Give Smart People the Tools to Do Smart Things
superuserdone.com
superuserdone.com
I realized all this was quite wrong, AI just helps people who already know become more efficient. It just gives confidence to people who dont know anything by the sycophantic nature of AI. AI is just a tool for smart people to become smarter.
Love AI and what it allows us to do. But, it does give some superpowers, but the problems that existed before still do and they need to be solved for. with or without AI.
A friend of mine is super smart, but he's not a software developer. He tried to use AI to build software. And it worked well for small projects, but he always reached a point where the AI could no longer fix bugs or add new features.
The problems were often simple. An experienced developer could fix them with a few minutes of manual editing. Sometimes it was just an incorrect > in an XML file, but the AI would get completely stuck.
So IMHO AI works best when you know how to guide it and when to step in yourself.
Big companies are always doing bad things, but not because they use AI, because they have legal protections which prevents small companies (which could be anyone like you and me) to compete. The same small companies who could also benefit from using AI.
What? How does that follow?
Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ). Just like neurons, if you don't use it you lose it and when the inevitable problems come, nobody knows the why, the how and the what. At that point someone smart would incorporate all those real costs and opportunity loses on the "automating everything" equation. But they usually don't.
Of course automating tasks is a must, but it's very far from being a black and white situation. These dynamics have been happening for centuries by now, nothing new.
Ask an AI to solve a problem and it may do that, but if you don't understand why or how it works, or what to do with the information in order to keep it useful for even the medium term, then all you've done is taken away the opportunity for someone else to be responsible for something you shouldn't be.
It's not necessarily a mystery how to make good food. You can ask an AI how to make good food, follow the instructions, and you're off to the races. The question then is whether you want to be in that race.
Would you have gone to chef school? Would you work in a kitchen? Are you willing to deal with customers, or risk RSI from so many repeated kitchen movements? Are you willing to practice and be tested?
If the answer to any of those is no, then get the hell out of that kitchen and let the people who have more grit than you do their job. Do what you can to make it easier for you to pay them consistently and well on the back-end.
Can you show us how it’s better to use an AI to ensure steadiness over a long period of time?
I chuckled. Institutional prompt will disappear so much faster than you imagine.
Management likes to think otherwise for a variety of reasons and peons such as myself know it is rarely that simple. Case in point, our team uses Jira, but Jira is not great at.. capturing efforts that are umm.. less code oriented. In fact, there are times when it is genuinely better to leave some details out for considerations that may simply not be part of coding considerations.
In other words, automation assumes proper capture of the entirety of the task, but, I have seldom seen it capturing anything but simple workflows well.
Think about all the security clearances no longer required to aggregate big data into intelligence reports. The conditions and incentives for LLMs seem almost laser focused on replacing those particular jobs.
It wasn't but ~20 years ago that people were concerned about Google slurping up all the world's data into spying programs. Now that the hardest part to hide is happening, people have forgotten or assumed it already had. Many other smaller and far less capable businesses have come and gone and taken tiny bits of blame until the public was satisfied they knew who the "real" scapegoats were. What they really had were overcomplicated theories built on a nebulous cloud of debatable evidence that led nowhere. This is how it succeeds in plain sight every time.
We are looking forward to bring the same productivity gains to logistics and manufacturing (look at the advancements done in the last few decades!).
Why not bring this to white collar work too? I get so much more shit done today than I did a few years ago. It's a great time to be alive!
You're not one of the people who gets to benefit from the gains.
Can this model be scaled to the rest of society?
Instead, you can and probably should see technology as augmenting you and your coworkers.
Implementing labor protections and basic income is not seeing the forest for the trees. What we need is a more educated public that can contribute their ideas. All AI can do is lower the barrier to entry, but it does not replace the need for education.
AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points. The 100 base doesn't quite matter as much does it? What does that world look like?
No, it's not just next word prediction. No you can't just wave your hand that it's probabilistic, so insert bad analogy to compiler or calculator and go about your day. And no, you can't just look at its limitations today, make a conclusion, and go back under your rock.
one end is luddites nothing to see here, and the other end is omg humanity is cooked because programming is solved! and consciousness is coding so -> gg
yes there’s a wide surface of emergent behavior we haven’t fully explored, but why do you get the pass to draw a straight line to a conclusion? the naysayers are doing the same thing.
all things decay on a curve. pretty much all things in life are not modeled by a straight line.
so you’re saying no theres still more UP. sure, but that’s a tale as old as time. when where and how much in how long is the reality piece.
