If we want to continue on the path of increased human development we desperately need to lift the productivity of a whole bunch of labor intensive sectors.

We're going to need to seriously think about how to redistribute the gains, but that's an issue regardless of AI (things like effective tax policy).

The only question is how much fat there is to trim as the middle management is wiped out because the algorithms have determined that they are completely useless and mostly only increase cost over time.

Now, all the AI companies think that they are going to be deriving revenue from that fat, but those revenue streams are going to disappear entirely because a huge number of purely politic positions inside corporations will vanish, because if they do not the corporation will go bankrupt competing with other companies that have already cut the fat. There won't be additional revenue streams that get spent on the bullshit. The good news is that labor can go somewhere else, and we will need it due to a shrinking global population, but the cushy bullshit management job is likely disappear.

At some point AI agents will cease to be sycophantic and when fed the priors for the current situation that a company is in will simply tell it like it is, and might even be smart enough to get the executives to achieve the goal they actually stated instead of simply puffing up their internal political position, which might include a rather surprising set of actions that could even lead to the executive being fired if the AI determines that they are getting in the way of the goal [1].

Fun times ahead.

0. https://web.archive.org/web/20180705215319/https://www.econo... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evitable_Conflict

By all means, continue to make or improve your Llamas/Geminis (to the latter: stop censoring Literally Everything. Google has a culture problem. To the former... I don't much trust your parent company in general)

It will undoubtedly lead to great advances

But for the love of god do not tightly bind them to your products (Kagi does it alright, they don't force it on you). Do not make your search results worse. Do NOT put AI in charge of automatic content moderation with 0 human oversight (we know you want to. The economics of it work out nicely for you, with no accountability). People already as is get banned far too easily by your automated systems

This really misunderstands what the stock market tracks

That's because they are. The stock market is all about narrative.

> Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence.

Yes it is, the mega companies that wil be providing the intelligence are, Nvidia, AMD, TSMC, ASML, add your favourite foundry.

uh last time I checked, "markets" around the world are a few percent from all time highs

Most recently down because I worked on two separate projects over the last few weeks with the latest models available on GitHub Copilot Pro. (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and some lesser capable ones at times as well). Trying the exact same queries for code changes across all three models for a majority of the queries. I saw myself using Claude most, but it still wasn't drastically better than others, and still made too many mistakes.

One project was a simple health-tracking app in Dart/Flutter. Completely vibe-coded, just for fun. I got basic stuff to start working. Over the days I kept finding bugs as I starting using it. Since I truly wanted to use this app in my daily life, at one point I just gave up cause fixing the bugs was getting way too annoying. Most "fixes" as I later got into the weeds of it, were wrong, with wrong assumptions, made changes that seemed to fix the problem at the surface but introducing more bugs and random garbage, despite giving a ton of context and instructions on why things are supposed to be a certain way, etc. I was constantly fighting with the model. Would've been much easier to do much more on my own and using it a little bit.

Another project was in TypeScript, where I did actually use my brain, not just vibe-coded. Here, AI models were helpful because I mostly used them to explain stuff. And did not let them make more than a few lines of code changes at most at a time. There was a portion of the project which I kinda "isolated" which I completely vibe-coded and I don't mind if it breaks or anything as it is not critical. It did save me some time but I certainly could've done it on my own with a little more time, while having code that I can understand fully well and edit.

So the way I see using these models right now is for research/prototyping/throwaway kind of stuff. But even in that, I literally had Claude 4 teach me something wrong about TypeScript just yesterday. It told me a certain thing was deprecated. I made a follow up question on why that thing is deprecated and what's used instead, it replied with something like "Oops! I misspoke, that is not actually true, that thing is still being used and not deprecated." Like, what? Lmao. For how many things have I not asked a follow up and learnt stuff incorrectly? Or asked and still learnt incorrectly lmao.

I like how straightforward GPT-5 is. But apart from that style of speech I don't see much other benefit. I do love LLMs for personal random searches like facts/plans/etc. I just ask the LLM to suggest me what to do just to rubber duck or whatever. Do all these gains add up towards massive job displacement? I don't know. Maybe. If it is saving 10% time for me and everyone else, I guess we do need 10% less people to do the same work? But is the amount of work we can get paid for fixed and finite? Idk. We (individuals) might have to adapt and be more competitive than before depending on our jobs and how they're affected, but is it a fundamental shift? Are these models or their future capabilities human replacements? Idk. At the moment, I think they're useful but overhyped. Time will tell though.

Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base: bugs that escaped the code review of a competent programmer.

Since LLMs and in general deep models are poorly understood, and even the most prominent experts in the field failed miserably again and again to modulate the expectations (with incredible errors on both sides: of reducing or magnifying what was near to come), it is hard to tell what will come next. But even before the Transformer architecture, we were seeing incredible progress for many years, and so far there is no clear sign that the future will not hold more. After all, a plateau of the current systems is possible and very credible, but it would likely stimulate, at this point, massive research efforts in the next step of architectures.

However, if AI avoids plateauing long enough to become significantly more useful and independent of humans, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones. Yet the economic markets are reacting as if they were governed by stochastic parrots. Their pattern matching wants that previous technologies booms created more business opportunities, so investors are polarized to think the same will happen with AI. But this is not the only possible outcome.

