5 ms·
You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.
by AndyKelley 1y ago
You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.
- salviati 1y agoIsn't it kind of both? Did luddites ever have a chance of stopping the industrial revolution?
- StanislavPetrov 1y agoDid the Dutch ever have a chance to stop the massive run up in tulip prices? It's easy to say what was inevitable when you are looking into the past. Much harder to predict what inevitable future awaits us.
- grues-dinner 1y agoIt's interesting that the Dutch actually had more success at stopping the actual tide coming in than controlling a market tide (which was more like a tidal wave I suppose).
- TeMPOraL 1y agoOne is external, the other exists within. A literal tidal wave is a problem for everyone; a market tide is - by definition - an opportunity to many.
- bgwalter 1y agoNo, but software engineers for example have more power, even in an employer's market, than Luddites. You can simply spend so much time on meticulously documenting that "AI" (unfortunately!) does not work that it will be quietly abandoned.
- elliotec 1y agoWhat? Can you elaborate?
- kaffekaka 1y agoThe dutch have walls/dams that keep the ocean away.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoSoftware engineers have less power than we'd like to think; we may be paid a lot relative to the baseline, but for vast majority that's not even in the "rich" range anymore, and more importantly, we're not ones calling the shots - not anymore. But even if, that presupposes a kind of unity of opinion, committing the exact same sin the article we're discussing is complaining about. Many engineers believe that AI does, in fact, work, and will keep getting better - and will work towards the future you'd like to work against.
- bgwalter 1y agoThe exact same sin? It seems that you don't go off message even once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568811
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThe article is wrong though :). It's because people make choices, that this future is inevitable - enough people are independently choosing to embrace LLMs because of a real or perceived value. That, as well as the (real and perceived) reasons for it are plain and apparent, so it's not hard to predict where this leads in aggregate.
- ben_w 1y agoThe Luddites were among the precursors to Marx et al.; even a revolution wasn't enough to hold back industrialisation, and even that revolution had a famous example of the exact kind of resource-distribution failure that Marx would have had in mind when writing (Great Famine in Ireland was contemporaneous with the Manifesto, compare with Holodomor).
- Yizahi 1y agoLuddites weren't stopping industrial revolution. They were fighting against mass layoffs, against dramatic lowering of wages and against replacement of skilled workers with unskilled ones. Now this reminds me of something, hmmm...
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThey are not wrong. The market, meant in a general sense, is stronger than any individual or groups of people. LLMs are here, and already demonstrate enough productive value to make them in high demand for objective reasons (vs. just as a speculation vehicle). They're not going away, nor is larger GenAI. It would take a collapse of technological civilization to turn the tide back now.
- suddenlybananas 1y agoThe market is a group of people.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoIndeed. Here, a very large one. Now, focus on the dynamics of that group to see my point. Or much more elaborately, but also exhaustively and to the point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
- suddenlybananas 1y agoI'm not going to read that hack, but in either case, the metaphysical monster of the market you're proposing is not what is propping up LLMs. It's the decisions of actors at major tech companies and VCs. These are people, not magical entities. And even still, LLMs aren't profitable.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago> I'm not going to read that hack, but in either case, the metaphysical monster of the market you're proposing is not what is propping up LLMs. It's the decisions of actors at major tech companies and VCs. These are people, not magical entities. Your loss. The article is actually talking about the thing you're saying. And so am I. These are all people, not magical entities, and that is exactly why the near-term future of "AI being the new electricity" is inevitable (short of a total collapse of civilization). The article spells out the causal mechanism 20 different ways, so I still recommend reading it if the dynamics are not blindingly apparent to you yet.
- stillpointlab 1y agoThere is an old cliché about stopping the tide coming in. I mean, yeah you can get out there and participate in trying to stop it. This isn't about fatalism or even pessimism. The tide coming in isn't good or bad. It's more like the refrain from Game of Thrones: Winter is coming. You prepare for it. Your time might be better served finding shelter and warm clothing rather than engaging in a futile attempt to prevent it.
