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Comment by mjr00 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.

Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.

The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.

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Some of my coworkers will complain that management is short-sighted for trying to automate programming work they don't understand then immediately suggest we automate management because nobody knows what they do all day.

Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.

They are currently experimenting with replacing engineers with LLMs, so it would at least be interesting to try the flipped experiment.

It seems like, at least for tasks like distilling the work done at lower levels and passing it up the management tree, LLMs should be good at that. Maybe they could take out some levels at least.

And they can be programmed to be 100% selfless and on-mission: no turf battles or other internal politics. Everybody’s job involves office politics of course, but my gut says management has a lot more of it than engineering, so zeroing that out could be more significant.

Aren't LLM's mostly overconfident? If they are independent entities/agents, they may be tempted to try to sabotage the less performing teams to take over their projects - just like in human world.

The models are trained on data that encodes hundreds or thousands of years of turf battles and office politics. The model is shaped by the script of ‘Succession’, the history of the English monarchy and the Chinese Communist Party, and the biographies of Steve Jobs and Alexander Hamilton…

The models don’t generate what’s right and good: they generate what people are likely to generate.

They managed to fine-tune models to be good at math and coding, despite the vast majority of humanity being awful at those…

I dunno. You are probably right. But it’d be an experiment. It wouldn’t be an experiment if it was a sure thing.

>> The models are trained on data that encodes hundreds or thousands of years of turf battles and office politics. The model is shaped by the script of ‘Succession’, the history of the English monarchy and the Chinese Communist Party, and the biographies of Steve Jobs and Alexander Hamilton…

> They managed to fine-tune models to be good at math and coding, despite the vast majority of humanity being awful at those…

Think about the kind of people who are leading the companies making these models, and their underlings who will be leading the fine tuning.

Math and coding are fairly objective. Fine tuning for morality and ethics is going to reflect the biases of those people.

> ...so it would at least be interesting to try the flipped experiment

Trying to replace the foot-soldiers of capital in a capitalist system would be bold, if one could raise the capital for the experiment.

Sorry but MBAs are the foot soldiers. That doesn’t really describe the vast middle management layer, what the Gervais Principle calls “the clueless”, aka those who take the blame.

Attempting to replace this layer is unwise in this system. Someone else would need to take the blame, and you can be sure it won’t be the sociopaths at the top. It’d be the losers who get the blame AND do the work. At this point the work would slow, then stop. Or at least that’s how I see things playing out?

More interesting, to me, is what happens to the clueless in that scenario. Without work these folks would probably revolt?

Hacker News is awash wirh people who believe many jobs are "bullshit jobs", based on nothing beyond lacking intellectual humility, and ignorance of what the jobs emtsil.

Careful what you wish for…

>>fully replaceable by AI

I am trying to fathom a more catastrophic failure in communications than the lab CEO's using this narrative. The reality ends up being closer to Radiology jobs [1], but we're never able to fully realize this because the press is running around like headless chickens and unloading the fear on a public that then reaches for any leverage they can get (see: Datacenter NIMBY-ism).

Any short term FOMO valuation bumps they got from this narrative has to now be liquidated into paying premium for server racks in a warehouse.

Reminder folks: There is no evidence that AI is not normal technology [2]

[1]: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...

[2]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

The radiology stuff is just jevons paradox combined with liability issues. No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease, the issue is that the ai boosters didnt realize that healthcare providers number one priority is not getting sued so they cant get rid of the radiologists until the government says so. Radiologists at this point are effectively just rent seekers taking advantage of slow government regulatory updates while they sign off on work done by AI. That doesnt mean the future is bright for radiologists, at some point the government will give the green light to do radiology work without human involvement.

>> "No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease"

Literally the Godfather of AI did [1]. The rest is pablum, Radiologists do far more than just protect against liability. I hope you never find out why they are so critical to vast number of patients getting the worst news of their lifetime. As OP lays out, life and its professions is just not as simple as these narratives would like us to think, and we keep backfilling reasons for why all dooming and glooming consistently comes up wrong. Just selective memory writ large to keep the literal infinite scroll of doom going.

[1]: https://www.auntminnieeurope.com/imaging-informatics/advance...

> "No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease"

I was talking about number of scans analyzed, not time. In fact, the decrease in the amount of time it takes to do radiology work is exactly why they are now paid more. Everything in american medical care is about profit, hospitals love this new paradigm because they get to charge the same amount and do 5x as much work per radiologist. Since incentives between patients and providers arent aligned we've entered this hellscape where providers are constantly ordering radiology work that is completely unnecessary because the MBAs are pushing high margin stuff to the entire organization. I personally have many stories from my 2 doctor friends where the business forces them to overprescribe in the stupidest ways. It sucks that the whole thing is a racket and that Hinton couldnt see that but I dont think that makes him wrong about the long term future of the profession.

