Comment by temp_12345 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temp_12345 | Hacker News Reader

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So, a question bordering on the philosophical :

What can be done to prepare for the end of human supremacy, and quite likely human civilization? For instance, as a software developer it feels almost pointless to continue improving at my craft if AI systems will surpass me within 2-4 years (even if the pessimists are right about it taking 5-10 years, that's still an awfully small timeframe).

Likewise, it feels a little pointless to work on any endeavor - technical or otherwise - including but not limited to AI research itself. From a purely practical standpoint just getting up to speed on AI research will take a solid 5+ years, and from a moral vantage point I'm not sure that's even a defensible career given the obvious and hugely negative implications that field will have for human civilization.

Even in artistic endeavors, humans will soon be second fiddle to our own creations - so it's not like there's any "point" to starting down that path either.

Is it time to just engage in a hedonistic, nihilistic, fest of gluttony and "fun" while that's still possible? Honestly, news like this just makes me consider ending it all : it feels like none of us will have much of a future before long.

You need to get out of whatever bubble you're living in. Human civilization is doing fine. Machine learning will do some stuff but not major changes at the civilization level in the next 40 years.

Walk into any real world business today. There's a huge amount of need for humans, because fundamentally business is about trust not productivity.

There are ways to greatly improve chances that AI will be beneficial to humanity rather than otherwise.

Check out: UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI, led by Prof. Stuart Russell, a co-author of the field's standard textbook. [1] He just gave a TED talk on the issue [2].

Several other noted researchers in AI are working on the issue as well.

For a short primer: https://futureoflife.org/background/aimyths/

[1] http://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/global-catastrophic-ri...

[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_how_ai_might_make_u...

> AI systems will surpass me within 2-4 years

Oh lord. 4 years ago was 2013. Was there such a jump from 2013 to today that makes you or anyone claim that within just 24 months machines will actually program better than developers, when there isn't as much as a proof of concept of that yet? Bar a major and unexpected breakthrough you can sleep assuredly that no machine will take your job just yet.

I agree that becoming an AI researcher seems daunting, since the field is moving so fast. However, so far we haven't seen any useful applications of machine learning to ordinary computer programming, so this hopelessness seems rather premature.

(Perhaps applying machine learning to code review might be useful, to spot bugs? The problem would be getting good data to train it.)

Is there really anyone credibly suggesting software developers will be surpassed by AI within a few years? Writing arbitrary software seems dramatically more complex than what "AI" like systems are capable of today.

Even 10 years seems impossibly soon.

People said the same thing about Go. That it was far too difficult and that a pro-level AI was 10+ years away.

What happened was new mathematical tools and new hardware were developed, and suddenly it was all too possible.

It's clear that with our current tools, general AI is out of reach, and new tools must first be developed. But because nobody has any idea what those new tools are, it could happen overnight or over 100 years.

It didn't come from nowhere, the current streak of ML achievements rides on the back of deep learning, which is an elaborate pattern matching at its core. What makes Go "harder" than chess is that it's difficult to estimate how good or bad a particular position is, so we employed a "magical box" of deep learning and learned to estimate how good a particular move is. That's pretty good, but let's not forget

- it took a ton of very hard work

- it's not transferrable to other domains per se ("elaborate pattern matching" can be, but it's not even an AI)

- this has nothing to do with qualia, consciousness or the theory of mind.

Programming is not about elaborate search or pattern matching at the end. It's about formalizing a domain, stripping it from some subset of real-world complexity, and inventing a solution to a problem in that domain. A rift between beating someone in Go and deducing a fact that doubles wouldn't do well in financial calculations is immense.

This sort of over-extrapolation of current trends is surprisingly prevalent in the tech crowd to be honest. It's like folks in mid-20th century who saw both airline and car industry exploding and made a "logical" guess about flying cars being the obvious next step. Guess what, physics doesn't work that way and flying cars are a dumb idea. The current AI craze seems very, very similar to me.

Well, firstly AI outdoing us in software development is going to take a while, probably >10 years.

Secondly you're looking mostly at the negatives but not positives of AI advancing. Some of those:

We will likely use AI to enhance ourselves rather than just have it take over.

Such merging may lead to the end of death. At the moment sure you can develop away then age and die - the AI thing may be jollier.

Robots at some stage will be able to do the work so you should be able to have a hedonistic gluttony fest it that's your thing.

Also, we'll get to use amazing AI tools in our projects. That should create a lot work opportunity, even for non-AI experts.

I've been thinking about this all morning... surely there must be people already working on the following:

- AI that builds an understanding of a large legacy codebase, and is able to diagram & explain it

- using that to refactor convoluted logic and reduce complexity

- using that to train something that can write code from scratch or rewrite an exisiting codebase in a different language

Seems like a billion dollar business, as the world develops more and more large and shitty codebases with high maintenance costs.

"What are people for?"

That's the question you're asking.

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