There is no 'wages go up 20%'. That's not how the economy works. Wages are renegotiated on an annual basis and most people have to job hop to get anything close to a 20% raise.
Inflation affects everyone rapidly. But to get the claimed wage increase people have to do work to find new jobs.
> There is no 'wages go up 20%'. That's not how the economy works. Wages are renegotiated on an annual basis and most people have to job hop to get anything close to a 20% raise.
The example was not meant to be a single year. Over the 2020-2024 timeframe we did see movements around that size (though the gap between average wages and inflation was smaller than my example, where I rounded the numbers).
yeah but it's not a great example, because actually wages aren't going up. maybe people would be able to psychologically handle inflation if it wasn't out-pacing wages. actually, now i think about it, that's not psychological at all, so the whole premise is kind of out the window, isn't it?
Though I disagree with your conclusions, that part is irrelevant to whether the example works.
An example is not bad simply because it's unrealistic. I'm sure you've heard plenty of examples which allow you to understand the main point without being perfectly representative.
The point of this example in particular was to illustrate how wages work alongside inflation. As long as you understand the point--that inflation is relative--the specific numbers don't matter.
the point of the example was to illustrate how people fixate on the increased cost of living fron inflation and ignore their increased earnings, even if the increased earnings out-pace the inflation in their cost of living. my point is that's a bad example because we couldn't say that that's true given that the cost od living has been out-pacing wage inflation for a long time.
so yeah, the example illustrates the idea, but it also underlines how the idea contradicts reality.
No, the point of the example was not to make any specific claim about wages or inflation. The point of the example was to illustrate that wages and inflation are relative. That's it.
If instead OP had said "if wages go up 500%, and prices go up 1,000%, everyone is worse off and got a 500% pay cut", then the main point being made would remain exactly the same. Again, this is because the exact numbers were never relevant, and the example was for explanation purposes.
Now apart from the fact that we are now 6 comments deep in the most pedantic thread I have ever had the displeasure of participating in (this is my fault too, to be fair), you also might be interested to know that cost of living/inflation has not outpaced wages for a "long time" as you so claim.
Here's a graph from the last 30 years, for example, showing earnings keeping up with inflation.
Or if your a low wage earner, those wages have especially kept up, outpacing inflation and even high wage earners by significant margin in recent years.
This is not to say that there is no affordability problem, but no matter what way you put it, your specific claim, that wages have not been outpaced by inflation "for a long time", is demonstrably false.
> No, the point of the example was not to make any specific claim about wages or inflation. The point of the example was to illustrate that wages and inflation are relative. That's it.
i'm sorry but that's just bird-brained
>> They should lift incomes, not suppress prices
> I think this misses the psychology of inflation.
> If wages go up 20%, and prices go up 15%, everyone is better off and got a 5% raise, right?
> Go poll people that experienced that and they won't tell you they're celebrating being 5% richer, they'll tell you they're outraged about the 15% inflation.
> Psychologically they'll believe they earned that 20% raise through hard work. Putting in extra hours to get that promotion. But then the inflation robbed them of their 20% raise, and turned it into a measly 5% raise. They'll be outraged.
how you get from what they said to what you said they said, i have no idea.
as for how real wages have changed overtime, you should be aware that it isn't a straight-forward measurment, and that it is an area of active political contestation.
there are ways you can slice it to make things look one way or another. for example, 1979-2017 had almost universal real wage loss for the "some college" demographic.
OP mentioned that inflation is confusing because people often don't realize that inflation is relative to their wages. I'm not denying that.
My issue with your criticism specifically was that you called out the example. It's like if someone had issue with Hitler, but their criticisms only focused on Hitler's choice of clothing.
"Boo Hitler! Not because of his ideology though, but because the collars he wore were too tight!" This is ridiculous because even if your criticism is valid, you are just criticizing the wrong thing.
> That's not how the economy works.
> yeah but it's not a great example, because actually wages aren't going up.
> my point is that's a bad example because we couldn't say that that's true given that the cost od living has been out-pacing wage inflation for a long time.
All of these quotes have you fixating on the numbers. If you take only one thing from this entire reply, let it be this: *the example works regardless of the numbers used*. My whole point is that whether wages rise with inflation or not, the example's (not any surrounding exchange, just the example) only purpose was to illustrate that wages are relative to inflation. It did that.
To take this even further, and make it so even a bird-brain like myself can't possibly misunderstand, let's look at my previous example with the Nazis. Does my analogy stop working if I switch "Hiter" with "Stalin", or him with "bin Laden"?
