Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
I have to mention words like "stakeholder" at behavioral interviews and to leadership just to sound like I belong at my seniority level.
But I don't want anyone holding any stakes. I wish people would just get shit done. Shit that matters to the CEO. Or leave.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
So you can see how AI solves that problem too ;-)
(Only half joking)
This is the kind of shit I have to fight every day. I have to align my manager, skip, VP. If I don't align them, one of them will be necessarily pissed no matter what I do, and the pissed one will fire orders down to hate on me, overriding the opinions of anyone on the way down.
Fortunately for our employers, it's illegal for us to build a competitor in our free time.
> ...
> But even after controlling for AI-exposure, O*NET tasks from occupations with larger wage bills are significantly overrepresented among benchmark prompts:
So, in short: they want AI to take the good jobs. AI is not coming for jobs with tasks like "gather and empty trash" or "service, clean, or supply restrooms," or "mix water and detergents or acids in containers to prepare cleaning solutions according to specifications." We software engineers and lawyers would be smart to start retraining (and adjusting our living standards) now!
And this points to one of the ways AI will help improve society and living standards for all: we'll have cleaner, better-maintained bathrooms, as labor one wasted on engaging intellectual tasks is redirected towards menial, low-pay tasks that still need a human touch.
Reason to be optimistic, amirite?
More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.
All this being said, I don't think AI usage will meaningfully go down in the long run cause it's a very powerful dopamine loop and tech companies are very good at making those. How many people report social media making them unhappy and how many people do you know who have actually quit? Or to paraphrase Jim Gaffigan, nobody says they eat at McDonalds, but the sign outside says "billions served". Somebody's lying (and it's not McDonalds).
Is this not just a gimmick? You still need people on hand to take over if the robot has an issue, I don't see how it would reduce labour costs.
I don't use them; not because of any moral objection, but because they can't come inside buildings. The whole point of food delivery is to avoid going outside. Most human couriers come directly to your unit. The food delivery companies have spoiled us too much, and we are not ready to return to a world where you have to put on shoes to get food. Oddly, the delivery robots are probably better suited to suburbia, where folks are used to answering the front door to pick up a food delivery. But the distances involved aren't viable until you have delivery Waymos that can move at highway speeds.
Like any sizable population, there are absolutely some do-nothing inefficiencies to be culled. But most of the time it's just onlookers seeing a tiny slice of the day to be interpreted from their very limited vantage.
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I've started to notice this on a micro scale as well. I am 20x more productive at coding and scripting, but I don't spend more of my time coding. My time is now filled with things like presentations, Jira, QA, etc. Ironically, despite all of the automation, the things that are painstaking and time consuming disproportionately require more time now.
For example, the “social workers & care -> counsel parents with child rearing problems” category is considered “well covered” because there are 13 prompts.
It’s self-evident that the spectrum of work carried out by a social worker undertaking that work cannot be well represented by thirteen prompts.
I suspect if you really strictly defined “covered well”, to the extent that any normal person would use that phrase, the headline would be above 99.9%.
It's really easy to fall into the McNamara fallacy when rolling out these kinds of solutions. Focusing on the low value stuff is attractive. It tends to be easier to do, and also easier to quantify outcomes. But it also tends to direct attention away from important but difficult to quantify considerations, which may mean you don't notice negative externalities. So we often found ourselves in a verschilmmbessern situation where automating what we could automate made things worse overall.
I guess if I wanted to put my skepticism about the AI stock bubble into one little phrase, it would be that I don't think the bubble has accounted for Amdahl's Law. Costs don't actually go to zero with AI, and there's a huge difference between costs falling even 90% and costs falling a full 100%. And the difference between "30% improvement this year, trending to 85% in five years" and "90% this year" is pretty significant too.
You know what? The truth doesn't matter much. If people believe in the resale value of tulips, each tulip would sell for a million.
It's the beliefs and perception that create the reality. Reality and truth don't exist on their own.
Yep, makes sense...
Right now it's £5.60, but that says more about the decline of the British Pound than an increase in the price of wheat.