We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence: either AI will be eventually a commodity, or the governments would do something, in such an odd economic setup (a setup where a single industry completely dominates all the others).

The future may reduce the economic prosperity and push humanity to switch to some different economic system (maybe a better system). Markets don’t want to accept that, so far, and even if the economic forecasts are cloudy, wars are destabilizing the world, the AI timings are hard to guess, regardless of all that stocks continue to go up. But stocks are insignificant in the vast perspective of human history, and even systems that lasted a lot more than our current institutions eventually were eradicated by fundamental changes in the society and in the human knowledge. AI could be such a change.

LLMs do not "understand the human language, write programs, and find bugs in a complex code base"

"LLMs are language models, and their superpower is fluency. It’s this fluency that hacks our brains, trapping us into seeing them as something they aren’t."

https://jenson.org/timmy/

Maybe a "loss of jobs" is what we need so we can go back working for ourselves, cooking our own food, maintaining our own houses etc.

This is why I doubt it will happen. I think "AI" will just end up making us work even more for even less.

But the question is a system optimized for what? That emphasizes huge rewards for the few, and that requires the poverty of some (or many). Or a more fair system. Not different from the challenges of today.

I'm skeptical even a very intelligent machine will change the landscape of our dificult decisions, but will accelerate which direction we decide (or is decided for us), that we go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

Humans never truly produce anything; they only generate various forms of waste (resulting from consumption). Human technology merely enables the extraction of natural resources across magnitudes, without actually creating any resources. Given its enormous energy consumption, I strongly doubt that AI will contribute to a better economic system.

LLMs don't _understand_ "the human language". They dont _understand_ anything. It would be really great if everyone would keep their heads and not lose sight of this fundamental truth.

It's not really clear to me to what extent LLMs even do *understand* human language. They are very good at saying things that sound like a responsive answer, but the head-scratching, hard-to-mentally-visualise aspect of all of this is that this isn't the same thing at all.

Or am I just too idealistic ?

Sidenote, I never quite understand why the rich think their bunkers are going to save them from the crisis they caused. Do they fail to realize that there's more of us than them, or do they really believe they can fashion themselves as warlords?

But seeing it in action now makes me seriously question “human intelligence”.

Maybe most of us just aren’t as smart as we think…

they are tremendous tools but seems like they make a near equal amount of work from the stuff the save time on

From the beginning, corporations and their collaborators at the forefront of this technology tainted it by ignoring the concept of intellectual property ownership (which had been with us in many forms for hundreds if not thousands of years) in the name of personal short-term gain and shareholder interest or some “the ends justify the means” utilitarian calculus.

A compilation of claims, takes, narratives, shills, expectations and predictions from the late 90s "information superhighway" era.

I wonder if LLMs can produce this.

A lot of the dotcom exuberance was famously "correct, but off by 7 years." But... most of it flat wrong. Right but early applies mostly to the meta investment case: "the internet business will be big."

One that stands out in my memory is "turning billion dollar industries into million dollar industries."

With ubiquitous networked computers, banking and financial services could become "mostly software." Banks and whatnot would all become hyper-efficient Vanguard-like companies.

We often starts with an observation that economies are efficiency seeking. Then we imagine the most efficient outcome given legible constraints of technology, geography and whatnot. Then we imagine dynamics and tensions in a world with that kind of efficiency.

This, incidentally, is also "historical materialism." Marx had a lot of awe for modern industry, the efficiency of capitalism and whatnot. Almost Adam Smith-like... at times.

Anyway... this never actually works out. The meta is a terrible predictor of where things will go.

Imagine law gets more efficient. Will we have more or less lawyers? It could go either way.

Aren't the markets massively puffed up by AI companies at the moment?

edit: for example, the S&P500's performance with and without the top 10 (which is almost totally tech companies) looks very different: https://i.imgur.com/IurjaaR.jpeg

Humans want to go to space, start living on other planets, travel beyond solar system, figure out how to live longer and so on. The list is endless. Without AI, these things would take a very long time. I believe AI will accelerate all these things.

Humans are always ambitious. That ambition will push us to use AI more than it's capabilities. The AI will get better at these new things and the cycle repeats. There's so much humans know and so much more that we don't know.

I'm less worried about general intelligence. Rather in more worried about how humans are going to govern themselves. That's going to decide whether we will do great things or end humanity. Over the last 100 years, we start thinking more about "how" to do something rather than the "why". Because "how" is becoming more and more easier. Today it's much more easier and tomorrow even more. So nobody's got the time to ask "why" we are doing something, just "how" to do something. With AI I can do more. That means everyone can do more. That means governments can do so much more. Large scale things in a short period. If those things are wrong or have irreversible consequences, we are screwed.

and, germane to this discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY vibe physics

Language is a very powerful tool for transformation, we already knew this.

Letting it loose on this scale without someone behind the wheel is begging for trouble imo.

A more interesting piece would be built around: “AI is disruptive. Here’s what I’m personally doing about it.”

As William Gibson said, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Even if LLMs, reasoning algorithms, object recognition, and diffusion models stopped improving today, we're still at a point where massive societal changes are inevitable as the tech spreads out across industries. AI is going to steadily replace chair-to-keyboard interfaces in just about every business you can imagine.