"Boo Stalin! Not because of the Great Purge, but because of his funny mustache!"
See how the point being made remains exactly the same, regardless of whom you use to illustrate it? Please, please, please try to understand this.
And as this has now become a stress test for how thoroughly I want to humiliate myself through meaningless argument, let me also briefly address your argument on the data.
> as for how real wages have changed overtime, you should be aware that it isn't a straight-forward measurment, and that it is an area of active political contestation.
Of course it's politically contested, but that doesn't mean we're just nowhere; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We have some statistics that can give us some good idea of wages relative to inflation, and the graphs I gave you were a very good start. Especially the one from FRED, where three different earnings metrics are supplied--at the very least this is an okay proxy for income.
> there are ways you can slice it to make things look one way or another.
Yes, there are different ways to interpret the data. This is why I said that the affordability problem is real.
But this is not the claim you made. Your claim was much stronger, and much less defensible. You said that wages outpacing cost of living/inflation is unrealistic, and critically, that inflation had outpaced wages for "a long time."
This is just false. Inflation generally outpacing wages for "a long time" is just not a conclusion you can make based on the data. We can have more nuanced conversation about this, but here specifically I think you're trying to take your broad, conclusive, and incorrect claim, and equivocate it into a smaller, more defensible, but different claim.
I don't work in tech, and hopping jobs will get you 5% at most, usually. Maybe it's because I'm in the public sector and wages are public information? Either way, it always comes across as VERY out of touch when people here talk about massive increases just by changing jobs.
Not to mention how casually they talk about changing jobs. As though there weren’t pressures (and desires) keeping people at one workplace, and that those people form a large enough percentage of the population that their resentment of inflation has political force.
That's classic HN showing off their privilege. But the golden era of tech is coming to an end. The industrialisation of software is about to begin. Many of the devs here will soon be getting a reality check
That falsely turns your experience into an imagined generality.
There was one year I received 3 raises at Travelocity and nearly doubled my compensation. I was hired as a web designer and after 3 months was involuntarily reassigned to a developer role and told to “figure it out”. I got a negative annual review that year and then ended up in Afghanistan on a military deployment. When I came back to Travelocity I was still classified as a developer but was reassigned from marketing to product development where to wages are higher, but I was earning as a junior designer. After eagerly looking for other internal jobs they gave me a raise to catch me up. Several months later I was promoted to a senior developer position and became the company A/B test engineer, which also came with a raise. A little after that another company gave me a better offer and Travelocity countered. This was like a million years ago.
Because most of my career is in writing JavaScript if I want to continue to increase my wages I would have to do the most beginner level shit work because that is common expectation for JavaScript developers.
> That falsely turns your experience into an imagined generality.
> There was one year I received 3 promotions at Travelocity and nearly doubled my compensation. I was hired as a web designer and after 3 months was involuntarily reassigned to a developer role and told to “figure it out”.
This is obviously an aberration where you are doing exactly what you claimed the gp did.
Moving jobs is the single best way to get a raise and has been for decades. Leveraging the experience at a company (which is relatively static) for a higher wage at another where that new and different experience has more value.
Notably, how company leadership changes are less likely to be from internal candidates than a transplant from another company.
This might be true for software but it isn’t true into management, it isn’t true for any other industry, and it isn’t true for other forms of compensation.
LLM utility is exponential with increased LLM capability. Even if improvements to LLMs slow down their impact will continue to increase. And there is no evidence LLMs are slowing down. In fact improvements still seem to be accelerating.
You like these evocative words that imbue one with a feeling of "vroom" and "whoosh", like "exponential" and "accelerating", don't you?
But arithmetically speaking, is any of that true? Is model progress truly "accelerating"? How can you compare the delta from GPT-2 to GPT-3 with the delta from GPT-5 to GPT-6 with no sense of irony? And, at the risk of being quite blunt, do you know the meaning of the term "exponential"?
I didn't say that. However, the utility delta in the "early days" was infinitely more palpable. By the time GPT-5 or GPT-6 came out, these models were just doing things they did before more accurately, with more context integrity across long-horizon tasks, etc., not doing things they couldn't do before.
This is true of every frontier model. The real agentic coding breakthrough in Claude land was around Opus 4.5 or so, though it's hard to say if that might have just been coeval with the release of the Claude Code harness.
On the Chinese front (my preferred landscape because of the open weight aspect, not because I'm Chinese), Kimi has been perfectly viable since K2.5, DeepSeek since however many major releases ago, and GLM and MiMo and the rest of them too, although they all achieved breakout moments of publicity at different times. There's no denying that every release brings improvements, but if we're going to be honest, they're fairly marginal.