- OtomotO 1y agoThe last tide being the blockchain (hype), which was supposed to solve all and everyone's problems about a decade ago already. How come there even is anything left to solve for LLMs?
- dr_dshiv 1y agoThe difference between hype and reality is productivity—LLMs are productively used by hundreds of millions of people. Block chain is useful primarily in the imagination. It’s just really not comparable.
- OtomotO 1y agoNo, it's overinvestment. And I don't see how most people are divided in two groups or appear to be. Either it's total shit, or it's the holy cup of truth, here to solve all our problems. It's neither. It's a tool. Like a shovel, it's good at something. And like a shovel it's bad at other things. E.g. I wouldn't use a shovel to hammer in a nail. LLMs will NEVER become true AGI. But do they need to? No, or course not! My biggest problem with LLMs isn't the shit code they produce from time to time, as I am paid to resolve messes, it's the environmental impact of MINDLESSLY using one. But whatever. People like cults and anti-cults are cults too.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThere are two different groups with different perspectives and relationships to the "AI hype"; I think we're talking in circles in this subthread because we're talking about different people. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208831. Quoting myself (sorry): > For me, one of the Beneficiaries, the hype seems totally warranted. The capability is there, the possibilities are enormous, pace of advancement is staggering, and achieving them is realistic. If it takes a few years longer than the Investor group thinks - that's fine with us; it's only a problem for them.
- tankenmate 1y agoI have a parallel to suggest; I know it's the rhetorical tool of analogous reasoning, but it deeply matches the psychology of the way most people think. Just like getting to a "certain" number of activated parameters in a model (for some "simple" tasks like summarisation) can be as low as 1.8 billion, once that threshold is breached the "emergent" behaviour of "reasonable", "contextual", or "lucid" text is achieved; or to put this in layman's terms, once your model is "large enough" (and this is quite small compared to the largest models currently in daily use by millions) the generated text goes from jibberish to uncanny valley to lucid text quite quickly. In the same way once a certain threshold is reached in the utility of AI (in a similar vein to the "once I saw the Internet for the first time I knew I would just keep using it") it becomes "inevitable"; it becomes a cheaper option than "the way we've always done it", a better option, or some combination of the two. So, as is very common in technological innovation / revolution, the question isn't will it change the way things are done so much as where will it shift the cost curve? How deeply will it displace "the way we've always done it"? How many hand weaved shirts do you own? Joseph-Marie Jacquard wants to know (and King Cnut has metaphorical clogs to sell to the Luddites).
- PeterStuer 1y agoThe reality for most people is that at a macro level the future is something that happens to them. They try to participate e.g. through voting, but see no change even on issues a significant majority of 'voters' agree on, regardless of who 'wins' the elections.
- nradov 1y agoWhat are issues that a significant majority of voters agree on? Polls indicate that everyone wants lower taxes, cleaner environment, higher quality schools, lower crime, etc. But when you dig into the specifics of how to make progress on those issues, suddenly the consensus evaporates.
- imdsm 1y agoYou can fight against the current of society or you can swim in the direction it's pulling you. If you want to fight against it, you can, but you shouldn't expect others to. For some, they can see that it's inevitable because the strength of the movement is greater than the resistance. It's fair enough to say "you can change the future", but sometimes you can't. You don't have the resources, and often, the will. The internet was the future, we saw it, some didn't. Cryptocurrencies are the future, some see it, some don't. And using AI is the future too. Are LLMs the endpoint? Obviously not. But they'll keep getting better, marginally, until there's a breakthrough, or a change, and they'll advance further. But they won't be going away.
- staunton 1y agoI think it's important not to be too sure abot what of the future one is "seeing". It's easy to be confidently wrong and one may find countless examples and quotes where people made this mistake. Even if you don't think you can change something, you shouldn't be sure about that. If you care about the outcome, you try things also against the odds and also try to organize such efforts with others. (I'm puzzled by poeple who don't see it that way but at the same time don't find VC and start-ups insanely weird...).
- ACCount36 1y agoThe year is 1985. Internet is coming. You don't want it to. Can you stop it?
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- AndyKelley 1y agoYou can shape it.