We are already in the singularity. We’ve always been. It just gets faster at each step.
Human advancement is a story we tell ourselves. Agree. That it in any way looks like a straight line is just not true. If nothing else, it looks coherent after the fact... because it's an extremely lossy story our limited brains can comprehend. But it's not reality. No entity in the known Universe "comprehends" the march of progress. They weren't there when it started. So I just don't know what we're talking about anymore.
No, you don't have trends backing your claims that we are going to add 10,000 IQ points to the average person. Anymore than the S&P 500 is going to 100x in a decade years.
We’ve seen a lot of claims over the years substituting one metric (amount of code written) for another (useful code produced) to justify that AI are getting “better”. We just want a proper definition of better.
Presumably there are a lot of use cases that are essentially “solved” where more powerful models won’t matter.
The only thing we can do is look at the current state of things, and we still have the same problems we've always had with these models, they need proper direction and input.
> [...] we are living in a society [that is out] virtually to satisfy and gratify each and every human need, except for one need, the most basic and fundamental need operant in man, the need for meaning.
https://youtu.be/GTbliwS0gS4?t=153
Maybe the Amish had it right, after all.
The next paradigm will be similar. It might seem meaningless to us. For example, most of our identity is tied to our jobs in our current society. This will have to change. What does that look like? Do we create content and share our art? Do followers and attention become the new currency?
“Man’s search for meaning” is arguably the most visceral human framed definition of meaning. Let’s just say it’s not about attention and the Metaverse.
You seem to be implying that there was nothing before. Obviously not true.
“AI may be a tool and add 50 IQ points to a 100 IQ person today but what happens when its adding 10000 IQ points.”
What is even IQ? What if it adds 50 now, 25 next month, 12.5 the month after, etc. You should check out Zeno.
Yes. If it looks like 10000 iq is possible, then money will be thrown at whoever is most likely to achieve it first, and whoever has the most intelligent models right now strongly predicts who will be first.
This is driven by the belief that whoever gets to 10000 iq first will likely dominate the majority of all economic activity, since it will be more efficient to trade with them than with some less efficient (dumber).
This does not depend on traditional economic demand, at some point this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead I can spend far less to use my 200 iq machine that already exceeds everything I could ever want. Im not ever going to personally fund a war of intellegence against other intellegences so anything more is of marginal value. The same reason I don't own a 2,000 horsepower truck or tractor, there are almost no uses for me to want it.
That's the fun part, there is none (in the traditional way of people buying things at least).
> Why would I invest my earning into sustaining a machine that ideally is extracting every cent possible without leeway and funneling it up the pyramid.
You shouldn't! Unfortunately everyone acting in their own self interest still results in this getting funded, since if such a machine were to exist, would it not be better to have a share of it?
I agree with your perspective! I just don't think that, as a species, we have a good track record of saying no to the existence of 2000hp trucks with ALMOST no use.
Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek, but in case it's not.
No, nobody does. Consider that a person in their lifetime could have seen the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, then the first jet engine in 1939, then commercial jet travel in the 1950s. That is an amazing 50 years for air travel. If you were living in 1950 and were to extrapolate where air travel would be by 2026, you would think we would be taking routine trips to Mars. Instead what we got was TSA, cramped seats, and better safety. But "progress" leveled off dramatically. Commercial air flight has looked pretty much the same for my entire life.
We have no idea how far transformers and LLMs will take us. It certainly isn't obvious where this is going.
The parent comment could be interpreted as frustration from a lack of imagination about how weird the future could be.
Perhaps we're not at the recursive self improvement yet, but it seems increasingly naive to believe that it isn't possible.
Also, I think you've set up a straw man. I haven't seen anyone arguing that this future isn't possible. What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.
We think about starships and humans mining Mars, and it'll probably be nothing like that. It might just be humanoids or AI drones that actually end up colonizing the solar system, with the humans never really leaving earth except as mind uploads...
But at the end of the day, things are changing. Things are accelerating. And our mental models of what works or doesn't work will almost certainly break. I don't fear the future, nor do I project any confidence on what that's going to look like, but I know I want to be part of it.
I think you're right, my bad.
> What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.
I'm arguing that if recursive self improvement happens, that the trend line will be reasonably predictable. (and that we are close enough to RSI that we should take this possibility seriously).
I guess it's a matter of education. People with a mathematics or computer science background know that unless the dynamics of a process are known to be linear, extrapolation is usually wrong. Since we don't know that the dynamics here are linear and have every reason to believe they aren't, extrpolation is unlikely to teach us anything valuable.