Interestingly, AI seems to be affecting the highest level "white collar" professionals first, rather than replacing the lowest level workers immediately, like what happened when blue collar work was automated. We're still pretty far away from AI truck drivers, but people with fine arts or computer science degrees, for example, are already feeling the impact.

"Decimation" is definitely an accurate way to describe what's in the process of happening. What used to take 10 floors of white collar employees will steadily decline to just 1. No idea what everyone else will be doing.

Nonetheless I do still believe humans will continue to be the more cost efficient way to come up with and guide new ideas. Many human performed services will remain desirable because of its virtue and our sense of emotion and taste for a moment that other humans are feeling too. But how much of the populous does that engage? I couldn't guess right now. Though if I was to imagine what might make things turn out better it would be that AI is personally ownable, and that everyone owns, at least in title, some energy production which they can do things with.

LLMs feel like a fluke, like OpenAI was not intended to succeed... And even now that it succeeded and they try to turn the non-profit into a for-profit, it kind of feels like they don't even fully believe their own product in terms of its economic capacity and they're still trying to sell the hype as if to pump and dump it.

If we factor in that LLMs only exist because of Google search, after they have indexed and collected all the data on the WWW than LLMs are not surprising. They only replicate what has been published on the web, even the coding agents are only possible because of free software and open-source, code like Redis that has been published on the WWW.

Companies have to be a bit more farsighted than this thinking. Assuming LLMs reach this peak...if say, MS says they can save money because they don't need XYZ anymore because AI can do it, XYZ can decide they don't need Office anymore because AI can do it.

There's absolutely no moat anymore. Human capital and the shear volume of code are the current moat. An all capable AI completely eliminates both.

It's a bit scary to say "what then?" How do you make money in a world where everyone can more or less do everything themselves? Perhaps like 15 Million Merits, we all just live in pods and pedal bikes all day to power the AI(s).

For example, one path may be: AI, Robotics, space travel all move forward in leaps and bounds.

Then there could be tons of work in creation from material things from people who didn't have the skills before and physical goods gets a huge boost. We travel through space and colonize new planets, dealing with new challenges and environments that we haven't dealt with before.

Another path: most people get rest and relaxation as the default life path, and the rest get to pursue their hobbies as much as they want since the AI and robots handle all the day to day.

I'd guess, within a few years, 5 to 10% of the total working population will be unemployable due to no fault of their own, because they have relevant skill left, and they are incapable of learning anything that cannot be done by AI.

I'm not sure how someone can seriously write this after the release of GPT-5.

Models have started to plateau since ChatGPT came out (3 years ago) and GPT-5 has been the final nail in this coffin.

But realistically, you're not going to have a personal foundry anytime soon.

In which science fiction were the dreamt up robots as bad?

This is demonstrably wrong. An easy refutation to cite is:

https://medium.com/@akshatsanghi22/how-to-build-your-own-lar...

As to the rest of this pontification, well... It has almost triple the number of qualifiers (5 if's, 4 could's, and 5 will's) than paragraphs (5).

We used to have deterministic systems that required humans either through code, terminals or interfaces (ex GUI's) to change what they were capable of.

If we wanted to change something about the system we would have to create that new skill ourselves.

Now we have non-deterministic systems that can be used to create deterministic systems that can use non-deterministic systems to create more deterministic systems.

In other words deterministic systems can use LLMs and LLMs can use deterministic systems all via natural language.

This slight change in how we can use compute have incredible consequences for what we will be able to accomplish both regarding cleaning up old systems and creating completely new ones.

LLMs however will always be limited by exploring existing knowledge. They will not be able to create new knowledge. And so the AI winter we are entering is different because it's only limited to what we can train the AI to do, and that is limited to what new knowledge we can create.

Anyone who work with AI everyday know that any idea of autonomous agents is so beyond the capabilities of LLMs even in principle that any worry about doom or unemployment by AI is absurd.

it's a very constrained task, you can do lots of reliable checking on the output at low cost (linters, formatters, the compiler), the code is mostly reviewed by a human before being committed, and there's insulation between the code and the real world, because ultimately some company or open source project releases the code that's then run, and they mostly have an incentive to not murder people (Telsa except, obviously).

it seems like lots of programmers are then taking that information and then deeply overestimating how useful it is at anything else, and these programmers - and the marketing people who employ them - are doing enormous harm by convincing e.g. HR departments that it is of any value to them for dealing with complaints, or much much more danderously, convincing governments that it's useful for how they deal with humans asking for help.

this misconception (and deliberate lying by people like OpenAI) is doing enormous damage to society and is going to do much much more.

I dunno why exactly but that’s what felt the most stunning about this whole era. It can screw up the number of fingers in an image or the details of a recipe or misidentify elements of an image, etc. but I’ve never seen it make a typo or use improper grammar or whatnot.

For example, one of the tasks we could put ASI to work doing is to ask it to design implants that would go into the legs that would be powered by light, or electric induction that would use ASI designed protein metabolic chains to electrically transform carbon dioxide into oxygen and ADP into ATP so to power humans with pure electricity. We are very energy efficient. We use about 3 kilowatt hours of power a day, so we could use this sort of technology to live in space pretty effortlessly. Your Space RV would not need a bathroom or a kitchen. You'd just live in a static nitrogen atmosphere and the whole thing could be powered by solar panels, or a small modular nuke reactor. I call this "The Electrobiological Age" and it will unlock whole new worlds for humanity.