"At some point"

Hinton said 10 years, what do you say? Could you maybe take from his prediction being wrong that you should practice some humility? Of all the pro-AI arguments people make, the "eventually it will happen" one is one of the strangest. Yes, and eventually the sun will blow up, so what the fuck are we talking about here? Most smart people ten years ago thought truck drivers, cab drivers, radiologists, and customer support would be obsolete by now, hasn't happened.

Where Hinton was right: AI has and will continue to significantly change the field of radiology including making radiologists more productive.

Where Hinton was wrong: He figured if each radiologist could do twice as much work we'd only need half as many and therefore there would be an oversupply of them. Instead what happened is we now do three times as much radiology. I went over the economic reasons for this in the other comment.

I dont think its correct to say Hinton was wrong on his core claim that AI will radically change radiology, he was just wrong about what that looked like.

He said that "People should stop training radiologists now" because there were enough radiologists already and the profession would be obsolete in the future. He said nothing about productivity or getting more work done. He said radiologists would be replaced. He was arrogant and didn't understand the scope of what radiologists actually do, which is more than just look at pixels.

It's obvious that deep learning did/would radically change the part of any job that required analysis of patterns or images. The core point of the OP is exactly the claim you're making, which is that you seem to think that all a radiologist does is either look at images or "sign off" on what AI has done after looking at the pixels.

Radio0logists have been replaced by AI. Its just that we do so much more radiology now that we need way more of them

>> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.

> Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either.

That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease

https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...

I wonder if it was (ironically) coined by nonengineers who don't understand how engineers (or other high-stakes professionals at Pareto boundaries) solve problems: by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances.

I have seen this personally, where merely identifying a possible solution (harmless, reversible) is misinterpreted as selecting and implementing that solution (may be irreversible).

> by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances.

This is how all people solve problems. Now everyone are not great at all parts, but this really is what anyone does.

Surely the title ”engineer” means something else?

Ideally, but this is not at all taught or incentivized in (American) schools. We're taught to "hack it" which means getting to a solution without much regard for how we got there.

Even if engineers were uniquely capable in this regard it still wouldn't equip them to solve problems in fields where they lack domain expertise.

Again: identifying possible solutions to a problem is not "solving" the problem.

You're right. I'll rephrase: Even if engineers were uniquely capable in this regard it still wouldn't equip them to identify solutions, let alone solve problems, in fields where they lack domain expertise.

I have a bachelor's and masters in engineering and was never taught to "hack it" without regard for how a solution is reached.

Documenting and analyzing your solution is an extremely important part of managing risk, which is what engineers actually do.

Not everyone is going to school for engineering.

I believe it was coined by non-engineers to describe the obnoxious behavior of engineers who arrogantly disrespect other's expertise and assume they're better than non-engineers (when the reality is the engineer doesn't know what he's talking about). Often that involves stupid analogies to things like computer systems.

I mean, if one has a solid physics + engineering background, he is potentially equipped to solve many problems from other fields.

> I mean, if one has a solid physics + engineering background, he is potentially equipped to solve many problems from other fields.

If you've got engineer's disease, those "other fields" include things like psychology and politics. It's a combination of arrogance and myopia.

If your expertise is legitimately relevant and you know where your expertise ends, that's not a problem.

The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations.

On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.

Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?

> Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?

I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools.

I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry.

In fairness, I agree that end-of-2025 AI probably could make a film so badly that 41% of the crew get cancer within 24 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film)

Considering that about 39.2% of the population is expected to get diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, do you actually think a rate of 41% is statistically significant?

https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html

It is significant because cancer is much more detectable today than in 1956-80, both because of better tests and more testing being conducted. In that earlier era, if you knew you had cancer, it was likely because it was already bad.

I also expect that of the 39.2% of the population, the cancer is diagnosed much later in life than it was for the 91 movie crew members, I doubt 41% of the crew was over 50 in 1956.

Think about this for a minute. If three months of filming actually cause an increase in cancer rates the long-term residents of St. George (the downwinders), would have have devastatingly high cancer rates, right? The nearby residents were exposed to fallout from 100+ above ground nuclear tests and they were exposed for multiple decades, not just three months. This issue has actually has been studied and published in peer reviewed journals. A paper that studied the mortality of residents in that area concluded:

>...There was no excess risk of cancer mortality in southwestern Utah, for single or grouped sites, with the single exception of leukemia which showed statistically significant odds ratios of 1.45 based on 62 deaths at all ages, and 2.84 based on nine deaths at ages 0-14. The finding for childhood leukemia was based on different time periods and geographic comparisons from those of two earlier studies in which no such excess was found. Mortality from all cancer sites combined was significantly lower in southwestern Utah than in the remainder of the state, even after adjustment for the higher proportion of (lower risk) Mormons in southwestern Utah.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3788954/

Trying to figure out when this strange idea about The Conqueror first appeared, I saw references to a 1980 article in People magazine. People magazine is not actually a peer reviewed journal.

