5 ms·

This is gonna keep happening with every AI advance until humans are an absolute bottleneck in every domain. May take a bit of time for some professions, but the

This is gonna keep happening with every AI advance until humans are an absolute bottleneck in every domain. May take a bit of time for some professions, but the writing is on the wall. This will be the greatest shift in human history, and I think a lot of people will have trouble grappling with it because its not fun to think about being made irrelevant. The only thing that will slow AI down is massive universal international regulation. Human intelligence really isn’t the be all end all to intelligence in general, it’s just a stepping stone. I feel many on this site don’t want to accept this because their intelligence has been such a valuable tool and source of personal pride/identity for them for so long.

timhigins 1y ago
> unilateral international regulation is an oxymoron/contradictory
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  sorry I meant "universal" or "omnilateral"
  - layer8 1y ago
    Did you mean global regulation?
    - atleastoptimal 1y ago
      yeah
matthewkayin 1y ago
What is all of this for if the result is that human beings are "made irrelevant"? If these LLMs truly become as game changing as so many say they will be, then can we agree that it's time to stop thinking that a person's worth equals their economic output?
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  It is definitely past time to start thinking outside of the economy. Although must we deal in "worth" at all at that point? If two people have conflicting visions, it shouldn't be the one who is "worth" more that gets their way, it should be the one whose vision is most appealing to the rest of us.
  - intended 1y ago
    No, I disagree, and for everyone who bemoans capitalism or the power of money, its important to understand the foundational arguments from which economics is born. Wants are infinite, and resources limited. Economics is the objective methods to order a system to achieve subjective ends. For better or worse, money is a medium of exchange and signal of what people are willing to allocate for their needs. Unless you create economic markets, information markets, and political systems that are built to handle the forces being harnessed by society, you have failure states. In other words, taxes need to bleed of wealth, to ensure that it cannot create advantage in other fields (media, politics), breaking the even playing field in those other economies.
    - Eisenstein 1y ago
      You are begging the question by relying an unproven basis for your argument. Why do economies have to be based on free market capitalism?
      - emp17344 1y ago
        Free markets are superior to planned economies because they’re able to instantly respond to consumer preferences, resulting in efficient allocation of resources. On a side note, I’m not sure why HN is often hostile to economic arguments. Economics is a well-established science.
        conception 1y ago
        Just wanted to note that free markets are separate from capitalism. Free market socialism has existed here and there as well.
metalliqaz 1y ago
What good is intelligence if there is nobody with the money to pay for it? We run our brains on a few thousand calories a day. Who is going to pay to provide the billions of calories it takes to run/cool GPUs all day long if there are no humans with marketable skills?
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  AIs will pay other AIs through various means of exchange Assuming AI need humans in that way is like being a tribe of monkeys and saying “What good is being human if they don’t have bananas to pay? Monkey only need banana, humans need clothes, houses, cars, gas, who is going to pay the humans bananas if monkeys have all the banana?”
- skybrian 1y ago
  “No marketable skills” seems pretty unlikely if you look beyond office work.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    Genuine question--I've seen this thrown around a lot. Do you count yourself in this hypothetical situation where society returns to physical labor, or do you think you're immune from being automated?
    - skybrian 1y ago
      Since there are excellent educational resources available online, I've sometimes wondered what it is that teachers do that couldn't be done by computer software. But it seems clear that they're somehow necessary? In theory, a bright kid with access to the Internet should be able to teach themselves, but most kids won't learn much that way. We're going to see more jobs automated, and lots of jobs will change, but I think lots of jobs will still be around for similar reasons. Even if it's not what we'd normally consider physical labor, there's something about in-person interaction that's not easy to automate. Independent, self-sufficient adults who could and want to get by with just machine interaction are a minority.
nly 1y ago
What a load of guff. AI models still produce galling inconsistencies and errors for me on a daily basis.
- bayarearefugee 1y ago
  Same. I find LLMs to be useful, but my day to day usage of them doesn't fit the narrative of people who suggest they are creating massive complex projects with ease. And if they are, where's the actual output proof? Why don't we see obvious evidence of some massive AI-powered renaissance, and instead just see a never ending stream of anecdotes that read like astroturf marketing of AI companies?
  - agos 1y ago
    Speaking of which, astroturfing seem like the kind of task LLMs should excel at…
- sponnath 1y ago
  I think it's easy to ignore all the times the models get things hilariously wrong when there's a few instances where its output really surprises you. That said, I don't really agree with the GP comment. Humans are the bottleneck if we knew these models get things right 100% of the time but with a model like o3-pro it's very possible it'll just spend 20 minutes chasing down the wrong rabbit hole. I've often found prompting o4-mini gave me results that were pretty good most of the time while being much faster whereas with base o3 I usually have to wait 2-3 minutes and hope that it got things right and didn't make any incorrect assumptions.
mlsu 1y ago
Humans have more access to the real world. These models have to tokenize everything and put it into words, but so much information is outside of words. These models may well be super intelligent but their intelligence is locked inside of a cage (the tokenizer). Even in the world where AI has full control of lights out factories (again, doubt it. something goes wrong at the factory, you gotta send a guy in), human beings still need to look each other in the eye and communicate, they need to touch each other. Not only that, they need to be seen and acknowledged by other human beings. "AI" cannot ever replace this. People whose intelligence is their pride/identity kind of miss this. Stupid people are capable of loving each other more deeply and more completely than any machine ever will love them.
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  You basically just said people will be the janitors, the on-site fixers, and the personification of decisions and that they will still be able to live fulfilling lives in the real world. I think that is perfectly in line with what the parent wrote.
- atleastoptimal 1y ago
  All those things could be done by humanoid robots. AI models aren’t limited to words, as we’ve seen with video models. Gpt 4o, which has been out for over a year, is natively multimodal. Robotics companies are training robots to take in all the data they have avaliable, video, audio, and interpret them all together in context. There is the core substrate of tokens, yes, but largely it is just a standard “bit” level of information for AI brains, not some essential limiter that will keep AI from understanding all the soft, abstract stuff that humans can. If you look at o3 now, just feeding it images, it clearly now can reason in a way closer to humans than a calculator is to it.
intended 1y ago
I think too many people call this intelligence, and it results in intuitions that are useless and waste time, pushing the day we understand this moment further into the future. The best I’ve got is theres 2 frames of assessment people are using: 1) Output frame of reference: The output of an LLM is the same as what a human could make. 2) Process frame of reference: The process at play is not the same as human thinking These 2 conversation streams end up with contradictions when they engage with each other. Yes, the tools are impressive. The tools aren’t thinking. etc. A useful analogy is rote learning - many people have passed exams by memorizing textbooks. The output is indistinguishable from someone who manipulates a learned model of the subject to understand the question and provide the answer.
hooverd 1y ago
Yes, people will start asking "when must we kill them?"

