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- Hacker News
- I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?”
That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?".
Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...
by paulorlando - I think the better Luddite position is "what can we do to protect humans?"
Which can be channeled into making the change healthy.
I heard a statistic that the average QOL and life expectancy didn't increase for most of the Industrial Revolution, once you account for the increase in pollution and disease (disease partly coming from greater urbanization). Yes, our lives are much richer now than they would've been 200 years ago, but it was pretty rough there for a while.
I'd like to think we can do better this time. Though, realistically, I'm not sure. Gilded Age 2.0, coming up
by Windchaser - paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste.
If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"?
Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.
by ks2048 - > Every new model release brings another paradigm shift
It does not; the increments are almost imperceptible now and locked to the same paradigm, whose peak has already gone by.
by kazinator - > Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work.
But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully.
I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.
by kmoser - AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.by rayiner
- But what about putting food on the table for your babies and spouse?by willchis
- > If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.
If that were true, you would have done it (given up working) by now. You haven't, hence it's not true.
by lelanthran - how will you afford that baby, or picnic, or trip to the ocean?by yacin
- I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI.
When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context.
The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximally distributed. It cannot be hoarded. You can't eat so that I feel satiated. AI is called to do the work, but it can't handle 3 things - start, middle and end of a task.
by visarga - Well said. Deciding what to build is derived by experience in the context of your problem space, and that is human centric. Makes me encouraged that as AI tooling increases in adoption, more people will build things to solve their problems. Instead of large corporations hoarding talent and then building things for people, I could see more small business success where they sit closer to the very things that need solving.by silksowed
- I agree with all that but the problem is what others will pay for. There might be niche artisans that survive but most of it might go the way of wallmart.by swader999
- Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes - in fact I'd be very happy if AI could just fix software - basically heaps upon heaps of software is just built wrong fundamentally (operating systems, just to give one huge example), and AI productivity could give us a chance to try again and build things the right way.by torginus
- > Btw, its insane to think imo that a few years from now theres going to be no jobs - AI isnt going to cook food or stack bricks or any number of manual processes
We're all really excited to do those mostly minimum wage jobs. Especially given how much competition there will be for them when the currently non-minimum-wage jobs disappear.
- > My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest.
lol
Two More Weeks(TM)
- That really pissed me off. Why do people continute to pretend they can predict the futureby stemlord
- I've noticed that "18 months" is a very popular prediction target, across a wide variety of prognosticators. Close enough to seem urgent, and if what they predict comes to pass anytime in the next few years, they can claim "See, I was right, just a little off on the timing because <excuse>". If it doesn't happen, most everyone will have forgotten their prediction. And in the unlikely event they get called out, they have over a year of random events to find a plausible fall guy for their failure.by GolfPopper
- I, everyone here, has read all these discussions a thousand times now. I've tried to have a more nuanced view, I understand the excitement and I think there can be real value in automation being accessible to everyone.
What matters to me is, I like programming and making things, and I'm okay at it. I can learn to enjoy, and get good at, other work (I hope). Close a fairly brief chapter of my life where I felt some certainty about what I wanted to do for the coming decades. But it's maddening to not have any idea if I will need to.
Here's my point: it may not be bad to live in a future world were ai and llm's are very prevelant, ordinary technology. But I think living in the now, while that world is (slowly) being born, can get to be pretty bad.
by Fraterkes - >So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach.
Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think what they were really asking is how they’ll feed their kids
by brap - OP after completing this essay https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f...by brap
- Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand.
They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a social security system).
They smashed the machines for leverage. There was little labour law at the time. Most of it was written by the capital holders with the help of the constabulary. Things like showing up to work on time or no pay, etc. Violence, controlled violence, was the tool they used to try and get the capital holders to the table and negotiate.
It failed, as we know, and it was a bloody failure. People were executed and jailed. The movement became a pejorative for someone who is backwards and against technology and progress.
by agentultra - If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content).
I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thought of one way how AI can pay all of us for our content ..posted quick thoughts on my Substack... https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
Overall, AI is irrelevant without us and it needs to pay us to keep it relevant I think! It can not continue to be a bloodsucker!
by paul7986 - I think the vibe is generally same with AI too. If people believe AI will genuinely be used for good (like many in China seem to think, I get the feeling) then the public at large seems fine with industry focusing on it. But when people have the feeling or even expectation that it'll be used for things like increasing the wealth/wage/inequality gap, control of the masses, automated widespread surveillance and more, you get the violent attacks on data centers and such.
Maybe if these people who are basically wealthier than some countries would share their loot or just care a tiny bit about 99% of the rest of the world, people would feel differently about things. Use AI and your data centers to figure out how to quench, feed and power the entire world, and probably a bunch of people who hate AI would even get onboard.
- Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.
- Glad I wasn't the only one!
- My boss pays me for the lines of code, right?by pocksuppet
- Maybe you don't understand, if we didn't have LLMs expanding our ideas into longer form we wouldn't have anything to give to LLMs to summarize.by uludag
- I enjoyed the fact that AI was used to deliver the anti-AI message.by stavros
- Isn't the original post in Chinese? English is probably llm translated - like the whole blogby 627467
- I actually didn't smell AI at all while reading this article, because the idea density seemed high, rather than when AI just expands a few ideas into repetitive mumbo jumbo. The last portion was a bit wordy and metaphysical, but he landed the plane at the end.by mizzao