Massive food price deflation has been one of the wonders of the modern world. Hopefully the last few years were only a small blip on this overall trend.
The only “disinflation” consumers have experienced is devaluation of products through obsolescence as newer, often more expensive alternatives enter the market.
Just like good blue collar jobs were shipped overseas, good knowledge jobs are going to be shipped to GPUs whenever they can.
Which doesn’t play well with “savings for consumers”, because these consumers will be unemployed.
You pick the highest leverage occupation first. Automating lawyers gives you.. angry lawyers? Automating programmers gives you improved ways of doing literally all other things because all other automation requires.. automation. That is to say bucketloads of software.
It’s completely obvious what the play is here and it has nothing to do with pay. We pay peanuts for tokens so automating a developer for 200-500 a month worth of tokens ain’t getting you to a trillion a year.
RSI is the play and it’s already happening. Our work is easier and faster and anyone that claims otherwise I have a very hard time taking serious.
You think they come for mathematicians’ pay? If you want to earn money I guarantee you they need to automate some other low-hanging fruits first that pay a lot better.
No, programming and math is basically what AI research is. You automate that and you got the golden ticket to all other things.
"They" figured out that it's a lot easier to hillclimb AI on verifiable digital tasks, and it just so happened that white collar jobs tend to pay more
Ai will decimate customer support jobs but those are not considered highly paid
If robotics continue to progress, we'll have all the robots to do our dishes and clean our bathrooms as you wish
No, we are currently unable to do most tasks that require physical manipulation, independent of what anyone wants.
This is also the reason absolutely no attention is spent on evolving B2C products.
What is being exploited is the overt attention businesses pay to their own cost metrics, to the point where broader strategy is getting thrown under the bus in favor of efficiency. I believe this is an illusion, and for many companies that jump on board, sober learnings are right around the corner.
I think you may also be incorrect on your notion that training data is proportional to good models if anything the opposite is true. what ai models are ultimately trying to be are a universal theorem prover and encode all human knowledge into "theorems" and rulesets
not trying to come off too harsh here but i think most of the work is just innovating on the frontier or people pleasing
It's just a harder to do. Would not be at all surprised to see e.g. Autodesk bought out for exactly that purpose.
You don't even need Autodesk. You can have Claude whip up a web app and build a higher level understanding the building and then export it to whatever format you desire.
Oh don't worry Mr. Former Software Engineer. You won't be picking up the trash or cleaning toilets. You have things like an expectation for your work to pay a reasonable wage. You'll be passed over for a third world immigrant who'll work for a pittance, and they'll be replaced only when robots are capable enough and cheap enough to undercut _them_.
If you step back, the LLM revolution is just "computers now respond to human instruction, like they were always supposed to".
If you think of this field as a historic accident, and the current shift is a very unfortunate reset - it's a little less dystopian. In the long run, if it didn't affect me immediately, I don't mind a society that values "keeping restrooms clean" a little bit more and "talking to computers good" a little bit less.
Isn't it just typical the humans get automation v1 the wrong way around, haha
As someone who recently switched from data scientist to electrician, starting the day can be pretty tough because you have to get physically moving and uncomfortable, but I feel way better at the end of the workday than after an office job. Most of the time, the work is pretty uncomfortable, but somehow it's a lot of fun.
...don't you think the ability to create a virtually unlimited amount of software is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of extremely hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands, to take one example, but once you can develop an almost infinite amount of software at basically no cost, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get solved!
(Whether a role's cost/value tradeoff is actually worth it for a company is a different question than the idealized model of a "bullshit job" doing nothing useful)
In industries with large margins, this indicates weak competitive pressure, ie., a weak incentive signal to "compete away" this ineffective labour.
I imagine that, upon this analysis, we'd find it holds up. ie., the observation that there are lots of people doing very little productive work correlates well with weak competitive pressures and hence high margins.
That also explains why, institutionally, there's no internal pressure either. If margins are good, no one rocks the boat.
verdverm•1h ago