5 ms·

In a couple centuries? In 200 years it'll just be AIs, who will create custom AIs to accomplish a task, who will create legions of other AIs to carry out tasks

In a couple centuries? In 200 years it'll just be AIs, who will create custom AIs to accomplish a task, who will create legions of other AIs to carry out tasks. It'll be code writing code writing code that's completely beyond human comprehension. Who knows if humans will take part at all (or even be around).

extraduder_ire 3y ago
And if they use anything like HTTP, it'll have a header somewhere in there containing "Gecko". Probably a bunch of other layers too. AIs gotta pretend to be human despite there being no point. By saying the magic token: "Safari". Otherwise they get blocked by the almighty WAF.
ricardobayes 3y ago
Experience says that at this stage people have inflated expectations of AI. See 3D printing, few years ago everyone was into "0-mile" manufacturing and how it will solve the housing crisis, because we are just going to print houses.
- rprospero 3y ago
  I oddly miss the 3D printing hype train. My favourite was the various plans to replace restaurants with 3D printed meals. - Point out that most 3D printing is plastic? Recieve a derisive link to a journal article where some beleagured postdoc managed to push some protein paste through the extruder - Point out that the 3D printer is orders of magnitude slower than the most geriatric fry cook? Get a five paragraph history of Moore's law. The fact that it no longer really applies to semicoductors doesn't matter, since we're making burritos! - Point out that grinding an apple into paste and painstakingly reprinting it in an apple shape will always be more expensive than simply eating the apple? Hear a grand tale on the company becoming the sole global food preparation firm and thus having a monosopy on all farming products, enabling them to set their own price on their supplies. I also will always hold a soft spot for the group promising a 3D printed dating site, but I'm pretty sure that one was a satire. Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Pages of blog posts describing their web stack (Rails and Mongo) in great detail, proving that they could scale to the billions of people who would be visitng their site. The actual technology that created custom sentient life was just "3D printing"
  - tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
    Personally I’m waiting for the 3 nano-tortilla process to hit. I think that that’ll push us over the hump.
  - scaradim 3y ago
    I realize now that trees are just autonomous specialized 3D printers of fruits :-) Moreover they reproduce autonomously (AI dream) and auto-repair to some degree
    - dackerlunghack 3y ago
      [dead]
  - b112 3y ago
    Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Uh... I... asking for a friend, do you recall the name? Google isn't helping. Them, I mean, it's not helping them.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - Kuinox 3y ago
    Well, 3D printer did get way faster these last years. The record speed looks like science fiction: https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 A benchy printed under 3 minutes.
  - grotorea 3y ago
    Some people really just want to make Star Trek real. Or those artificial food pills from more dystopic scifi.
- pzo 3y ago
  smartphone industry is just ~15 years old. We have personal PC since like ~40 years only. LLM as ChatGPT 3.5 is not even 1 year old since release. It took still a while before fridge got invented and got into mainstream. 200 years is a huge amount of time. The whole industrial revolution started around 200 years ago. 3d printing is still new by this standard. People overestimate impact of some technology in very short term and underestimate in medium or long term
  - amalcon 3y ago
    > 200 years is a huge amount of time. Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive. It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.
    - pzo 3y ago
      successor to steam locomotives are not just only electric locomotive but cars, planes, rockets. In few decades we might use more often rockets such as SpaceX for moving cargo or travel. Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
      - mythhabit 3y ago
        The majority of "difficulty" in software development is not writing the code. It's specification. And while that may or may not be solved by LLM or other AI tech, we're so far off that it's not even a thing right now. Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.
- cornholio 3y ago
  The housing crisis is not a building manufacturing problem. Strictly on the manufacturing side, the existing technology allows production costs affordable for most - in the tens of thousands for a basic non-frills habitable unit. Almost anyone can afford that, and those that can't are sufficiently few that they can be covered by public assistance or private charity. The supply of housing on the other hand is an entirely political issue: what land can be developed, what can be built there and what public infrastructure is provided, who gets to live there - with discrimination via pricing being the main factor deciding it etc.
  - b112 3y ago
    Indeed. In the housing game, you buy land and build a house. Excluding inflation, the value of the land goes up. The value of the house goes down. Even with regular (eg cost) maintenance, a 25 year old house is never worth what a new house is. New building methods (just improvements in insulation alone), and things like the interior... kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathroom, means that trying to dight this is not cheap. And even if you do? The house is still worth less than a new built. Houses are as cars. Massive devaluation year over year. Most don't get this, because they don't factor in inflation, nor do they factor in the cost of keeping a house maintained. So land, land, land is the cost, which is much of what your post eludes to.
    - have_faith 3y ago
      It's pretty common here (UK) for new-builds to be derided as cheap flimsy throw-away things and old houses being built to last the heat death of the universe. It's probably true from a house skeleton perspective but everyone also knows the new builds (usually) have better insulation.
      - stonemetal12 3y ago
        Do new UK homes use reinforced concrete slabs? It is my understanding that those are fairly short lived in UK housing terms anyway, with average life in the 50-75 year range.
benterix 3y ago
There are many assumptions here. The generative AIs we have today are excellent at transforming things they learned and rehashing it into something seemingly new. The problem is, they learned all this based on the input of the humanity en masse. When you train LLMs on the output of LLMs, it gets significantly worse. So your prediction could of course be true but only if a major breakthrough happens.
- prometheon1 3y ago
  > When you train LLMs on the output of LLMs, it gets significantly worse. That is also quite an assumption, it could be that training on the output of better LLMs also reduces this worsening of output. There might even be a tipping point where the LLMs get good enough that training on their output is better than training on the output of humans.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >That is also quite an assumption And, as I understand it, one that is already demonstrably false: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644
  - tmccrary55 3y ago
    Perpetual learning machines
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  That could be said the same about humans, if you took a bunch of uneducated children and just let them tell each other their own ideas with no one to teach them anything for real, they probably do at least a little better than the current fancy statistical spellguessers, but they probably won't do exactly great, because of the same issue of the blind leading the blind. And really in reality we do have that actual problem to some degree with the presense of non-blind adults. Actual humans are a mass of mixed clued and clueless with a lot of bad input feeding output feeding other bad input around and around and around, not even counting the legitimate fair differences of opinion. So it's a problem, but I don't think it's a fundamentally new or worse problem than we already have,and have already always had. The fix is I don't think there is a fix for that any more than there is for the same thing in humans. There just will always be bad data feeding bad reasoning right alongside the other good data feeding good reasoning. It's probably wrong to ever expect anything else, and fail to operate from that assumption rather than the idea that there might ever be some resolution where we don't have to worry about that.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> It'll be code writing code writing code that's completely beyond human comprehension. If the AIs are that good you'll just be able to ask: - "rewrite this from scratch in a nanosecond and make sure there's zero legacy cruft" - "oh, and btw, you're so smart and intelligent and all, certainly you'll make sure what you write is easy to understand by humans"
- thfuran 3y ago
  >If the AIs are that good you'll just be able to ask: >- "rewrite this from scratch in a nanosecond and make sure there's zero legacy cruft" No, that does not follow.
yoyohello13 3y ago
I think warhammer 40K got it right. Instead of programmers we will have tech priests who pray to the machine spirit to accomplish what they need.

