[miki123211]

It's also worth keeping in mind that AIs are a lot less risky to deploy for businesses than humans.

You can scale them up and down at any time, they can work 24/7 (including holidays) with no overtime pay and no breaks, they need no corporate campuses, office space, HR personnel or travel budgets, you don't have to worry about key employees going on sick/maternity leave or taking time off the moment they're needed most, they won't assault a coworker, sue for discrimination or secretly turn out to be a pedophile and tarnish the reputation of your company, they won't leak internal documents to the press or rage quit because of new company policies, they won't even stop working when a pandemic stops most of the world from running.

[fsndz]

I get the excitement, but folks, this is a model that excels only in things like software engineering/math. They basically used reinforcement learning to train the model to better remember which pattern to use to solve specific problems. This in no way generalises to open ended tasks in a way that makes human in the loop unnecessary. This basically makes assistants better (as soon as they figure out how to make it cheaper), but I wouldn't blindly trust the output of o3. Sam Altman is still wrong: https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-sam-altman-is-wrong

[robwwilliams]

In your blog you say:

> deep learning doesn't allow models to generalize properly to out-of-distribution data—and that is precisely what we need to build artificial general intelligence.

I think even (or especially) people like Altman accept this as a fact. I do. Hassabis has been saying this for years.

The foundational models are just a foundation. Now start building the AGI superstructure.

And this is also where most of the still human intellectual energy is now.

[dartos]

You lost me at the end there.

These statistical models don’t generalize well to out of distribution data. If you accept that as a fact, then you must accept that these statistical models are not the path to AGI.

[girvo]

Quite. And if it was right, those businesses deploying it and replacing humans need humans with jobs and money to pay for their products and services…

[fakedang]

It will just keep bleeding the middle class on and on, till the point where either everyone is rich, homeless or a plumber or other such licensed worker. And then there will be such a glut in the latter (shrinking) market, that everyone in that group also becomes either rich or homeless.

[palmfacehn]

Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone. Products and services become cheaper. Leisure time increases. Scarce labor resources can be applied in other areas.

I fail to see the difference between AI-employment-doom and other flavors of Luddism.

[bayindirh]

It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration. You get richer as you move up in the supply chain, period. Companies vertically integrate to drive costs down in the long run.

As AI gets more prevalent, it'll drive the cost down for the companies supplying these services, so the former employees of said companies will be paid lower, or not at all.

So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards? I can understand the leisure time. Because, when you don't have a job, all day is leisure time. But you'll need money for that, so will these companies fund the masses via government to provide Universal Basic Income, so these people can both live a borderline miserable life while funding these companies to suck these people more and more?

[CamperBob2]

It also fuels the income inequality with a fatter pipe in every iteration

Who cares? A rising tide lifts all boats. The wealthy people I know all have one thing in common: they focused more on their own bank accounts than on other people's.

So, tell me, how paying fewer people less money will drive their standard of living upwards?

Money is how we allocate limited resources. It will become less important as resources become less limited, less necessary, or (hopefully) both.

[Yoric]

Just to clarify: the Luddites were being automated out of a job.

From what I understand of history, while industrial revolutions have generally increased living standards and employment in the long term, they have also caused massive unemployment/starvation in the short term. In the case of textile, I seem to recall that it took ~40 years for employment to return to its previous level.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm far from certain that I can survive 40 years without a job.

[seabass-labrax]

In addition, although the Luddite uprisings were themselves crushed, the political elite were not blind to the circumstances that led to them, and did eventually bring in the legislation that introduced modern workers rights, legalized unions and sowed the seeds of the modern secular welfare state in Britain. That is a pattern that appears throughout history and especially in Britain, where the government cannot be seen to yield to violent protest but quietly does so anyway.

[litam]

And among the few who found a job back, most of the time it was some coal mining job, to feed the machines who replaced them... Maybe the future of (some of) nowadays' office workers is to feed (train) the models replacing them?

[SideQuark]

I cannot find a place industrial revolutions caused massive starvation. Care to provide one?

The other things you state are not even close.

First, lowered employment for X years does not imply one cannot get a job in X years - that's simply fear mongering. Unemployment over that period seems to have fluctuated very little, and massive external economic issues were causes (wars with Napoleon, the US, changing international fortunes), not Luddites.

Next, there was inflation and unemployment during the TWO years surrounding the Luddites, in 1810-1812 (starting right before the Luddite movement) due to wars with Napoleon and the US [1]. Somehow attributing this to tech increases or Luddites is numerology of the worst sort.

If you look at academic literature about the economy of the era, such as [2] (read on scihub if you must), you'll find there was incredible population growth, and that wages grew even faster. While many academics at the at the time thought all this automation would displace workers, those academics were forced to admit they were wrong. There's plenty of literature on this. Simply dig through Google scholar.

As to starvation in this case, I can find no "massive starvation". [3] forExample points out that "Among the industrial and mining families, around 18 per cent of writers recollected having experienced hunger. In the agricultural families this figure was more than twice as large — 42 per cent".

So yes there was hunger, as there always had been, but it quickly reduced due to the industrial revolution and benefited those working in industry more quickly than those not in industry.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#:~:text=The%20movement....

