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Comment by huurtehoog | Hacker News Reader

Anything that fosters complexity will create jobs.

Jobs won't dissolve into the ether. If the human civilization system grows bigger and complex, it necessitates more people.

If humans were a high energy configuration in the evolution of intelligent systems, we'd never come into being. That Earth's ecosystem has begotten us indicates we're some low energy configuration for packing more information density into the energy flows from the Sun through Earth's biosphere.

Unless we create replicating machines, any machine system we build will only grow more complex by enabling more humans to work on it. We'd be in trouble if we somehow created autonomous self replicating and evolving machinery but chatbots built on natural language machine learning ain't it.

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This take only makes sense when the required inputs are human exclusive. As soon as the abilities of the "chatbots" near that of the average human (a point that we are fast approaching if we haven't reached it already) the logic falls apart because any newly created task that a human can do can instead be automated in turn. Even if we're left with a few highly difficult tasks at the top of the pyramid by definition the vast majority of people won't be capable of performing them.

If anything, this report actually made me feel a bit better about AI-led job extinction not being that close. The sheer complexity of the swarm's actions required AI to parse and aggregate, but even with the METR team effectively having an unmetered token budget to do so, the output/summary still required extensive human review.

Even if we ignore the hinted possibility that the agents used to summarize the voluminous data may be acting deceptively (i.e. no snitching), the agents' summaries often 'missed the mark'. Maybe this is another example of 'taste', but it seems less subjective than arguments I've seen for that. It could be that an LLM is no better able to define 'usefulness' or 'relevance' to humans absent being told exactly what that is.

Fair enough, but even so surely putting together the METR report is an example of a highly difficult task that the vast majority of humans are incapable of? It's easy to forget how heavily skewed the crowds on HN and those surrounding engineering and science operations are.

> As soon as the abilities of the "chatbots" near that of the average human (a point that we are fast approaching if we haven't reached it already)

That is entirely not clear. Besides, these tools are limited to producing text and software. There is indeed a lot of employment predicated on producing a bloated output of text and software but this is not existential. Incentives will shift behavior.

But the idea that LLM based 'agents' will (1) be on par with a human using a computer, and (2) disruptively displace the workforce, well that's just not what we're seeing. Unemployment is down across the board, and these tools might be very useful but they are not displaying autonomous intelligence at all.

> these tools are limited to producing text and software

Oh good, so they can't produce images or do graphic design work. Thus it follows that movies being sequences of images are obviously completely safe. And since they can't synthesize sounds obviously things like voice acting, call center jobs, and certainly music production are entirely off the table. And it sure is a good thing they can't accept video and audio streams as input because otherwise we might need to worry about their application to robotics and all the trade jobs that could eventually be automated as a result. But those are 100% immune thanks to the aforementioned limitations. Yeah. Definitely. /s

> LLM based 'agents' will (1) be on par with a human using a computer

They are already substantially more capable when it comes to writing exploits and decompiling binaries than the vast majority of professionals. Sure a lot of that is raw persistence as opposed to novel reasoning but when it comes to employment prospects the "how" doesn't matter only the "what".

> disruptively displace the workforce, well that's just not what we're seeing

You would deny that we fast approach a cliff on the basis that we are not yet in free fall? Surely you see how absurd that is?

That's a lot of words for "soon, you'll see" which is just as good as mine "yeah, we'll see alright".

Since those are purely opinions, there's no point in debating them. Thanks for sharing though.

Whenever this deus ex machina rises from the GPUs and replaces us, you'll be proven right I guess.

By that logic you can bury your head in the sand given literally any situation. Incoming hurricane tomorrow? That's purely the opinion of a talking head. No point to debating it, I'm ignoring the mandatory evacuation. Wildfire broke containment? That's a lot of complicated words when in fact my house is not presently on fire. Only a sucker would leave town.

Amusingly you appear entirely unable to contest any of the points I made about current (not predicted) model capabilities.

Unable to contest? The models do what they do. There is no sign of any LLM based system as a drop-in replacement for people. The capability of this technology is a matter of fact, not opinion. Their supposed future capabilities is a matter of opinion and we can clearly not convince each other to change either position.

What does it matter what I say? You already showed bad faith in equating skepticism towards LLM as a path to "AGI" to refusing to acknowledge severe weather warnings. You're trying to drag this into some contest of egos.

It is still a matter of a novel technology that has some uses, is being feared as well as hyped as the harbinger of some computer genie, and the fact that I don't think it is and you do has no solution.

I mean. What is your point? Besides throwing mud at me, what would you have me do about it if you think that there it amounts to stupidity to doubt that LLMs can somehow become anything more than a statistical model of text that can be used to put out mediocre software, corporate copy, and expose the fact that bloated web apps built on dynamically typed languages can be cracked open by Kali linux boxes and simulated script kiddies?

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