I'll take it.

> ChatGPT is the new techno-atheist's substitute for God

Not really, no ~~true~~ AInotKillingeveryoneIst says that ChatGPT (or GPT-like) is ASI. Please stop beating this particular strawman.

Which experts? Yann? Not sure he counts.

It seems like LLMs are destroying traditional search engines (Google) much faster than they are enabling new ones (Bing + GPT).

Are we going to enter a dark age of search where the signal is drowned out by the noise for a few years? SEO blogspam was bad enough when humans had to write it, now it's becoming impossible to avoid.

We can't stop ourselves from 'crappifying' ourselves.

We are driven by local min/max in society that we can't break free from, until the system breaks.

Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Past post on 'enshittification' from Cory Doctorow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245

Oh come on.

You could have said that for almost all tech improvements in history - electricity, medicine, radio, cars, trains, plumbing etc. Capitalism as in people selling stuff for money is just how things get done. At least to begin with.

The 'trump card' for all the AI negativity is education. Think of the 590 million Indian kids that live in poverty, for example. If they can get access to a computer and the internet, they will have access to on demand 24/7 first class education. They can even ask questions like they could of a real teacher.

The boon to human productivity and possibility for less suffering in our Capitalist earth can't possibly be outweighed by some boogey-man negatives which will probably never materialize anyway.

I see a lot of people want to blame capitalism, but look at any other system, and ultimately they all fail due to human greed. The only way to make capitalism work correctly is with regulation, because once monopolies and collusions are reached, the natural incentives disappear (i.e. the lowest cost service that delivers what the consumer values).

> Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots.

Agreed. You will earn less money (relative to cost of living), tax will increase, but yet people will still pretend your quality of life has increased - but they haven't. Many services you now can't reach a human - at all. Emails have disappeared, phone lines have disappeared - I now have to waste 5 minutes speaking to a chat bot that I know cannot solve my issue for it to maybe allow me to type text to what it claims to be a human.

> LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you.

In a sense, most neural networks can be modelled as some form of Markov Model. What's becoming more obvious is that the structures of these models is super important, and there is still a lot to be learned.

> Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.

Cars are a decentralised transport (as much as a transport system can be), whereas a train is a centralised transport system. The internet is also a transport system, but with packets instead of people, and this has had great success with a mixture of centralised and decentralised transport mechanisms.

The biggest problem with trains is that you create a single point of failure and an unnatural monopoly. Your bandwidth is also heavily reduced due to safety considerations (you want to travel fast over long distances, but need to increase the safety margin to do so). Unlike cars or internet packets, you can't divert a train. One can imagine a new protest group "just stop energy" (instead of "just stop oil") quite trivially bringing an entire Country to a halt by placing cars on all of the tracks.

> AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models.

Interesting to see that none of the climate activists so far have gone for clear winners like crypto mining, or AI training. Instead they would rather keep making the life of the every-day person miserable, as if it isn't miserable enough already.

> You will never trust another product review.

You find that people pay for reviews anyway. Somebody I know gets sent Amazon products to review, and they get to keep the products. The more positive reviews you give, the more you get selected for future reviews. The only way around this is reputation - I find somebody you trust who has reviewed a product. It's why Linus Tech Tips (LTT) and the recent review scandal was important - they have a reputation and it does inform consumers about expensive computing equipment investments.

"Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed.

Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it."

The rest of the article.

There is a computer bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by computers. But it will probably be crappier, not better.

Contrary to the doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to computers. Contemporary advances in computing aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in 2018:

A panel from the webcomic “xkcd” showing a timeline from now into the distant future, dividing the timeline into the periods between “computers become advanced enough to control unstoppable swarms of robots” and “computers become self-aware and rebel against human control”. The period from self-awareness to the indefinite future is labelled “the part lots of people seem to worry about”; Randall is instead worried about the part between these two epochs.

What will happen to computers is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. Language models are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and computers will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.

The biggest lasting changes from computers will be more like the following:

- A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work - The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles - More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams - SEO hacking content farms dominating search results - Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market - Computer-generated content overwhelming social media - Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising

Computer companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the data monster.

You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those computer-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with computer content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm.

All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the computer epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math.

This will be incredibly profitable for the computer barons, and to secure their investment they are deploying an immense, expensive, world-wide propaganda campaign. To the public, the present-day and potential future capabilities of the technology are played up in breathless promises of ridiculous possibility. In closed-room meetings, much more realistic promises are made of cutting payroll budgets in half.

The propaganda also leans into the mystical sci-fi computer canon, the threat of smart computers with world-ending power, the forbidden allure of a new Manhattan project and all of its consequences, the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts and the barons themselves, but the illusion is maintained in the interests of lobbying lawmakers to help the barons erect a moat around their new industry.

Of course, computers do present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the computers themselves, but rather from the people that employ them. The US military is testing out computer-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. Computer tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using computers for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed.

Computers are defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of computers are going to make the world worse. The computer revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.

Completely unserious comment but I enjoy the Alan Fisher reference, it's funny seeing my online spheres intersect.

