Sad, but not as shittifying as losing the infinite onion grinder to COVID. The hot dog was only just the delivery device.
5,169 karma · joined October 1, 2010
With small kids, these sort of lazy tasks bring out focus, physical awareness and exploration. Living in the city, these are valuable respites from chaos and noise.
That's basically it. It is surprising hard to find people that can do both, but engineers are becoming much, much better at the first gate while flaming out on the second.
Same with data centers and current SOTA models. If the music stops, we have tilled some fertile ground that will be utilized by those that come after. Inference costs will fall through the floor if those data centers aren't being fully utilized, same with RAM prices.
Think of what came after the dot com crash: Facebook and YouTube. Neither could exist until internet usage and bandwidth reached a tipping point that came after all the hype.
Where things go off the rail is when you want it to plan AND implement features. The blind spots of LLMs are not where they are for humans and way more work to anticipate. You have to stay on top of the bucking bronco, but you CAN move much faster if you can architect your system so more tasks fall in the "obvious" bucket - that is where the art of engineering still lives. Human understanding remains the goal.
Also Apple: I bought my son an old refurbished iPad for watching Netflix on long drives. But you can't install Netflix! The OS is too old. What's the workaround? Simple, if you've previously installed a Netflix on another device you can "restore" it, and then Apple will let you install the old version. On the old OS.
Of course I didn't have an old Netflix installation so I went to install Netflix on my work laptop, but there is no Netflix app for laptops anymore! Finally, I got it working through Family Share after an hour of tedious effort. This may be more Netflix's fault than Apple, but why would an OS give that power to a 3rd party in the first place? What sense does this make?
It reminds me of NextJS where there is some minor niceties at the cost of magical thinking that you may need to move heaven and earth to circumvent in order to accomplish the most basic shit.
This applies to math discoveries as well. The Jacobian conjecture was always invalid, only our human understanding of it has changed thanks to human inquiry and validation, despite LLMs doing the hard work.
I feel like we are in that narrow window of time when humans grapple with a new technology by personifying it before we realize it is just another tool humans have created to amplify human capabilities.
The concept of "waste" completely shifts. Like in 1990, I had to decide if dow loading an image was worth it, because it would take 5 minutes or more. Now, it isn't even a remote concern, even though images are clearly "wasting" bandwidth sending a 12mb image to my tiny phone screen.
It is much more interesting to think about the cultural impact of that shift. You can be concerned about the impact of AI on various fronts, but worrying about "waste" is tilting at windmills.
AI is simply going to bury it as a useful system. What will grow from the ashes will be something much more dynamic, where verifiable data is the gold and the conclusions and associated details will persist only as the human-level translation.
If you are on top of the AI, it is a powerful tool for exploration of ideas, organization of thoughts, bridging connections, outlining, filling in gaps.
But if you vibe write, it will look good on the surface but be full of illogical, contradictory statements, disconnected characterizations, etc.
The best comparison is photography. Instantly, a whole career path of portraiture was tossed out the window. Go to a museum and you see portrait after portrait - the best ones. There were millions of shitty ones made at all levels of society, and that job was replaced by cameras. But painting didn't go away, it got weird, it became anti-camera and more human, in a way.
This splitting of purpose and amplification of humanness is going to ramp up. Expect everyone to grow a taste for weirder, unprocessed music, experimental novels, wild and unexpected designs. Art is human communication and AI brings that into sharp relief.
Novels seem the most protected from AI - pulp/romance/beach novels will be crushed by volume and the sad remains of the publishing industry along with it, but interesting human novels will be just fine. And, much like with photography, I think AI will eventually normalize to its own artistic medium with writing, where careful usage will allow more ambitious work to appear that wasn't possible before, like a novel written using only sestinas, for example.
So I expect more of a sobering process for AI companies rather than a blowup, simply because they all still will have cash in the bank and some have actual products with clients that make use of them.
When everyone first uses AI they are swayed by its intelligent sounding sentence construction. It took time to be able to look past that and understand basic assuptions still needed to be questioned.
Some mathematicians (like SWEs) view AI as a boost to their ability to explore and understand possibilities - it is a great tool. Others see it as taking the soul out of what they do (loss of flow or craft). Most worry about losing their jobs.
I think for both mathematicians and SWEs, there is real loss for how we worked in the past, but I don't think job loss will be quite as severe as feared (and may actually increase). Because we still need, more than ever, people who understand the output and, more importantly, can ask the right questions.