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Modern AI tools are amazing, but they’re amazing like spell check was amazing when it came out. Does it help with menial tasks? Yes, but it creates a new baseli

• amarant 1y ago
  It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? Or is it all just pointless busy-work invented since the industrial revolution to create jobs for everyone, when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games. To paraphrase Lee Iacocca: We must stop and ask ourselves, how much videogames do we really need?
  • npteljes 1y ago
    >do any of my hard work actually matter? Yes... basically in life, you have to find the definition of "to matter" that you can strongly believe in. Otherwise everything feels aimless, the very life itself. The rest of what you ponder in your comment is the same. And I'd like to add that baselines shifted a lot over the years of civilization. I like to think about one specific example: painkillers. Painkillers were not used during medical procedures in a widespread manner until some 150 years ago, maybe even later. Now, it's much less horrible to participate in those procedures, for everyone involved really, and also the outcomes are better just for this factor - because the patients moves around less while anesthetized. But even this is up for debate. All in all, it really boils down to what the individual feels like it's a worthy life. Philosophy is not done yet.
    • amarant 1y ago
      Well, from a societal point of view, meaningful work would be work that is necessary to either maintain or push that baseline. Perhaps my initial estimate of 5% of the workforce was a bit optimistic, say 20% of current workforce necessary to have food, healthcare, and maybe a few research facilities focused on improving all of the above?
      • npteljes 1y ago
        I'm sure we could organize it if that would be the goal.
        • amarant 1y ago
          Right? So what's the current goal, and why is it better than this one?
          • npteljes 1y ago
            Power itself seems to be the goal, and the reasons for it is human DNA I think. I have doubts that we can build anything different than this (on a sufficiently long run).
            • amarant 1y ago
              Power might be a goal for individuals, but surely it's not the goal for society as a whole? Does society as a whole even have a goal currently? I don't really think it does. Like do ideologists even exist today? I wish society was working towards some kind of idea of utopia, but I'm not convinced we're even trying for that. Are we?
              • npteljes 1y ago
                I don't feel like we have goals as a society either.
        • 1y ago
  • jajko 1y ago
    Mine doesn't, and I am fine with that, never needed such validation. I derive fulfillment from my personal life and achievements and passions there, more than enough. With that optics, office politics and promotion rat race and what people do in them just makes me smile. Seeing how otherwise smart folks ruin (or miss out) their actual lives and families in pursuit of excellence in a very narrow direction, often hard underappreciated by employers and not rewarded adequately. I mean, at certain point you either grok the game and optimize, or you don't. The work brings over time modest wealth, allows me and my family to live in long term safe place (Switzerland) and builds a small reserve for bad times (or inheritance, early retirement etc. this is Europe, no need to save up for kids education or potentially massive healthcare bills). Don't need more from life.
    • qwerpy 1y ago
      Agree. Now I watch the rat racers with bemusement while I put in just enough to get a paycheck. I have enough time and energy to participate deeply in my children’s upbringing. I’m in America so the paychecks are very large, which helps with private school, nanny, stay at home wife, and the larger net worth needed (health care, layoff risk, house in a nicer neighborhood). I’ve been fortunate, so early retirement is possible now in my early 40s. It really helps with being able to detach from work, when I don’t even care if I lose my job. I worry for my kids though. It won’t be as easy for them. AI and relentless human resources optimization will make tech a harder place to thrive.
  • Phanteaume 1y ago
    You're on the right path, don't fall back into the global gaslight. Go deeper. http://youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo http://youtube.com/watch?v=9lDTdLQnSQo
  • kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Most work is redundant and unnecessary. Take for example the classic gas station on every corner situation that often emerges. This turf war between gas providers (or their franchisees by proxy they granted a license to this location for) is not because three or four gas stations are operating at maximum capacity. No, this is 3 or 4 fisherman with a line in the river, made possible solely because inputs (real estate, gas, labor, merchandise) are cheap enough where the gas station need not ever run even close to capacity and still return a profit for the fisherman. Who benefits from the situation? You or I who don’t have to make a u turn to get gas at this intersection, perhaps, but that is not much benefit in comparison for the opportunity cost of not having 3 prime corner lots squandered on the same single use. The clerk at the gas station for having a job available? Perhaps although maybe their labor in aggregate would have been employed in other less redundant uses that could benefit out society otherwise than selling smokes and putting $20 on 4 at 3am. The real beneficiary of this entire arrangement is the fisherman, the owner or shareholder who ultimately skims from all the pots thanks to having what is effectively a modern version of a plantation sharecropper, spending all their money in the company store and on company housing with a fig leaf of being able to choose from any number of minimum wage jobs, spend their wages in any number of national chain stores, and rent any number of increasingly investor owned property. Quite literally all owned by the same shareholders when you consider how people diversify their investments into these multiple sectors.
