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Comment by sp1nningaway | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why all of these companies need to frame it like this. Why not a large amount of people doing an even larger amount of science?

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I love this question. If history is a guide, some version of that is what will happen (employment doesn't seem to go down, despite technological progress and population + economic growth).

I suspect the root cause is that it's harder and scarier to imagine good outcomes. It exposes us to disappointment, and when you do it publicly, it looks "crazy".

Another explanation is that there's no direct consumer for "more." Individuals, corporations and states are not in themselves interested in "a larger amount of science," or anything analogous, despite the fact that they would all benefit ambiently.

The net effect is that it's only "safe" to claim reduced risk (i.e. lower costs).

I know some scientists and there's barely enough demand for them as it is

I suspect we’re at the stage of technological civilizational development where, especially with LLM-assisted gradient descent seeking upon the results, basic science, research and engineering for the pure sake of establishing search space beacons of what is found to be true and what is not, irrespective of immediate industrial applications payoff, are valuable economic inputs in and of themselves into ever-expanding training corpus. It has never been easier for people in different fields to now search knowledge spaces in LLM’s, for applicability to their problem spaces of discoveries in seemingly unrelated spaces.

From my perspective, we are desperately short of scientists, researchers and engineers, but we are using an outdated economic model to leverage their findings. LLM’s are a large part of Bush’s Memex and Jobs’ bicycle for the mind visions for intelligence amplification, and in some ways exceed them. I hope we trampoline from how we currently use basic seeking efforts for knowledge.

I hope the demand for average-skilled people goes down.

Or that the floor is raised, at least, and AI empowers average scientists to do substantial work.

Is the demand low because the capital requirements to perform the research aren't there? Excluding wages...granted, for an average research project I don't know what % goes to wages and admin overhead. Probably the bulk?

Isn't that directionally what OpenAI's core message was for a while?

A large amount of people building their own customized apps for themselves.

Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.

> Similarily, everyone becoming their own accountant / lawyer / other professional services.

These professional services will defend themselves with gatekeeping. Suddenly it doesn't depend anymore on the quality of your legal advice, but whether it has been stamped by a qualified Lawyer. It doesn't matter that your taxes are correct, but whether they are submitted by an approved accountant. Etc.

They already do protect themselves. It’s what licensure is for in large part. I’m not saying licensure doesn’t have other benefits, many are plainly obvious. But licensure is also used as plain old gatekeepong.

It's not just gatekeeping though. The reason you get a qualified, credentialed structural engineer to sign off on your house instead of just YOLOing the build is so that you (and your insurance company) can sue their pants off if it collapses.

If a future version of Claude ever gets less error prone than a human, I might prefer the smaller chance of a building collapse from Claude than the larger but insured chance from a human engineer.

That future version of Claude will still be mediated by an error prone human who in this case would be a non-engineer. So even if Claude is not error prone, it could be giving correct answers to the wrong questions and correct designs for the wrong constraints because the human getting Claude to do things doesn't know any better.

Except in extreme cases of fraud or negligence, you won't win a suit against your accountant or lawyer.

Probably true, but the rubber-stamp process will be a race to the bottom.

Because one of the primary goals of using AI for companies is to pay as few humans as possible for the same amount or more work, or preferably pay no humans at all, because that makes them more profit.

What happens is that your competition uses AI, your investors factor AI in, and your customers use AI agents to find what they need and can switch providers with greater ease in the agentic era. So even if a company does nothing the economic environment around it changed. The AI boost is mandatory but produces few winners, it's mostly a scramble to swim harder just to stay in place. Benefits are competed away fast.

So it does not follow that companies can bank the savings from firing people. Anything AI can do for me it can do for my competition as well, and humans still make the difference. The big question in the AI age is "why pick me?" why hire me, why invest in my company, why buy my product, in a sea of similar products made by everyone. A differentiation crisis accentuated by AI.

Same amount of humans means no cost savings. More science is hard to value, while less salaries paid is easy to value.

Large groups suffer communication bottlenecks, so by Amdahl’s law will only be as fast as a smaller group.

You can of course have many independent small groups, but this is trivial and best left unsaid in the context of this comparison.

One reason is because they're currently a small team and are their own first customer. Their product wouldn't be much good if it only worked for a large amount of people.

I think these four people want to be in a smaller organization. It's more fun.

In fact given everybody is going to be using these tools - and for high tech compananies this is fundamentally where you compete - if you reduce your R&D workforce you are going to be left behind.

It's not as if there is a limited amount of R&D to do.

When you define prosperity in large amount of people, it makes you sound like a communist, and America spent decades to avoid that. The other alternative is to sound like a capitalist, which is very much ok by today’s standards.

This is so interesting to me... Maybe it's because I grew up after (most of) the heavy anti-communist propaganda in the US, but the last thing I think of when I hear "communism" is "prosperity in large amount of people".

That's just not true at all? Might as well just post that you like communism, you barely even tried to cater your post to the thread.

Guys I’m joking btw, left the comment during my jest mood

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