3 ms·

"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbe

by ben_w 3mo ago

"Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are. I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now. I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level. Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land. Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).

tjmtjmtjm 3mo ago
> LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now. I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
- Insanity 3mo ago
  It's not true indeed.
  - iwontberude 3mo ago
    [dead]
- ben_w 3mo ago
  LLMs can build their own code or close enough, and are used for AI work directly (both from what METR study shows and from reports I've read from the bigger companies themselves), but this is not what I meant as there isn't much point for anyone outside the bleeding edge companies to do this given open models exist. I've had LLMs write code which performs a genetic algorithm for balancing video game AI*. There's a very soft line in quickly moving metaphorical sand between what it can do and what it can't, and right now I'm not sure which side of that line you'd find a user saying they want a computer vision system to turn a robot arm into a barista given LLMs can search for, download, read, and seemingly do a decent job of implementing research papers e.g. sim2real. Just to be explicit though: I'm not saying the state of AI-led research is sufficient to render unimportant researchers who find better ways to train AI, just me as a software engineer is no longer a blocker to productising that research. * The same LLM had also written the game AI, but while I'm fine pointing to a genetic algorithm balancing it, I don't think that the game AI in itself counts because "game AI" is GOFAI.
bonoboTP 3mo ago
> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  They want to get paid enough to pay human models. Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
  - bonoboTP 3mo ago
    Get paid enough by who and for what reason? Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?
    - imtringued 3mo ago
      You think customers are so cheap they will refuse to pay the few cents per article for a proper online listing but somehow will be willing to pay tens of dollars for the mystery article itself?
    - ben_w 3mo ago
      > Get paid enough by who and for what reason? By their customers, for doing the same thing they'd been doing for much of their working lives up to this point. > Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will? You'd have the answer if you'd continued for just four more words (or five if you count the "they're" as two) past where you cut off the quotation: they're forced by economics
      - bonoboTP 3mo ago
        Is "economics" some god of the pantheon or how can he force things? No, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.
Animats 3mo ago
> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
eru 3mo ago
> The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least). Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.
imtringued 3mo ago
>I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started. After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next. And so on. Until every single job is gone.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  I consider that implicit in what I wrote, perhaps explicit given I wrote about LLMs writing AI. My surprise was the ordering.
ricardobayes 3mo ago
We haven't really been able to figure out the responsibility thing properly yet. I'm ok with AI/LLMs but not so much on agentic stuff, a human always needs to be in the loop. If there's anything we learned from Robocop, is the need of a human decision maker. I'm not okay with a fully agentic radiology AI or a fully autonomous surgery robot, without a surgeon supervising.
- varjag 3mo ago
  It's all a function of cost. If AI surgeon has 3% worse outcomes but works at 1/30th of the cost 24/7 there is no force in the Universe that would hinder adoption.
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    As a first order approximation perhaps; but consider false positives vs false negatives, and that "3% worse outcomes" has many possible measures, e.g. 3% of cases going catastrophically wrong may bump up insurance (or externalised social) costs by a lot more than 3%. We saw the same with the pandemic and the vaccines where the personal harm % of the vaccine was significantly smaller than the personal harm % of the illness and yet had (still has) a huge conspiracy theory about it.
    - varjag 3mo ago
      I meant 3% from median baseline. Humans have enormous variation with some very mediocre surgeons practicing yet people kinda live with that.
thaumasiotes 3mo ago
> But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land. The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities. The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.
- defrost 3mo ago
  > Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required With the significant exception of post plague periods during which some big changes occurred wrt landholder / serf relations, expected pay rates, part ownership, etc. eg: (unvetted source) Worker Power: How the black death revolutionised workers rights - https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-revolutionised-workers-rights/ https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-re...
  - thaumasiotes 3mo ago
    Once again, that isn't a case of the peasants experiencing a labor shortage; it's a case of everything else experiencing a labor shortage, giving opportunities to the peasants. The period after the Black Death was characterized by serfs abandoning their family farms for more lucrative options elsewhere. If the family farms needed them, that wouldn't have happened.
    - defrost 3mo ago
      > Once again, that isn't a case of the peasants experiencing a labor shortage It's your assertion that * no peasants died during the Black Death, * peasants owned "family farms" * no peasant owned family farms suffered a labour shortage despite being "abandoned for more lucrative options elsewhere" ? Okay. Sure.

by ben_w 3mo ago

tjmtjmtjm 3mo ago

> LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now. I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.