EDIT: serious comment.

The whole post is a bit of a doomer one, the thing is in the maximalist bad world that Drew DeVault poses, human interaction (customer support, human written articles and opinions) becomes a premium, meaning the pendulum will swing as people realise the mistake. A lot of people will hurt or even die in the medium term which is true but the world he posits seems one that leads to an unstable maximum.

out of interest, how did you make this post? with moral standards as high as yours, you certainly wouldn't run something as wasteful as a full browser, right? especially when hackernews' html is this easy to parse manually. i'd gues you used curl? and as for your hardware? what did you personally find the most ethical choice there? and about those unethical ISPs? and how did you verify that HN's backend is efficient enough to be considered ethical?

It seems as if you're attaching the same connotations to morality/ethics as you would to legality. If something is not perfectly moral/ethical, it doesn't mean you should never do it.

We over indulge, we waste electricity and water, we drive unnecessarily big cars because it's enjoyable. It's not moral or ethical, but it doesn't make you a bad person. When it's done en-masse, is encouraged, and corporations monetize it, is when it starts becoming a problem.

gp argued that stuff becomes problematic when done en masse. my issue with that is, if you disallow en-masse $thing, who’s going to gatekeep the tiny, exclusive, non-en-masse club allowed to do $thing?

Mm, Shakespeare.

'tis easy mimic'd in style and verse; and the many devices used, familiar. When anachronism strikes, few yet notice, and fewer yet call out, for the Bard is older to us than he to Chaucer.

What folly, that the rich dress and peacock themselves so, sitting quiet and polite; gathered at great expense to what was, in days yore, the entertainment of yeoman and serf who cheered and jeered as saint and villains pranced before?

Hark, though; I say not that Avon brought no talent, rather that the talent of The Globe was to his time as the talent of The Disk to ours, as the easy-read and prolific prose of Pratchett is the closer cousin, despite the esteem of the powerful going to those hardest to follow in modern vernacular — Ulysses, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and yea, also the Bard and King James.

'tis almost as if the difficulty is the point.

(Exits, pursued by a peacock)

There was a time where computers took up the space of whole rooms and had much much MUCH less processing power than the phone I am currently writing this comment on...

The same thing will happen with ai.

While it's true that, even with advancements in AI, top-tier content uniquely shaped by the individuals or teams behind it will still be more costly to produce, these are likely to get cheaper over time as AI improves. As a result, high-quality content will probably become more accessible.

There is only so much you can do with shoestring budgets that our directors have.

With that said, we should do all to eliminate jobs, but not eliminate workers. Technology can also be used to produce more services for more people, not just producing the same more effectively.

We're smart, lets figure out how to create the same impact on general education.

Could we wire up ChatGPT so it asks us questions and leads the conversation instead of us? Could we also make it present the questions in ways that make educational youtube channels like Kurzgesagt so easy to engage with?

We could start with private tutoring. LLMs tailored to educate kids of rich parents. Easy market fit as they're already looking for private tutoring. We prove out the need then quickly move onto schools.

Imagine if we could show that engaging with an LLM for an hour produces as much learning as sitting in class for 4. Could we cut school days in half, set LLM interaction as homework for an hour (teachers would get reports from the LLM on how the child is doing)?

I agree that I didn't have trouble interrogating a subject until it clicked before if I was sufficiently motivated. However ChatGPT reduced the time needed a lot, and thus motivated me to take on more learning than otherwise.

Of course, I take "facts" it outputs with a pinch of salt until I double check things with my own research, but it's great at uncovering unknown unknowns and is like an infinitely patient tutor that will let me throw analogies at it to test if my understanding is correct or needs adjustment.

To give a concrete example, if you're a standard 1-3 person business with a niche enterprise SaaS product targeting the enterprise, outbound sales is likely going to be a meaningful channel for you. Having a team of good SDRs is a huge step function for your org, and if an LLM can give you that functionality without you needing to hire, then they'll make an outsized impact on your business. However, the Google-sized org operating in your space likely already has a huge sales and marketing org. They've likely "saturated" the market in the sense that they're already engaging most of their prospects in one way or another. Adding the functionality of many SDRs via an LLM might give them some efficiency gains, but it won't unlock a new level of growth for them, nor will nullify the value the LLMs provide your smaller org.

Oh my, I think you are not ready for Siri.

Why do you assume that?

> What should be desired, is a return to quality and respecting the user (or at least taking the time to understand them), which unfortunately seems unnecessary now with a global reach and unimpeded manipulation and influence that can ignore demands for improvement.

I know the assumption is always that Big Greedy Co™ is hiring the worst possible employees to save money, but I think it's far more likely that the scale of work required far exceeds the labour required to provide it.

Also, a machine cannot create equally complex or more complex than itself, so AI is always capped at human capacity, at most, asymptotically.

It can be faster. It can batch process, but it can't process "like a human".

Even as the top tier tech support for a complex product, 99% of my calls could have been dealt with well by chat gpt in its current form. And my customers would have a more concise outcome, without the variability of my mood, hold times, judgement of their tone etc to effect my advice.

