The Flat Curve Society(steve-yegge.medium.com) |
The Flat Curve Society(steve-yegge.medium.com) |
> Superhuman means unverifiable
is not true for at least large classes of problems. The recent solution of the "unit distance" problem comes to mind, or any future AI-solved math problem that was beyond the capabilities of humans. You can tell it's superhuman (it's doing things humans can't) and you can easily verify its results are correct.
For other classes of problems (eg, policy suggestions for large scale systems like the economy), the point is fair.
The focus is placed on "AI Literacy", but it seems to use this to just mean 'volume of AI use'. The discussion of the Netflix case study is extra perplexing, since the summary here admits they didn't find any actual productivity improvement, just that only a few hours of "training" could induce on the order of $50/person/day on tokens.
That seems... the opposite of literacy?
We have only just begun our ascent up the hockey stick and the most intense change is yet to come.
The real danger is how big of a gap will exist once the curve does level off. If we are just at the start of the sigmoid curve and starting our ascent, then many jobs will be thrown off by the time we hit the peak and begin to level off.
No politician or corporation is preparing for this sufficiently.
If you want me to pay for your compiler it must be that much better than the compiler I can get for free that allows me much more freedom of agency in how I use it, if it is not I am going to use the free compiler. repeat for operating systems, word processors, databases and now LLM's