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AI's current trajectory is actually the best one for workers where it increases worker productivity but does not replace them which will increase demand.

grugagag 2y ago
Can you expand on that? I can’t see how productivity will not replace (at least some) them in the long run and shift the workload on the remaining ones, basically making fewer people handle a larger workload for a bit more pay or same pay? And that has more or less been the case with tech so far, though at a slower pace it seems. Or are you saying that AI will create a lot of demand for workforce? And how so?
- dilawar 2y ago
  There is an infinite amount of work in the future. Some jobs may become redundant because of AI but I don't see anyone becoming less busier.
- asolove 2y ago
  The amount of work to be done isn’t constant. If you make it cheaper to do a unit of work (less labor per unit) then the market will demand more of it. Look up the unintentional impact of the cotton gin for an example.
- m_ke 2y ago
  We’ll just have more stuff. Product backlogs for most companies have no end so a worker going from creating 2 widgets to 10 widgets a month means they’re creating more bang for the buck. It will only hurt industries with limited demand or fixed amount of work (think bookkeepers, customer support) that are cost centers.
kkfx 2y ago
Hum... So far I still have to see "improved productivity", at maximum some low skilled workers can find ways to complete some simple tasks quickly in certain domain, but that's essentially all. IF an LLM could ingest news and summarize headlines every day some jobs might gain help, but so far next to nothing is there. Some have tried for stocks and does not went anywhere, some others have tried to replace call center operators with horrific mean results and so on. Actually I fail to see much else except producing quick graphics for publishers and porn deepfakes for teenagers. At a certain point in time things might mature enough for something else, but so far...
- vladms 2y ago
  I am always amazed when interacting with some people how much it "helps" them to ask a (couple of) questions to LLM rather than (just) using google. I (am many IT friends) never need that. But there are many "low skilled workers" (and that can include people not being able to use technology) for which an LLM will improve their productivity. To the point I think I am the exception, and that's why LLM will have a larger impact than I would estimate.
  - aganbb 2y ago
    It does not help me either. C++ answers are flat out wrong and you develop bad habits. If I wanted to plagiarize and had no morals, I could take code from GitHub directly. And, as you say, Google provides links to better answers in 2 seconds. I suppose some people like the interaction with the machine. I'm much more exhausted after an LLM session and my brain is literally fried until the next morning. I stopped using LLMs and am much happier. Googling for answers and reading them strangely enough energizes me.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    As we have witnessed episodes like https://arstechnica.com/?p=1942936 https://arstechnica.com/?p=1942936 witch pose a big and so far unsolvable problem. Personally I tried khoj on my org-mode notes just for curiosity, it was able to produce some meaningful results, but fails to find much while a mere rg (ripgrep) succeed without special tricks. Similarly a classic Google Search tend to produce meaningful results quickly and with much less computation needed than ChatGPT. If that's the current bar well, LLMs cost way too much for the results they produce. Of course things change so at a certain point in future we might get much better results and to achieve such goals research, so data, experiments etc is needed but from research and release early and often vs "Artificial Intelligence is here" from PR there is a big gap in the middle.
teamspirit 2y ago
Problem is, with every advance in worker productivity, workers either work the same or more. They may become more efficient, but the real benefit hardly goes to the worker - it goes to the organization. Whether that’s good, bad, or somewhere in between is another conversation and highly dependent on where you measure success in increased productivity.
- vladms 2y ago
  Reference? This tells a quite different story: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours And talking about benefits, would you claim that life 50 years ago was the same for the average citizen as today? Because if not, to me it seems that people work less (see chart) for more (see what you have).
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    The labor market was way different 50 years ago (and especially even a little bit further back), because you generally had one bread winner working e.g. 1930 hours to support an entire family. In 1960 only 7% of households were single person, now it's 38% [1]. So now you have people working 1760 hours to support, in many cases, only themselves. This [2] site has a plethora of data about the inflection of basically everything that happened in 1971. 1971 was when the US defaulted on its agreements under Bretton Woods, enabling it to begin printing money at its own discretion, which is essentially when our current economic era began. Vast amounts of wealth has been generated, but it has come with costs. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-person-households-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-... [2] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
prerok 2y ago
It increases short term productivity, yes, long term, not so much. What I started to notice, and I think some people on HN have noticed already before me, is that producing lines of code is faster. Much faster, even, if examples are already in the knowledge base. This means that "rolling your own" has never been easier. So, we end up with the same solution, replicated many times in the code. So, now, programmers are producing code faster than reviewers can review. Even the authors of this GPT assisted pile of code may not read or even fully understand it. I think the critical thing missing is code duplication detection. I know some tools are available but I have yet to see one that does its job satisfactorilly. If, however, that does not get built in soon, then companies will start to see that AI causes people to produce lots of unmaintainable/duplicated content and will start to turn away.
- pants2 2y ago
  NOT rolling your own has also never been easier. I've had Sonnet recommend great libraries and tools to me that I probably wouldn't have discovered on my own, and the plus side is I don't need to spend as much time learning those libraries because I can pass in the documentation and have it interface my code with it.

