the entry-level smart people. When everyone is discouraged from starting, and the existing participants age out, then maybe you can get a world where there are no new smart, curious people.

tivert 3y ago
> That never made sense to me because you still have to have some smart, curious, creative people somewhere to keep things moving. Our society is quite dependent on the people who silently keep things running in the background. Regarding Idiocracy, once of the background conceits of the film is those kinds of people set up automation to keep things going before they died out (for the reasons clearly explained at the start of the movie). If you pay attention everything in that world is automated: a diagnostic machine with a playskool interface (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUVo0xVAqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmUVo0xVAqE) is what's actually doing the doctor's job, a major company is run by a computer the CEO doesn't understand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBFREFtFEgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBFREFtFEgs), etc.

guluarte 3y ago

> more senior-level people has been shut down (like the OP is doing). I am already seeing this, companies are desperate for senior developers but at the same time they don't want to hire juniors.

bawolff 3y ago

Computers have been putting people out of jobs since back when "computer" was a human job title and not a machine. Its always ended up creating more jobs than it eliminated in the end, i don't see why the future will be any different than the past.

jstx1 3y ago
Seems like a logical fallacy to assume that the past extrapolates cleanly into the future. "It was okay last time" isn't a good enough argument.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Well i mean unless someone comes up with a theory why this time is different from last time, then isn't my argument just modus tollens? That's pretty much the opposite of a logical fallacy. This time may very well be different, but there would have to be some additional factor and nobody has given a compelling answer as to what that might be.
  - tivert 3y ago
    > Well i mean unless someone comes up with a theory why this time is different from last time, then isn't my argument just modus tollens? That's pretty much the opposite of a logical fallacy. History isn't math, dude. This time is always different from last time. The fallacy is making the claim that it's the same (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different). Another mistake is taking an aloof perspective. A lot of changes that "turned out OK" from that perspective were pretty terrible for the people who actually had to live through them.
    - bawolff 3y ago
      > (conveniently ignoring all the differences that make it different) If someone wants to bring up some of those differences by all means. The reason i am unconvinced is because nobody ever does. > Another mistake is taking an aloof perspective. A lot of changes that "turned out OK" from that perspective were pretty terrible for the people who actually had to live through them. Sure, i'd agree. But this is moving goal posts quite a bit. If the claim was simply that some industries might experience some levels of short term disruption due to an emerging technology like AI and it will probably suck for the individuals being disrupted - I don't think anybody would disagree. It also wouldn't make AI exactly unique - short term disruptions in various industries due to changing conditions happen all the time.

strikelaserclaw 3y ago

It is endgame when AGI comes to fruition (which it will, it is just a matter of time, either in 10 years, 50 years, etc...), robots with AGI will be the ultimate life form in the universe and the final evolution of "life" on earth. It is laughable to think something so much more intelligent than people will somehow become a slave to us and do our bidding.