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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

Every profession seems to have a pessimistic view of AI as soon as it starts to make progress in their domain. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Artists seem to be in the depression state, many programmers are still in the denial phase. Pretty solid denial here from a mathematician. o3 was a proof of concept, like every other domain AI enters, it's going to keep getting better.

Society is CLEARLY not ready for what AI's impact is going to be. We've been through change before, but never at this scale and speed. I think Musk/Vivek's DOGE thing is important, our governent has gotten quite large and bureaucratic. But the clock has started on AI, and this is a social structural issue we've gotta figure out. Putting it off means we probably become subjects to a default set of rulers if not the shoggoth itself.

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Or is it just white collar workers experiencing what blue collar workers have been experiencing for decades?

So will that make society shift to the left in demand stronger of safety nets, or to the right in search of a strongman to rescue them?

Depends on the individual, do they think “look after us” or do they think “look after ME”?

It's because we then go check it out, and see how useless it is when applied to the domain.

> programmers are still in the denial phase

I am doing a startup and would jump on any way to make the development or process more efficient. But the only thing LLMs are really good for are investor pitches.

The reason why this is so disruptive is because it will effect hundreds of fields simultaneously.

Previously workers in a field disrupted by automation would retrain to a different part of the economy.

If AI pans out to the point that there are mass layoffs in hundreds of sectors of the economy at once, then i’m not sure the process we have haphazardly set up now will work. People will have no idea where to go beyond manual labor. (But this will be difficult due to the obesity crisis - but maybe it will save lives in a weird way).

If there are 'mass layoffs in hundreds of sectors of the economy at once', then the economy immediately goes into Great Depression 2.0 or worse. Consumer spending is two-thirds of the US economy, when everyone loses their jobs and stops having disposable income that's literally what a depression is

This will create a prisoner’s dilemma for corporations then, the government will have to step in to provide incentives for insanely profitable corporations to keep the proper number of people employed or limit the rate of layoffs.

Well it hasn’t happened yet at least (unemployment is near historic lows). How much better does AI need to get? And do we actually expect it to happen? Improving on random benchmarks is not necessarily evidence of being able to do a specific job.

I think it's a little of both. Maybe generative AI algorithms won't overcome their initial limitations. But maybe we don't need to overcome them to transform society in a very significant way.

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