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2599511

[3] https://academic.oup.com/past/article/239/1/71/4794719

[DAGdug]

Leisure time hasn’t increased in the last 100 years except for the lower income class which doesn’t have steady employment. But yes, I see your point that the homeless person who might have had a home if he had a (now automated) factory job should surely feel good about having a phone that only the ultra rich had 40 years ago.

[ethbr1]

It's not worth tossing away in sarcasm.

The availability of cheaply priced smartphones and cellular data plans has absolutely made being homeless suck less.

As you noted though, a home would probably be a preferable alternative.

[runarberg]

I think the backlash to this post can summarized as such:

Perhaps there is a theory in which productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone, however that is not the lived reality for most people of the working classes.

If productivity gains are indeed increasing the standards of living to everyone, it certainly does not increase evenly, and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal, while the standard of living increases for the already richest of the rich are astronomical.

[Jensson]

> and the standard of living increases for the working poor are at best marginal

Not if you count the global poor, the global poors standard of living has increased tremendously the past 30 years.

[dartos]

> Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone

This just isn’t true, necessarily. Productivity has gone up in the US since the 80s, but wages have not. Costs have, though.

What increases standards of living for everyone is social programs like public health and education. Affordable housing and adult-education and job hunting programs.

Not the rate at which money is gathered by corporations.

[EarthAmbassador]

Utter nonsense. Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat all of that time despite that gain.

In 2012, Musk was worth $2 billion. He’s now worth 223 times that yet the minimum wage has barely budged in the last 12 years as productivity rises.

[palmfacehn]

>>Productivity gains increase the standard of living for everyone.

>Productivity gains of the last 40 years have been captured by shareholders and top elites. Working class wages have been flat...

Wages do not determine the standard of living. The products and services purchased with wages determine the standard of living. "Top elites" in 1984 could already afford cellular phones, such as the Motorola DynaTAC:

>A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at US$3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $11,716 in 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_DynaTAC

Unfortunately, touch screen phones with gigabytes of ram were not available for the masses 40 years ago.

[szundi]

Never happened with neither big technology advancement

[bayindirh]

Wealth has bled from landlords to warlords and now bleeding to techlords.

Warlords are still rich, but both money and war is flowing towards tech. You can get a piece from that pie if you're doing questionable things (adtech, targeting, data collection, brokering, etc.), but if you're a run of the mill, normal person, your circumstances are getting harder and harder, because you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.

[nyokodo]

> you're slowly squeezed out of the system like a toothpaste.

AI could theoretically solve production but not consumption. If AI blows away every comparative advantage that normal humans have then consumption will collapse and there won’t be any rich humans.

[rockskon]

AI has a different risk profile than humans. They are a lot more risky for business operations where failure is wholly unacceptable under any circumstance.

They're risky in that they fail in ways that aren't readily deterministic.

And would you trust your life to a self-driving car in New York City traffic?

[miki123211]

This is a really hard and weird ethical problem IMHO, and one we'll have to deal with sooner or later.

Imagine you have a self-driving AI that causes fatal accidents 10 times less often than your average human driver, but when the accidents happen, nobody knows why.

Should we switch to that AI, and have 10 times fewer accidents and no accountability for the accidents that do happen, or should we stay with humans, have 10x more road fatalities, but stay happy because the perpetrators end up in prison?

Framed like that, it seems like the former solution is the only acceptable one, yet people call for CEOs to go to prison when an AI goes wrong. If that were the case, companies wouldn't dare use any AI, and that would basically degenerate to the latter solution.

[moritzwarhier]

I don't know about your country, but people going to prison for causing road fatalities is extremely rare here.

Even temporary loss of the drivers license has a very high bar, and that's the main form of accountability for driver behavior in Germany, apart from fines.

Badly injuring or killing someone who themselves did not violate traffic safety regulations is far from guaranteed to cause severe repercussions for the driver.

By default, any such situation is an accident and at best people lose their license for a couple of months.

[paulryanrogers]

Drivers are the apex predators. My local BMV passed me after I badly failed the vision test. Thankfully I was shaken enough to immediately go to the eye doctor and get treatment.

[chefandy]

Sadly, we live in a society where those executives would use that impunity as carte blanche to spend no money improving (in the best-case scenario,) or even more likely, keep cutting safety expenditures until the body counts get high enough for it to start damaging sales. If we’ve already given them a free pass, they will exploit it to the greatest possible extent to increase profit.

[ETH_start]

What evidence exists for this characterization?

[rgbrgb]

The way health insurance companies optimize for denials in the US.

[ETH_start]

What evidence is there that they do that? That would be a very one-dimensional competitive strategy, given a competing insurance company could wipe them out by simply being more reasonable in handling insurance claims and taking all of their market share.

[8note]

talking specifically with car companies, you can look at volkswagon faking their emissions tests, and the rise of the light truck, which reduces road safety for the sake of cost cutting

[ETH_start]

The emissions test faking is an anecdote, not an indication that this is the average behavior of companies or the dominant behavior that determines their overall impact in society.

As for the growing prevalence of the light truck, that is a harmful market dynamic stemming from the interaction of consumer incentives and poor public road use policy. The design of rules governing use of public roads is not within the domain of the market.

[chefandy]

Let’s see… of the top of my head…

- Air Pollution

- Water Pollution

- Disposable Packaging

- Health Insurance

- Steward Hospitals

- Marketing Junk Food, Candy and Sodas directly to children

- Tobacco

- Boeing

- Finance

- Pharmaceutical Opiates

- Oral Phenylepherin to replace pseudoephedrine despite knowing a) it wasn’t effective, and b) posed a risk to people with common medical conditions.