What reason? To me recursive self improvement seems credible, it's just a question of when. It seems obvious that given RSI, trend lines will be at least linear.
The disagreement could just be about if RSI is currently meaningfully happening, but that seems very difficult to tell given the lack of public data.
It's certainly plausible that improvements will continue, but the pace is completely unpredictable. It's also plausible that the training material is polluted and progress will not continue. I'm just saying that predicting the rate of technological progress is not easy, and historically, it's rarely been smooth in the long run.
There are many complicating technical factors, but also non-technical ones. Technological improvement in the short term will not necessarily yield commensurate economic gains, in which case, investment may not grow enough to sustain the progress.
As for the recursive part, currently it's either hypothetical or based on too few data points. Not saying it won't happen, but it's far from being the only plausible trajectory.
> Not saying it won't happen, but it's far from being the only plausible trajectory.
But if it does happen, then wouldn't expected outcome be at least linear?
So RSI toward what prompted goal? Then, how can you be so sure that reaching that goal looks like the straight line you envision?
edit: more accurately, it's about incentives. We generally understand that encoding a goal in a complex system is about aligning incentives. So now it's the incentives that are proxies for intended outcomes. But as mentioned, we have a growing body of evidence for just how bad we are at aligning incentives with intended outcomes. And it makes sense because complex systems are not a straight line.
> how can you be so sure that reaching that goal looks like the straight line you envision?
Because the thing pursuing the goal would be able to improve it's ability to pursue the goal. Doesn't that follow from the premise of RSI?
> we have a growing body of evidence for just how bad we are at aligning incentives with intended outcomes.
We are terrible at it! I don't think that will stop us letting something rip in some unknowable direction (with unintended outcomes). I hope that aligned incentives are a prerequisite, but it seems increasingly likely that they are not.
But not necessarily without needing a huge amount of resources. It is a mathematical certainty that no intelligence can solve computationally intractable problems (including forecasting the weather, or the economy) without access to resources we simply don't have.
I don't have any belief on the matter, but my scepticism isn't necessarily about RSI itself, but about how much it would matter even if it does happen soon. Too many things are limited by lack of resources that no brain in a jar can obtain. And if such a brain in a jar itself is very expensive to operate, it may not be easy for it to justify its existence. My point is that the technical aspect is uncertain, but it is also only a part of a larger system that's has many sources of uncertainty.
I think that resource acquisition is a solvable problem for such a system, robots seem mainly limited by software.
I concede that I am too certain about the linearity of it. But like, cmon man, in the limit entropy ensures that everything ends. The world could still get very weird very fast. I think that's what original comment was trying to argue, and I think it's possible within the limits you've laid out.
That's all I'm trying to argue at least. And I admit that waving my hand at linearity sounds uneducated.
First, I don't think so. Second, some resources would take even robots decades or centuries to collect. Even something as fundamental as energy production takes a lot of time and money to build. The question of where we'll get the energy to run the robots is not a simple one, and it's one of the simplest questions involved.
> I think that's what original comment was trying to argue, and I think it's possible within the limits you've laid out.
Possible isn't the same as likely, and the reason we don't extrapolate is that different extrapolations lead to very different results.
But regardless of what happens and when, I think that we, people educated in computer science, should remember that many questions are simply not answerable in a short amount of time, and we know with absolute certainty that answering them is not a question of intelligence but of computational power and time. We no that no human or machine, however intelligent, can predict or control the nonlinear systems that are all around us because they are computationally intractable.
For example, suppose AI helps us figure out a way to exploit much more of the sun's energy. Accomplishing that necessary preliminary can, on its own, take many decades, and if we split our efforts among multiple approaches, it may take longer. Intelligence can't break the actual laws of mathematics or of physics. And that's before we consider things like how resources will be allocated when AI tells people that man-made climate change and transgenderism are real.
This generation of AI hasn't even hit its first crisis. Assuming there will be none is like settlers assuming their town will never suffer a major earthquake because they haven't had one in five years.
Of course, improvements in problems that may not grow exponentially also matter a great deal, but there are too many unknowns (look at how many unknowns there are around quantum computing).
Take a step back and really take a look at what's going on. You are not thinking clearly.
Or extrapolate the curve for self driving cars once they were only "two years away".
Catch is, tech progress is not one curve. It's overlapping S curves, stair steps of progress and stagnation, with the next iteration starting off worse than the current one, until crossing it as the current one tops out.
Being embodied will always be a huge advantage over a “country full of geniuses in a datacenter”.
