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Comment by code51 | Hacker News Reader

Decision-making and reasoning was not automated in any era before. "Automation is just fine because it was fine until now" is an old world approach.

We are not only tool users at this point. We started to change through our tool use. We think we have guardrails against AI but our brains don't have any guardrails. It will get harder and harder to get motivated to learn any domain deeply. Our brains can't cope with these short-term job definitions in intellectually demanding contexts.

Prompt engineer today, automated next year. Take a look at the fate of indie AI startups (avatar generation is best example of this) and you'll see. Income opportunities are limited to shorter and shorter time windows. Only the big players dominate (with their marketing machine) and will probably pay peanuts after reaching dominance.

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Of course decision making has been automated, that's literally what computers do. This will just streamline the process of pushing it into more problem domains. Everyone thinks their job is special and that automating any part of it will be the end of the world.

Eventually, with full human level AI yes, sure, at that point we'd not be augmenting human intelligence but genuinely substituting for it. We are a long, long, long way away from that though.

I edited my post above, so you may not have read the last paragraph.

I understand our perspectives differ because I think we are right at the edge of fast take-off and you outlined your view as slow take-off.

Computers were bicycles for our minds, applying our previously formulated solutions to scale. I agree I did not explicitly clarify that I was meaning high-level decision-making getting automated.

“It’s not the end of the world” begs for definition of what end of the world looks like. A meteor is not end of the world apparently but it killed the dinosaurs.

Well, I'll put my big mouth on the line and make a prediction. 12 years ago we all thought self-driving cars would be with us by now, and my wife genuinely wondered whether our kids would need to learn how to drive. My youngest passed her test a few months ago.

There's a significant low hanging fruit effect in AI domains. We rapidly reach a 90% solution, but that last 10% is absolutely critical, and virtually impossible to attain. I think these LLMs will follow the same trajectory. They will quickly become incredibly valuable or even indispensable tools, but the alignment problem and over-fitting will come to limit their reliable applicability in critical edge cases that make skilled human oversight essential. This will relegate them to the role of productivity enhancement rather than genuine labour substitution.

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