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Comment by CommieBobDole | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to entertain the idea that AI is something fundamentally different that will cause chaos, but software has been automating away all levels of white-collar jobs by the millions for the past four or five decades yet unemployment in this area remains low.

Based on past experience, it seems more likely that what will happen is that skill sets will change, people will become more productive resulting in more stuff getting done that necessitates more companies employing more people, etc. Which sucks of course if your skills are the ones that are automated away or become obsolete, but that's something been going on for half a century or more.

The hypothetical arrival of AGI, of course, especially if it's doable on commodity-level hardware, would be a different thing and the societal upheaval could be catastrophic. But I feel like the current crop of AI is just a continuation of the previous thing.

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My cynical take is that the arrival of AGI would be legislated away, probably for decades. If it can do an engineer's job, but better, it can do the CEO's job better as well. And the president's. When everyone's livelihoods are on the line, those with a lot to lose will wage endless war to keep from losing it. The process of getting everyone on side and validating that things are unquestionably better will take a generation. Even if we perfected AGI tomorrow, I suspect I would be an old man, or dead and buried, before it actually runs the show.

The other question is: what sort of economy would even remain? One where the same AGI runs everything and engages in adversarial games against itself?

AGI is difficult to forbid, compared to certain illegal media. Legal enforcement can look at media to decide if some enforcement is neccessary. The most difficult thing is probably gaining access to a laptop, for example.

But what exactly is AGI? This is the first problem. Where to draw the border between harmless and dangerous AI? Careful legislation needs to give clear limits. Too little and real AGI doesn't get banned. Too much and useful AI like LLMs get banned. Unclear law is unenforceable and people start ignoring it.

The second problem is detecting. Police can just look at media and they know. But they can't look at abstract data and immediately say, hm, looks suspicious. They need to look at software behavior, and this is a lot more work. This is like catching someone stealing red-handed. But what behavior exactly is illegal, even if they could watch AGI doing something?

And finally, AGI is probably clever and might hide by playing dumb.

I think the shift in productivity here is potentially massive and compressed in such a short timeline that we've never seen anything like this before.

People often bring up horses and cars, but think about the timescale of how long it took to make that shift. Horses still played a role in WW1, decades after the automobile was a thing.

The other factor is the non-existent cost barrier. Think about the transition from typewriter to word processor -- it took a relatively long time for computing to become affordable enough to be accessible meaning that the transition from typewriter to word processor manifest over a large span of time allowing for labor to adjust.

AI is practically being given away for free and prices are constantly dropping.

> I think the shift in productivity here is potentially massive and compressed in such a short timeline that we've never seen anything like this before.

that's if hype will be supported by quality eventually. I think it is still not clear if AI can automate even some trivial clerks jobs without failures.

I am working in a 4-person team building AI powered authoring tools and we are already seeing this happen.

maybe you could expand on your experience, what do you see? Massive productivity jump in some scenarios, or high level of automation in some tasks?..

Both.

The authoring tool allows retailers and brands to generate hundreds of articles a day which would have taken a team of human writers days if not weeks to put together. Some of the work straight up couldn't be done previously because the number of people required would be too exorbitant for the returns.

Some of the content augments existing content on the retailer and brand websites. Some of the content is feeding into SEO.

And its good enough that we are ranking #1 in Google just a few weeks in for some customers in competitive search terms.

depending on your quality threshold, this could be classified as SEO spam, which I agree LLMs are likely good at.

I’m sincerely looking forward to when/if search engines get better at recognizing LLM content and start penalizing it heavily.

I wonder if spam (for human consumption) is just a temporary thing... the real value to capture is where the purchasing (or other kinds of) decisions are to made. If consumers embrace AI agents, the money in influencing their decision via their attention to influencing the AI training material directly.

I think search engines won't have a spam problem for long... but AI training will start to have a spam problem as a side effect of developing into a marketplace. The influence market moves from people to machines.

So you’re a spammer?

If the content is good, is it still spam?

We can't check if it is good

If the search terms are "competitive" what's the moat that keeps your customers' competitors from leveraging the same foundation models until that term is flooded with marginally-optimized copy? High-quality copy used to be a signal that the retailer or brand had enough success and therefore capital to afford to invest in the copy. Now anyone can do it, even retailers and brands that are terrible or maybe even fake. So what's the value of Google search if all it's surfacing is the highest-quality AI authoring tool? Maybe you can play the spread between now and wide adoption but it seems like eventually you'll be shooting yourself in the foot.

There's a lot of expertise and work involved in getting the context to generate really good content that is contextual and informative.

This is all of the work we do before even getting to the LLM.

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