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A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel https://gwern.net/guardian-angel. > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with y

A few snippets from his full post here: https://gwern.net/guardian-angel https://gwern.net/guardian-angel. > "The chatbot personas are deeply misaligned with you, and aligned with their owners; and the economic incentives are to farm you with ads and subscriptions, while racing not to amplify you but to replace you." > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years" > "One programmer driving 10 Claude instances, because he has to review their work, will never be as valuable as fully autonomous Claudes where there can be almost arbitrarily many instances, like 10,000 instances… but such scaling requires removing him from the loop as much as possible. And this is true of everyone else, whether lawyers or writers or researchers: increasingly, you are the bottleneck to be optimized away." I fully support the 3 core principles of GA: (1) Enhancement, not replacement (2) Mental Sovereignty (3) Self Actualization, which I think is a path to a more humane future.

artyom 2mo ago
Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop. No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*]. Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English. The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important". [*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/150_extra_engineers_thumb.jpg https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...
- brunoarueira 2mo ago
  To colaborate a bit with the no-code part, I worked at a place where they had some flows made with n8n, but the last one from non tech/software engineering left the company and left a bunch of flows breaking, because of some edge cases the flows aren't handling like reissuing credentials, throtling or bad input. The people dependent of said flows reached out to the engineering team to help fix them!
- reasonableklout 2mo ago
  It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can learn new tasks as fast as white-collar workers can find them.
  - majormajor 2mo ago
    > It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can learn new tasks as fast as white-collar workers can find them. Nah, sometimes the expectation and advertisement was that you could let go of the white collar worker because you're paying the overseas person 1/10th the amount. And "overseas person" is pretty general. "Everybody knew" it was a bad idea to get a CS degree for a bit after the dot-com bust because of that. (Some white-collar industries did get hit much harder by that; VFX is one I've heard in that context quite a bit.)
    - strangegecko 2mo ago
      The overseas person didn't work out because of time zone and cultural and language barrier friction that wasn't anticipated in the idea. This isn't analogous to the threat of AI.
      - antonvs 2mo ago
        I’m at a fully remote company with staff in at least 8 countries speaking at least 5 languages. It works out fine. A possible analogy to AI is that a lot depends on how you use it. The “skill issue” doesn’t disappear, at least not yet.
      - 2mo ago
- dataviz1000 2mo ago
  How many people here started writing code because of no code Drupal?
  - artyom 2mo ago
    I'm quite a bit older than that, so no. But I 100% get your point.
- doginasuit 2mo ago
  Marketing about a more efficient product that requires fewer engineers is obviously not new. The idea that human engineers are obsolete is pretty new, that's the claim that is getting pushback.
  - artyom 2mo ago
    I understand that but I think it's in direct proportion of the money being raised, spent and thrown around, including the price tag, to replace such engineers. The more money you ask for, the wilder the claim needs to be.
- nylonstrung 2mo ago
  I don't think the no-code comparison is valid, it's always been fundamentally flawed since its many leaky abstractions sitting on top of systems programming code LLMs can't replace developers but its foundationally different because it can operate on systems code instead of building abstractions on top
thi2 2mo ago
> > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years" I heard this already when ChatGpt came up. Still waiting to be fully obsolete.
hahahaa 2mo ago
Mods, please replace submission with this more accessiable link.
- aswegs8 2mo ago
  It's just restricted for me, even with X account I can't view it.
eru 2mo ago
What's wrong with replacement? That's how you get economic growth. We didn't augment horses or human computers either.
- hellscapesite 2mo ago
  [dead]
colechristensen 2mo ago
For 20 years my job has been automating my job away. I remain unafraid of my future necessity, and as always, excited for the work I get to do because of the work I no longer have to do. The last 200 years of science, technology, and engineering is a long story about eliminating work people had to do being replaced by higher level work. Each time, each wave, there was always the FUD about the work nobody had to do any more and each time there were always new things to do enabled by people no longer having to do so many of the old things. The human won't exit the loop. The people who imagine they will have, at the same time, too much and not enough imagination. Their endgame is always some kind of hand waving magic where suddenly everything is fixed and works.
- xhevahir 2mo ago
  Previous technologies eliminated single categories of worker at a time. The machine learning that people are working on these days threatens to replace very broad swaths of the workforce, of many countries, over a very short period of time.
usernomdeguerre 2mo ago
I can find agreement with a lot of this post (and probably misunderstand just as much), but it's striking to me that it seems to overlook or avoid the obvious moral/ethical option: Pushing AI towards Personal Computing. It seems clear to me that if these models are to have any benefit for humanity then they must be made directly available to as many humans as possible. Right now that cost and effort is astronomical, but general computing also went through a mainframe/shared model before becoming personalized. I believe The Personal Computer was and still is a gift to humanity; for those with an interest in gathering its yield. And now we have an interface with it that can attempt to introspect its' program and speaks human tongue! Imagine what could have been done with this at the time... But if that approach clutches too many pearls to stomach (and I agree it's not all roses) then I'd submit that anyone who champions less is seeking to become our master.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

artyom 2mo ago

Leaving AI completely aside, it still amazes me that people finds "novel" the idea of removing highly-paid white collar intellectual workers (software developers or otherwise) completely out of the loop. No-code platforms date back to the 80's. Getting rid of engineers in general is even older [*]. Even relational databases and SQL were initially promoted as "ways to get rid of those expensive programmers to access your data" because they resembled some form of English. The funny thing about the ad below is that stuff like "stop hiring / get rid of humans" would have been seen as highly insensitive in 1950's America, so they touted that as "put them to do something more important". [*] https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/150_extra_engineers_thumb.jpg https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200...