He might be off by a decade, but isn't necessarily wrong.

When someone makes a prediction but is off by a decade+, that prediction is, necessarily, wrong.

Is that a prediction about where "Hollywood quality" is heading?

By that standard, no prediction can be wrong.

We're at the point now where we're seeing 30 second commercials that are mostly GenAI.

In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category.

Degree is the entire problem. I mean, four years back I was thinking:

  I don't know how long it will take, but Hollywood is obviously screwed the moment something like Stable Diffusion gets temporal coherency and stops randomly adding limbs, because the energy cost per image on my laptop multiplied by how many frames in a film and $0.1/kWh, is ballpark the same as the cost of a cinema ticket.

Right now temporal coherency is still quite limited, and the models still do enough daft things you can't easily take the first version even when cutting every 5 seconds.

I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster.

Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted".

But why is Hollywood screwed then? Same thing was said when cameras became cheap, when editing became cheep, and when internet made it possible for anyone to distribute movies: Now the movie industry is screwed because anyone with talent and an iphone can make and distribute a movie.

Turns out there is more to it than that.

Like I said, "Writing it is a separate problem". From what I've seen while experimenting with "creative" writing, I think they'd struggle with writing an episode of a kids TV show with a short running time in length (anything over about 9 minutes); and even then I would also doubt it would write correctly for a specific audience based on my experience while experimenting with writing myself educational apps (in my case to help me learn German, I'm extrapolating from that to not overburdening kids with too-complex vocabulary).

But do also consider that when cameras became cheap, *painting* is what became somewhat less valuable, and cinema became possible in the first place.

And consider that when cinema got sound, live musicians in theatres went away:

  The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement.

- 2012 reporting on 1927, even the reporting well before AI could do any of this at an interesting level; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...

If the AI could write… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough; if the AI could make coherent videos… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough.

"If". It's a matter of degree, but functionally the answer *today* is "no", because today when some humans make a video with AI, they need to put in a lot of effort to throw out the rubbish attempts by the AI.

When it stops being "no", and not before, is when Hollywood is screwed.

But why would Hollywood be screwed? They would have new tools at their disposal. Movies with sound put theatre musicians and some actors with unfortunate voices out of a job, but Hollywood thrived.

> But why would Hollywood be screwed?

I'm sorry, you're asking "why would Hollywood be screwed?" with regards to a tech that lets you write a short prompt and get an artefact out?

One where it already does this for stock photography, short scripts, and short clips?

Where random people already do this for fun because it's so cheap?

Where I'm talking specifically about a hypothetical which cost-anchors this for the price of a cinema ticket, i.e. $10 in creates a movie tailored to whatever the person prompting it happens to ask for?

You can't see how this has the same impact on Hollywood that sound recordings had on live music performances during cinema?

You can't see how anyone who wants a new film for some specific mood can just ask for that in this future, and skip the entirety of Hollywood?

I'm not using fiction as evidence here, so don't misunderstand it as such, but consider how the Holodeck is written in Star Trek: you talk to the computer and it gives you what you want, and if you don't like it half way through you pause and tell what to change. For a variety of obvious reasons, Trek's script writers and practical effects people didn't put in all the glitches we see in current GenAI models, but I'm asking you to imagine a future where GenAI models also don't make such mistakes.

> Movies with sound put theatre musicians and some actors with unfortunate voices out of a job, but Hollywood thrived.

"but Hollywood thrived." is Texan sharpshooter, it's picking the winner after the fact.

I specifically gave live theatre musicians as an example of the opposite, those who were screwed by the new tech.

Apropos of nothing, live theatre musicians and live voice over artists during movies made a solid comeback in the 1980s in several countries as part of what some described as the "dub parody" genre ala What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Hercules Returns and a run of actually live examples.

Addendum: eg https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-07-22-ca-7511-s... in California.

Most people will not want to create their own unique movies, even if it is technically possible.

They want to watch movies other people watch with actors they know.

> Most people will not want to create their own unique movies, even if it is technically possible.

Even if it's 1% of the population, this would be enough to end Hollywood and similar agglomerations when an entire film costs $10 to generate. Given what we already see, I think it is rather a lot more than 1%.