If AI technology continues to improve and becomes capable of learning and executing more tasks on its own, this revolution is going to be very unlike the past ones.

We don't how if or how our current institutions and systems will be able to handle that.

I'm flying, ofc, this is just a weird theory I had in the back of my head for the past 20 years, and it seems like we're getting there.

Antirez you are the best

There's a future where we won't be because to do the amazing things (tm), we need resources that are beyond what the average company can muster.

That is to say, what if the large companies becomes so magnificiently efficient and productive that it renders the rest of the small company pointless? What if there's no gaps in the software market anymore because it will be automatically detected and solved by the system?

Somehow, LLMs have those rules stored within a finite set of weights.

https://slator.com/how-large-language-models-prove-chomsky-w...

Stuff you can give someone 0-20 hours of training and expect them to do 80% as well as someone who has been doing it for 5 years are the kinds of jobs that robots will be able to do, but perhaps with certain technical skills bolted on.

Plumbing a requires the effective understanding and application of engineering knowledge, and I don’t think unsupervised transformer models are going to do that well.

Trades like plumbing that take humans 10-20 years to truly master aren’t the low hanging fruit.

A robot that can pick up a few boxes of roofing at a time and carry it up the ladder is what we need.

unless you consider people who write clickbait blogs to be skilled workers, in which case the damage is already done.

Will it do as good a job a competent adult? Probably not. Will it do it as well as the average 6 year old kid? Yeah, probably.

But given enough properly loaded dishwashers to work from, I think you might be surprised how effective VLA/VLB models can be. We just need a few hundred thousand man hours of dishwasher loading for training data.

And I'm telling you right now, man - when you fire off an ad hominem attack such as:

  I think the real issue here is understanding _you_.

my point about compound interest is that it is a major mechanism that prevents equitable redistrubution of resources, and is thus a factor in making economics (as it stands) bad at resource allocation.

Later.

but this other attribution people are doing- that it's going to achieve (the marketing term) AGI and everything will be awesome is clearly bullshit.

So I would say the overall service provided is better than it was, thanks to functions being built based on user queries, but not the actual LLM models themselves.

In the U.S. houses are built out of wood. What robot will do that kind of work?

After all, I can always pick up LLMs in the future. If a few weeks is long enough for all my priors to become stale, why should I have to start now? Everything I learn will be out of date in a few weeks. Things will only be easier to learn 6, 12, 18 months from now.

Also no where in my post did I say that LLMs can’t be useful to anyone. In fact I said the opposite. If you like LLMs or benefit from them, then you’re probably already using them, in which case I’m not advocating anyone stop. However there are many segments of people who LLMs are not for. No tool is a panacea. I’m just trying to nip and FUD in the butt.

There are so many demands for our attention in the modern world to stay looped in and up to date on everything; I’m just here saying don’t fret. Do what you enjoy. LLMs will be here in 12 months. And again in 24. And 36. You don’t need to care now.

And yes I mentor several juniors (designers and engineers). I do not let them use LLMs for anything and actively discourage them from using LLMs. That is not what I’m trying to do in this post, but for those whose success I am invested in, who ask me for advice, I quite confidently advise against it. At least for now. But that is a separate matter.

EDIT: My exact words from another comment in this thread prior to your comment:

> I’m open to programming with LLMs, and I’m entirely fine with people using them and I’m glad people are happy.

  It's irrlevant that they've had a few issues.

It’s strange to me watching the collective meltdown over AI/jobs when AI doesn’t do jobs, it does tasks.

The ceiling for current AI, while not provably known, can reasonably be upper bounded to human aggregate ability since these methods are limited to patterns in the training data. The big surprise was how many and sophisticated patterns were hiding in the training data (human written text). This current wave of AI progress is fueled by training data and compute in ”equal parts”. Since compute is cheaper, they’ve invested in more compute but failed scaling expectations since training data remained similarly sized.

Reaching super-intelligence through training data is paradoxical, because if it were known it wouldn’t be super-human. The other option is breaking out of the training data enclosure by relying on other methods. That may sound exciting but there’s no major progress I’m aware of that points that direction. It’s a little like being back to square one, before this hype cycle started. The smartest people seem to be focused on transformers, due to getting boatloads of money from companies or academia pushing them because of fomo.

8 billion people wake up every morning determined to spend the whole day working to improve their lives. we're gonna be ok.

If it were simple, we wouldn't need neural nets for it - we'd just code the algorithm directly. Or, at least, we'd be able to explain exactly how they work by looking at the weights. But now that we have our Babelfish, we still don't know how it really works in details. This is ipso facto evidence that the task is very much not simple.

Imperfection is not the problem with "AI Art". The problem is that it is really hard to not get the models to produce the same visual motifs and cliches. People can spot AI art so easy because of the motifs.

I think midjourney took this to another level with their human feedback. It became harder and harder to not produce the same visual motifs in the images to the point it is basically useless for me now.

I hope you're right, but when I think about all those lawyers caught submitting unproofread LLM output to a judge... I'm not sure humankind is wise enough to avoid the slopification.

The usual solution is to specify one language as binding, with that language taking priority if there turns out to be discrepancies between the multiple version.

