devolving-dev

If they pay market rate, the clearing price will go up making things more expensive for everyone. If they go off-grid they make the machines needed to produce water or electricity or whatever more expensive. If they borrow money, they make government bond yields go up and cause governments to start thinking about cutting pensions and stuff, not to mention increased mortgage rates for whoever wants to buy a home or is on a variable rate mortgage. There's no world in which this AI stuff doesn't increase costs for the rest of us.

I think that what's needed is a separation of concerns. Instead of a monolithic institution that is responsible for research, student enlightenment, self-discovery, vocational training, athletic competition, etc, we could move towards a micro-institution architecture and scale the different micro-institutions according to demand. Importantly, we wouldn't cross-subsidize the institutions, so if someone only wanted self-discovery for example, they could just pay for that and get a cheaper price than someone who wanted both self-discovery and vocational training. People could also decide how much of each they need according to their circumstances.

When autonomy is solved, they could put a bed or office or dining table in the car. But I agree, this halfway autonomy where you have to watch everything is kind of useless.

Like you said, I think skills are quickly subsumed by model abilities. I leave relevant notes about my own projects in agents.md and local comments around tricky bits of code that need them, but otherwise I just use vanilla codex.

I don't think Arabic script is that hard. It's nearly phonetic, unlike English. It's not super broad and hard to memorized like kanji. I don't know, maybe I'm just removed from the struggles of people learning it for the first time.

Models keep on improving though, so doesn't fine tuning become an ongoing task with ongoing maintenance burden?

What's the benefit of SSEs here?

I guess this ethics stuff is cool, but I'm more interested in how good it is at running a business and dealing with adversarial humans like in previous vending machine experiments. I hope they release something on that soon.

You'll make more money when you downsize or move to a cheaper city or country for retirement if your house goes up in price. If you own a house in San Francisco you can sell, move to a vlcol city, buy a new house, invest the remainder, and retire. You probably will want a smaller house once the kids move out too.

Is this a situation where AI will go away and we will regret the loss of skills? At worse, we will be forced to use open weight models instead of the cutting edge, so I don't think it's a big deal. I'm sure people got worse at arithmetic after the invention of the calculator.

He means that he's working 10 times faster so the manual things that he does once per task have to be done 10 times, and so he starts automating those too. I'm not claiming that he's actually 10x faster, just explaining.

But it kind of fits my experience too. Less time coding, and more time gathering requirements, testing, and doing knowledge transfer etc. Then you start thinking about how to make those parts automatic via automated tests or automated documentation generation that you review etc.

I think that AI is here to stay, and that you should focus most of your efforts on the parts that AI can't do. It's like with calculators, you still know how to add and multiply and stuff, and such low level things are even more pertinent with AI because it's not deterministic and can make mistakes, but generally you can rely on it for low level coding and debugging and what you really need to focus on is making sure that the artifacts it produces are aligned with your requirements, both functional and non-functional. Think about automated testing, scalability, security, etc. A single developer can produce code of much higher quality with AI because they have the bandwidth to work on such beneficial but optional things that they might have somewhat neglected before when implementation was more time-consuming and expensive.

Even if they don't benefit economically, there's some value in having them feel that they are valued and have a voice at the table. Such policies can provide the popular support needed to implement other more economically optimal policies, and we're seeing this happen for example with the mayor of New York.

People like to look at rent control from a purely economic lens, but the sociopolitical aspect must also be considered. A suboptimal economic outcome might actually be optimal when all factors are considered. Social harmony and a feeling of hope for underprivileged residents are hard to value, but we must admit that they do have value.

Right now, EVs are only good for people who have houses with garages that let them charge. If you need to use street parking or something then EVs don't work. But maybe if such technology improves everyone can use EVs.

Yeah, also stuff like robotics which might not really exist today but could be big in the future.

I wonder what this means for GLP 1 drugs that slow digestion.

May I suggest an AI coparent? I'm half-joking, but theoretically AI should eventually be able to take your high level intent and use it to apply appropriate restrictions to your children's phones.

I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong?

I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the models aren't intelligent enough, and that adding LiDAR wouldn't be enough to achieve the reliability required. But I don't know, I don't really work in that field so maybe engineers who have more experience with self driving might say otherwise.

It's just in my personal experience, I ask AI to help me and it seems to do it's best. Sometimes it fails because it's incapable. It's similar to an employee in that regard. Whereas when I install a computer virus it instantly tries to do malicious things to my computer, like steal my money or lock my files or whatever, and it certainly doesn't try to help me with my tasks. So that's the angle that I'm looking at it from. Maybe another good example would be to compare it to some other type of useful software like a web browser. The web browser might contain malicious code and stuff, but I'm not going to read through all of the source code. I haven't even checked if other people have audited the source code. I just feel like the risk of chrome or Firefox messing with my computer is kind of low based on my experience and what people are telling me, so I install it on my computer and give it the necessary permissions.

Whether driven by fear or by their model weights or whatever, I don't think that the likelihood of an AI agent, at least the current ones like Claude and Codex, acting maliciously to harm my systems is much different than the risk of a human employee doing so. And I think this is the philosophical difference between those who embrace the agents, they view them as akin to humans, while those who sandbox them view them as akin to computer viruses that you study within a sandbox. It seems to me that the human analogy is more accurate, but I can see arguments for the other position.

Don't you have the same issue when you hire an employee and give them access to your systems? If the AI seems capable of avoiding harm and motivated to avoid harm, then the risk of giving it access is probably not greater than the expected benefit. Employees are also trying to maximize paperclips in a sense, they want to make as much money as possible. So in that sense it seems that AI is actually more aligned with my goals than a potential employee.

I've never really been convinced that robots or AI replacing humans is a real problem. Because why would they do that? If I had an army of super intelligent robots, I would have them waiting on me and fulfilling my every whim. I wouldn't send them off to silicon valley to take all of the programming jobs or something like that.

You might say: "but you'll need money!". Why would I need money? The robots can provide my every need. And if I need money for some land or resource or something, I would have my robots work until my need was satisfied, I wouldn't continue having them work forever.

And even if robots did take all of the jobs, they would have to work for free. Because humans would have no jobs, and thus no money with which to pay them. So either mankind enjoys free services from robots that demand no compensation, or we get to keep our jobs.

So I really don't get the existential worry here. Yes, at a smaller scale some jobs might be automated, forcing people to retrain or work more menial jobs. But all of humanity being replaced? It doesn't make sense.

Another way to think about it is that if all of the jobs were replaced by AI, us leftover jobless humans would create a new economy just trying to grow food and make clothes and build houses and take care of our needs. The robot masters would just split away and have their own economy. Which is the same as them not existing.