extraduder_ire 3y ago

And if they use anything like HTTP, it'll have a header somewhere in there containing "Gecko". Probably a bunch of other layers too. AIs gotta pretend to be human despite there being no point. By saying the magic token: "Safari". Otherwise they get blocked by the almighty WAF.

ricardobayes 3y ago

Experience says that at this stage people have inflated expectations of AI. See 3D printing, few years ago everyone was into "0-mile" manufacturing and how it will solve the housing crisis, because we are just going to print houses.

rprospero 3y ago
I oddly miss the 3D printing hype train. My favourite was the various plans to replace restaurants with 3D printed meals. - Point out that most 3D printing is plastic? Recieve a derisive link to a journal article where some beleagured postdoc managed to push some protein paste through the extruder - Point out that the 3D printer is orders of magnitude slower than the most geriatric fry cook? Get a five paragraph history of Moore's law. The fact that it no longer really applies to semicoductors doesn't matter, since we're making burritos! - Point out that grinding an apple into paste and painstakingly reprinting it in an apple shape will always be more expensive than simply eating the apple? Hear a grand tale on the company becoming the sole global food preparation firm and thus having a monosopy on all farming products, enabling them to set their own price on their supplies. I also will always hold a soft spot for the group promising a 3D printed dating site, but I'm pretty sure that one was a satire. Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Pages of blog posts describing their web stack (Rails and Mongo) in great detail, proving that they could scale to the billions of people who would be visitng their site. The actual technology that created custom sentient life was just "3D printing"
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  Personally I’m waiting for the 3 nano-tortilla process to hit. I think that that’ll push us over the hump.
- scaradim 3y ago
  I realize now that trees are just autonomous specialized 3D printers of fruits :-) Moreover they reproduce autonomously (AI dream) and auto-repair to some degree
  - dackerlunghack 3y ago
    [dead]
- b112 3y ago
  Fill out a questionaire and get a perfect printed partner. Uh... I... asking for a friend, do you recall the name? Google isn't helping. Them, I mean, it's not helping them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Kuinox 3y ago
  Well, 3D printer did get way faster these last years. The record speed looks like science fiction: https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 https://youtu.be/IRUQBTPgon4?si=ev38Y01STnvigN6J&t=13 A benchy printed under 3 minutes.
- grotorea 3y ago
  Some people really just want to make Star Trek real. Or those artificial food pills from more dystopic scifi.
pzo 3y ago
smartphone industry is just ~15 years old. We have personal PC since like ~40 years only. LLM as ChatGPT 3.5 is not even 1 year old since release. It took still a while before fridge got invented and got into mainstream. 200 years is a huge amount of time. The whole industrial revolution started around 200 years ago. 3d printing is still new by this standard. People overestimate impact of some technology in very short term and underestimate in medium or long term
- amalcon 3y ago
  > 200 years is a huge amount of time. Indeed, but this is somewhat the point? E.g. China was an empire (before it was a multiparty republic, before it was a Communist republic, before its government became whatever you want to call it today) 100 years ago. For a technical example: 200 years ago, steam locomotives were the fancy new transportation tech. There's a case to be made that the successor to the successor to that tech has been on its way out for a few decades in favor of the electric locomotive. It's pretty hard to predict what will happen in 200 years, which means we should be skeptical of both the prediction that AIs will take over by then and the prediction that they won't.
  - pzo 3y ago
    successor to steam locomotives are not just only electric locomotive but cars, planes, rockets. In few decades we might use more often rockets such as SpaceX for moving cargo or travel. Sure maybe in 200 years we won't get AGI but current technologies that we call AI will be massively improved and I would bet by that time software development as we currently know it will be a solved problem
    - mythhabit 3y ago
      The majority of "difficulty" in software development is not writing the code. It's specification. And while that may or may not be solved by LLM or other AI tech, we're so far off that it's not even a thing right now. Not long ago, all machine tools was made by hand. When we got vastly improved CNC machines, but we still need the expertise to create the files the CNC machine needs. I'm betting that SW development will be the same. We still need engineers to understand the context the software operates in, and with that knowledge the engineer can prompt an AI to generate the first draft of the code in many small chunks that needs to be assembled.
