Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

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> This is the worst LLMs will ever be. Not outsourcing critical thinking to LLM will be seen as a liability in the not so distant future. Just a year or two ago almost no one even took LLM seriously for coding. Now the status quo has moved for also critical thinking, and we hear comments like this. LLM's chances of making a mistake will be orders of magnitude lowers than humans. Slowly learn to let the wheel go. AI will be much better at holding and controlling it.

If that's true, you're fucked. Because then what good are you for? How long do you think they'll pay you to be useless meat-in-the-middle?

Not outsourcing your critical thinking means trying to preserve a scrap of value-add for having you around.

> "We should NEVER outsource number crunching to calculators. They are not 100% reliable and we can make mistakes when inputting the data." Someone in 1920's probably. I know it's a metaphor, and like all metaphors can't be compared 1-1. But it's to make a point how it illustrates my argument above.

That's a dumb analogy. Automating one activity cannot be extrapolated justify automating all the activities, including some of the most human ones.

We're moving toward a future where intellectual workers are, indeed, fucked. At least intellectual work will be the first real casualty.

I'm not AI maximalist. But with how things have progressed the past 4-5 years, I'm more confident on the above being true, than not.

I don't think intellectual work will drop off overnight. There will be a long period, perhaps decade or two, where many jobs will just gradually disappear, where salaries will be suppressed, and humans will just become AI-babysitters and auditors.

It is a uncomfortable scenario, but people - especially young ones about the enroll college or early in their career - should consider the possibility as realistic.

> I don't think intellectual work will drop off overnight. There will be a long period, perhaps decade or two, where many jobs will just gradually disappear, where salaries will be suppressed, and humans will just become AI-babysitters and auditors.

What I'm sick of is this passive acceptance of technological determinism. Why build a technology that's so corrosive and so destructive to so many? You've got powerful people talking about creating a permanent underclass, and happily charging forward anyway. AI is literally the most anti-human thing ever, and should be opposed politically.

But there's been so much indoctrination it will be very difficult. For instance, software engineers were so fucking smug for decades, foolishly adopting libertarian ideas while imagining themselves to be capitalists. We resisted any efforts towards unionization to create translate our (former) economic power into political power. Now we're literally the first on the chopping block.

Some see it as the road to dystopia, other see it as the road to universal basic income, and a less laborious future.

The real danger is not that AI becomes smarter. The real danger is that humans never learned how to justify their existence except through labor.

> Some see it as the road to dystopia, other see it as the road to universal basic income, and a less laborious future.

A less laborious future is called mass unemployment. We have none of the sociological or ideological infrastructure to make that anything but a dystopia, and are making no progress on that front. Just look at what happened to the rust belt, what reason do you have to think things will be different this time?

If a happy, abundant communist future was in the cards, we'd have had it decades ago. The limit was never technological.

"Universal basic income" is just a sop to mute resistance to buy time while a small few grab most if not all economic power.

You need to git good

The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced!

> The fact that you’re nervous means you will be the first to be replaced!

Is that sarcasm? Cause it's not too different from something I'd say sarcastically (e.g. it's very 10X AI engineer, very overconfident while missing pretty obvious things).

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