I agree that we're not about to be all replaced with AGI, that there is still a need for junior eng, and with several of these points.
None of those arguments matter if the C suite doesn't care and keeps doing crazy layoffs so they can buy more GPUs, and intelligence and rationality are way less common than following the cargo cult among that group.
Where the Western worker can really only shine is in advancing on the tech forefront and helping keep that tech within Western borders. Stuff like defence or cybersecurity or some advanced new product/tool development. Anything else is free to be arbitraged away.
Lets say there are 1,000 decent engineers in a country and they get hired by various western companies and it's all a great success. They're very happy, obviously offshoring there works well, other companies pile in and hire 10,000 engineers. Ok, are there another 10,000 decent engineers in the country? Probably not, but maybe you can poach some of the 1,000 and use them to train up the other 10,000. But soon there are openings for 100,000 offshored jobs, then 500,000. How many well trained engineers are there again?
That ramp up takes time, and it's not just a matter of smart people, it's relevant experience. If you have two countries with the same number of competent trained people, but in one of them 5% have directly relevant experience, and in the other 50% of them do, that's a massive advantage that cannot even be solved with money.
Then there's the fact the the most talented and experienced people move out of the country. So for every 10 engineers that get to top tier, 3-4 of them move to Europe or the US. So, not only are these countries losing those people, but also they're losing out on all the juniors they could lead and train up. Hiring there is like trying to fill a leaky bucket.
None of which is to say this is impossible, or that it isn't worth doing, or that it won't work. I've seen it work, and the company I'm at now has reaped huge benefits from offshoring. You just need to go into it clear eyed and with the understanding that it has to work for the people you're offshoring to, and that country as well, and you need to be adaptable as the situation changes.
Almost forgot India is the fastest growing economy, built entirely on taking advantage of ours. Don’t worry it will totally work out!!!
> Maybe one day India will be able to afford the products we’re building for them!!!!
Actually they already do. Only there's so much glaring inequality in the country that wealth is concentrated in the hands of about 50 million people or so.
My point was that offshoring is inevitable. If it's not India, it will be Brazil or Poland or Africa. The best folks hired in these countries have zero interest in relocating to the West when they can live like royalty in their own home countries. They will gladly take 25% of the Western worker's paycheck and do an on par or better job. For the more mundane tasks, companies can hire Indian BPOs for cheap, who will then work their Indian employees to the bone for peanuts. At the end of the day, both results give a profitable outcome to the outsourcing company. The issues arise only when the company decides to outsource actual knowledge work to Indian sweatshops.
Yes, markets work. But people insist on ignoring attrition against all the evidence. It's an almost religious belief.
The big tech monopolists can literally buy off any emerging competition. They have massive political influence that they can leverage to shape the market based on their needs. Not that there would be any political appetite to challenge national "champions" in times of rising international tension anyway. They are too big to fail.
don't discount the possibility of a total rout for those who put all eggs in such a shoddy basket.
interesting to note the limits of political influence now that the megabill stripped the ai moratorium nonsense.
i suspect that the brick and mortar politicos are a bit like "thanks for the money, now bugg off, kid, before i beat you up"
it will be interesting to see what sort of revenge the worlds richest man is cooking for his uppity fixer dude.
I keep seeing and talking to people that are completely high guzzling Kool-Aid straight from a pressure tap.
The level of confirmation bias is absolutely unhinged "I told $AGENTICFOOLLM to do that and WOW this PR is 90% AI!", _ignoring any previous failed attempt_, nor the 10% of humanness needed for the change of what ultimately is a 10 line diff and handwaving any counterpoint away as "you're holding it wrong".
I'm essentially seeing two groups emerging: those all aboard the high velocity hype train and those that are curious about the technology but absolutely appalled about the former's irrational attitude which is tantamount to completely winging it diving head first off of a cliff deeply convinced that of course the tide will rise at just the right time for skulls not to be cracked open upon collision with very big sharp rocks.
Someone pointed out that AI has a gatcha / intermittent reinforcement effect to it, which explains a lot of its power to capture minds. Sometimes it produces great results. The entire history of industrial process control is about trying to always produce good, or at least identical, results. These two are incompatible.
AI is right in the sweet spot of winning the demo but failing in mass production, and I think people are too optimistic about this being fixable.
It is also possible for artisans to produce functioning goods in low volumes, which is why "hand made" has often been seen a positive quality sign rather than a negative quality sign, and AI can do "artisanal" (same root as artificial). With mass production we want all three of "good", "cheap", and "fast", and we've been able to get it.
But even that AI can do artisanal is not sufficient for AI to succeed, and likely still won't be sufficient even when AI is near the best you can hire in a human, because AI is a memetic monoculture: while the errors of many human artisans can be somewhat uncorrelated and therefore the failure modes different, if everything comes from a single AI mind, it all fails in the same general kind of way. Likewise the quotation about science advancing one funeral at a time: diversity beats even very smart geniuses.
Memetic monoculture is what I think can't be fixed with current approaches, because current approaches need too much information for it to be possible to give each LLM* (even from different providers) a statistically distinct training set to learn from.