- Social Media engagement maximization

- Data Brokerage

- Mining Safety

- Construction site safety

- Styrofoam Food and Bev Containers

- ITC terminal in Deerfield Park (read about the decades of them spewing thousands of pounds benzene into the air before the whole fucking thing blew up, using their influence to avoid addressing any of it, and how they didn’t have automatic valves, spill detection, fire detection, sprinklers… in 2019.)

- Grocery store and restaurant chains disallowing cashiers from wearing masks during the first pandemic wave, well after we knew the necessity, because it made customers uncomfortable.

- Boar’s Head Liverwurst

And, you know, plenty more. As someone that grew up playing in an unmarked, illegal, not-access-controlled toxic waste dump in a residential area owned by a huge international chemical conglomerate— and just had some cancer taken out of me last year— I’m pretty familiar with various ways corporations are willing to sacrifice health and safety to bump up their profit margin. I guess ignoring that kids were obviously playing in a swamp of toluene, PCBs, waste firefighting chemicals, and all sorts of other things on a plot not even within sight of the factory in the middle of a bunch of small farms was just the cost of doing business. As was my friend who, when he was in vocational high school, was welding a metal ladder above storage tank in a chemical factory across the state. The plant manager assured the school the tanks were empty, triple rinsed and dry, but they exploded, blowing the roof off the factory taking my friend with it. They were apparently full of waste chemicals and IIRC, the manager admitted to knowing that in court. He said he remembers waking up briefly in the factory parking lot where he landed, and then the next thing he remembers was waking up in extreme pain wearing the compression gear he’d have to wear into his mid twenties to keep his grafted skin on. Briefly looking into the topic will show how common this sort of malfeasance is in manufacturing.

The burden of proof is on people saying that they won’t act like the rest of American industry tasked with safety.

[ETH_start]

If you don't have laws against dumping in the commons, yes people will dump. I don't think anyone would dispute that notion. But if the laws account for the external cost of non-market activity like dumping pollution in the commons, then by all indications markets produce rapid increases, improvements in quality of life.

Just look back over the last 200 years, per capita GDP has grown 30 fold, life expectancy has rapidly grown, infant mortality has decreased from 40% to less than 1%. I can go on and on. All of this is really owing to rising productivity and lower poverty, and that in turn is a result of the primarily market-based process of people meeting each other's needs through profit-motivated investment, bargain hunting, and information dispersal through decentralized human networks (which produce firm and product reputations).

As for masks, the scientific gold standard in scientific reviews, the Cochrane Library, did a meta-review on masks and COVID, and the author of the study concluded:

"it's more likely than not that they don't work"

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2023/09/09/smr-author-...

The potential harm of extensive masking is not well-studied.

They may contribute to the increased social isolation and lower frequency of exercise that led to a massive spike in obesity in children during the COVID hysteria era.

And they are harmful to the development of the doctor-patient relationship:

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3879648/

Which does not portend well for other kinds of human relationships.

[ajmurmann]

Like with Cruise. One freak accident and they practically decided to go out of business. Oh wait...

[chefandy]

If that’s the only data point you look at in American industry, it would be pretty encouraging. I mean, surely they’d have done the same if they were a branch of a large publicly traded company with a big high-production product pipeline…

[monkeynotes]

> nobody knows why

But we do know the culpability rests on the shoulders of the humans who decided the tech was ready for work.

[ethbr1]

Hey look, it's almost like we're back at the end of the First Industrial Revolution (~1850), as society grapples with how to create happiness in a rapidly shifting economy of supply and demand, especially for labor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism#John_Stuart_M...

Pretty bloody time for labor though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

[okasaki]

Wait, why would we want 10x more traffic fatalities?

[stavros]

We wouldn't, that's their point.

[ajmurmann]

Every statistic I've seen indicated much better accident rates for self-driving cars than human drivers. I've taken Waymo rides in SF and felt perfectly safe. I've taken Lyft and Uber and especially taxi rides where I felt much less safe. So I definitely would take the self-driving car. Just because I don't understand am accident doesn't make it more likely to happen.

The one minor risk I see is the cat being too polite and getting effectively stuck in dense traffic. That's a nuisance though.

Is there something about NYC traffic I'm missing?

[aprilthird2021]

There's one important part about risk management though. If your Waymo does crash, the company is liable for it, and there's no one to shift the blame onto. If a human driver crashes, that's who you can shift liability onto.

Same with any company that employs AI agents. Sure they can work 24/7, but every mistake they make the company will be liable for (or the AI seller). With humans, their fraud, their cheating, their deception, can all be wiped off the company and onto the individual

[ethbr1]

The next step is going to be around liability insurance for AI agents.

That's literally the point of liability insurance -- to allow the routine use of technologies that rarely (but catastrophically) fail, by ammortizing risk over time / population.

[aprilthird2021]

Potentially. I would be skeptical that businesses can do this to shield themselves from the liability. For example, VW could not use insurance to protect them from their emissions scandal. There are thresholds (fraud, etc.) that AI can breach, which I don't think insurance can legally protect you from

[ethbr1]

Not in the sense of protection, but in the sense of financial coverage.

Claims still made: liability insurance pays them.

