After AI Takes Everything(ursb.me) |
After AI Takes Everything(ursb.me) |
They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system).
They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate.
It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.
Maybe if these people who are basically wealthier than some countries would share their loot or just care a tiny bit about 99% of the rest of the world, people would feel differently about things. Use AI and your data centers to figure out how to quench, feed and power the entire world, and probably a bunch of people who hate AI would even get onboard.
I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thought of one way how AI can pay all of us for our content ..posted quick thoughts on my Substack... https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!
I think you're on to something. Imagine OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly started funding millions of artists worldwide, basically "we pay monthly rent and food, you get to create what you want, we get rights to train on your output while you retain ownership", wonder how many would actually agree to that?
What matters to me is, I like programming and making things, and I'm okay at it. I can learn to enjoy, and get good at, other work (I hope). Close a fairly brief chapter of my life where I felt some certainty about what I wanted to do for the coming decades. But it's maddening to not have any idea if I will need to.
Here's my point: it may not be bad to live in a future world were ai and llm's are very prevelant, ordinary technology. But I think living in the now, while that world is (slowly) being born, can get to be pretty bad.
Not a fan either but there are real game theoretic reasons to do it.
Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids
We're all really excited to do those mostly minimum wage jobs. Especially given how much competition there will be for them when the currently non-minimum-wage jobs disappear.
lol
Two More Weeks(TM)
When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context.
The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.
That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".
Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
Which can be channeled into making the change healthy.
I heard a statistic that the average QOL and life expectancy didn't increase for most of the Industrial Revolution, once you account for the increase in pollution and disease (disease partly coming from greater urbanization). Yes, our lives are much richer now than they would've been 200 years ago, but it was pretty rough there for a while.
I'd like to think we can do better this time. Though, realistically, I'm not sure. Gilded Age 2.0, coming up
But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully.
I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.
If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"?
Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.
I can see glimpses of that today but we are a bit too early.
And with that almost all of the software will be written by AI for AI but humans will be in control - I hope :)
Next viral doom post in September-ish?
[1] https://situational-awareness.ai/
[2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/ai-fraudster-matt-shumer-wrote-so...
It does not; the increments are almost imperceptible now and locked to the same paradigm, whose peak has already gone by.
This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is:
Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth?
If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.
If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is probably also a dystopia worth resisting.
I think the only good outcome is one in which humanity benefits on the whole. If that means that we have to become a post-capitalist society in order to share in the wealth, so be it.
The article compared market conditions to argue that the current revolution is similar to the shipping container revolution of the '60s-'80s -- with a lot of market interest and no real moat or market leader, high competition drove prices down, kept margins low, and most of the benefits went to the consumer.
This seems like the best case scenario here. AI ends up expensive to train but cheap to copy and run, so we end up with lots of competitors or even just running it in-house. It's cheap to use, so there'll be lots of businesses trying similar AI-driven ideas and pushing prices of their products down for the consumer.
Have you looked around at the current state of wealth inequality?! The internet (without AI) already did that.
The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation.
We value these things because they have become correlated with quality. We now have the opportunity to decouple these things; maybe something that took no effort will be just as good as a painstaking human labor.
The risk is if this doesn't come true. If we let our skills degrade and get ahead of our skis, embracing "slop" that superficially appears to "work", we will eventually pay the price. Financially and culturally, it seems like we are already all-in on the bet that it will work.
I hope it does, I just want to solve the problems I am working on.
That's where I'm at too. Saves you weeks of effort to boot.
Which is based on what?
> AI can process the entire world
It can process what is in it's training set. Which is a monumental gap to step over. Failing to understand this leads to all kinds of silly predictions and mindless prognostication.
I'd like to see an AI article based on data and not paragraphs of internal monologue spewed out onto the internet.
AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place.
I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential crisis is at its core, acknowledgement of of a skill issue.
Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I absolutely respect. I can look at a couple modules, and have a good idea what the other modules are going to be like, because the mental model of the author is clear from the code itself. Even teams with multiple authors with taste average out to one taste-profile and in a similar way, I’ve seen LLM output shaped by someone with taste and had the same feeling: “yeah I see the direction you’re going in”.