I can’t wait for more ai cs so I can stop talking to a fuckwhit, and talk to an ai that’s almost certainly far more equipped to handle my query.

No. We're talking about the future. ChatGPT doesn't have millions of hours of customer service experience. It has zero!

(Well, unless you count the RLHF stuff, but my point is it isn't actually learning from human feedback, although we don't actually know what they're doing with those thumbs up / down buttons...)

> losing the option to speak with a human

Already the case at many companies, sadly. (In those cases, if not elsewhere, it's going to be a significant improvement.)

We're just too impatient to wait for GPT-7 aren't we?

They were desperate for work.

The unemployment in farms was caused by the Industrial Revolution.

We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity.

If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options.

Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience).

[1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency

It's usually well hidden though, to save money.

Yes. (Of course I still have a long way to go)

> Same with dev. Does it actually make you better...

Also yes. In terms of "scripting" it helped me tremendously. There were many little tasks that I wouldn't bother to automate without ChatGPT, because the time spent on looking up those niche APIs would outweight the time saved.

Without ChatGPT I would have learned 0 about them. With ChatGPT at least I learned a bit.

I think AI could help me if ChatGPT or whatever else had proper text to speech with a reasonably convincing accent, even if it sounds off, as long as the accents American I am good to go.

I am also a pessimist with AI but I still try it out and use it because I do see it being used more and more.

Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing.

Same with teaching. A lot of people simply don't have access to teachers, and if even the ones that do, might not have teachers that have the time and knowledge to actually teach what they want to learn.

It's very easy for me to see how an "LLM teacher" developed and trained specifically for that purpose could be of HUGE value over that status quo. That doesn't mean that the child's human teacher goes away, only that they now have access to a new amazing tool at home as well.

There is a lot of value from just having help diagnose/triage people with illness. Certainly not a replacement but definitely a complement to get access to healthcare to more.

Quite possibly both; governments only switched to universal education instead of having 12 year olds in factories because it was good for the economy, even if some of the lessons are supposed to be good for the (for lack of a better term) "soul".

AIs have more patience than human teachers.

The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".

That’s why all kinds of products today with nearly zero marginal cost are free?

Because, why not? It's called segmentation.

> Copying human generated context costs basically nothing, so the marginal cost of letting the poor view it is basically nothing.

How do you explain why more recent movies are more expensive to buy or rent on streaming services, then?

I think this is probably a technically solvable problem but doing so has potential 'optics'/marketing issues in terms of reducing the level of confidence it projects which a lot of people associate with competence.

Live performance (orchestra and operas) were for rich only. Beautiful paintings were for the noble and churches. Porcelain was something needed to be imported from another continent. Tropical fruits were so expensive that people rented them.

Now we have the affordable versions of them for everyone in developed countries, and the middle class in developing ones. Yes, often we just got inferior, machine-made or digital copies, but I personally prefer something inferior than nothing.

Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.

No, they don't. If that happened anywhere near all the time, we would never have given up alchemy and bloodletting, because there would be no reason to trust medicine at all, and yet it works overwhelmingly well most of the time for most people. Meanwhile, AIs hallucinate by design.

Meanwhile, AIs don't possess anything akin to thought, memory, perception or awareness. They simply link text tokens stochastically. When an AI makes a mistake, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do, because AIs have no concept of "reality" or "truth." Tell an AI to prescribe medication, it has no idea what "medication" is, or what a human is. When an AI doesn't make a mistake, it's entirely by coincidence. Yet humans are so hardwired with paredolia and gaslit by years of science fiction that such a simple hat trick leads people to want to trust their entire lives to these things.

>The fact is simple. Professional diagnosing is such a scarce resource that people buy over-the-counter drugs all the time. It's not AI vs doctors; it's AI vs no doctor.

That's not a fact, it's your opinion, and I'm assuming you've got some interest in a startup along these lines or something, because I honestly cannot fathom your rationale otherwise. You're either shockingly naive or else you have a financial stake in putting poor people's lives in the hands of machines that can't even be trusted to count the number of fingers on a human hand.

I have no doubt the future you want is going to happen, and I have no doubt we're all going to regret it. At least I'm old enough that I'll probably be dead before the last real human doctor is put out to pasture.

They can easily produce enough doctors, they just don't. A couple of reasons for this: schools inflate the amount of education required so they they can make more money and doctors go along with it (and a crazy amount of licensing requirements) to prop wages up by keeping the supply of doctors artificially low.

You could be an ICU nurse with 20+ years of experiences. Want to make a jumpt to becoming a doctor? You have to start ALL the way from the beginning of med school as if you an 23 year-old humanities major who decided to go to med school. Your 2 decades of hands-on medical experience counts for exactly nothing in the eyes of medical schools and certification boards. Does anyone really believe this is a good way to run things?

Fix the low pay and terrible conditions and yeah, you'll easily produce enough doctors and teachers, but late-stage capitalism isn't going to do that...