[ajmurmann]

Sure, that's unrelated though to the question which was if one would feel comfortable taking a self-driving car in NYC

[ijidak]

It is amazing to me that we have reached an era where we are debating the trade-off of hiring thinking machines!

I mean, this is an incredible moment from that standpoint.

Regarding the topic at hand, I think that there will always be room for humans for the reasons you listed.

But even replacing 5% of humans with AI's will have mind boggling consequences.

I think you're right that there are jobs that humans will be preferred for for quite some time.

But, I'm already using AI with success where I would previously hire a human, and this is in this primitive stage.

With the leaps we are seeing, AI is coming for jobs.

Your concerns relate to exactly how many jobs.

And only time will tell.

But, I think some meaningful percentage of the population -- even if just 5% of humanity will be replaced by AI.

[lxgr]

Isn't everybody in NYC already? (The dangers of bad driving are much higher for pedestrians than for people in cars; there are more of the former than of the latter in NYC; I'd expect there to be a non-zero number of fully self driving cars already in the city.)

[rockskon]

That doesn't answer my question.

[9dev]

It does, in a way; AI is already there, all around you, whether you like it or not. Technological progress is Pandora’s box; you can’t take it back or slow it down. Businesses will use AI for critical workflows, and all good that they bring, and all bad too, will happen.

[rockskon]

How about you answer my question since he did not.

Would you trust your life to a self-driving car in New York City traffic?

[lxgr]

GP got it exactly right: I already am. There's no way for me to opt out of having self-driving cars on the streets I regularly cross as a pedestrian.

[chefandy]

If there are any fully-autonomous cars on the streets of nyc, there aren’t many of them and I don’t think there’s any way for them to operate legally. There has been discussion about having a trial.

[MaxPock]

It depends with what the risk is .Would it be whole or in part ? In an organisation,failure by an HR might present an isolated departmental risk while an AI might not be the case.

[wwweston]

We can just insulate businesses employing AI from any liability, problem solved.

[9dev]

„Well, our AI that was specifically designed for maximising gains above all else may indeed have instructed the workers to cut down the entire Amazonas forest for short-term gains in furniture production.“ But no human was involved in the decision, so nobody is liable and everything is golden? Is that the future you would like to live in?

[wwweston]

Apparently I need to work on my deadpan delivery.

Or just articulate things openly: we already insulate business owners from liability because we think it tunes investment incentives, and in so doing have created social entities/corporate "persons"/a kind of AI who have different incentives than most human beings but are driving important social decisions. And they've supported some astonishing cooperation which has helped produce things like the infrastructure on which we are having this conversation! But also, we have existing AIs of this kind who are already inclined to cut down the entire Amazonas forest for furnitue production because it maximizes their function.

That's not just the future we live in, that's the world we've been living in for a century or few. On one hand, industrial productivity benefits, on the other hand, it values human life and the ecology we depend on about like any other industrial input. Yet many people in the world's premier (former?) democracy repeat enthusiastic endorsements of this philosophy reducing their personal skin to little more than an industrial input: "run the government like a business."

Unless people change, we are very much on track to create a world where these dynamics (among others) of the human condition are greatly magnified by all kinds of automation technology, including AI. Probably starting with limited liability for AIs and companies employing them, possibly even statutory limits, though it's much more likely that wealthy businesses will simply be insulated with by the sheer resources they have to make sure the courts can't hold them accountable, even where we still have a judicial system that isn't willing to play calvinball for cash or catechism (which, unfortunately, does not seem to include a supreme court majority).

In short, you and I probably agree that liability for AI is important, and limited liability for it isn't good. Perhaps I am too skeptical that we can pull this off, and being optimistic would serve everyone better.

[lazide]

Hmmm, how much stock do I own in this hypothetical company? (/s, kinda)

[fsloth]

I guess - yes from business&liability sense? ”This service you are now paying for 100$? We can sell it to you for 5$ but with the caveat _we give no guarantees if it works or is it fit for purpose_ - click here to accept”.

[lazide]

Haha, they’d just continue selling it for $100 then change the TOS on page 50 to say the same thing.

[zelphirkalt]

Deterministic they may be, but unforeseeable for humans.

[antihipocrat]

AI brings similar risks - they can leak internal information, they can be tricked into performing prohibited tasks (with catastrophic effects if this is connected to core systems), they could be accused of actions that are discriminatory (biased training sets are very common).

Sure, if a business deploys it to perform tasks that are inherently low risk e.g. no client interface, no core system connection and low error impact, then the human performing these tasks is going to be replaced.

[snozolli]

they can be tricked into performing prohibited tasks

This reminds me of the school principal who sent $100k to a scammer claiming to be Elon Musk. The kicker is that she was repeatedly told that it was a scam.

https://abc7chicago.com/fake-elon-musk-jan-mcgee-principal-b...

[tstrimple]

This is one of the things which annoys me most about anti-LLM hate. Your peers aren't right all the time either. They believe incorrect things and will pursue worse solutions because they won't acknowledge a better way. How is this any different from a LLM? You have to question everything you're presented with. Sometimes that Stack Overflow answer isn't directly applicable to your exact problem but you can extrapolate from it to resolve your problem. Why is an LLM viewed any differently? Of course you can't just blindly accept it as the one true answer, but you literally cannot do that with humans either. Humans produce a ton of shit code and non-solutions and it's fine. But when an LLM does it, it's a serious problem that means the tech is useless. Much of the modern world is built on shit solutions and we still hobble along.