Someone without taste using an LLM writes slop. I can’t tell what you’re doing. Any question about what you’re doing results in “sorry that was Claude”. Entirely pointless that you’re even involved.
It’s a property of the author IMO. They were kind of owed an existential crisis as cruel as that is to say.
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
Steve Jobs
giving a shit != perfect.
i recently had a PR which had a comment explaining a change of an import: "// Changed imports to add Foo as it's needed for updated bar()".
apparently the person behind "it" has been a developer for 10 years. couldn't be bothered to remove completely useless "how" comments from a 25 line change (without all the useless comments).
also, i posted on another AI slop thread about taste: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463
That's a wildly optimistic take.
Most of them will never realize it by themselves, and will put the blame of people reacting badly to their work on the people complaining, not themselves.
In that light I’m not happy about it, but the code always was just a means to an end.
One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one).
With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that really doesn't matter anymore.
Said another way: AI generated code doesn't chase perfection. It just chases good enough.
So do many developers. I've lost count how many times a code review had to be rejected or cleaned up because of copy and pasted code and I'm going to admit, sometimes it's just quicker to duplicate a little code and leave a comment for 'next time'.. we've all done it.
.. like this one time I had a PR and the developer created on loooong linear method, couldn't figure out how to share between targets and copied and pasted the same bad code somewhere else. Somehow it got through and when asked why this was on production the answer was 'it worked'.
>> no time for elegance
This happens, your experience in is generally your quality out. But that doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be elegance. I've worked at major product driven companies where elegance took a back seat to getting release out the door.
I mean, I guess if all you do is work on implementing CRUD endpoints ... sure I guess you're cooked. but we had tech to automate this already, this isn't anything new. But oh man, if you're doing real engineering, the tools are barely usable.
I hate when people don't give examples, so I am going to throw one here. just the other day, I asked the newest and most expensive claude model to write an LRU and to have a running tally of the capacity of bytes in the cache as the threshold to evict something from the cache. It wrongly implemented the threshold checks and just tracked how many elements were in the cache. this might sound small, but scale that mistake up to a real production system. this is literally unusable. and the expectation to sit there, have it generate 1000s of lines of code for you, and then spot check that small but huge error is not worth it. you have to move so slow to spot check everything - to the point that it's literally faster to type it. This is a model that costs $100s to run per hour and is advertised as "PHD level intelligence" making High school AP computer science to freshman computer science errors - like come on.
If you're reading this, are an expert in your field, and are actually worried about your job - you got be able to have some mental fortitude and not fall for this ...
I wonder if the author tried to sit down and read the whole post, from beginning to end in one go? The AI-written posts feel sludgy, like plain oatmeal that's been cooked too long, homogenous and bland.
first is that the model will write out that it “thought” and “double checked” it’s output
Second, this was in a fresh context window of the latest model (that isn’t fable b/c we can’t use for reasons beyond this thread), and it was on it’s second highest thinking mode. I shouldn’t have to double check something that it claimed to have burned more tokens on to double check
Outside of it costing me more money to fix what it claims to do, the main point of this article is that models are implementing things nearly end to end, and if we scale it up, it will only continue to do that. I Intentionally chose the example of something that is < 70 lines to implement in TS (btw, the language with the second most amount of data available to scrape and train on) I would assume a machine that can almost implement things end to end should be able to implement something of 70 lines of code and has been documented for nearly 50 years.
My point is that time and time again on the most trivial examples, under the best of conditions, and with unlimited amounts of money, they can’t do what it claims
Outside of that, this follow up comment(s) that say, “oh you need to ask it to check its own work and be so involved in the process of it writing the code that you need to spot check it” goes against everything the article states
The best analogy I have for this is New speak in 1984, it’s just vibes dictating vibes and trying to make people claim that the vibes are right. and if you try to validate the vibes, your vibes are just wrong because you don’t get the vibes. The claims that it made have no data backing it. And if there is data, it’s cherry picked. Please use your brain and stop outsourcing your ability to think to a machine that is incorrectly thinking on your behalf
Edit: Typos