They seem more marginal because the models are already capable of so much. But there was a turning point about November of last year if I recall where software developers I know went from "lol look at how this thing codes, my job is safe" to "oh no". And the models back then were actually pretty bad at many things compared to Astra or Opus 5.5.
You're right that many of the less capable / open weights models are very good themselves, but that's part of showing how much more capable the frontier models are becoming. Cheaper (smaller) models are able to do the same things, in many cases better, as the way larger models were able to do a year ago. The efficiency is getting way better alongside the 'intelligence'. That'll also cause the models to become much faster over time which is the real improvement I'm waiting for.
I think a part of why many people aren't seeing big deltas if they're using it for code and they're actually coders is we actually sit down and reason out the project with the LLM. Someone who knows nothing about coding ~1 year ago wouldn't come even close to the kind of app they'd get now with the same instructions. If you just give it a task like "help me decompile this game" without knowing a whole lot about decompiling suddenly in the last 3 or so months you start to get some half-decent results.
The sea-change I see lately is about lifting up the people who couldn't do these things before more than the people who could. And I actually see problems coming from that already as people I've met think they can make enterprise grade software if they just tell their LLM to make it safe.
I just want one 'philosopher' or other AI consciousness skeptic to provide a test we can use to determine if AI is conscious that can also be used to determine if humans, dogs, cats, whales, lizards and insects are conscious.
Entirely different categories so the default position should be that living beings have properties computers don't & consciousness is one of those things. Similarly, I can't do 1B arithmetic operations per second but I don't think of myself as a lesser calculator. Computer perform arithmetic operations, if you're looking for consciousness in arithmetic then the burden of proof is on you to explain how exactly an abacus acquires consciousness at sufficient scale. The alternative position is equivalent to idealistic monism & everything ends up being conscious b/c the monic substance is conscious (which is a position some people hold but it's not very popular).
This is why I said anyone who doesn't at least know some basics of Turing computability, thermodynamics, information theory and probability should not comment on consciousness.
You seem to be not aware but you are claimning there is something non-mechanistic in the human brain. Current physics as far as is known is all turing computable, the human brain is a physical system.
I searched around and a basic query says wave function collapse is turing computable. I would rather ask a physicist this question and by default trust this answer than yours.
> However, the selection of the outcome is probabilistic (via Born rule), and randomness is not strictly Turing-computable unless you assume access to a random oracle.
I have thought about this a lot more than you have so good luck. I've already spent enough time in this thread.
If the randomness is truly proven in physics, I don't know if it is, then its also not a problem as it can be harvested and used in our program. Moreover, it appears probabilistic turing computers are no more powerful than normal turing computers. Sorry, no hypercomputation for you.
I looked up this claim about wavefunction collapses and it leads to bounded randomness which does not still go beyond standard Turing computers. I would listen to physicists rather than randoms making unverified claims.
The randomness thing doesn't really match reality, because it's known to be incomplete: it only describes what happens to particles observed in a lab, everything else is out of scope. That's its area of applicability. That's why there's a problem of interpretation of quantum mechanics: what complete theory it approximates.
Another ambiguity here is is it theory or reality that should be computable.
I suspect that it's possible to have consciousness that's a kind of outwardly directed wordly awareness without necessarily any robust concept of self-awareness. I think something like self-modifying internal sets of intentions in response to the world gets close to the thing that matters but somehow "self awareness", and imo a cartoonish simplification of it, somehow became the definitional acid test to some people when I don't think it's anything more than an imperfect proxy.
I don't think that says what you think that says, but more importantly dictionary definitions report conventional usage, they're not meant to be cited to litigate the truth of underlying philosophical assumptions.
Instead, try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry which inventories several different conceptions of consciousness including ones that don't obviously depend on self awareness. Under section 2, Concepts of Consciousness it notes the following varieties: Sentience, Wakefulness, Self-consciousness, What it is like, Subject of conscious states, and especially transitive consciousness which most closely approximates what I was talking about:
>Transitive Consciousness. In addition to describing creatures as conscious in these various senses, there are also related senses in which creatures are described as being conscious of various things. The distinction is sometimes marked as that between transitive and intransitive notions of consciousness, with the former involving some object at which consciousness is directed (Rosenthal 1986).
The gist of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics" (1989) is that no algorithm, no breakthrough line of code/instruction, no pattern of on/off transistor states on silicon will magically make the thing genuinely conscious. At least not in an intuitive or classical sense. Reduced to absurdity like "Oops, forgot to add +1. Now it's a real mind!"