brunoarueira 2mo ago
To colaborate a bit with the no-code part, I worked at a place where they had some flows made with n8n, but the last one from non tech/software engineering left the company and left a bunch of flows breaking, because of some edge cases the flows aren't handling like reissuing credentials, throtling or bad input. The people dependent of said flows reached out to the engineering team to help fix them!
reasonableklout 2mo ago
It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can learn new tasks as fast as white-collar workers can find them.
- majormajor 2mo ago
  > It's novel because previous rounds of automation were about automating specific tasks or well-scoped functions. There was always an implicit understanding that the white-collar worker would be freed to spend their time on more valuable, higher-level problems. But this time is different because of the generality of the technology. Agents promise to automate the process of thinking itself. And in many domains they can learn new tasks as fast as white-collar workers can find them. Nah, sometimes the expectation and advertisement was that you could let go of the white collar worker because you're paying the overseas person 1/10th the amount. And "overseas person" is pretty general. "Everybody knew" it was a bad idea to get a CS degree for a bit after the dot-com bust because of that. (Some white-collar industries did get hit much harder by that; VFX is one I've heard in that context quite a bit.)
  - strangegecko 2mo ago
    The overseas person didn't work out because of time zone and cultural and language barrier friction that wasn't anticipated in the idea. This isn't analogous to the threat of AI.
    - antonvs 2mo ago
      I’m at a fully remote company with staff in at least 8 countries speaking at least 5 languages. It works out fine. A possible analogy to AI is that a lot depends on how you use it. The “skill issue” doesn’t disappear, at least not yet.
    - 2mo ago
dataviz1000 2mo ago
How many people here started writing code because of no code Drupal?
- artyom 2mo ago
  I'm quite a bit older than that, so no. But I 100% get your point.
doginasuit 2mo ago
Marketing about a more efficient product that requires fewer engineers is obviously not new. The idea that human engineers are obsolete is pretty new, that's the claim that is getting pushback.
- artyom 2mo ago
  I understand that but I think it's in direct proportion of the money being raised, spent and thrown around, including the price tag, to replace such engineers. The more money you ask for, the wilder the claim needs to be.
nylonstrung 2mo ago
I don't think the no-code comparison is valid, it's always been fundamentally flawed since its many leaky abstractions sitting on top of systems programming code LLMs can't replace developers but its foundationally different because it can operate on systems code instead of building abstractions on top

thi2 2mo ago

> > "On my visits to the Bay Area, I would ask AI researchers or interns why they are doing their current research or projects, when in a year or three agentic LLMs could probably do them; they rarely had a good answer, or any idea what they would be doing in 3 years" I heard this already when ChatGpt came up. Still waiting to be fully obsolete.

hahahaa 2mo ago

Mods, please replace submission with this more accessiable link.

aswegs8 2mo ago
It's just restricted for me, even with X account I can't view it.

eru 2mo ago

What's wrong with replacement? That's how you get economic growth. We didn't augment horses or human computers either.

hellscapesite 2mo ago
[dead]

colechristensen 2mo ago

For 20 years my job has been automating my job away. I remain unafraid of my future necessity, and as always, excited for the work I get to do because of the work I no longer have to do. The last 200 years of science, technology, and engineering is a long story about eliminating work people had to do being replaced by higher level work. Each time, each wave, there was always the FUD about the work nobody had to do any more and each time there were always new things to do enabled by people no longer having to do so many of the old things. The human won't exit the loop. The people who imagine they will have, at the same time, too much and not enough imagination. Their endgame is always some kind of hand waving magic where suddenly everything is fixed and works.

xhevahir 2mo ago
Previous technologies eliminated single categories of worker at a time. The machine learning that people are working on these days threatens to replace very broad swaths of the workforce, of many countries, over a very short period of time.

usernomdeguerre 2mo ago

I can find agreement with a lot of this post (and probably misunderstand just as much), but it's striking to me that it seems to overlook or avoid the obvious moral/ethical option: Pushing AI towards Personal Computing. It seems clear to me that if these models are to have any benefit for humanity then they must be made directly available to as many humans as possible. Right now that cost and effort is astronomical, but general computing also went through a mainframe/shared model before becoming personalized. I believe The Personal Computer was and still is a gift to humanity; for those with an interest in gathering its yield. And now we have an interface with it that can attempt to introspect its' program and speaks human tongue! Imagine what could have been done with this at the time... But if that approach clutches too many pearls to stomach (and I agree it's not all roses) then I'd submit that anyone who champions less is seeking to become our master.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]