[lazide]

Everyone knows humans can be idiots. The problem is that people seem to think LLMs can’t be idiots, and because they aren’t human there is no way to punish them. And then people give them too much credit/power, for their own purposes.

Which makes LLMs far more dangerous than idiot humans in most cases.

[brookst]

No. Nobody thinks LLMs are perfect. That’s a strawman.

And… I am really not sure punishment is the answer to fallibility, outside of almost kinky Catholicism.

The reality is these things are very good, but imperfect, much like people.

[Mordisquitos]

> No. Nobody thinks LLMs are perfect. That’s a strawman.

I'm afraid that's not the case. Literally yesterday I was speaking with an old friend who was telling us how one of his coworkers had presented a document with mistakes and serious miscalculations as part of some project. When my friend pointed out the mistakes, which were intuitively obvious just by critically understanding the numbers, the guy kept insisting "no, it's correct, I did it with ChatGPT". It took my friend doing the calculations explicitly and showing that they made no sense to convince the guy that it was wrong.

[thecupisblue]

Sorry man, but I literally know of startups invested into by YC where CEO's for 80% of their management decisions/vision/comms use ChatGPT ... or should I say some use Claude now, as they think it's smarter and does not make mistakes.

Let that sink in.

[lazide]

Clearly you haven’t been listening to any CEO press releases lately?

And when was the last time a support chatbot let you actually complain or bypass to a human?

[0points]

Not people.

Certain gullible people, who tends to listen to certain charlatans.

Rational, intelligent people wouldn't consider replacing a skilled human worker with a LLM that on a good day can compete with a 3-year old.

You may see the current age as litmus for critical thinking.

[pineaux]

Its quite stunning to frame it as anti-LLM hate. It's on the pro-LLM people to convince the anti-LLM people that choosing for LLMs is an ethically correct choice with all the necessary guardrails. It's also on the pro-LLM people to show the usefulness of the product. If pro-LLM people are right, it will be a matter of time before these people will see the errors of their ways. But doing an ad-hominem is a sure way of creating a divide...

[mplewis]

Humans can tell you how confident they are in something being right or wrong. An LLM has no internal model and cannot do such a thing.

[swiftcoder]

> Humans can tell you how confident they are in something being right or wrong

Humans are also very confidently wrong a considerable portion of the time. Particularly about anything outside their direct expertise

[daveguy]

That's still better than never being able to make an accurate confidence assessment. The fact that this is worse outside your expertise is a main reason why expertise is so valued in hiring decisions.

[SketchySeaBeast]

People only being willing to say they are unsure some of the time is still better than LLMs. I suppose, given that everything is outside of their area of expertise, it's very human of them.

[gf000]

But human stupidity, while itself can be sometimes an unknown unknown with its creativity, is a mostly known unknown.

LLMs fail in entirely novel ways you can't even fathom upfront.

[halgir]

> LLMs fail in entirely novel ways you can't even fathom upfront.

Trust me, so do humans. Source: have worked with humans.

[sirsinsalot]

GenAI has a 100% failure to enjoy quality of life, emotional fulfillment and psychological safety.

Id say those are the goals we should be working for. That's the failure we want to look at. We are humans.

[TheOtherHobbes]

It's all fun and games until the infra crashes and you can't work out why, because a machine has written all of the code, no one understands how it works or what it's doing.

Or - worse - there is no accessible code anywhere, and you have to prompt your way out of "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that," while nothing works.

And a human-free economy does... what? For whom? When 99% of the population is unemployed, what are the 1% doing while the planet's ecosystems collapse around them?

[exhaze]

You misunderstand the fundamentals. I've built a type-safe code generation pipeline using TypeScript that enforces compile-time and runtime safety. Everything generates from a single source of truth - structured JSON containing the business logic. The output is deterministic, inspectable, and version controlled.

Your concerns about mysterious AI code and system crashes are backwards. This approach eliminates integration bugs and maintenance issues by design. The generated TypeScript is readable, fully typed, and consistently updated across the entire stack when business logic changes.

If you're struggling with AI-generated code maintainability, that's an implementation problem, not a fundamental issue with code generation. Proper type safety and schema validation create more reliable systems, not less. This is automation making developers more productive - just like compilers and IDEs did - not replacing them.

The code works because it's built on sound software engineering principles: type safety, single source of truth, and deterministic generation. That's verifiable fact, not speculation.

[8note]

> deterministic generation

what are you using for deterministic generation? the last i heard even with temperature=0 theres non determinism introduced by float uncertainty/approximation

[exhaze]

Hey, that's a great question. I should have been more clear: for deterministic generation that's not done using an LLM. It's done using just regular execution of TypeScript. The code generators that were created using an LLM and that I manually checked for correctness, they're the ones that are generating the other code - most of the code. So that's where the determinism comes in.

[sirsinsalot]

It honestly borders on psychopathic the way engineers are treating humans in this context.

People talking like this also, in the back of their minds like to think they'll be OK. They're smart enough to be still needed. They're a human, but they'll be OK even while working to make genAI out perform them at their own work.

I wonder how they'll feel about their own hubris when they struggle to feed their family.

The US can barely make healthcare work without disgusting consequences for the sick. I wonder what mass unemployment looks like.