    • senordevnyc 1y ago
      We benefit because when there’s only one gas station, they can charge more than if there are four.
      • overfeed 1y ago
        It's weird to read the same HN crowd that decries monopolies and extols the virtues of competition turn around and complain about job duplication and "bullshit jobs" like marketing and advertising that arise from competition.
        • oasisaimlessly 1y ago
  • randcraw 1y ago
    > It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use? And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software. The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission. Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.
    • dehrmann 1y ago
      So... to what extent is software a durable good?
      • staunton 1y ago
        Who said it's durable?
        • dehrmann 1y ago
  • Clubber 1y ago
    >It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter? It mattered enough for someone to pay you money to do it, and that money put food on the table and clothes on your body and a roof over your head and allowed you to contribute to larger society through paying taxes. Is it the same as discovering that E = MC2 or Jonas Salk's contributions? No, but it's not nothing either.
  • cortesoft 1y ago
    > Don't think we'd have as many videogames, but then again, we would have time to play, which I would argue is more valuable than games. Would we have fewer video games? If all our basic needs were met and we had a lot of free time, more people might come together to create games together for free. I mean, look at how much free content (games, stories, videos, etc) is created now, when people have to spend more than half their waking hours working for a living. If people had more free time, some of them would want to make video games, and if they weren’t constrained by having to make money, they would be open source, which would make it even easier for someone else to make their own game based on the work.
  • hliyan 1y ago
    I've been thinking similarly. Bertrand Russell once said: "there are two types of work. One, moving objects on or close to the surface of the Earth. Two, telling other people to do so". Most of us work in buildings that don't actually manufacture, process or anything. Instead, we process information that describes manufacturing and transport. Or we create information for people to consume when they are not working (entertainment). Only a small faction of human beings are actually producing things that are necessary for physiological survival. Rest of us are at best, helping them optimize that process, or at worst, leeching off of them in the name of "management" of their work.
  • vasco 1y ago
    Unless you propose slaves how are you going to choose the 5%? Who in their right mind would work when 95 out of 100 people around them are slacking off all day? Unless you pay them really well. So well that they prefer to work than to slack off. But then the slackers will want nicer things to do in their free time that only the workers can afford. And then you'd end up at the start.
    • amarant 1y ago
      Easy solution: everyone works 5%, which works out to 2 hours per week. Tho 5% is likely unfeasibly low, we would probably need at least twice that
  • chii 1y ago
    > when in reality we would be fine if like 5% of society worked while the rest slacked off? if that were really true, who gets to decide who those 5% that gets to do work, while the rest leeches off them? Coz i certainly would not want to be in that 5%.
  • thyrsus 1y ago
    Nope. The current system may be misdirecting 95% of labor, but until we have sufficiently modeled all of nature to provide perfect health and brought world peace, there is work to do.
• arealaccount 1y ago
  Its why executive types are all hyped about AI. Being able to code 2x more will mean they get 2x more things (roughly speaking), but the workers aren’t going to get 2x the compensation.
  • npteljes 1y ago
    Indeed. And AI does its work without those productivity-hindering things like need for recreation and sleep, ethical treatment, and a myriad of others. It's a new resource to exploit, and that makes everyone excited who is building on some resource.
  • cylemons 1y ago
    Keep in mind that competitors will also produce 2x, so even executives wont get 2x compensation
• pythonguython 1y ago
  AI can’t do our jobs today, but we’re only 2.5 years from the release of chatGPT. The performance of these models might plateau today, but we simply don’t know. If they continue to improve at the current rate for 3-5 more years, it’s hard for me to see how human input would be useful at all in engineering.
  • codr7 1y ago
    They will never be creative, and creativity is a pretty big deal.
    • pythonguython 1y ago
      To the extent it’s measurable, LLMs are becoming more creative as the models improve. I think it’s a bold statement to say they’ll NEVER be creative. Once again, we’ll have to see. Creativity very well could be emergent from training on large datasets. But also it might not be. I recommend not speaking in such absolutes about a technology that is improving every day.
      • pclmulqdq 1y ago
        "To the extent it's measurable" is very load-bearing in the semantics here. A lot of "creativity" is very hard to measure.
        • pythonguython 1y ago
          I agree, and I think most people would say the current models would rank low on creativity metrics however we define them. But to the main point, I don’t see how the quality we call creativity is unique to biological computing machines vs electronic computing machines. Maybe one day we’ll conclusively declare creativity to be a human trait only, but in 2025 that is not a closed question - however it is measured.
          • Jensson 1y ago
• nkrisc 1y ago
  Spellcheck (and auto completion) is like AI - it solves one problem and creates another. Now instead of misspelled words (which still happens all the time) we have incorrect words substituted in place of the correct ones. Look at any long form article on any website these days and it will likely be riddled with errors, even on traditional news websites!