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I think all the AI stuff is oversold. I don’t think it’s very good, but I think it’s going to be hugely successful because big companies will happily replace p

I think all the AI stuff is oversold. I don’t think it’s very good, but I think it’s going to be hugely successful because big companies will happily replace people with half broken garbage. They don’t care if nothing works because no one will have working systems and we’re forced to buy a lot of their junk no matter what due to oligopolies and monopolies, especially for critical services like communications, electricity, etc..

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
Perhaps more to the point, executives will replace people with half broken garbage and then ride the wave of cost savings and innovation woo just long enough to cash out a fat bonus and bounce to another organization like a swarm of locusts.
visarga 3y ago
I don't think the market will allow that. AI doesn't do autonomy well. It can work ok for a few steps, maybe surpassing average humans, but in long time horizon tasks it doesn't carry out. Companies need their people to extract the AI juice, they need humans-in-the-loop. Especially in critical tasks. Even if AI can't carry out serious tasks, it can still have better form than humans, it would be an improvement for customer support compared to what some companies are doing today (almost nothing). We still need humans to escalate to, when AI is useless. I hope instead of leading to layoffs AI will lead to competition on quality, diversity, price or customizability. Raising the bar for everyone, instead of replacing us. Is there any reason a company would prefer lowering costs to competing for market share with AI? There's more upside to increasing profits than reducing costs.
- mola 3y ago
  I think the market already allowed that. AI shitifying everything is just another step (a big one) in the same direction we've been heading anyway. Think about offshoring support representatives. Instead of someone actually trying to help you get someone bound to a script and following the motions. This infected the entire service culture. And the market accepted.it,because all big companies did the same. AI in support roles is an obvious next step, now that everyone is used to scripted interaction, a half baked AI solution is not much worse. AI
  - donmcronald 3y ago
    This is exactly what I see happening. It doesn't matter if it's a terrible consumer product as long as the entire market moves at the same time. The other area that really worries me is government. I think they're the most likely to get sold on AI as a cost cutting measure, we'll all suffer as a result, and there won't be any recourse. I can't believe how many people are willing to hand the world over to a bunch of non-deterministic, opaque boxes. Being an outlier is going to suck in the future.
    - visarga 3y ago
      Yes but now it is easier to break the rank and offer better customer service using AI, especially if AI gets better every year. There will be no excuse for offering 2023 level quality in 2025.
- nervlord 3y ago
  [dead]
retrac98 3y ago
What makes you think it’ll be “half broken garbage”? We’re at AI’s 80s brick cell phone stage right now, there’s a lot of improvement to come.
- rocgf 3y ago
  I believe it is a coping mechanism for many people. Software engineering is a field in which many revel in its perceived complexity, the 'status' that comes with doing a job that brings so much to the table, yet is not understood by the average person. Now, all of a sudden, there is a tool that is starting to bite into that and it is very easy to dismiss it using phrases such as "half broken garbage".
  - modo_mario 3y ago
    To be fair, regardless of the status and what have you I've seen a lot of people in my time complain that they're making unoptimized garbage with half broken tooling and they weren't shy about saying it. For now AI in this context is often just another piece of such tooling and people using it may experience for example github copilot or the like spit out faulty blocks of code most of the time when it's not doing something cookiecutter. When you then know full well it needs to improve till it's almost correct 100% of the time and do a whole lot more then yeah people are going to be dismissive for a good while longer.
- ergl 3y ago
  Self-checkout machines in supermarkets are famously shit and generally require customers to perform extra work, and yet they are preferred by shops because they can pay one employee to manage 10 machines instead of having 10 employees
null0pointer 3y ago
This is pretty much my view as well. I’m dreading this near future.
mrtksn 3y ago
A lot of stuff companies are doing is overly complicated because of their legacy. Awful lot of people are doing work beneath their qualifications because this. The AI can remove a lot of complications and do a lot of mundane jobs IMHO.
- Jensson 3y ago
  > The AI can remove a lot of complications Not the AIs we have today, I don't even think the initial AGI will be smart enough to significantly simplify current processes, it would need to be much smarter than the humans it replaces to do that.
Gigachad 3y ago
So much of the discussion seems to be along the lines of “yeah it’s broken now, but it’s just the start, it’ll get better” I can list so many things that were hyped up the same way 10 years ago that still aren’t revolutionising the world today. Maybe it will get super good really fast. Or maybe it’s the next self driving trucks or 3D tv where solving the last of the problems is much harder than the first 90%.
- CynicusRex 3y ago
  Give us that list, please?
  - poisonborz 3y ago
    Crypto/blockchain. VR. Chat assistants. Or to heckle HN, Rust.
  - TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    Apple Siri.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    IBM Watson.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    IVR trees on phone call centers, which evolved into: Chatbots in front of customer care agents.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Every battery breakthrough. Every previous AI hype-train (Eliza did not replace therapists)
    - andruby 3y ago
      Agreed on the AI. Battery though, we have seen the price (USD/KWh) go down every year, and the energy density (KWh/kg) increase every year. Research articles are usually things that take years to trickle down into the mass production. And by then the hopes or lab results no longer translate, or they've evolved into improvements and savings that are harder to link back to their original source.
bufferoverflow 3y ago
I don't think the AI stuff is oversold. If anything, it's going to hit us sooner than most people expect. Once robots and their AI software are good enough, once self-driving is good enough, it's game over for most manual jobs. And many software-based jobs will be automated even faster (accountants, lawyers, data analysis, etc).
- Jensson 3y ago
  > Once robots and their AI software are good enough, once self-driving is good enough, it's game over for most manual jobs Why would those getting good enough happen sooner than people expected? I'd assume those will get good enough at roughly the rate pessimists expected, at least if we look historically that seems like a good bet, these things move really really slowly once you try to apply it to the real world in practice.
- thefz 3y ago
  > I don't think the AI stuff is oversold. If anything, it's going to hit us sooner than most people expect. Once robots and their AI software are good enough, once self-driving is good enough, it's game over for most manual jobs. Would you call an AI bot to fix your heater? I would not. There's no substitute for artisanship.
  - bufferoverflow 3y ago
    Yes, I would. If robots are known to work at least as well as humans, I choose the robot.
karmasimida 3y ago
If company can replace people with AI, emphasize on 'can', then it is not oversold by any means. AI is different than previous generation of disruptions, because its primary target will be software industry itself. ChatGPT has replaced stackoverflow and Google for me.
bawolff 3y ago
I feel like AI will replace a lot of the "pointless"/bottom of the barrel jobs. If you program entirely by copy and pasting from stack overflow, sure you should be worried. But despite that being a meme, most people do more than that.
spaceman_2020 3y ago
Before you say this: what AI tools have you used, and what versions of those AI tools have you used?

