[i_love_retros]

Hasn't all automation up to this point been same input equals same output though? Automation using LLMs feels different to anything before and I don't think there's a comparative time in history to point at and say "look it happened before and we are now better off"

[lazystone]

I think we all been fooled by the sentence: "It's yet another automation, it's like horses were replaced by cars". It is not. Industrialization and automation is about manual labor. LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking. And while I'll give two thumbs up for using ML(there is not 'I' in 'AI') as a technology for some tasks, outsourcing thinking is an evolutionary dead-end.

[joe_mamba]

>LLM/AI is about outsourcing thinking.

No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.

If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.

[cryo32]

It shouldn't be used for that either. The problem is our programming languages and tools are shit so we made another expensive tool to drive them.

I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.

All I want is a fucking report.

The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.

[jonatron]

Recently, I had some data for which I wanted some graphs. I uploaded the .jsonl file, and prompted "make a html page and graph this data using plotly". I wanted a report, and got a report, quicker than I could have made it myself.

[joe_mamba]

Not sure why you got downvoted, but I agree with your take. It's now so much easier to one-shot such small task that are supposed to be one-and-done, instead of needing a small army of interns or juniors with would typically handle such non-business critical tasks.

[ethin]

> I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.

Do you really though?

Here's a question: how many times do you visit claude.ai or open Claude Code (or whatever harness you use) (or use whatever model you prefer) to help you solve a problem, ask it a question, etc.?

One thing I've noticed, which seems to go completely unmentioned, is how these LLM tools are like drugs. It can pump out thousands of lines of code ---> it can write my entire program for me ---> I've written quite a few programs with it and I don't write a single line anymore ---> I go to it for what would normally be things I could do on my own. The problem is that this isn't some immediate thing: like a drug, it sneaks up on you and you don't even realize it until it's far, far too late. I've been programming since I was 13 and I've just now started to notice the deskilling that's been happening to me. I've just now started noticing how often I'll visit Claude Web for something I should be able to do on my own. Nobody really seems to mention this, or it's repharsed as a good thing. And I don't get it: how is undergoing cognitive surrender a "good" thing by any metric other than the metric a beancounter would use? What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it. That is ultimately what this "AI revolution" is going to bring. It's what the billionaires want, and what they want is usually what they get because the systems we've built are set up to not constrain them.

[joe_mamba]

> I've been programming since I was 13

Congrats, you're in a small minority of people.

>What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it.

People probably said the same thing about using pocket calculators when they started getting cheap and mainstream in the 1970s.

Do you still use your brain to calculate sales tax or the square root of pi just to keep your brain sharp on knowing calculus, or do you always use a calculator because it's a mainstream commodity that will never go away?

[ethin]

> People probably said the same thing about using pocket calculators when they started getting cheap and mainstream in the 1970s.

Except a pocket calculator is very different from an LLM. It isn't a tool you can go to and ask it literally anything under the sun and get an answer (even if incorrect). It's cold, logical and uninterested in your life or what happens. These LLMs are trained to be interested and empathetic. They are, IMO, way more like drugs than most other things.

[joe_mamba]

>It's cold, logical and uninterested in your life or what happens.

The entire universe is cold, logical and uninterested in your life or what happens to you. But that's exactly what I want from a machine that's supposed to be my personal slave. I don't want a lecture from it on current day political correctness and sensibilities, I just want it to do exactly what I ask it no matter how rude or machiavellian it may be. Whoever will deliver this type of unhinged obedient slave to the masses(most likely China), will win the AI race.

> These LLMs are trained to be interested and empathetic.

Luckily there's already like a dozen LLMs at this point, many free and open source, especially from China, and I and many others will just pick the one that isn't trained to be interested and empathetic, but the one that's my personal slave and does exactly what I want from it, because of the competition between them will allow this freedom of choice.