Insanity 3mo ago
It's not true indeed.
- iwontberude 3mo ago
  [dead]
ben_w 3mo ago
LLMs can build their own code or close enough, and are used for AI work directly (both from what METR study shows and from reports I've read from the bigger companies themselves), but this is not what I meant as there isn't much point for anyone outside the bleeding edge companies to do this given open models exist. I've had LLMs write code which performs a genetic algorithm for balancing video game AI*. There's a very soft line in quickly moving metaphorical sand between what it can do and what it can't, and right now I'm not sure which side of that line you'd find a user saying they want a computer vision system to turn a robot arm into a barista given LLMs can search for, download, read, and seemingly do a decent job of implementing research papers e.g. sim2real. Just to be explicit though: I'm not saying the state of AI-led research is sufficient to render unimportant researchers who find better ways to train AI, just me as a software engineer is no longer a blocker to productising that research. * The same LLM had also written the game AI, but while I'm fine pointing to a genetic algorithm balancing it, I don't think that the game AI in itself counts because "game AI" is GOFAI.

bonoboTP 3mo ago

> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.

ben_w 3mo ago
They want to get paid enough to pay human models. Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
- bonoboTP 3mo ago
  Get paid enough by who and for what reason? Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?
  - imtringued 3mo ago
    You think customers are so cheap they will refuse to pay the few cents per article for a proper online listing but somehow will be willing to pay tens of dollars for the mystery article itself?
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    > Get paid enough by who and for what reason? By their customers, for doing the same thing they'd been doing for much of their working lives up to this point. > Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will? You'd have the answer if you'd continued for just four more words (or five if you count the "they're" as two) past where you cut off the quotation: they're forced by economics
    - bonoboTP 3mo ago
      Is "economics" some god of the pantheon or how can he force things? No, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.

Animats 3mo ago

> I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".

eru 3mo ago

> The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least). Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.

imtringued 3mo ago

>I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started. After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next. And so on. Until every single job is gone.

ben_w 3mo ago
I consider that implicit in what I wrote, perhaps explicit given I wrote about LLMs writing AI. My surprise was the ordering.

ricardobayes 3mo ago

We haven't really been able to figure out the responsibility thing properly yet. I'm ok with AI/LLMs but not so much on agentic stuff, a human always needs to be in the loop. If there's anything we learned from Robocop, is the need of a human decision maker. I'm not okay with a fully agentic radiology AI or a fully autonomous surgery robot, without a surgeon supervising.

varjag 3mo ago
It's all a function of cost. If AI surgeon has 3% worse outcomes but works at 1/30th of the cost 24/7 there is no force in the Universe that would hinder adoption.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  As a first order approximation perhaps; but consider false positives vs false negatives, and that "3% worse outcomes" has many possible measures, e.g. 3% of cases going catastrophically wrong may bump up insurance (or externalised social) costs by a lot more than 3%. We saw the same with the pandemic and the vaccines where the personal harm % of the vaccine was significantly smaller than the personal harm % of the illness and yet had (still has) a huge conspiracy theory about it.
  - varjag 3mo ago
    I meant 3% from median baseline. Humans have enormous variation with some very mediocre surgeons practicing yet people kinda live with that.

thaumasiotes 3mo ago

> But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land. The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities. The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.

defrost 3mo ago
> Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required With the significant exception of post plague periods during which some big changes occurred wrt landholder / serf relations, expected pay rates, part ownership, etc. eg: (unvetted source) Worker Power: How the black death revolutionised workers rights - https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-revolutionised-workers-rights/ https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-re...
- thaumasiotes 3mo ago
  Once again, that isn't a case of the peasants experiencing a labor shortage; it's a case of everything else experiencing a labor shortage, giving opportunities to the peasants. The period after the Black Death was characterized by serfs abandoning their family farms for more lucrative options elsewhere. If the family farms needed them, that wouldn't have happened.
  - defrost 3mo ago
    > Once again, that isn't a case of the peasants experiencing a labor shortage It's your assertion that * no peasants died during the Black Death, * peasants owned "family farms" * no peasant owned family farms suffered a labour shortage despite being "abandoned for more lucrative options elsewhere" ? Okay. Sure.