* The image generators do seem to be able to get meaningfully distinct output styles. At least superficially, I'm not an artist, so I may be missing some common thread they share beyond the "indistinct blurry background item" that I count as an error rather than a style. But in this topic, even that error would count as a common failure mode.
I'm reminded of https://qntm.org/mmacevedo ; even if we don't get brain uploading, we have a similar sort of thing going on with synthetic "personalities" of LLMs.
> diversity beats even very smart geniuses.
Some of HN will get very mad about that statement but it is often true. Of course, the best combination is a diverse collection of geniuses, which is why midcentury openish borders US did so well.
> The image generators do seem to be able to get meaningfully distinct output styles
Generally they can plagiarize in the style of any human artist you can name whose work is on the internet. Artists are, not unreasonably, upset about this.
Mmm.
My inspiration was from Alastair Reynolds putting indoctrinal viruses into the Revelation Space series, listening to an audio book of that several years before mmacevedo was published. At the time, I was thinking of how AI might enforce group-think, rather than write the content itself directly: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2019/12/30-18.46.50.html
> Generally they can plagiarize in the style of any human artist you can name whose work is on the internet. Artists are, not unreasonably, upset about this.
Indeed, but so can LLMs of text styles. I meant more of the "voice" seems to be different between them — there seems to be more of a difference between getting SDXL and SD 3.5 (or DALL•E 2 and whatever it's called now it's baked into ChatGPT) to mimic, say, Hieronymus Bosch, than there is between getting GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4 to do a poem in the style of a Shakespeare soliloquy.
On the other hand, this may just be my limited appreciation for the arts, as per XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1015/
Oh, but the entire history of gambling is trying to produce highly variable results with exactly the characteristics you mentioned. That's what gets people addicted.
You realize even if you're onboard the agentic coding hype train, you don't have to just blithely paste tickets to the agent and let them rip. You can have a long conversation about design and architecture, and have them write their own implementation plan based on that, then watch them ticking items off the list and review code for changes as they're completed while the agent forges ahead. A lot of times you don't even need to have a long conversation about this stuff, just write a readme that very clearly outlines what you're doing and how to do it, and the agent will read it and do just fine.
They're doing layoffs and giving a wall street friendly reason for it
The media eats the shit up because it's run by a bunch of people who hate the tech industry
I guess it'll work until the market turns around and it forces them to shut up or bleed talent. Which could be around the corner since the R&D tax deduction is coming back, or if interest rates start dropping
If it doesn’t work, it eventually dies.
Unless it is a bank, in which case it gets bailed out by tax payers.
"relaxing regulations" =/= not "highly regulated". We can quibble about what the exact amount of regulation is ideal, but I don't think the core concept of "the economy benefits from a banking system that is backstopped by the government, and the government should regulate banks to ensure the backstop isn't being abused" is controversial, contrary to what the parent poster was trying to imply with his "Unless it is a bank, in which case it gets bailed out" comment. Similar thing happens in insurance. If a ship sinks in rough waters the owner gets reimbursed by the insurance company, nobody makes snarky comments about how ship owners are being "bailed out".
The ship owner paid the insurance company a premium.
It isn't clear to me that banks are doing anything comparable. They are paying some tax, but so is every business.
For a bank the calculation seems to be heads I win (trebles and massive bonuses all round) tails you (the tax payer) lose. Given this situation, from a game theory point of view, why wouldn't they take reckless risks, if the regulations allow them to?
>It isn't clear to me that banks are doing anything comparable. They are paying some tax, but so is every business.
From wikipedia: "The FDIC charges premiums based upon the risk that the insured bank poses."
Moreover even if the government provides this for "free", it's hardly the only example where the government provides an implicit subsidy to some group by not levying direct taxes. For instance Louisiana probably gets more FEMA aid than Idaho, but when was the last time you heard someone making snarky comments about how Hurricane Katrina victims got "bailed out" by the federal government?
>For a bank the calculation seems to be heads I win (trebles and massive bonuses all round) tails you (the tax payer) lose. Given this situation, from a game theory point of view, why wouldn't they take reckless risks, if the regulations allow them to?
That's exactly why the regulations are there for, to mitigate the moral hazard. The same exists for insurance, which often comes with various provisions the insured has to follow. For buildings it might be having working sprinklers and annual inspections of fire alarms. For restaurants it might be training/inspections that are over and above what the local jurisdiction requires. Of course, just like banks the insured are also incentivized to do as little as possible to comply with the regulations. Nobody is going be inspecting their fire equipment once a month, even though that'd probably reduce the fire risk by some non-zero amount. Any sort of insurance is going to have this issue.
AOL
Blockbuster
Pan Am
I mean… if you define "does not work" as "place my own guy in a high position so he can make it stop working"… sure…
In the last 40 years capitalism has stopped being an economic model and has become theology. I mean, sure, it lasted way more than soviet communism before ending up in the same way, I'll give to it.
If you mean that a socialist structure was created on the 30s, yes, it was. But it didn't kill capitalism. Relentless corruption and cronyism is what killed it, the socialism in fact depends on it to work.