In 5-15 years when semiconductor shortages ease up and hardware advances a bit more, there's a chance offline open LLMs in your pocket will be as obliquus as pocket calculators were in the 80s.

>They are, IMO, way more like drugs than most other things.

So was music, TV, video games, porn, etc. when they became mainstream. We adapted and survived.

I'm more scared about the state of world peace, economy, CoL, jobs and housing market than of LLMs being addicted.

There's millions of people on the planet who are a couple of meals away from hunger and rioting and migrating to other countries, and a climate catastrophe or one more wars could destabilize the whole planet for good, than LLMs being addictive. If LLMs are your biggest concern, you're in a very privileged position.

[rrvsh]

> > I've been programming since I was 13

> Congrats, you're in a small minority of people.

Why did you respond to this? I fail to see how it relates to your point whatsoever.

[joe_mamba]

Why did he mention it? How does it relate to the topic? Why do you think people are not allowed to reply to it?

[dbalatero]

Thank you for writing what I want to scream every time a comparison is made to some archaic technology change.

[satisfice]

It’s worse— it’s seeking to replace every single aspect of what it means to be YOU in the world. Some people are literally trying to “fire themselves” and be replaced with digital twins. Perhaps those people are independently wealthy and also have no need of human connection? For the rest of us, it is a sickening prospect.

AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.

When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.

[jvanderbot]

Its advertised as outsourcing thinking, but I doubt many serious people making serious things actually outsourced their thinking very much. I definitely outsource my typing, search, and LSP interaction!

[wolvesechoes]

Moreover, historical events and processes are unique, even if there are some similarities. Nothing that happened in the past can give us certainty on what will happen now.

[samiv]

The automation at least built unimaginable amounts of wealth for the rich people while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.

[joe_mamba]

>while the poor people are essentially just as poor they were hundreds of years ago.

How can people say false things like this with a straight face?

Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc

Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.

Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.

[samiv]

Because most of the poor people in the world (majority of the population of the planet actually) have no access to clean water, food or medical care or education and that is the same as it was hundreds of years ago.

[wolvesechoes]

> Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom

Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.

> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.

Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.

Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.

[joe_mamba]

>Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.

You don't have to participate in globalism, you can be a hermit state that doesn't trade with the evil imperial capitalists, like Cuba and North Korea. Everyone wants to live there because the QoL is so good.

[wolvesechoes]

And it so good, because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places, and still extracts through globalisation.

QoL is so good here precisely because it is so poor out there.

[joe_mamba]

>because west extracted wealth and materials from all around the world places

If those "around the world places" had all the valuable resources that enabled modern civilisation when the west came and took them, why weren't they the ones to first make use of them to build computers, vaccines, MR machines and moon rockets, or at least clean drinking water and indoor sanitation facilities for their people?

Or why didn't those "around the world places" then go and extract wealth and materials from the west instead? What stopped them? Surely it wasn't their moral values, since war, slavery and genocide even cannibalism, of their neighboring tribes and nations, was the norm of the day over there.

>and still extracts through globalisation

Correction: "pays for it through globalisation". That's how countries like India and China got so many people out of poverty after globalisation.

[wiseowise]

> All this with no job, and no care in the world.

Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?

[joe_mamba]

yes. Have you?

Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.

[joe_mamba]

No, because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.

Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.

SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.

[lelanthran]

> No because you still need a skilled human operator in the loop for clearly defining the input and to check the output.

For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?

If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?

[joe_mamba]

>Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?

I don't have a crystal ball. In 4 years whoever is US president might start another war and fuck the whole planet back to the stone age. Nobody will know what will happen in 4 years so why worry about it?

[ganSo]

What are your plans if you truly think that that's the future?

[lelanthran]

> What are your plans if you truly think that that's the future?

I don't have any - thinking is the only non-cattle job left for humans to do; if we outsource thinking for all of humanity, we're an evolutionary dead-end.

[i_love_retros]

Dude relax, you can keep using Claude