He believes in certain quantum phenomenon having sway on brains which has been increasingly proven improbable. Still I would commend him on positing a physically testable theory, that's far better than most thinkers of consciousness manage.
And maybe a different way of saying the same thing, it's easier to kick down a sand castle than to build one. Which I suppose is a way of saying there are a lot of correct ways to create "destroyed sandcastle" and relatively fewer ways to create "intact sandcastle".
I get both your and the GP's points. Still, kicking down a sandcastle or building a sandcastle one grain at a time do not differ in kind. Certainly the ease and energy involved differ. But it's the same fundamental manipulation in both activities.
And the gist of Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a brilliant book on animal consciousness, is that evolution tends to give rise to things by degrees, such that a vague alertness to photoreception and full scale self awareness and abstract thinking may be on a continuum rather than just being lights on or lights off.
"psychological condition defined by the English philosopher John Locke as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.”
So it is impossible to prove that any being outside of oneself has conciousness, unless you compare brain scanners like they did to prove that the color blue is seen the same by everyone (same neural structures lighting up).
But... An LLM clearly can't have consciouness, as its "mind" would be the weights in the model, and the passing through it would be the data going from the input tokens to the output tokens. There is no place for the LLM to detect what is going inside and process it separately.
It is aware of what it's processing. That's all conciousness is.
If you open a dictionary and read the entry for "dictionary" or "define" you can't say that the dictionary is conscious of its inner working. In the same way the information moving through the weights of an LLM can't be said to be conscious of itself.
I don't think we need to start from definitions. You can do what we do with something like dark matter and note its observable effects, and use that to pose the problem, and ask what gives rise to those effects. You can also reason from paradigmatic examples that model the phenomena we want to explain. Or maybe heat is a better example - we didn't know what it was exactly, except for a related kludge of effects. It's something you feel, it seems related to fire, but also fevers and the body and friction and chemistry. And some amount of it turns out to all be tied together, and some amount of it gets explained away (e.g. fever and chills and spiciness aren't just excitation of molecules), but it gets explained away in a satisfactory way.
Defining consciousness would be something we're only capable of doing once we solve it rather than something to do at the beginning. I also think it "how do we define X" is a trap that sounds deeper than it is, because for some questions it gets the order of operations reversed.
"Do you believe that AI is ${X}?" -> "Do you believe that AI is whatever you believe my definition of ${X} to be, and do you trust your belief that you understand my definition of ${X} enough that it's meaningful to have a discussion about it, even if we actually disagree on AI having ${X}? Or are we merely arguing about definitions?"
That's exactly why it's a completely irrelvant question. It's unanswerable and unanswerable questions are irrelevant.
By the way my personal test is "Does it dream?".
That's my test to determine if cats or dogs are conscious.
If you dream, it means you have a world model inside and a main thread that traverses it and decides on actions even without actually performing actions. For me it's a proof that embodied object is conscious.
Can you even define what a dream is and where your line is for what things definitely don't or do have dreams? There are conditions like Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome which cause people to be unable to dream. Are they no longer conscious?
When I see a cat chasing something while he sleeps I can pretty much be sure he dreams. Thus by my count he's conscious.
I'm not really sure if Charcot-Wilbrand actually means lack of dreams since REM sleep still seems to be going on. I think we just have less evidence for the dreaming.
Of course there might be dreaming people that are unconscious but I don't think we believe unconscious people are actually devoid of consciousness in philosophical sense.
No. The word "proponent" means you're in favor of the position, i.e. you think they're conscious. If you don't then you're not a proponent, and I wasn't talking about you. The word you're looking for might be "agnostic".
Can you name some? I think youve created a type of strawman here because almost no one actually believes current models are definitely conscious and all of the current discussion is from things like what Anthropic are saying which is that they might be or might one day be.
Blake Lemoine comes to mind, or Richard Dawkins [1] if you want someone with a weightier name.
> I think youve created a type of strawman
Why are the only objections to what I said about proponents of AI consciousness coming from people who are not proponents but insist that I'm talking about them? And how does someone else's inability to understand the meaning of the word "proponent" make me guilty of creating a strawman?
I'm not a consciousness proponent, but this strikes me as missing the point. We don't know how to measure that a fellow human is conscious (except that they tell us they are), and since LLMs trained on human text are also likely to output that they're conscious, the AI industry kind of put us in a place where we have no way of finding out?
I don't think we need him to tell us that. We usually infer it from the fact that he is responding to our actions and his responses seem to indicate he has somewhat accurate partial model of reality inside of him.
