Efficiency gains have primarily benefited the capital owners. Workers ability to buy essentials like housing and healthcare have not gotten worse, not better.
I can cover every wall of my living space in flat screen color television more cheaply than feed, house, heal, and educate another child in my family.
I started reading about the industrial revolutions and the evolution of capitalism recently. And it is my understanding that something similar was happening around the second industrial revolution - normal people barely making a living while owners of massive factories and other "means of production" getting richer rand richer.
That's why communism got so popular in some places and why after capitalism won, it demonized communism so much that people now think those are the only two options and communism is the bad one so capitalism must be the good one.
There are other options like mutualism or market socialism and people (including me until recently) have never heard of them.
Cooperatives exist and most people don't even know what that word means.
We need a system where ownership of both the means of production and more importantly the product goes to the workers. If production is more effective with an assistant ("manager") overseeing them, then can hire one and negotiate his salary collectively. If they need an investment, they can quantify the risk and agree how much the investor gets in return after how long but it should not give the investor a massive chunk of or complete ownership - at most it should give small ownership according to his hourly rate compared to other workers.
No one chooses to be born. Once they are, they may find that procreation is impossible for them or just not something they'll do well or even want. None of these is necessarily depressing.
We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.
More likely it will be a larger burden on the environment. If there are no future generations to care about then why bother investing in a better future?
the earth regenerates itself, provided we stay out of the way. if anything there's more motivation to care when the degredation slows down and makes change feel tangible.
not necessarily connected to the number of people but the type - if they are all conservationists that would be a net positive, not counting OTT population numbers.
we're talking about aging in advanced economies - those are folks with heavy footprints. if the west could be content with africa's growth and allowing for more migration, this problem is licked.
Lines on a map are just that. Globally we're doing fine. And anyway, constant growth can't continue forever, it's probably a good thing if we stabilize or even shrink a bit.
It does appear the only consistent motivation in this administration is personal glory and enrichment. They crave the spotlight and thinnest appearance of success over everything else.
Apparently nothing. I was curious if Tiananmen Square was getting special treatment or if it was just some control to warn users before answering about any violent incidents.
Humans are also non-deterministic, though. Why does replacing one non-deterministic actor with another matter here?
I'm not particularly swayed by arguments of consciousness, whether AI is currently capable of "thinking", etc. Those may matter right now... but how long will they continue to matter for the vast majority of use cases?
Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted. We have error budgets for a reason, and AI is just shifting how we allocate them. It's only in certain roles where small mistakes can end your company - think hedge funds, aerospace, etc. - where there's safety in the non-determinism argument. And I say this as someone who is not in one of those roles. I don't think my job is safe for more than a couple of years at this point.
It has nothing to do with whether small mistakes are allowable or not. It’s about customers needing a consistent product.
The in-code tests and the expectations/assumptions about the product that your users have are wildly different. If you allow agents to make changes restricted only by those tests, they’re going to constantly make changes that break customer workflows and cause noticeable jank.
Right now agents do this at a rate far higher than humans. This is empirically demonstrable by the fact that an agent requires tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines and a human does not. A human is capable of writing tens of thousands as of lines with no tests, using only reason and judgement. An agent is not.
They clearly lack the full capability of human reason, judgment, taste, and agency.
My suspicion is that something close enough to AGI that it can essentially do all white dollar jobs is required to solve this.
> Generally speaking, my feeling is that most code doesn't need to be carefully-crafted. We have error budgets for a reason, and AI is just shifting how we allocate them. It's only in certain roles where small mistakes can end your company - think hedge funds, aerospace, etc. - where there's safety in the non-determinism argument.
That's a bit shortsighted. There have been cries of software becoming needlessly bloated and inefficient since computers have existed (Wirth, of course, but countless others too). Do you visit any gamer communities? They are constantly blaming careless waste of resources and lack of optimization in games for many AAA games performing badly in even state of the art hardware, or constantly requiring you to upgrade your gaming rig.
I don't think the only scenario is boring CRUD or line of business software, where indeed performance often doesn't matter, and most of it can now be written by an AI.
Even in CRUD line of business software, lack of performance causes enormous problems that the current software development culture glosses over.
Just one example I've seen time and again. You take an application that if optimized could run on a single server (maybe 2 if you absolutely have to have zero downtime deployments), but because no one cares about performance it runs on 10 or more. You now have a complexity avalanche that rapidly blows up. Then you need more hierarchy to handle the additional organizational complexity etc...
Then people start breaking out pieces of the app so they can scale them separately and before long you're looking at 200 engineers to do a job that certainly doesn't need that many people.
I realize I'm ignoring a whole lot of other issues that result in this kind of complexity, but lack of performance contributes to this a lot more than people want to admit.
Agreed. I wanted to give some credence to the fact many cookie-cutter CRUD apps can absorb a ton of inefficiencies until they truly burst at the seams, but yeah, even in that case software bloat and bad use of resources matters.