There are bound to be all kinds of complicated sociopolitical effects, and as you say there is a backlash against obvious AI slop, but what about when teams of humans working with AI become more skillful at hiding that?

There was also wide understanding that those architectures were trying to imitate small bits of what we understood was happening in the brain (see marvin minsky's perceptron etc). The hope was, as I understood it that there would be some breakthrough in neuroscience that would let the computer scientists pick up the torch and simulate what we find in nature.

None of that seems to be happening anymore and we're just interested in training enough to fool people.

"AI" companies investing in brain science would convince me otherwise. At this point they're just trying to come up with the next money printing machine.

I’m open to programming with LLMs, and I’m entirely fine with people using them and I’m glad people are happy. But this insistence that progress is so crazy that you have to be tapped in at all times just irks me.

LLM models are like iPhones. You can skip a couple versions it’s fine, you will have the new version at the same time with all the same functionality as everyone else buying one every year.

Yes, but the claims do not. When the hypemen were shouting that GPT-3 was near-AGI, it still turned out to be absolute shit. When the hypemen were claiming that GPT-3.5 was thousands of times better than GPT-3 and beating all highschool students, it turned out to be a massive exaggeration. When the hypemen claimed that GPT-4 was a groundbreaking innovation and going to replace every single programmer, it still wasn't any good.

Sure, AI is improving. Nobody is doubting that. But you can only claim to have a magical unicorn so many times before people stop believing that this time you might have something different than a horse with an ice cream cone glued to its head. I'm not going to waste a significant amount of my time evaluating Unicorn 5.0 when I already know I'll almost certainly end up disappointed.

Perhaps it'll be something impressive in a decade or two, but in the meantime the fact that Big Tech keeps trying to shove it down my throat even when it clearly isn't ready yet is a pretty good indicator to me that it is still primarily just a hype bubble.

I also disagree that it's "not even remotely close to reaching human-like quality". I have translated large chunks of books into languages I know, and the results are often better than what commercial translators do.

It doesn’t even seem relevant how good you are at step 1 for something so many steps later.

Then the tool worked for you(r team). That's great to hear and maybe gives some hope for my projects.

It has just mostly been more of a time sink than an improvement ime though it appears to strongly vary by field/application.

> Certainly not doing any monkey-esque web programming

The point here was not to demean the user (or their usage) but rather to highlight how developers are not being dependent on LLMs as a tool. Your team presumably did the same type of work before without LLMs and won't become unable to do so if there were to become unavailable.

That likely was not properly expressed in the original comment by me, sorry.

I can dream, can't I?

I was pushing back against that comment’s snearing smugness by pointing to an established field that uses clear terminology about how and why markets are useful. Even so, I invited an explanation in case I was missing something.

Anyone curious about the terms I used can quickly find explanations online, etc.

Aside from what that would do to my 401(k), I think that would be a positive outcome (the going broke part).

After the trade, the tier 2 person would still be richer than they were before the trade. So tier 2 would become richer in absolute terms by trading with tier 1 in this manner. And it's very likely that what tier 2 wants from tier 1 is whatever they need to build their own AIs. So my argument still stands. They wouldn't be poorer than they are now.

One problem is it is met from the other side by customers who think they understand software but don't actually have the training to visualise the consequences of design choices in real life.

Good software does require cross-domain knowledge that goes beyond "what existing apps in the market do".

I have in the last few years implemented a bit of software where a requirement had been set by a previous failed contractor and I had to say, look, I appreciate this requirement is written down and signed off, but my mother worked in your field for decades, I know what kind of workload she had, what made it exhausting, and I absolutely know that she would have been so freaking furious at the busywork this implementation will create: it should never have got this far.

So I had to step outside the specification, write the better functionality to prove my point, and I don't think realistically I was ever compensated for it, except metaphysically: fewer people out there are viscerally imagining inflicting harm on me as a psychological release.

I don't see how AGI could be centuries off (at least without some major disruption to global society). If computers that can talk, write essays, solve math problems, and code are not a warning sign that we should be ready, then what is?

It's happening right now with rich people and lobbies.

> It is only power so long as the 95% remain cooperative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_consumption#Contemp... I rest my case.

We've come a long ways to that goal. The amount of work both economic and domestic that humans do has dropped dramatically.

Probably more than what you think people did thousands of years ago. And there are almost infinite more people living from singing than ever.

i suspect humans had to invest millions of hours into writing the code, the tests, and validating the outputs.

Literally the only open source self driving platform, from trillion to billion to million dollar companies is comma.ai, founded by Geohot. Thats it. Its actually very good, and I bet they would welcome these upgrades, but that would be a consortium of one underdog pushing for them.

- destroy voting population's jobs

- put power in the hand of 1-2 tech companies

- clog streets with more cars rather than build trams, trains, maglevs, you name it

For some reason everyone thinks as LLMs get better it means programmers go away. The programming language, and amount you can build per day, are changing. That's pretty much it.

It's easy to sit in a café and ponder about how all jobs will be gone soon but in practice people aren't as easily replacable.

I guess AI tools can eventually become more human-like in terms of demeanor, mood, facial expressions, personality, etc. but this is a long long way from a photorealistic video.

The more software AI can write, the more of a commodity software will become, and the harder the value of software will tank. It's not magic.