RodgerTheGreat 3y ago

Perhaps more to the point, executives will replace people with half broken garbage and then ride the wave of cost savings and innovation woo just long enough to cash out a fat bonus and bounce to another organization like a swarm of locusts.

visarga 3y ago

I don't think the market will allow that. AI doesn't do autonomy well. It can work ok for a few steps, maybe surpassing average humans, but in long time horizon tasks it doesn't carry out. Companies need their people to extract the AI juice, they need humans-in-the-loop. Especially in critical tasks. Even if AI can't carry out serious tasks, it can still have better form than humans, it would be an improvement for customer support compared to what some companies are doing today (almost nothing). We still need humans to escalate to, when AI is useless. I hope instead of leading to layoffs AI will lead to competition on quality, diversity, price or customizability. Raising the bar for everyone, instead of replacing us. Is there any reason a company would prefer lowering costs to competing for market share with AI? There's more upside to increasing profits than reducing costs.

mola 3y ago
I think the market already allowed that. AI shitifying everything is just another step (a big one) in the same direction we've been heading anyway. Think about offshoring support representatives. Instead of someone actually trying to help you get someone bound to a script and following the motions. This infected the entire service culture. And the market accepted.it,because all big companies did the same. AI in support roles is an obvious next step, now that everyone is used to scripted interaction, a half baked AI solution is not much worse. AI
- donmcronald 3y ago
  This is exactly what I see happening. It doesn't matter if it's a terrible consumer product as long as the entire market moves at the same time. The other area that really worries me is government. I think they're the most likely to get sold on AI as a cost cutting measure, we'll all suffer as a result, and there won't be any recourse. I can't believe how many people are willing to hand the world over to a bunch of non-deterministic, opaque boxes. Being an outlier is going to suck in the future.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Yes but now it is easier to break the rank and offer better customer service using AI, especially if AI gets better every year. There will be no excuse for offering 2023 level quality in 2025.
nervlord 3y ago
[dead]

retrac98 3y ago

What makes you think it’ll be “half broken garbage”? We’re at AI’s 80s brick cell phone stage right now, there’s a lot of improvement to come.

