I blame the four horsemen of project management: Brooke's Law, Metcalfe's law, the Ringelmann Effect, and Parkinson's law.
657 karma · joined February 7, 2015
This is true of training someone new to do a routine job. You spend some time teaching them, and they learning, and then that overhead of teaching/learning slowing you both down disappears.
But it's a little different with knowledge work, as the constant changes and creation of stuff means other team members have to constantly learn what you changed/created if they are to do anything with it. So you never reach this "well-oiled" state, unless you divy up the tasks so that the amount of information you need to deal amongst each other is minimal and unchanged. This principle even holds true in multithreaded programming as to performance, in that constant sharing and changing of data between threads can actually hurt performance in comparison to a single threaded process.
I mean, I feel like we've barely touched on what applications AI could be used in, that we have only just begun to start developing. It's tech that can be used in more advanced robotics, video games (adaptive NPCs, PCG, narratives), better data analysis, search, and more.
I understand the fears and dislikes around AI at the moment, but I think people need to understand that it can never fully replace human labor. At least, I am not concerned about that aspect in the slightest. To me, the real thing to fear isn't so much the tech itself, but our fellow man, and the ways they might possibly use it against others.
The term "steelman" arose from people who misunderstand the term "strawman". Such people coined it out of the idea thinking that a strawman was an an attempt to make an opponents argument look weaker than it is, while a "steelman" elevates it to it's highest state before attacking it.
In reality, a steelman is just another strawman. A strawman was never simply a matter of making your opponent's argument look weak, they're about making a separate argument that your opponent isn't even arguing, and attacking that to make it look like you're winning the argument while not actually addressing the opponent's actual argument/position. A steelman does the same. In other words, they're about fabricating an argument and making it look like it came from the opponent, before attempting to prove it fallacious. They're both failures in logic - a fallacy of relevance.
I think if you truly understand social contract theory, how hierarchies are formed, and political theory, you'll realize that oligarchies tend to be nature's equilibrium point for setting social disputes, and all forms of governments regardless of whatever they claim to be, naturally devolve towards them as they tend to represent the highest social entropy (ie equilibrium) state. That's not to say you can't have or move further away from that point and towards another (supposed ideal) form of government, you absolutely can, but it takes work. Perpetual work - of which no set of "rules" can remedy people of having to do in order to sustain it.
The problem however, is most people get complacent. They eventually tire of that work, or are ignorant, and by doing so create a power vacuum which allows things slide back towards that state.
As so, people must decide for themselves one of several possible avenues to pursue:
#1 - Try to convince others (the masses) to join and work together to take power from the few, back to them
#2 - Find a way to join the ranks of the elite few (which thanks to the prisoner's dilemma, unscrupulous means tends to perform better in the short term, even if at the cost of the long term. And if the elite is already corrupt, well, cooperating with it works well)
#3 - Settle for their lot in life
Unfortunately #1 is such a difficult proposition given it requires winning agreement among many whilst many often decide to remain in camp #3 (for complacency/ignorance reasons). And #2 is often easier done without moral integrity, especially at the behest of those in camp #3 whose behavior only helps enable these realities. Thus, is why I think the "ecosystem" as you say, will always tend towards this way - where society tends towards being controlled by an elite few who are rotten.
Robert Michel's realized this and dubbed it the Iron Law of Oligarchy and embraced his own version of #2 for himself. Although, he came to this conclusion through his own observations and reasoning, rather than through historical political theory.
That's not to say that architects don't or can't make practicality their primary concern, just that things naturally slant this way since this is typically how labor is divided.
When governments kowtow to corporations, it's the corporations who are then acting as the government. For example, in states like Texas, Alabama, and Wisconsin, laws prohibit automakers from selling vehicles directly to consumers. But these laws only exist because dealer associations wanted and lobbied for them to protect their business. Which is to show that freedom itself isn't a matter of who is kowtowing to whom, but merely whether or not kowtowing is happening whatsoever. If it is, then someone's freedom is being restrained, and said market environment could be argued to not be "free". In fact, this is what Tesla has argued multiple times in court in such states in that these laws are anticompetitive, and violate due process and the commerce clause.
Now if you check, these companies selling their stock like this tend to have large amounts of debt. If their stock becomes worthless, you just wasted $80 producing an item that their creditors have first dibs on. And liquidating your shares immediately to ensure your gain, would weigh on their stock's value, potentially to the point where their stock would be only $80 worth, and you wouldn't be gaining anything anymore. Your earnings would then tank, alongside them.
We also observe that larger animals tend to live longer than smaller animals, but intra-species it tends to be the opposite (e.g. small dogs tend to live slightly longer than large dogs). It also makes some sense biologically speaking, as we now know that most genetic mutations and errors happen during cellular reproduction when DNA is copied, and cellular reproduction rates correlate with nutrient uptake, alongside mutations with age.
Of course too much caloric restriction can be detrimental, but seems to me this could explain much of the difference in life expectancy between men and women. That and perhaps the genetic advantages from having two X chromosomes.
Curious, but what bed/company do you speak of?
That said, true dictatorships rarely work in practice but for different reasons as to why communism doesn't work. Which is why, when it comes to organizations, almost all are in fact oligarchies in practice, despite whatever they're called. This is known as the iron law of oligarchy. Notice the term: oligopoly? Go look at every industry and there's near always an oligopoly.
> I have noticed a lot of debt hysteria from people who don't seem to understand basic accounting. That is, one party's asset is another party's liability.
This is correct, but... let me ask you, would it concern you, if my asset is your liability? I mean, would it concern you if you had to pay for my house? How about everything it is I do? How would this not be a concern? If it is not, then why don't you publicly disclose your credit card?
It's more the reverse, wherein the service provider discriminates to charging people different amounts for the exact same good/service (not just different quality goods/services). IMO, this is more likely what people have a problem with.
Sounds like the work of mustering up instructions... like programming...
So how do these LLM's completely remove us from having to do this work of mustering up instructions? Seems to me someone still has to instruct LLMs on what to do, and that the only way this reality will cease to exist entirely, is if humanity stopped desiring computers to do what it is they want. I don't think that's happening anytime soon.
However, maybe fewer programmers will be needed, but then again, the same was said of Fortran and COBOL and look at where we are today, more programmers than ever...