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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

This is the tip of the iceberg, right? It's foreshadowing AI helping experts become better. I can see it happening in a lot of creative fields, including software. Perhaps this is where it really pulls the experts from the juniors, because only experts will be able to judge whether the AI has helped him create something actually good.

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Go is a constructed game with a precise definition of the rules and victory.

The real challenge with AI helping experts is whether it can correctly help them balance their own value function for what "better" means. And whether we can still train human experts who can think about that independently with good judgement, if we've automated away the things that beginners would normally do to train their judgement with black boxes that they can't interrogate.

Will be interesting for sure.

I'd say GPT4 has definitely helped me become a better programmer - I'm able to ask it questions, learn how I can refactor my code better, or approach a problem in a way I might not have considered.

It does hit its limits, but it's been so useful - it's a funny cycle of training AI and having it train us, a great symbiotic relationship.

I can't think of any reason we should be so lucky that AI will have a ceiling somewhere between human "juniors" and human "experts"

Maybe I'm too small minded but I would love to see AI like this enhance...well, the AI in games in general. I long for the day where I no longer play Civilization or an RTS against AI that has perfect knowledge, or is given handicaps to allow it to be competitive.

Flight simulators are set to benefit from AI. Imagine talking to an AI Air Traffic Control that understands natural language. Imagine walking down the aisle of your plane and overhearing AI people's conversations.

> It's foreshadowing AI helping experts become better.

The humans are still way worse than the Go programs. People are still willing to pay them to play a game as entertainment. Are lots of people willing to pay you to do whatever it is you do even when AIs do it much better, out of sheer entertainment value & sentimentality? If they are willing to pay you in particular, how many other people like you are they also willing to pay for, and is that number much greater than or much less than the current number paid to do it?

People are also cheering for Usain Bolt or whoever is the speediest runner this year, in spite of being able to outrun him by simply getting into a car...

I think about this at the gym. I feel very proud of myself when I can go from being 1% as strong as a front-end loader to being 1.1% as strong. The king of my gym, the most high status guy there, is up to maybe 3%.

That 0.1% is a 10% for you which is great progress!

"If they are willing to pay you in particular, how many other people like you are they also willing to pay for, and is that number much greater than or much less than the current number paid to do it?"

There are not many Usain Bolts out there: just one, as a matter of fact. Who is Usain Bolt #100? Or #1000?

A good bunch of the people he beat were also paid.

Paid by the standards of Kenya, perhaps. Not America. And how many of those people were paid anything like a living wage across all of the years of training? And how many orders of magnitude smaller is that number than '8 billion'?

And I note you still haven't answered my question. How many people are willing to pay you - who are not Usain Bolt - your current salary to watch you do whatever it is you do for sheer entertainment value for decades to come?

> Paid by the standards of Kenya, perhaps. Not America.

Well, with him being the world record holder, I'd assume he beat some americans too. And that they were not paid Kenya wages to go to that competition they lost to Bolt.

> How many people are willing to pay you - who are not Usain Bolt - your current salary to watch you do whatever it is you do for sheer entertainment value for decades to come?

Not sure, but i think it can be done. There was a mention of someone doing live coding with a Patreon and all here on HN in the past few years :)

TBH I think that in a few years 'no AI' will become a badge of honour in arts and entertainment. Just like the 'handmade' clothing/furniture...

As for how many people can make a living out of it, most artists/entertainers starve by definition. Or are amateurs. I've certainly paid to do sports before.

It's exactly like the invention of agriculture. Not having to hunt for food gave more opportunities for intellectual pursuits because of having more free time.

I'm skeptical of this argument. It gave free time to some people i.e. the landed gentry but also created the toiling peasants and a hierarchical civilization.

Many other types of governance was enabled by the agricultural revolution, not just feudalism.

Toiling peasants had more free time than we do today.

As I understand it, this is largely inaccurate. People just read "days off" as "more time", even though peasant farmers would need to engage in a lot of labor around the farm or household even on "days off" (your cows and chickens don't care that you're on vacation).

Of course people still do some chores today even on days off, but it's a lot less than you need to do on a farm, ask basically any farmer.

The amount of toiling they could do without dying was calorically limited. Having lethargy induced by a shortage of food doesn’t necessarily mean a preferable lifestyle.

Hunter gatherers had more leisure than farming peasants. Surely, one can spot the trend.

[citation needed]

"Who's going to teach those idle medieval peasants to read, Ben? Augustine-man?!"

Pfft, disagree. Got laid off a year ago and have had nearly 100% free time since

No, it just meant you could support more people on the same amount of land. Non-mechanised agriculture is very labour-intensive compared to hunting.

Absolutely! We're just beginning to scratch the surface of how AI can augment and enhance human expertise in various fields

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