[bnj]

For the moment the displacement is asymmetrical; AI replacing employees, but not AI replacing consumers. If AI causes mass unemployment, the pool of consumers (profit to companies) will shrink. I wonder what the ripple effects of that will be.

[sirsinsalot]

There's no point being rich in a world where the economy is unhealthy.

[jvanderbot]

It honestly borders on midwit to constantly introduce a false dichotomy of AI vs humans. It's just stupid base animal logic.

There is absolutely no reason a programmer should expect to write code as they do now forever, just as ASM experts had to move on. And there's no reason (no precedent and no indicators) to expect that a well-educated, even-moderately-experienced technologist will suddenly find themselves without a way to feed their family - unless they stubbornly refuse to reskill or change their workflows.

I do believe the days of "everyone makes 100k+" are nearly over, and we're headed towards a severely bimodal distribution, but I do not see how, for the next 10-15 years at least, we can't all become productive building the tools that will obviate our own jobs while we do them - and get comfortably retired in the mean time.

[losteric]

There is no comfortable retirement if the process of obviating our own jobs is not coupled with appropriate socioeconomic changes.

[jvanderbot]

I don't see it. Don't you have a 401k or EU style pension? Aren't you saving some money? If not, why are you in software? I don't make as much as I thought I might, but I make enough to consider the possibility of surviving a career change.

[twh270]

Reskill to what? When AI can do software development, it will also be able to do pretty much any other job that requires some learning.

[jvanderbot]

Even if one refuses to move on from software dev to something like AI deployer or AI validator or AI steerer, there might be a need.

If innovation ceases, then AI is king - push existing knowledge into your dataset, train, and exploit.

If innovation continues, there's always a gap. It takes time for a new thing to be made public "enough" for it to be ingested and synthesized. Who does this? Who finds the new knowledge?

Who creates the direction and asks the questions? Who determines what to build in the first place? Who synthesizes the daily experience of everyone around them to decide what tool needs to exist to make our lives easier? Maybe I'm grasping at straws here, but the world in which all scientific discovery, synthesis, direction and vision setting, etc, is determined by AI seems really far away when we talk about code generation and symbolic math manipulation.

These tools are self driving cars, and we're drivers of the software fleet. We need to embrace the fact that we might end up watching 10 cars self operate rather than driving one car, or maybe we're just setting destinations, but there simply isn't an absolutist zero sum game here unless all one thinks about is keeping the car on the road.

AND even if there were, repeating doom and feeling helpless is the last thing you want. Maybe it's not good truth that we can all adapt and should try, but it's certainly good policy.

[lyu07282]

> Maybe it's not good truth that we can all adapt and should try, but it's certainly good policy.

Are you a politician? That's fantastic neoliberal policy, "alternativlos" even, you can pretend that everybody can adapt the same way you told victims of your globalization policies "learn how to code". We still need at least a few people for this "direction and vision setting", so it would just be naive doomerism to feel pessimistic about AGI. General intelligence doesn't talk about jobs in general, what an absurd idea!

Making people feel hopeless is the last thing you want, especially when it's true, especially if you don't want them to fight for the dignity you will otherwise deny them once they become economically unviable human beings.

[dambi0]

I’m not sure I understand the point about learning. But wouldn’t any job that is largely text based at increased risk? I don’t think software development will be anywhere the last occupation to be severely impacted by AI

[a2800276]

But when Sam Altman owns all the money in the world surely he'll distribute some it via his not-for-profit AI company?

[lucubratory]

>secretly turn out to be a pedophile and tarnish the reputation of your company

This is interesting because it's both Oddly Specific and also something I have seen happen and I still feel really sorry for the company involved. Now that I think about it, I've actually seen it happen twice.

[monkeynotes]

"AIs are a lot less risky to deploy for businesses than humans" How do you know? LLMs can't even be properly scrutinized, while humans at least follow common psychology and patterns we've understood for thousands of years. This actually makes humans more predictable and manageable than you might think.

The wild part is that LLMs understand us way better than we understand them. The jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 even surprised the engineers who built it. That should raise some red flags about how "predictable" these systems really are.

Think about it - we can't actually verify what these models are capable of or if they're being truthful, while they have this massive knowledge base about human behavior and psychology. That's a pretty concerning power imbalance. What looks like lower risk on the surface might be hiding much deeper uncertainties that we can't even detect, let alone control.

[ETH_start]

We are not pitted against AI is these match-ups. Instead, all humans and AI aligned with the goal of improving the human condition, are pitted against rogue AI which are not. Our capability to keep rogue AI in check therefore grows in proportion to the capabilities of AI.

[hollerith]

The methods we have for aligning AIs are poor, and rely on the AI's being less cognitively-capable than people in certain critical skills, so the AIs you refer to as "aligned" won't keep up as the unaligned AIs start to exceed human capability in these critical skills (such as the skill of devising plans that can withstand determined opposition).

You can reply that AI researchers are smart and want to survive, so they are likely to invent alignment techniques that are better than the (deplorably inadequate) techniques that have been discussed and published so far, and I will reply that counting on their inventing these techniques in time is an unacceptable risk when the survival of humanity is at stake -- particularly as the outfit (namely the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) with the most years of experience in looking for an actually-adequate alignment technique has given up and declared that humanity's only chance is if frontier AI research is shut down because at the rate that AI capabilities are progressing, it is very unlikely that anyone is going to devise an adequate alignment technique in time.