I find it intriguing seeing this new batch of dev-types completely giving up on the matter. The conversation of machine vs developer efficiency is not new, but completely giving up on any sane use of resources is something relatively new, I think. Especially coming from some in the HN crowd. Maybe these are new people, so I can chalk it up to generational turnover?
> adversarial AI reviewers, runtime tests (also by AI), or something else?
And spec management, change previews, feedback capture at runtime, skill libraries, project scaffolding, task scoping analysis, etc.
Right now this stuff is all rudimentary, DIY, or non-existent. As the more effective ways to use LLMs becomes clearer I expect we'll see far more polished, tightly-integrated tooling built to use LLMs in those ways.
Agents require tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines, but we know that tests are wildly insufficient to describe the state of the actual code.
You are essentially saying that we should develop other methods of capturing the state of the program to prevent unintended changes.
However there’s no reason to believe that these other systems will be any easier to reason about than the code itself. If we had these other methods of ensuring that observerable behavior doesn’t change and they were substantially easier than reasoning about the code directly, they would be very useful for human developers as well.
The fact that we’ve not developed something like this in 75 years of writing programs, says it’s probably not as easy as you’re making it out.
Electronics can kill too. IIRC capacitors in CRTs are particularly deadly. Though I suppose someone using LLMs only as a first step, much like Wikipedia, is probably at much less risk than someone using it as their only source.
Yeah, okay but... look, I concede that someone who shouldn't be doing anything except watching passive entertainment could absolutely take insane advice from an LLM (or a sociopathic human) and seriously hurt themselves.
But raw dogging capacitors in CRTs is such an overtly straw man argument in this conversation. People who are cleaning bathrooms for the first time can hopefully be trusted not to drink the bleach, right?
If someone licks a running table saw because an LLM said it would be fine, we're talking about entirely different problems.
Again: not doing anything at all with health or chemistry. They aren't what I am interested in, even peripherally.
What you seem to be missing is that LLMs are better at/for some things than others. Legal review, 3D geometry, therapy and apparently chemistry are off the list.
It doesn't make sense to project that onto domains where it excels.
It’s an inconvenient truth that the better off don’t want to face up to. Your environmental impact is going to be correlated to your consumption. More spending == more damage.
Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.
There are some scenarios where it’s a coordination problem. People could drive light fuel efficient vehicles if so many other people weren’t driving large, heavy, dangerous ones, for example.
Those large heavy vehicles are incentivized by loopholes in regulations because politicians were afraid of affecting "domestic jobs" as US automakers weren't even trying to compete with JP fuel-efficient imports.
Yeah, apparently it was originally to try to stop the rules from killing Jeep, which was having a hard time. New ones that allow more emissions for bigger vehicle footprints are also a big issue since it encourages larger vehicles.
You could work less hard and buy less things, spending the time and energy you save by working less hard on more enjoyable things than buying more stuff.
And that choice is basically the exact opposite of what western civilization is heading for, and thanks to the AI boom, it has never been worse at any time in human history, I guess. Which means you are likely surrounded by people who want the opposite of what you want. That will be problematic.
However, this really only would be the proper answer if given by a majority as a community. In a crowd of people who want more, more, more more MORE, you will just drown and die.
But in principle you are right:
No, you do not really need to re-industrialize your country. Instead think about how endless growth in a reality of finite resources is going to play out. California is just fine as it is. Let's think about where Californians will get drinking water from in the near future, instead of thinking about building water-consuming factories.
> You might have to downsize your life but humanity as a whole will be better off
This assumes that there will be other jobs to get. If AI replaces a large enough segment of office jobs then huge portions of the population will be unable to afford essentials like food and healthcare.
Walk into a staffing agency, ask for a job. They'll give you a list, pick the one that sounds the least disagreeable. Show up on time, every day, for at least two or three months and you'll convert the temp position into a full time job.
It's literally that easy, showing up reliably is a super power that puts you in the 90th percentile of workers these days. The job probably won't be as comfortable as sitting on a comfortable chair in an air-conditioning office wiggling your fingers at a computer, but so what? Other people make it work, so can you. Man up.
sorry, no jobs at the staffing agency, those are AI. Feel free to walk into a burger king, show up everyday, and flip those fries for minimum wage until you die. Man up brother, other people make it work. Sleeping on the street, well half the year its not even snowing.
The last study I know of that measured the conversion rate from temp to perm employees showed about 15%-30% success… and that was well before the gig economy really took hold. So you’re looking at 4 or 5 temp placements to reliably get a probably underpaying job when very few white collar workers could survive long enough to make the end of a lease, or sell their house, while on a temp job salary. It’s a viable option for a 25 year old that could couch surf for a few months, but not for a mid-late career professional, or anyone with a family.
You can give any complex problem a simple answer if you ignore enough factors.
I can cover every wall of my living space in flat screen color television more cheaply than feed, house, heal, and educate another child in my family.
reply