Early LLMs were like that. That's not what they are now. An LLM got Gold on the Mathematical Olympiad - very difficult math problems that it hadn't seen in advance. You don't do that without some kind of working internal model of mathematics. There is just no way you can get to the right answer by spouting out plausible-sounding sentence completions without understanding what they mean. (If you don't believe me, have a look at the questions.)

> These people haven't suffered from the fact that mass production of media is cheap, they've benefited from it.

Maybe? This really depends on your value system. Every moment that you are focused on how you look on camera and trying to optimize an extractive algorithm is a moment you aren't focused on creating the best music that you can in that moment. If the goal is maximizing profit to ensure survival, perhaps they are thriving. Put another way, if these people were free to create music in any context, would they choose content creation on social media? I know I wouldn't, but I also am sympathetic to the economic imperatives.

Why would I listen to algorithmic Bach compositions when there are so many of Bach's own work I have never listened to?

Even if you did get bored of all JS music, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach has over 1000 works himself.

There are also many genius baroque music composers outside the Bach family.

This is true of any composer really. Any classical composer that the average person has heard of has an immense catalog of works compared to modern recording artists.

I would say I have probably not even listened to half the works of all my favorite composers because it is such a huge amount of music. There is no need for some kind of classical music style LORA.

I don't know the name of any of the artists whose music I listened to over the last week because it does not matter to me. What mattered was that it was unobtrusive and fit my general mood. So I have a handful of starting points that I stream music "similar to". I never care about looking up the tracks, or albums, or artists.

I'm sure lots of people think like you, but I also think you underestimate how many contexts there are where people just don't care.

Think of a world where software engineering itself is handled relatively well by the llm and the job of the engineer becomes just collecting business requirements and checking they’re correctly addressed.

In that world the limit for scarcity might be less in the difficulty of training and more in the willingness to bend your back in the sun for hours vs comfortably writing prompts in an air conditioned room.

Intent is in the eye of the beholder.

As for retraining, I am skeptical. I think it, at best, puts an older demographic in competition for entry level jobs, and generally at a disadvantage[2].

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/geograph... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/the-fa...

https://www.wired.com/story/kia-web-vulnerability-vehicle-ha...

But even if they can theoretically be hacked, so far Waymos are still safer and more reliable than human drivers. The biggest danger someone has riding in one is someone destroying it for vindictive reasons.

Marvel movies have become tiresome for me, too much CGI that does not tell any interesting story. Old animated Disney movies are more rewatchable.

This has a bunch of implications that are positive and also a bunch that are troubling. On one hand, it's likely going to create a burst of economic activity as the cost of these marginal activities goes way down. Many things that aren't feasible now because you can't afford to pay a copywriter or an artist or a programmer are suddenly going to become feasible because you can pay ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini at a fraction of the cost. It's a huge boon for startups and small businesses: instead of needing to raise capital and hire a team to build your MVP, just build it yourself with the help of AI. It's also a boon for DIYers and people who want to customize their life: already I've used Claude Code to build out a custom computer program for a couple household organization tasks that I would otherwise need to get an off-the-shelf program that doesn't really do what I want for, because the time cost of programming was previously too high.

But this sort of low-value junior work has historically been what people use to develop skills and break into the industry. And juniors become seniors, and typically you need senior-level skills to be able to know what to ask the AI and prompt it on the specifics of how to do a task best. Are we creating a world that's just thoroughly mediocre, filled only with the content that a junior-level AI can generate? What happens to economic activity when people realize they're getting shitty AI-generated slop for their money and the entrepreneur who sold it to them is pocketing most of the profits? At least with shitty human-generated bullshit, there's a way to call the professional on it (or at least the parts that you recognize as objectionable) and have them do it again to a higher standard. If the business is structured on AI and nobody knows how to prompt it to do better, you're just stuck, and the shitty bullshit world is the one you live in.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711306

To me it looks like we'll see well paying jobs decrease, digital services get cheaper, food+housing stay the same, and presumably as displaced workers do what they need to do physical service jobs will get more crowded and pay worse, so physical services will get cheaper. It is unclear whether there will be a net benefit to society.

Where do the jobs come from?

That’s not what the AI developers profess to believe, or the investors.

At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.

Why can't AIs be controlled with democratic institutions? Why are democratic institutions worse? This doesn't seem to be the case to me.

Private institutions shouldn't be allowed to control such systems, they should be compelled to give them to the public.

Most likely? It's ridiculously expensive and you're poor.

I'm afraid it's really a matter of faith, in either direction, to predict whether an AI can take over the autonomous decision making and robotic systems can take over physical actions which are currently delegated to human professions. And, I think many robotic control problems are inherently solved if we have sufficient AI advancement.

Median forecasts indicated a 50% probability of AI systems being capable of automating 90% of current human tasks in 25 years and 99% of current human tasks in 50 years[1]

The scope of work replaceable by embodied AGI and the speed of AGI saturation of vastly under estimated. The bottle necks are production of a replacement workforce, not retraining human laborers.

1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.08579

So it's simply a matter of time

>often too erratic to be useful

So sometimes it is useful.

You can farm and fish the entire undeveloped areas of NYC, but it won't be enough to feed or support the humans that live there.

You can say that for any metro area. Density will have to reduce immediately if there is economic collapse, and historically, when disaster strikes, that doesn't tend to happen immediately.