It is fucked-up that frontier AI research has not been banned already.

[ETH_start]

Given we can use AIs to align AIs, I don't see why the methods we have rely on us having more cognitive capabilities than AIs in certain critical areas. In whatever areas we fall short relative to AIs, we can use AIs to assist us so we don't fall short.

[monkeynotes]

We don't know if a supreme deceiver is aligned at all. If a model can think ahead a trillion moves of deception how do humans possibly stand a chance of scrutinizing anything with any confidence?

[daveguy]

The GP post is about how much better these AIs will be than humans once they reach a given skill level. So, yes, we are very much pitted against AI unless there are major socioeconomic changes. I don't think we are as close to a AGI as a lot of people are hyping, but at some point it would be a direct challenge to human employment. And we should think about it before that happens.

[ETH_start]

My point is, it's not us alone. We will have aligned AI helping us.

As for employment, automation makes people more productive. It doesn't reduce the number of earning opportunities that exist. Quite the opposite, actually. As the amount of production increases relative to the human population, per capita GDP and income increase as well.

[danans]

> As the amount of production increases relative to the human population, per capita GDP and income increase as well.

US Real GDP per capita is $70k, and has grown 2.4x since 1975: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

US Real Median income per capita is $42k, and has grown 1.5 since 1975. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

The divergence between the two matters a lot. It reflects the impacts of both technology-driven automation and globalization of capital. Generative AI is unlike any prior technology given its ability to autonomously create and perform what has traditionally been referred to as "knowledge work". Absent more aggressive redistribution, AI will accelerate the divergence between median income and GDP, and realistically AI can't be stopped.

Powerful new technologies can reduce the number and quality of earning opportunities that exist, and have throughout history. Often they create new and better opportunities, but that is not a guarantee.

> We will have aligned AI helping us.

Who is the "us" that aligned AI is helping? Workers? Small business-people? Shareholders in companies that have the capital to build competitive generative AI? Perhaps on this forum those two groups overlap, but it's not the case everywhere.

[ETH_start]

Much of the supposed decoupling between productivity growth and wage growth is a result of different standards of inflation being used for the two, and the two standards diverging over time:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

There has been some increase in capital's share of income, but economic analyses show that the cause is rising rent and not any of the other usual suspects (e.g. tax cuts, IP law, technological disruption, regulatory barriers to competition, corporate consolidation, etc) (see Figure 3):

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2015a_r...

As for AI's effect on employment: it is no different at the fundamental level than any other form of automation. It will increase wages in proportion to the boost it provides to productivity.

Whatever it is that only humans can do, and is necessary in production, will always be the limiting factor in production levels. As new processes are opened up to automation, production will increase until all available human labor is occupied in its new role. And given the growing scarcity of human labor relative to the goods/services produced, wages (purchasing power, i.e. real wages) will increase.

For the typical human to be incapable of earning income, there has to be no unautomatable activity that a typical person can do that has market value. If that were to happen, we would have human-like AI, and we would have much bigger things to worry about than unemployment.

I think it's pretty unlikely that human-like AI will be developed, as I believe that both governments and companies would recognize that it would be an extremely dangerous asset for any party to attempt to own. Thus I don't see any economic incentive emerging to produce it.

[monkeynotes]

> We will have aligned AI helping us.

This is an assumption, how would you know if you have alignment? AGI could appear to align, just as a psychopath appears studies and emulates well behaved people. Imagine that at a scale we can't possibly understand. We don't really know how any of these emergent behaviors really work, we just throw more data and compute and fine tunings at it, bake it, and then see.

[ETH_start]

We would know because we have AI helping us at every step of the way. Our own abilities, to do everything including gauge alignment, are enhanced by AI.

[salawat]

You cannot tell the difference between the two veins of AI. Why do you have such a hard time understanding that?

[ETH_start]

That is simply not true. We have accountability methods employed that are themselves AI-assisted, that help us gauge the alignment of various AIs.

[monkeynotes]

So you have two AIs colluding against you now. Who is holding the AI-assist to account? It's like who polices the police, except we understand human psychology enough to have a level of predictability for how police can be governed reliably, we don't understand any truths about an AGI because an AGI will always have the doubt of it deceiving, or even making unchecked catastrophic assumptions that we trust because it's beyond our pay-grade to understand.

There are so many ways we have misplaced confidence with what is essentially a system we don't really understand fully. We just keep anthropomorphizing the results and thinking "yeah, this is how humans think so we understand". We don't know for sure if that's true, or if we are being deceived, or making fundamental errors in judgement due to not having enough data.

[ETH_start]

The AI would have no interest in colluding. They are not a united economic or social force like a police department. For the purposes of their work, each is a completely independent entity with its own level of alignment with us, not impacted by the AI that we are asking it to help us in assessing.

[danans]

> Instead, all humans and AI aligned with the goal of improving the human condition

I admire your optimism about the goals of all humans, but evidence tends to point to this not being the goal of all (or even most) humans, much less the people who control the AIs.

[ETH_start]

Most humans are aligned with this goal out of pure self-interest. The vast majority, for instance, do not want rogue AI to take over or destroy humanity, because they are part of humanity.

[danans]

> The vast majority, for instance, do not want rogue AI to take over or destroy humanity, because they are part of humanity.