grugagag 2y ago

Can you expand on that? I can’t see how productivity will not replace (at least some) them in the long run and shift the workload on the remaining ones, basically making fewer people handle a larger workload for a bit more pay or same pay? And that has more or less been the case with tech so far, though at a slower pace it seems. Or are you saying that AI will create a lot of demand for workforce? And how so?

dilawar 2y ago
There is an infinite amount of work in the future. Some jobs may become redundant because of AI but I don't see anyone becoming less busier.
asolove 2y ago
The amount of work to be done isn’t constant. If you make it cheaper to do a unit of work (less labor per unit) then the market will demand more of it. Look up the unintentional impact of the cotton gin for an example.
m_ke 2y ago
We’ll just have more stuff. Product backlogs for most companies have no end so a worker going from creating 2 widgets to 10 widgets a month means they’re creating more bang for the buck. It will only hurt industries with limited demand or fixed amount of work (think bookkeepers, customer support) that are cost centers.

kkfx 2y ago

Hum... So far I still have to see "improved productivity", at maximum some low skilled workers can find ways to complete some simple tasks quickly in certain domain, but that's essentially all. IF an LLM could ingest news and summarize headlines every day some jobs might gain help, but so far next to nothing is there. Some have tried for stocks and does not went anywhere, some others have tried to replace call center operators with horrific mean results and so on. Actually I fail to see much else except producing quick graphics for publishers and porn deepfakes for teenagers. At a certain point in time things might mature enough for something else, but so far...

vladms 2y ago
I am always amazed when interacting with some people how much it "helps" them to ask a (couple of) questions to LLM rather than (just) using google. I (am many IT friends) never need that. But there are many "low skilled workers" (and that can include people not being able to use technology) for which an LLM will improve their productivity. To the point I think I am the exception, and that's why LLM will have a larger impact than I would estimate.
- aganbb 2y ago
  It does not help me either. C++ answers are flat out wrong and you develop bad habits. If I wanted to plagiarize and had no morals, I could take code from GitHub directly. And, as you say, Google provides links to better answers in 2 seconds. I suppose some people like the interaction with the machine. I'm much more exhausted after an LLM session and my brain is literally fried until the next morning. I stopped using LLMs and am much happier. Googling for answers and reading them strangely enough energizes me.
- kkfx 2y ago
  As we have witnessed episodes like https://arstechnica.com/?p=1942936 https://arstechnica.com/?p=1942936 witch pose a big and so far unsolvable problem. Personally I tried khoj on my org-mode notes just for curiosity, it was able to produce some meaningful results, but fails to find much while a mere rg (ripgrep) succeed without special tricks. Similarly a classic Google Search tend to produce meaningful results quickly and with much less computation needed than ChatGPT. If that's the current bar well, LLMs cost way too much for the results they produce. Of course things change so at a certain point in future we might get much better results and to achieve such goals research, so data, experiments etc is needed but from research and release early and often vs "Artificial Intelligence is here" from PR there is a big gap in the middle.

teamspirit 2y ago

Problem is, with every advance in worker productivity, workers either work the same or more. They may become more efficient, but the real benefit hardly goes to the worker - it goes to the organization. Whether that’s good, bad, or somewhere in between is another conversation and highly dependent on where you measure success in increased productivity.

vladms 2y ago
Reference? This tells a quite different story: https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours And talking about benefits, would you claim that life 50 years ago was the same for the average citizen as today? Because if not, to me it seems that people work less (see chart) for more (see what you have).
- somenameforme 2y ago
  The labor market was way different 50 years ago (and especially even a little bit further back), because you generally had one bread winner working e.g. 1930 hours to support an entire family. In 1960 only 7% of households were single person, now it's 38% [1]. So now you have people working 1760 hours to support, in many cases, only themselves. This [2] site has a plethora of data about the inflection of basically everything that happened in 1971. 1971 was when the US defaulted on its agreements under Bretton Woods, enabling it to begin printing money at its own discretion, which is essentially when our current economic era began. Vast amounts of wealth has been generated, but it has come with costs. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-person-households-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242022/number-of-single-... [2] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

prerok 2y ago

It increases short term productivity, yes, long term, not so much. What I started to notice, and I think some people on HN have noticed already before me, is that producing lines of code is faster. Much faster, even, if examples are already in the knowledge base. This means that "rolling your own" has never been easier. So, we end up with the same solution, replicated many times in the code. So, now, programmers are producing code faster than reviewers can review. Even the authors of this GPT assisted pile of code may not read or even fully understand it. I think the critical thing missing is code duplication detection. I know some tools are available but I have yet to see one that does its job satisfactorilly. If, however, that does not get built in soon, then companies will start to see that AI causes people to produce lots of unmaintainable/duplicated content and will start to turn away.

pants2 2y ago
NOT rolling your own has also never been easier. I've had Sonnet recommend great libraries and tools to me that I probably wouldn't have discovered on my own, and the plus side is I don't need to spend as much time learning those libraries because I can pass in the documentation and have it interface my code with it.