Comment by billisonline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by billisonline | Hacker News Reader

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An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exciting exponentials started to look more like plateauing S-curves, executives conveniently stopped using the term "AGI," preferring weasel-words like "transformative AI" instead.

I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can, and something that can reason symbolically about novel domains as well as we can. I've seen about enough from LLMs, and I agree with the critique that som type of breakthrough neuro-symbolic reasoning architecture will be needed. The article is right about one thing: in that moment AI will overtake us suddenly! But I doubt we will make linear progress toward that goal. It could happen in one year, five, ten, fifty, or never. In 2023 I was deeply concerned about being made obsolete by AI, but now I sleep pretty soundly knowing the status quo will more or less continue until Judgment Day, which I can't influence anyway.

I think a lot about how much we altered our environment to suit cars. They're not a perfect solution to transport, but they've been so useful we've built tons more road to accommodate them.

So, while I don't think AGI will happen any time soon, I wonder what 'roads' we'll build to squeeze the most out of our current AI. Probably tons of power generation.

This is a really interesting observation! Cars don't have to dominate our city design, and yet they do in many places. In the USA, you basically only have NYC and a few less convenient cities to avoid a city designed for cars. Society has largely been reshaped with the assumption that cars will be used whether or not you'd like to use one.

What would that look like for navigating life without AI? Living in a community similar to the Amish or Hasidic Jews that don't integrate technology in their lives as much as the average person does? That's a much more extreme lifestyle change than moving to NYC to get away from cars.

"Tons of power generation?" Perhaps we will go in that direction (as OpenAI projects), but it assumes the juice will be worth the squeeze, i.e., that scaling laws requiring much more power for LLM training and/or inference will deliver a qualitatively better product before they run out. The failure of GPT 4.5, while not a definitive end to scaling, was a pretty discouraging sign.

Customer service will be almost fully automated, and human customers will be forced to adapt to the bots.

Or customers will find other providers who don't annoy them.

History so far suggests this is a dim possibility.

Exactly why Comcast and Google went out of business with their abysmal customer support.

It already has with IVRs . I wonder if as a generalization, current technology will keep being used to provide layers and layers of "automation" for communication between people.

SDR Agents will communicate with "Procurement" Agents. Customer Support Agents will communicate with Product Agents. Coffee Barista Agents will talk with Personal Assistant Agents.

People will communicate less and less among each other. What will people talk about? Who will we talk to?

We didn't just build roads, we utterly changed land-use patterns to suit them.

Cities, towns, and villages (and there were far more of the latter then) weren't walkable out of choice, but necessity. At most, by the late 19th century, urban geography was walkable-from-the-streetcar, and suburbs walkable-from-railway-station. And that only in the comparatively few metros and metro regions which had well-developed streetcar and commuter-rail lines.

With automobiles, housing spread out, became single-family, nuclear-family, often single-storey, and frequently on large lots. That's not viable when your only options to get someplace are by foot, or perhaps bicycle. Shopping moved from dense downtowns and city-centres (or perhaps shopping districts in larger cities) to strips and boulevards. Supermarkets and hypermarkets replaced corner grocery stores (which you could walk to and from with your groceries in hand, or perhaps in a cart). Eventually shopping malls were created (virtually always well away from any transit service, whether bus or rail), commercial islands in shopping-lot lakes. Big-box stores dittos.

It's not just roads and car parks, it's the entire urban landscape.

AI, should this current fad continue and succeed, will likely have similarly profound secondary effects.

Remember, these companies (including the author) have an incentive to continue selling fear of job displacement not because of how disruptive LLMs are, but because of how profitable it is if you scare everyone into using your product to “survive”.

To companies like Anthropic, “AGI” really means: “Liquidity event for (AI company)” - IPO, tender offer or acquisition.

Afterwards, you will see the same broken promises as the company will be subject to the expectations of Wall St and pension funds.

There is a lot of critihype

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...

> executives conveniently stopped using the term "AGI," preferring weasel-words like "transformative AI" instead.

Remember when "AGI" was the weasel word because 1980s AI kept on not delivering?

> I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can

That's highly irrelevant because if it were otherwise, we would already be replaced. The article was talking about the future.

The article was speculating about the future.

It was doing both.

> An engine performs a simple mechanical operation

It only appears “simple” because you're used to see working engines everywhere without never having to maintain them, but neither the previous generations nor the engineers working on modern engines would agree with you on that.

An engine performs “a simple mechanical operation” the same way an LLM performs a “simple computation”.

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