Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?
There is quite opposing discourse on the internet as to whether AI is going to take everyone's job, or if we are witnessing one of the greatest pre-IPO PR jobs in history. Or both.
I'm wondering what people smarter than me believe or don't believe.
A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
My best guess is it will be similar to tractors and farming.
1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.
Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.
Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.
What makes this hard to predict is that it's a question about human behaviour as much as about technology... if we do it well, I don't think AI should take everyone's job but it should certainly make our jobs more fun and give us more free time. But when did humanity really do things well...
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.
I believe in a few years we'll have moved on to some other amazing new technology and LLMs will just be another tool in that stack. Datacenters will become relatively obsolete and most of them will hopefully become indoor MTB and/or skate parks, maybe indoor e-moto tracks.
In a way I wish this would become true, and to some extent I believe it will (excitement will go down, and some part of the bubble will burst). But I can't fully see it happening this way, these tools are just so disruptive in so many different areas... perhaps not all, but it can speed up the development of almost anything so I don't see it disappearing. I hope it'll help improving its own efficiency as well so we can still get rid of some of the datacenters (or at least stop building more of them), but I don't see it going away as "just another tool", it really sits on top of other tools I think.
If the goal is genuine artificial intelligence (or artificial cognition), and I think it is, then an LLM can only ever be a piece of that puzzle, they represent the language center of the AI brain. True cognitive intelligence will require a completely new and novel technology that doesn't yet exist and it will itself rely on a language model for all its powerful reasoning tools. Reasoning is only part of cognition, the role of an LLM in the AI puzzle.
A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.
An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree or even in the same direction. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.
An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.
1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.
Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.
Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.
On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936234
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628