rocgf 3y ago
I believe it is a coping mechanism for many people. Software engineering is a field in which many revel in its perceived complexity, the 'status' that comes with doing a job that brings so much to the table, yet is not understood by the average person. Now, all of a sudden, there is a tool that is starting to bite into that and it is very easy to dismiss it using phrases such as "half broken garbage".
- modo_mario 3y ago
  To be fair, regardless of the status and what have you I've seen a lot of people in my time complain that they're making unoptimized garbage with half broken tooling and they weren't shy about saying it. For now AI in this context is often just another piece of such tooling and people using it may experience for example github copilot or the like spit out faulty blocks of code most of the time when it's not doing something cookiecutter. When you then know full well it needs to improve till it's almost correct 100% of the time and do a whole lot more then yeah people are going to be dismissive for a good while longer.
ergl 3y ago
Self-checkout machines in supermarkets are famously shit and generally require customers to perform extra work, and yet they are preferred by shops because they can pay one employee to manage 10 machines instead of having 10 employees

null0pointer 3y ago

This is pretty much my view as well. I’m dreading this near future.

mrtksn 3y ago

A lot of stuff companies are doing is overly complicated because of their legacy. Awful lot of people are doing work beneath their qualifications because this. The AI can remove a lot of complications and do a lot of mundane jobs IMHO.

Jensson 3y ago
> The AI can remove a lot of complications Not the AIs we have today, I don't even think the initial AGI will be smart enough to significantly simplify current processes, it would need to be much smarter than the humans it replaces to do that.

Gigachad 3y ago

So much of the discussion seems to be along the lines of “yeah it’s broken now, but it’s just the start, it’ll get better” I can list so many things that were hyped up the same way 10 years ago that still aren’t revolutionising the world today. Maybe it will get super good really fast. Or maybe it’s the next self driving trucks or 3D tv where solving the last of the problems is much harder than the first 90%.

CynicusRex 3y ago
Give us that list, please?
- poisonborz 3y ago
  Crypto/blockchain. VR. Chat assistants. Or to heckle HN, Rust.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
  Apple Siri.
- Jensson 3y ago
  IBM Watson.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  IVR trees on phone call centers, which evolved into: Chatbots in front of customer care agents.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Every battery breakthrough. Every previous AI hype-train (Eliza did not replace therapists)
  - andruby 3y ago
    Agreed on the AI. Battery though, we have seen the price (USD/KWh) go down every year, and the energy density (KWh/kg) increase every year. Research articles are usually things that take years to trickle down into the mass production. And by then the hopes or lab results no longer translate, or they've evolved into improvements and savings that are harder to link back to their original source.

bufferoverflow 3y ago

I don't think the AI stuff is oversold. If anything, it's going to hit us sooner than most people expect. Once robots and their AI software are good enough, once self-driving is good enough, it's game over for most manual jobs. And many software-based jobs will be automated even faster (accountants, lawyers, data analysis, etc).

Jensson 3y ago
> Once robots and their AI software are good enough, once self-driving is good enough, it's game over for most manual jobs Why would those getting good enough happen sooner than people expected? I'd assume those will get good enough at roughly the rate pessimists expected, at least if we look historically that seems like a good bet, these things move really really slowly once you try to apply it to the real world in practice.
thefz 3y ago
> I don't think the AI stuff is oversold. If anything, it's going to hit us sooner than most people expect. Once robots and their AI software are good enough, once self-driving is good enough, it's game over for most manual jobs. Would you call an AI bot to fix your heater? I would not. There's no substitute for artisanship.
- bufferoverflow 3y ago
  Yes, I would. If robots are known to work at least as well as humans, I choose the robot.

karmasimida 3y ago

If company can replace people with AI, emphasize on 'can', then it is not oversold by any means. AI is different than previous generation of disruptions, because its primary target will be software industry itself. ChatGPT has replaced stackoverflow and Google for me.

bawolff 3y ago

I feel like AI will replace a lot of the "pointless"/bottom of the barrel jobs. If you program entirely by copy and pasting from stack overflow, sure you should be worried. But despite that being a meme, most people do more than that.

spaceman_2020 3y ago

Before you say this: what AI tools have you used, and what versions of those AI tools have you used?