timhigins 1y ago

> unilateral international regulation is an oxymoron/contradictory

atleastoptimal 1y ago
sorry I meant "universal" or "omnilateral"
- layer8 1y ago
  Did you mean global regulation?
  - atleastoptimal 1y ago
    yeah

matthewkayin 1y ago

What is all of this for if the result is that human beings are "made irrelevant"? If these LLMs truly become as game changing as so many say they will be, then can we agree that it's time to stop thinking that a person's worth equals their economic output?

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
It is definitely past time to start thinking outside of the economy. Although must we deal in "worth" at all at that point? If two people have conflicting visions, it shouldn't be the one who is "worth" more that gets their way, it should be the one whose vision is most appealing to the rest of us.
- intended 1y ago
  No, I disagree, and for everyone who bemoans capitalism or the power of money, its important to understand the foundational arguments from which economics is born. Wants are infinite, and resources limited. Economics is the objective methods to order a system to achieve subjective ends. For better or worse, money is a medium of exchange and signal of what people are willing to allocate for their needs. Unless you create economic markets, information markets, and political systems that are built to handle the forces being harnessed by society, you have failure states. In other words, taxes need to bleed of wealth, to ensure that it cannot create advantage in other fields (media, politics), breaking the even playing field in those other economies.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    You are begging the question by relying an unproven basis for your argument. Why do economies have to be based on free market capitalism?
    - emp17344 1y ago
      Free markets are superior to planned economies because they’re able to instantly respond to consumer preferences, resulting in efficient allocation of resources. On a side note, I’m not sure why HN is often hostile to economic arguments. Economics is a well-established science.
      - conception 1y ago
        Just wanted to note that free markets are separate from capitalism. Free market socialism has existed here and there as well.

metalliqaz 1y ago

What good is intelligence if there is nobody with the money to pay for it? We run our brains on a few thousand calories a day. Who is going to pay to provide the billions of calories it takes to run/cool GPUs all day long if there are no humans with marketable skills?