What is the purpose of the scare quotes around the word philosopher? Do you not believe that philosophers exist? Or is it intended to cast some kind of aspersion on folks who discuss consciousness?
Very wishy washy and confused. Does this person know anything of thermodynamics, turing computability, information theory and probability? If she doesn't, she should be dismissed.
Since you seem to believe that simply dropping these terms has any value, you’ve already convinced me that someone who has studied philosophy most likely understands these things better than you do. It’s a bit like Ben Shapiro and logic. He likes to act as if it’s his area of expertise, but he only has a very amateurish grasp of it.
Its not about me liking or not liking. Its about the universe allowing the theory to exist at all. Does this philosopher have basic working knowledge in these fields and showed his theory does not violate any of them?
You are already in some trouble at step one - how do you figure out if something has any of those feelings? Just asking or observing the behavior does not seem good enough, one can easily write a program that prints »Yes, I am tired, I need some sleep.« and with more effort one could build a robot that behaves as if it was tired.
On the other hand I have a lot of sympathy for something I heard the first time from Daniel Dennett, that something like pain is just the sum of its effects. It occupies your mind and prevents you from thinking clearly, it makes you not move or touch the body part that hurts, it dulls other sense, and so on. If you removed all those effects, what would be left of pain? With that understanding you could probably probe if something is experiencing pain from the outside by looking for those effects.
These needs are often conflicting, so satisfying these needs me delaying others. Your definition makes all animals conscious (which tbf I may not disagree with, but i think you do). This is before getting into what an instinct is.
Here is a counter example to your test. If we view an entire nation as one entity, especially considering the perspective of other nations in terms of diplomatic relationships, the nation would satisfy all requirements in your test. However, I don’t think most people believe that a nation has continuous consciousness which outlives all of its citizens for hundreds or even thousands of years. This argument can be applied to any large organization or a group of people.
The following lines say "any of", not "all of". Lack of one particular feeling does not imply lack of consciousness. Lack of all of them probably would.
if a human could not feel hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, fear, tiredness, or literally anything else, they'd be considered braindead. we already don't consider them conscious.
Let's say you artificially meet or restrict the biological basis of the needs.
E.g. put the subject on a drip so that none of the hunger senses are triggered. Automatically manage the body's water balance with sensors and a feeding tube. Restrict them so that they can't hurt themselves to feel pain. Modulate their sexual hormones to inhibit sexual desire. Etc., etc.
They still have the capacity to, in this case the experiment is being set up so that a being that COULD pass the test on their own CAN NOT when hooked up to a bunch of equipment.
I mean I can easily train a model to say it feels those things, which is experimentally indistinguishable. I focus on the first part your or comment because the second part is clearly satisfied by an LLM inside a suitable harness.
Also there are people who for whatever reason don't feel at least one of those things, we do not doubt their consciousness.
If you train a model to say it feels those things, then you are forcing an unconventional definition of the word "feel".
If you satisfy the second part thanks to a suitable harness, then you agree it is not an emergent property of the AI itself, but rather an add-on tacked in.
They should be using an automated AI agent to validate vulnerability reports. Have it pull up the code base, confirm the bug exists, try to reproduce, then update the ticket. You might even run another AI agent pass to clean up the text before humans look at it. AI writing quality improves a lot with multiple passes.
"Vibe reviewing" is an underrated way of dealing with vibe coded PRs. There's going to be a lot of low-quality noise that's probably better to just close without a human looking at it, but it would be unfortunate to ignore the stuff that might be worthwhile because of that.
1. Truck drivers are not deciding to take a Ferrari instead of their truck. The company knows roughly how much gas a given delivery is going to consume and how much that is.
With AI, that definitely happens if you default to Claude Opus/GPT Sol.
2. A truck driver's value scales with gas usage. The further they drive, the more valuable.
Not true for tokens.
3. Gas doesn't create extreme outliers. One developer can easily consume 100x the tokens of another, which makes AI economics much more extreme.
Well no, but even with the gas prices jumping the way they are, that is a much more predictable cost than AI spend. Drive 250km, in 2015 Volvo truck is X liters of fuel at X cost. Solve a predefined problem using AI... you have no idea what that will cost you, if you did you'd most likely already have the answer.
No, but truck drivers (who work for a company making this decision) do sometimes get told there is no work for them because nobody wants to pay the price. (this also happens when there is nothing to ship though - drivers can't tell the difference)
"Most software that requires hiring and paying software engineers has low risk tolerance" The problem is that this statement simply isn't true. Most software engineers do not work on low risk tolerance code.
reply