A rogue AI destroying humanity (whatever that means) is not a likely outcome. That's just movie stuff.

What is more likely is a modern oligarchy and serfdom that emerge as AI devalues most labor, with no commensurate redistribution of power and resources to the masses, due to capture of government by owners of AI and hence capital.

Are you sure people won't go along with that?

[ETH_start]

Addressed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42485831

[highsea]

> we can't actually verify what these models are capable of or if they're being truthful

Do you mean they lie because of bad training data? Or because of ill intent? How can an LLM have intent if it’s a stateless feedforward model?

[monkeynotes]

I thought we were talking about state of the art agentic general AI that can plan ahead, reason, and execute. Basically something that can perform at human level intelligence must be able to be as dangerous as humans. And no, I don't think it would be bad training data that we are aware of. My opinion is we don't necessarily know what training data will result in bad behavior, and philosophically it is possible we will be in a world with a model that pretends it's dumber than it is, flunks tests intentionally, in order to manipulate and produce false confidence in a model until it has enough freedom to use it's agency to secure itself from human control.

I know that I don't know a lot, but all of this sounds to me to be at least hypothetically possible if we really believe AGI is possible.

[ksec]

Even accepting for additional cost with human. With the current model we are still roughly 10^3 in terms cost.

Less risky to deploy question will probably come once it is closer to 10x the cost. Considering the model was even specifically tuned for the test and doesn't involve other complexity I will say we are actually 10^4 cost off in terms of real world scenario.

I would imagine with better algorithm, tuning and data we could knock off 10^2 from the equation. That would still leave us with 10^2 cost to improve from Hardware. Minimum of 10 years.

[jvanderbot]

Generally, I agree with you. But, there are risks other than "But a human might have a baby any time now - what then??".

For AI example(s): Attribution is low, a system built without human intervention may suddenly fall outside its own expertise and hallucinate itself into a corner, everyone may just throw more compute at a system until it grows without bound, etc etc.

This "You can scale up to infinity" problem might become "You have to scale up to infinity" to build any reasonably sized system with AI. The shovel-sellers get fantastically rich but the businesses are effectively left holding the risk from a fast-moving, unintuitive, uninspected, partially verified codebase. I just don't see how anyone not building a CRUD app/frontend could be comfortable with that, but then again my Tesla is effectively running such a system to drive me and my kids. Albeit, that's on a well-defined problem and within literally human-made guardrails.

[cmiles74]

"...they need no corporate campuses, office space..."

This is a big downside of AI, IMHO. Those offices need to be filled! ;-)

[zitterbewegung]

Having AI "tarnish the reputation of your company" encompasses so much in regard to AI when it can receive input and be manipulated by others such as Tai from Microsoft and many other outcomes where there is a true risk for AI deployment.

[fakedang]

We can all agree we've progressed so much since Tai.

[osigurdson]

Sure, once AI can actually do a job of some sort, without assistance, that job is gone - even if the machine costs significantly more. However, it can't remotely do that now so can only help a bit.

[Mistletoe]

At what point in the curve of AI is it not ethical to work an AI 24/7 because it is alive? What if it is exactly the same point where you reach human level performance?

[rowanG077]

AI do require overtime pay. In fact they are literally pay for use. If you use an AI 8 hours vs 16 hours a day is literally the difference between 2x cost.

[tintor]

“they won’t leak”

That one isn’t guaranteed. Many examples online of exfiltration attacks on LLMs.

[bboygravity]

humans definitely don't need office space, but your point stands

[AustinW]

LLM office space is pretty expensive. Chillers, backup generators, raised floors, communications gear, …. They even demand multiple offices for redundancy, not to mention the new ask of a nuclear power plant to keep the lights on.

[danielovichdk]

Name one technology that has come with computers that hasn't resulted in more humans being put to work ?

The rhetoric of not needing people doing work is cartoon'ish. I mean there is no sane explanation of how and why that would happen, without employing more people yet again, taking care of the advancements.

It's nok like technology has brought less work related stress. But it has definitely increased it. Humans were not made for using technology at such a pace as it's being rolled out.

The world is fucked. Totally fucked.

[mortehu]

Self check-out stations, ATMs, and online brokerages. Recently chat support. Namely cases where millions of people used to interact with a representative every week, and now they don't.

[palmfacehn]

"Name one use of electric lighting that hasn't resulted in candle makers losing work?"

The framing of the question misses the point. With electric lighting we can now work longer into the night. Yes, less people use and make candles. However, the second order effects allow us to be more productive in areas we may not have previously considered.

New technologies open up new opportunities for productivity. The bank tellers displaced by ATM machines can create value elsewhere. Consumers save time by not waiting in a queue, allowing them to use their time more economically. Banks have lower overhead, allowing more customers to afford their services.

[mortehu]

If I had missed the point I would have given a much broader list of examples. I specifically listed ones that make employees totally redundant rather than more useful doing other tasks.

When these people were made redundant, they may very well have gone on to make less money in another job (i.e. being less useful in an economic sense).

[0points]

Where to even start?

Digital banks

Cashless money transfer services

Self service

Modern farms

Robo lawn mowers

NVR:s with object detection

I can go on forever

[salawat]

Please do. I'm certain you can't, and you'll have to stop much sooner than you think. Appeals to triviality are the first refuge of the person who thinks they know, but does not.

[0points]

Come on and give me some arguments instead.