Also humans (especially large groups of them) need more than food: shelter, clothes, medicine, entertainment, education, religion, justice, law, etc.

I didn't say that. My example of the market includes companies that are groups of people.

> We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?

I can see this about myself. I don't need to use hypotheticals. Time ago, I voted for a referendum that made nuclear power impossible to build in my country. I voted just like the majority. Years later, I became passionate about economics, and only then did I realise my mistake.

It's not that I was stupid, and there were many, many debates, but I didn't put the effort into researching on my own.

The feedback in a democracy is very weak, especially because cause and effect are very hard to discern in a complex system.

Also, consensus is not enough. In various countries, there is often consensus about some Deity existing. Yet large groups of people worldwide believe in incompatible Deities. So there must be entire countries where the consensus about their Deity is wrong. If the consensus is wrong, it's even harder to get to the reality of things if there is no incentive to do that.

I think, if people get this, democracy might still be good enough to self-limit itself.

For comparison to how things are today:

- contacting vendors requires using the telephone, sitting on hold, talking to a person, possibly navigating the phone tree to reach the parts department

- it would need to understand redirection, so if call #1 says "not us, but Jimmy over at Foo Parts has it"

- finding the part requires understanding the difference between the actual part and an OEM compatible one

- ordering it would require finding the payment options they accept that intersect with those the caller has access to, which could include an existing account (p.o. or store credit)

- ordering it would require understanding "ok, it'll be ready in 30 minutes" or "it's on the shelf right now" type nuance

Now, all of those things are maybe achievable today, with the small asterisk that hallucinations are fatal to a process that needs to work

I'd love a source to these claims. Many companies are claiming that they are able to layoff folks because of AI, but in fact, AI is just a scapegoat to counteract the reckless overhiring due to free money in the market over the last 5-10 years and investors are demanding to see a real business plan and ROI. "We can eliminate this headcount due to the efficiency of our AI" is just a fancy way to make the stock price go up while cleaning up the useless folks.

People have ideas. There are substantially more ideas than people who can implement ideas. As with most technology, the reasonable expectation is to assume that people are just going to want more done by the now tool powered humans, not less things.

When it gets to the point that you don't need a senior engineer doing the work, you won't need a junior either.

Name three?

Could you offer some examples? I'm having a hard time thinking of what could be at the intersection of "hard enough for SotA LLMs" yet "easy enough for students (who are still learning, not experts in their fields, etc)".

For that to happen tier 1 would have to buy all of the resources from tier 2. Would you sell your house and be homeless so that you can have a highly efficient humanoid robot? I don't think so. And sooner or later, what tier 2 would want from tier 1 is what they need to build their AIs, and then they'd be more similar to tier 1.

Written tasks are obvious, writing a paper, essay or answering questions is part of most LLMs advertised use-cases. The only other thing was recorded videos, effectively recorded presentations, thanks to video/audio/image generation that probably can be forged too.

So the simple solution to choose something that an "LLM can't do" is to choose something were an LLM can't be applied. So we move away from a digital solution to meatspace.

Assuming that the goal is to test your knowledge/understanding of a topic, it's the same with any other assistive technology. For example, if an examiner doesn't want you[1] to use a calculator to solve a certain equation, they could try to create an artificially hard problem or just exclude the calculator from the allowed tools. The first is vulnerable to more advanced technology (more compute etc.) the latter just takes the calculator out of the equation (pun intended).

[1]: Because it would relieve you of understanding how to evaluate the equation.

It doesn’t matter if the revolution is bad for the commoners — they will support it anyway if the aristocracy is hateful enough.

The status quo does not go well for the avg person.

My recommendation was that it's useful to try the tools on greenfield projects, since they you can see them at their best.

The productivity improvements of AI for greenfield projects are real. It's not all bullshit. It is a huge boost if you're at a small startup trying to find product market fit. If you don't believe that and think it would be faster to do it all manually I don't know what to tell you - go talk to some startup founders, maybe?

- human individuals create wealths

- groups of humans can create kinds of wealth that isn’t possible for a single indovidual. This can be a wide variety of associations: companies, project teams, governments, etc.

- governments (formal or less formal) create the playing field for individuals and groups of individuals to create wealth

I literally pasted an announcement from the CEO of a major corporation warning they are going to decimate their workforce due to the adoption of AI.

The CEO literally made the following announcement:

> "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," Jassy wrote. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs."

This is not about selling a product. This is about how they are adopting AI to reduce headcount.

Someone still has to choose what to prompt and I don’t think a boilerplate “make me a marketing plan then write pages for it” will be enough to stand out. And I’d bet that the cyborg writers using AI will outcompete the purely AI ones.

(I also was just using it as a point to show how being identified as AI-made is already starting to have a negative connotation. Maybe the future is one where everything is an AI but no one admits it.)

EDIT: As in, it can make really good derivative works. But it will always lag behind a human that has been in real life situations of the time and experienced being a human throughout them. It won't be able to hit the subtle notes that we crave in art.

This could change with varying results.

What is average quality? For some it’s a massive upgrade. For others it’s a step down. For the experienced it’s seeing through it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=44919671&goto=item%3Fi...