atleastoptimal 1y ago
AIs will pay other AIs through various means of exchange Assuming AI need humans in that way is like being a tribe of monkeys and saying “What good is being human if they don’t have bananas to pay? Monkey only need banana, humans need clothes, houses, cars, gas, who is going to pay the humans bananas if monkeys have all the banana?”
skybrian 1y ago
“No marketable skills” seems pretty unlikely if you look beyond office work.
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  Genuine question--I've seen this thrown around a lot. Do you count yourself in this hypothetical situation where society returns to physical labor, or do you think you're immune from being automated?
  - skybrian 1y ago
    Since there are excellent educational resources available online, I've sometimes wondered what it is that teachers do that couldn't be done by computer software. But it seems clear that they're somehow necessary? In theory, a bright kid with access to the Internet should be able to teach themselves, but most kids won't learn much that way. We're going to see more jobs automated, and lots of jobs will change, but I think lots of jobs will still be around for similar reasons. Even if it's not what we'd normally consider physical labor, there's something about in-person interaction that's not easy to automate. Independent, self-sufficient adults who could and want to get by with just machine interaction are a minority.

nly 1y ago

What a load of guff. AI models still produce galling inconsistencies and errors for me on a daily basis.

bayarearefugee 1y ago
Same. I find LLMs to be useful, but my day to day usage of them doesn't fit the narrative of people who suggest they are creating massive complex projects with ease. And if they are, where's the actual output proof? Why don't we see obvious evidence of some massive AI-powered renaissance, and instead just see a never ending stream of anecdotes that read like astroturf marketing of AI companies?
- agos 1y ago
  Speaking of which, astroturfing seem like the kind of task LLMs should excel at…
sponnath 1y ago
I think it's easy to ignore all the times the models get things hilariously wrong when there's a few instances where its output really surprises you. That said, I don't really agree with the GP comment. Humans are the bottleneck if we knew these models get things right 100% of the time but with a model like o3-pro it's very possible it'll just spend 20 minutes chasing down the wrong rabbit hole. I've often found prompting o4-mini gave me results that were pretty good most of the time while being much faster whereas with base o3 I usually have to wait 2-3 minutes and hope that it got things right and didn't make any incorrect assumptions.

mlsu 1y ago

Humans have more access to the real world. These models have to tokenize everything and put it into words, but so much information is outside of words. These models may well be super intelligent but their intelligence is locked inside of a cage (the tokenizer). Even in the world where AI has full control of lights out factories (again, doubt it. something goes wrong at the factory, you gotta send a guy in), human beings still need to look each other in the eye and communicate, they need to touch each other. Not only that, they need to be seen and acknowledged by other human beings. "AI" cannot ever replace this. People whose intelligence is their pride/identity kind of miss this. Stupid people are capable of loving each other more deeply and more completely than any machine ever will love them.

Eisenstein 1y ago
You basically just said people will be the janitors, the on-site fixers, and the personification of decisions and that they will still be able to live fulfilling lives in the real world. I think that is perfectly in line with what the parent wrote.
atleastoptimal 1y ago
All those things could be done by humanoid robots. AI models aren’t limited to words, as we’ve seen with video models. Gpt 4o, which has been out for over a year, is natively multimodal. Robotics companies are training robots to take in all the data they have avaliable, video, audio, and interpret them all together in context. There is the core substrate of tokens, yes, but largely it is just a standard “bit” level of information for AI brains, not some essential limiter that will keep AI from understanding all the soft, abstract stuff that humans can. If you look at o3 now, just feeding it images, it clearly now can reason in a way closer to humans than a calculator is to it.

intended 1y ago

I think too many people call this intelligence, and it results in intuitions that are useless and waste time, pushing the day we understand this moment further into the future. The best I’ve got is theres 2 frames of assessment people are using: 1) Output frame of reference: The output of an LLM is the same as what a human could make. 2) Process frame of reference: The process at play is not the same as human thinking These 2 conversation streams end up with contradictions when they engage with each other. Yes, the tools are impressive. The tools aren’t thinking. etc. A useful analogy is rote learning - many people have passed exams by memorizing textbooks. The output is indistinguishable from someone who manipulates a learned model of the subject to understand the question and provide the answer.

hooverd 1y ago

Yes, people will start asking "when must we kill them?"