Even if it weren't done by end users (and I am confident it will be done by end users even without requiring much creativity, for the same reason Google now has generative answers and not just search results), at this price* any advertiser wanting a product placements would consider it a no-brainer to make a whole range of films for their brand in much the same way (but different details) as we're now drowning in AI slop blog posts because the cost of generating even just one custom blog post is now lower than the ad revenue shown on it.

i.e. soap operas all over again. Except now there's one for all tastes, in such quantity and diversity the new drowns out the old.

> They want to watch movies other people watch with actors they know.

What is today is not the same as what comes when the tech sucks less. But what we see already with this limited tech is that the group size for "other people watch" can easily just be "your personal friends", and the "actors they know" can be people in their lives rather than their adverts, both as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake_pornography though one may hope the future version of this is less that and more https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/deepfake-2

* and yes, hypothetical on the future quality being better

> Even if it's 1% of the population, this would be enough to end Hollywood

Why? Hollywood would still have 99% percent of the population as audience.

Hollywood films and 30 second advertisements are different categories.

AI is just another tool in the arsenal of tools for both developers (Linus [1]) and movie makers (Ben Affleck [2]). These are expert practitioners in their fields intelligently opining on AI, and they are promoting it not as a magic machine, but as another tool in the toolbox.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s

they might manage to get a semi passable AI movie... but will people pay to watch it? I certainly would not.

The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.

I've seen people saying that with other technologies. Years later, they are still in the same job but a lot richer.

If Karpathy's "auto-research" is at all representative of typical "AI research", then presumably it will!

> The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.

Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome for everyone else?

Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?

> Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome?

Yes. Basically based on my conversations with coworkers who went to these frontier AI labs: this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.

But making money isn't enough, though? If you think about it from this perspective, what matters far more is connections with the wealthy, or enough power to defend yourself.

Which is different from just being rich and chilling. Rich and chilling implies a stable society. But life isn't a video game where you hit some Absolute Level 99 and are impervious to everything. There's no outside justificatior for you - only you are. In this hypothetical society, when GrokBots rule the world, you think they'll care that you're a millionaire? You need to get into the inner circle.

I see some really smart professors/PhDs even, going to SV, starting startups, networking, etc. That is consistent with the worldview.

But someone who says that AI can replace them but just works at a lab, at least has the belief that they will be automated last. Maybe they believe they can become friends with the AI, I don't know. But let's stop and analyze the situation with a bit more nuance, for more than like, 5 seconds.

> this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.

There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it.

Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators.

"Somebody might do <bad thing> and get rich, might as well be me."

I just call these people "cowards"

'Judas goat' perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judas_goat

I think the established word is "class traitors".

Traitors to humanity

I know people who believe the end state is a Star Trek-style post-scarcity world.

This is not the same thing as communism. You can still have private ownership, differing levels of wealth, entrepreneurship, and competition. It's just that having money is not necessary for survival or to lead a reasonably comfortable life.

And they don't believe it will magically happen -- it will take intentional action by governments to get there. This is, perhaps, the reason the AI labs are talking so much about AI replacing people's jobs. It's not arrogance, it's to make sure our leaders are thinking about this now instead of when it's too late to guide the outcome.

> This is, perhaps, the reason the AI labs are talking so much about AI replacing people's jobs. It's not arrogance, it's to make sure our leaders are thinking about this now instead of when it's too late to guide the outcome.

I thought they were talking about AI replacing people's jobs, because that's music to investors' ears.

Think about how much wealth concentration would happen if they could hit their goals eat that much of the economy.

IIRC, Elon Musk has literally compared the effect of AI on people to the effect of highway construction on an anthill (that's in the way), and kinda shrugged his shoulders.

The former.

Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job.

"You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to?

Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.

I felt this watching the recent season of Clarksons Farm which had some nice product placement for what looked like automation startups. It was hard to watch as a software person as these farmers see the best part of their jobs automated away, but there’s also the rub: nobody wants to spend on automating that part. Eventually economics will require them to but perhaps the way to get started today is to focus on the stuff they actually don’t like doing.

Reminds me of the engineers/designers who regularly announce they've created a new revolutionary form of bicycle. Turns out the bicycle is a (nearly) perfect design and making it more complicated and expensive and less efficient is not an improvement.

> As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.

As I understood it, the attraction of blockchain was more that the money could get moved around without Bank of America and Capital One knowing about it, and therefore without those financial institutions reporting the transactions to the government as they are required to by law. Which of course screams "money laundering" and "tax evasion" to the government. Yes, there are possible legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to move cash around anonymously and invisibly, but they're basically rounding error compared to the ones mentioned above.

In other words, blockchain on this view was a classic example of the old saying that you can't apply a technical solution to a social (or in this case political) problem.

This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.

Every time I've done that, the people were so ignorant that they still didn't recognize that expert judgment was required... they just had the LLM make some slop.

> inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence

Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)

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