4 ms·

So… what? With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I have

by teeeew 9mo ago

So… what? With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this. Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest. In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions. So broadly where is the net benefit here?

simonw 9mo ago
You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs? I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first. And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.
- teeeew 9mo ago
  “I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.” Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint. Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!
  - bathtub365 9mo ago
    The average person already automates a lot of things in their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs probably automate the wrong thing for the average person (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold the laundry after) but automation has saved the average person a lot of time
    - zahlman 9mo ago
      What sorts of things will the average, non-technical person think of automating on a computer that are actually quality-of-life-improving?
      - simonw 9mo ago
        My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of years ago I was attending a training session at a fire station and the fire chief happened to mention that he had spent the past two days manually migrating contact details from one CRM to another. I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!
        gjadi 9mo ago
        I don't want my doctor to vibe script some conversion only to realize weeks or months later it made a subtle error in my prescription. I want both of them to have enough fund to hire someone to do it properly. But wanting is not enough unfortunately...
        danenania 9mo ago
        Humans make subtle errors all the time too though. AI results still need to be checked over for anything important, but it's on a vector toward being much more reliable than a human for any kind of repetitive task. Currently, if you ask an LLM to do something small and self-contained like solve leetcode problems or implement specific algorithms, they will have a much lower rate of mistakes, in terms of implementing the actual code, than an experienced human engineer. The things it does badly are more about architecture, organization, style, and taste.
        gjadi 9mo ago
        But with a software bug, the error becomes rapidly widespread and systematic, whereas human error are often not. Doing wrong with a couple of prescription because the doc worked for 12+ hrs is different from systematically doing wrong on a significant number of prescriptions until someone double check the results.
  - simonw 9mo ago
    > Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything! One of my life goals is to help bring as many people into my "technology can automate things for you" bubble as I possibly can.

by teeeew 9mo ago

simonw 9mo ago

You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs? I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first. And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.

teeeew 9mo ago
“I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.” Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint. Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!
- bathtub365 9mo ago
  The average person already automates a lot of things in their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs probably automate the wrong thing for the average person (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold the laundry after) but automation has saved the average person a lot of time
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    What sorts of things will the average, non-technical person think of automating on a computer that are actually quality-of-life-improving?
    - simonw 9mo ago
      My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of years ago I was attending a training session at a fire station and the fire chief happened to mention that he had spent the past two days manually migrating contact details from one CRM to another. I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!
      - gjadi 9mo ago
        I don't want my doctor to vibe script some conversion only to realize weeks or months later it made a subtle error in my prescription. I want both of them to have enough fund to hire someone to do it properly. But wanting is not enough unfortunately...
        danenania 9mo ago
        Humans make subtle errors all the time too though. AI results still need to be checked over for anything important, but it's on a vector toward being much more reliable than a human for any kind of repetitive task. Currently, if you ask an LLM to do something small and self-contained like solve leetcode problems or implement specific algorithms, they will have a much lower rate of mistakes, in terms of implementing the actual code, than an experienced human engineer. The things it does badly are more about architecture, organization, style, and taste.
        gjadi 9mo ago
        But with a software bug, the error becomes rapidly widespread and systematic, whereas human error are often not. Doing wrong with a couple of prescription because the doc worked for 12+ hrs is different from systematically doing wrong on a significant number of prescriptions until someone double check the results.
- simonw 9mo ago
  > Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything! One of my life goals is to help bring as many people into my "technology can automate things for you" bubble as I possibly can.