Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There's a "non-zero" chance all life on earth is eradicated in an extinction event like a gamma ray burst too. That phrase is just smarter sounding weasel words.

With regards to generative AI replacing jobs, it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in.

For example, I am not a lawyer or doctor therefore it seems trivial to me that AI will replace much of what lawyers and doctors do. Both boil down to reading a libraries worth of information and then making sense of it right? Bam, easy for AI.

However, I'm a professional engineer and I know how extremely complex and difficult computer science is to get right, especially at scale, therefore I'll eat my hat if in 10 years you can write "Create a facebook clone that can support 500 million simultaneous users" and the AI does anything but hallucinate nonsense that won't work. (There's also the reality that there is far more to large scale software than what can be typed into a computer or repeated by an AI, but hey, details).

I'll also point out that 10 years is not so long. 10 years ago Elon Musk told us AI was replacing driving and taxis. 2015 that feature was launched. 10 years later... not so much.

"it seems to me that AI is best at replacing jobs I have a layman's understanding of, and AI is no good at replacing jobs I have a professional understanding in."

You attribute this to a 'bias of underestimating other people's jobs' I attribute this to a 'bias of overestimate our own jobs'.

Most programmer jobs do not involve facebook clones that support 500 million users. Most programmer jobs are boring crud apps for random companies in traditional industries. Just think of what the outsourcing mills in India produce, and how many people they employ, then think again about how many jobs generative AI replace.

Also, Hollywood rapidly organised to try to slow down AI. They could see, very evidently, how extremely rapidly AI was advancing, and how lethal the threat is to them.

Far easier to AI fake Jim Carey speaking on camera, even doing acrobatics, than it is to AI fake the development of even a tiny piece of novel UI in an app. The reason is we have lots of footage of Jim Carey doing those things and so we can easily recreate him doing those kinds of things. We can probably even put entertaining words in his mouth via AI because we have the entire history of human writing in the model so we should be able to easily create something semi-novel and funny to have him say. What these models cannot do is thoughtfully interview users, evaluate designs on functionality and aesthetics (and perhaps brand) and build an app that looks and behaves well but very different/distinct from existing apps. The novelty is the hard part for these AIs. Even that AI Jim Carey script will reflect or outright steal from the training data. This is why actors came together to say no. It's just too easy, today, to steal their likenesses and do things they would themselves never agree to do. If you're building yet another clone app or site, you too are like these actors, only you're unprotected because too many of us over the last couple of decades were foolishly saying we had it good, the sodas were free, and there was nothing to complain about. If, on the other hand, you're doing something novel, creative, and interesting, you will be fine, better than fine, you will be able to command a premium over the AIs and all the loser might as well be AIs who thought they were too good for a union.

The actors and writers guilds moved to protect their interests against studios abusing AI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com