Songs right now are terrible. For the videos, things are going to be very different once people can create full movies in their computers. Many will have access to the ability to create movies, and a few will be very good, and this will likely change many things. Btw this stupid "AI look" is only transient and is nowhere needed. It will be fixed, and AI images/videos generation will be impossible to stop.

Maybe you’re a gentleman of such discerningly superior taste that you can always manage to identify the spark of human creativity that eludes the rest of us. Or maybe you’ve just told yourself you hate it and therefore you say you always do. I dunno.

I'd pay extra for writing with some kind of "no AI used" certification, especially for art or information

You would like to learn to play the guitar? Sorry, that kind of money didn’t pass in the budget bill, but how about you ask the bot to create music for you?

Elites also get something way better than keeping people busy for distraction… they get mass, targeted manipulation and surveillance to make sure you act working the borders of safety.

You know what job will surely survive? Cops. There’ll always be the nightstick to keep people in line.

We’ve also been gaslit into believing that it’s not a good approach, that peaceful protests are more civilised (even though they rarely cause anything meaningful to actually change).

The argument above (or some version of it) gets repeated over and over, but it is deeply flawed for various reasons.

The argument implies that “we” is a single agent that must do some set of things before other things. In the real world, different collections of people can work on different projects simultaneously in various orderings.

This is very different than optimizing an instruction pipeline for a single core microprocessor. In the real world, different kinds of tasks operate on very different timescales.

As an example, think about how change happens in society. Should we only talk about one problem at a time? Of course not. Why? The pipeline to solving problems is long and uncertain so you have to parallelize. Raising awareness of an issue can be relatively slow. Do you know what is even slower? Trying to reframe an issue in a way that gets into people’s brains and language patterns. Once a conceptual model exists and people pay attention, then building a movement among “early adopters” has a fighting chance. If that goes well, political influence might follow.

Then a few words later ...

>Deep Utopia (Bostrom) is an excellent read that extensively discusses various options if things go well

Oh, the irony

Could.

> So many assumptions. There is no need to just assume any particular distribution of boredom across the future population of the world. Making predictions about social unrest is even more complicated

I’m assuming that previous outcomes predict future failures, because the forces driving these changes are of our societies, and not a hypothetical, assumed new society.

In this world, ownership, actual, legal ownership, is a far stronger and fundamental right than any social right to your well-being.

You would have to change that, which is a utopian project whose success has been assumed in the past, that a dialectical contradiction of the forces of social classes would lead to the replacement of this framework.

It is indeed very complicated, but you know what’s even more complicated? Utopian projects.

Sorry but I see it as far more likely that the plebes will be told to kick rocks and ask the bots to generate art for them, when asking for money for art supplies on top of their cup noodle money.

Take global warming as an example: this is a real thing that's happening. We have measurements of CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. Most people accept that this is a real thing. And still getting anybody to do anything about it is nearly impossible.

Now you have a hypothetical risk of something that may happen sometime in the distant future, but may not. I don't see how you would be able to get anybody to care about that.

Maybe the tech will at some point be good enough. At the current rate of improvement this will still take decades at least. Which is sad because I personally hoped that my kids would never have to get a driver’s License.

You just shift the emissions from your location to the location that you buy products from.

Basically what happened in Germany: more expensive "clean" energy means their own production went down and the world bought more from China instead. The net result is probably higher global emissions overall.

What corporation will accept to pay dollars for members of society that are essentially "unproductive"? What will happen with the value of UBI in time, in this context, when the strongest lobby will be of the companies that have the means of producing AI? And, more essentially, how are humans able to negotiate for themselves when they lose their abilities to build things?

I'm not opposing the technology progress, I'm merely trying to unfold the reality of UBI being a thing, knowing human nature and the impetus for profit.

Is there like a transition period where some people don't have to pay taxes and yet don't get UBI, and if so, why hasn't that come yet ? Why aren't the minimum tax thresholds going up if UBI could be right around the corner ?

If no UBI is installed there will be a hard crash while everyone figures out what it is that humans can do usefully, and then a new economic model of full employment gets established. If UBI is installed then this will happen more slowly with less pain, but it is possible for society to get stuck in a permanently worse situation.

Ultimately if AI really is about to automate as much as it is promised then what we really need is a model for post-capitalism, for post-scarcity economics, because a model based on scarcity is incapable of adapting to a reality of genuine abundance. So far nobody seems to have any clue of how to do such a thing. UBI as a concept still lives deeply in the Overton window bounded by capitalist scarcity thinking. (Not a call for communism btw, that is a train to nowhere as well because it also assumes scarcity at its root.)

What I fear is that we may get a future like The Diamond Age, where we have the technology to get rid of scarcity and have human flourishing, but we impose legal barriers that keep the rich rich and the poor poor. We saw this happen with digital copyright, where the technology exists for abundance, but we’ve imposed permanent worldwide legal scarcity barriers to protect revenue streams to megacorps.

We "made cars work" about 100 years ago, but they have been innovating on that design since then on comfort, efficiency, safety, etc. I doubt the very first version of self driving will have zero ways to improve (although eventually I suppose you would hit a ceiling).

Having had the experience of living under communist regime prior to 1989 I have zero trust in the state providing support, while I am totally dependent and have no recourse. Instead I would rather rely on my own two hands like my grandparents did.

I see a world where we can build anything we want with our own hands and AI automation. Jobs might become optional.