My in laws smugly asked me what I would be doing for work since AI would take away all the programming jobs and I said its not gonna happen and they laughed in derision.
Some people who "used to love programming" have jumped ship for precisely this reason. Ordinary software (not R&D) is getting serious. A broken or disagreeable app is no longer a mere inconvenience. There is growing alignment between business and politics and the older generation is retiring out.
It's crazy how defensive (offensive) people can get when you're into programming/math/whatever. Almost like "I don't understand your world, I don't want to, and I hate it and hope you fail".
You should make $ bets with them on whether you will still have a job 2 years from now. An easy way to make money and teach them a lesson :)
It did replace draftsmen and designers, and changed the work that the engineers do. It's now more efficient to let engineers be their own draftsmen and designers. And design work has changed -- a lot less "hard" quantitative engineering, and a lot more "bureaucracy in three dimensions" as things have gotten more complex.
In the long run, this is as misleading as saying: Humans did not replace animals.
So, today, if I think really really really, and I mean, really fucking hard about that “number”, I really really really come up with a number close to 1 (we need one person to type in the instruction at least, maybe two? Maybe three? Definitely not a team … no not that at all).
That means, for everything that we build today, before we even build it, we’ve already mentally replaced people. People be replaced yo, in your mind, in your company, in your reality. That’s it.
It’s a replacement, not a tool. And if you reaaallly think a bit more, you’ll see that it is truly the stupidest possible thing if in your scoping of what needs to be built, you didn’t scope out people. You’d have to be crazy not to scope out people.
Trust me, I never thought we’d get to this point either. I thought it was going to be an “assistant” too.
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The layoff numbers still look “normal “ to us. 75k here, 20k there, all numbers we’ve heard before. It hasn’t even really happened yet, the true numbers should be in millions. I didn’t believe the number “trillion dollar company” until, BAM, here’s a trillion dollar company.
Best we can do is kinda get used to the numbers, like the number 0 on one end (how many people you need), and some number N (in millions) that we won’t need anymore. We’ll just slowly get used to these new numbers.
This shit ain’t no tool.
One programmer can know if the program is right. So N additional programmers, in that case, can truly be replaced.
I can know the SQL query came back right, I can know the drop down menu looks right, you know what I mean? I can even know if it’s any good. [Person .., ] of Type Y (let’s say Y is “programmer” for now) can be reduced down to 1 in that case (we no longer need the full array of people of a certain type anymore, just the one). Over time we’ll see all different “types” get collapsed down.
I think that's really unlikely on a large software project, or even a medium size one. Mature things usually get big enough that developers specialize in an area. Just as a random example I know a lot about, Unreal Engine has so many incredibly complicated and huge features that expecting even a project manager to know half the features is unlikely, and expecting that a single programmer could maintain it is wild.
You're also making the mistake of thinking developers are interchangeable, or that any given developer can know all of the tech stack. Again with the Unreal Engine example, how many developers understand animation, procedural generation, localization, high end 3d graphics, the math behind physics, gameplay systems, storage systems, consoles.. (I'm probably covering like 5% here)
False, Anthropic didn’t claim what was linked in the article.
> OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speculates that enough AI compute could help figure out how to cure cancer
Idk likely true? What’s so wrong here.
> Elon Musk says there will be no need for compilers as AI will write the binary directly
What seems so off about this? AI can write binary and probably better in a few years. Higher level languages would still be efficient probably.
> Anthropic claims that Mythos is super dangerous, the people can’t possibly handle such a powerful cyberweapo
Well it was?
Wouldn’t that make the AI the compiler?
We have no viable mechanism yet to get the same level of confidence if some LLM-based system writes the binary.
Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.
Though then the question will be whether we've gained anything, or whether we've just replaced the compiler with something massively more expensive that does the same thing.
There's some potential here for the LLM-based system to drive better performance optimizations than a regular compiler could.
Of course this isn't what Elon is actually saying, and we'd be better off if fewer people listened to him.
We don't even have a solution to the halting problem, and it probably can't be solved. "Proof it implements a spec" is pure science fiction.
Hard agree that we'd all be better off muting Elon Musk though.
Assuming you mean an LLM, you'd have to train this LLM entirely on a parameter space of binary tokens. Or are you saying the LLM generating natural language tokens is going to be printing machine language in 3-5 years, because that claim kinda betrays a misunderstanding of LLM functions.
I assume that "AI can write binary" means "AI can use a toolset that results in a binary" because we've already seen GPTs use a combination of LLM and specialized math tools to do the things the original GPTs did.