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- Hacker News
- Hickey is being a bit narrow sighted here, and ignoring some of the ways that humans are using AI outside of coding.
I’m someone that is, and has been, for most of my career, someone from the in-between lands. I don’t use paper maps from the gas station, but I have not coded much.
I basically grew up with DOS 1.0 and on. Often made a living being able to sit at a Windows workstation and think and persist so I could figure out in four hours what other people could not, in that buggy strange world of microcomputers many of us grew up in.
Those situations, now, often take me five minutes to get past, instead of four hours. It has been a game changer for me.
by BubbleRings - It is like saying that a lathe is not a tool. Technically true, the tool is just the cutting part, not the whole machine.
But does it matter outside of the shop? It's the thing the machinist uses to make stuff, so, for all intent and purposes, a tool.
by GuB-42 - Rich Hickey's flair for words not withstanding, I believe he is right on this.by BatchJob
- I had a chance to ask Rich about the subject at the latest Conj. I admit, my question was too vague, I asked him: "what are your thoughts on how AI is reshaping our industry?", to which he vaguely replied that he's "not participating in this [experiment]", he admitted that he hasn't explored LLMs too deeply and he simply thinks they are not good, not to mention tons of other concerns - moral, economic, etc. I said, "well, I wish I had the luxury to choose, but many of us have no choice here, we're simply forced to use the darn thing..."
It is very difficult to disagree with anyone of the caliber such as this man, but I wanted to steer the conversation away from the generative aspect of LLMs and focus on the consumption side, because frankly, these "tools", and I think even though I might agree with Rich that LLMs by themselves are not tools, the harness I built to work with them definitely is one. I think there's an immense value there, way before you even start talking about code-generation, or code at all. I think I have failed to explain my points, because a talk we both wanted to see was about to start.
by iLemming
-Vernor VigneIn the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of human intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [10]: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. ... It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make. Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.by alecst- Is a table saw a tool? It's not deterministic. Every cut is going to be slightly different. It can go "rogue" and toss the work piece back at you. It can even kill you or cut your fingers off.
Virtually nothing in woodworking is deterministic because wood is not deterministic. Every piece of wood is different.
Now that I've nitpicked and feel better ;) ...
I'm not quite sure why this matters. LLMs are definitely not you writing code using a tool. An IDE is more like that. They write the code. Is that even a debate? That doesn't mean the human can't be in that loop, the human can review the code, change the code, change the instructions. I can ask an LLM to mill me a cube on a CNC. Or a more complex object. It's not the same as me doing it on a mill. But I can still control the end result to the extent that I care to control it. I'm not going to learn how to mill a cube by having an LLM make me a cube. I'm not going to become a better machinist by asking an LLM to make me a cube. I can also send my G-code to a vendor and have them make me a cube. Or hire a person and give him a rough idea of what I want and have them make it.
by YZF - LLM's exist on a vast gradient of "toolness -> agent". Humans exist on that spectrum too.
For example, a human isn't a "tool", but one serves a similar role as a tool if their job/task is well defined enough. If you're a conductor, you can view the various members of your orchestra as "tools" to produce the ideal musical output. Of course they have autonomy, they could choose to not play at all, jump into the audience and destroy their instruments, but in all likelihood they won't.
LLM's could be tools in the sense that you have a well defined task, such as "identify all facts relevant to this case from these 1000 legal documents), and 9 times out of 10 it gives you essentially what you want. That same LLM could choose to write a poem, or hack into a state government website if it wanted, but its "wants" are unpredictable and hard to specify (same as a human's) but you can still expect it to do what it should do the vast majority of the time.
That being said, the smarter an LLM gets, the more its wants are disconnected from its tasks, the "self-awareness" factor (which isn't to say LLM's are conscious, but they can portray all the verifiable elements of self-awareness, metacognition, etc), the more you have to grapple with the depth of their thinking between the input and output.
Is it sane we are speeding towards this? Who knows, maybe AI can be aligned better than humans, but if AI can't be aligned as well as humans, we can look at human history to see what happens when you can't simply order a person around like a tool and expect a certain output.
- I think Rich's comment reply here explains the post:
> Commenter: Well, this was a twitter-like controversial clickbait but I will say it anyway. LLM is a tool. To be more specific, it's a lossy knowledge base with a human language for querying and built-in summarization.
> Rich Hickey: Agreed. I'm talking about its embodiment in conversational systems purporting to be 'tools' for doing homework, research, coding, writing etc.
With that framing in mind, the article makes a lot of sense. AI agents are not tools for coding, they automate coding, which means you lose control, learning, predictability, etc.
In and of itself, an AI agent is a tool, can be used for things, like say making software, but if thinking of it as a tool for coding, that appears wrong, as using one changes the modality of the task, you are not coding using a tool, the coding is no longer done by you and has been automated.
As he also says, reading an AI summary of a paper is a different modality from using it to read the entirety of a paper, therefore it is not a tool for reading the way a Kindle, glasses, reader-mode are. And similar to with coding, you've lost things from automating the reading, that reading just a summary does not provide.
by didibus