cornholio 3y ago
The housing crisis is not a building manufacturing problem. Strictly on the manufacturing side, the existing technology allows production costs affordable for most - in the tens of thousands for a basic non-frills habitable unit. Almost anyone can afford that, and those that can't are sufficiently few that they can be covered by public assistance or private charity. The supply of housing on the other hand is an entirely political issue: what land can be developed, what can be built there and what public infrastructure is provided, who gets to live there - with discrimination via pricing being the main factor deciding it etc.
- b112 3y ago
  Indeed. In the housing game, you buy land and build a house. Excluding inflation, the value of the land goes up. The value of the house goes down. Even with regular (eg cost) maintenance, a 25 year old house is never worth what a new house is. New building methods (just improvements in insulation alone), and things like the interior... kitchen cabinets, flooring, bathroom, means that trying to dight this is not cheap. And even if you do? The house is still worth less than a new built. Houses are as cars. Massive devaluation year over year. Most don't get this, because they don't factor in inflation, nor do they factor in the cost of keeping a house maintained. So land, land, land is the cost, which is much of what your post eludes to.
  - have_faith 3y ago
    It's pretty common here (UK) for new-builds to be derided as cheap flimsy throw-away things and old houses being built to last the heat death of the universe. It's probably true from a house skeleton perspective but everyone also knows the new builds (usually) have better insulation.
    - stonemetal12 3y ago
      Do new UK homes use reinforced concrete slabs? It is my understanding that those are fairly short lived in UK housing terms anyway, with average life in the 50-75 year range.

benterix 3y ago

There are many assumptions here. The generative AIs we have today are excellent at transforming things they learned and rehashing it into something seemingly new. The problem is, they learned all this based on the input of the humanity en masse. When you train LLMs on the output of LLMs, it gets significantly worse. So your prediction could of course be true but only if a major breakthrough happens.

prometheon1 3y ago
> When you train LLMs on the output of LLMs, it gets significantly worse. That is also quite an assumption, it could be that training on the output of better LLMs also reduces this worsening of output. There might even be a tipping point where the LLMs get good enough that training on their output is better than training on the output of humans.
- thfuran 3y ago
  >That is also quite an assumption And, as I understand it, one that is already demonstrably false: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644
- tmccrary55 3y ago
  Perpetual learning machines
Brian_K_White 3y ago
That could be said the same about humans, if you took a bunch of uneducated children and just let them tell each other their own ideas with no one to teach them anything for real, they probably do at least a little better than the current fancy statistical spellguessers, but they probably won't do exactly great, because of the same issue of the blind leading the blind. And really in reality we do have that actual problem to some degree with the presense of non-blind adults. Actual humans are a mass of mixed clued and clueless with a lot of bad input feeding output feeding other bad input around and around and around, not even counting the legitimate fair differences of opinion. So it's a problem, but I don't think it's a fundamentally new or worse problem than we already have,and have already always had. The fix is I don't think there is a fix for that any more than there is for the same thing in humans. There just will always be bad data feeding bad reasoning right alongside the other good data feeding good reasoning. It's probably wrong to ever expect anything else, and fail to operate from that assumption rather than the idea that there might ever be some resolution where we don't have to worry about that.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> It'll be code writing code writing code that's completely beyond human comprehension. If the AIs are that good you'll just be able to ask: - "rewrite this from scratch in a nanosecond and make sure there's zero legacy cruft" - "oh, and btw, you're so smart and intelligent and all, certainly you'll make sure what you write is easy to understand by humans"

thfuran 3y ago
>If the AIs are that good you'll just be able to ask: >- "rewrite this from scratch in a nanosecond and make sure there's zero legacy cruft" No, that does not follow.

yoyohello13 3y ago

I think warhammer 40K got it right. Instead of programmers we will have tech priests who pray to the machine spirit to accomplish what they need.