ericmcer

Automating manual labor or repetitive brainless tasks is way different from automating high skill knowledge work.

I agree that automation is good when it frees us up for higher pursuits, but what is the end goal? All human labor is replaced? No human can produce anything of value relative to a machine? What does our life look like then?

I see a ton of people praising AI tools replacing software engineers. There is like a weird schadenfreude and an ignorance that this will only affect the tech industry.

They don't seem to realize that 100X the resources have been dumped into building coding/design tools as other industries. As soon as that hose gets turned towards their industry they are going to be in a similar or worse boat.

I don't think that is possible. Humans have always taken the path of least resistance, especially when it comes to work/school.

The idea that we just "trust everyone to carefully check and learn from AI output" as our barrier to human skillsets eroding is never going to work.

There is an Anthropic engineering post on HM front page that addresses this exact issue:

"... supervise the agent’s behavior via a human-in-the-loop. Claude Code previously protected against agents taking unintended actions by asking users for permission at each turn. Theoretically that works, but we’ve found the approach to be fallible. Our telemetry showed users approved roughly 93% of permission prompts. The more approvals a user sees, the less attention they pay to each, becoming over time much less diligent in their supervision. "

They seem to have a post on every Who is hiring thread for the last few months so... infer from that what you will

If every violation gets captured hopefully we can have law enforcement and judges that can use their discretion to make sure the "spirit of the law" is what actually results in punishment. Or we fire 80% of them if an AI can outperform them.

By spirit of the law I mean: rolling a stop sign at 1am on a flat country road is not the same as rolling a stop sign in a busy parking lot.

6,400 is maybe a tiny fraction of the total. Maybe AI will allow them to have way more breadth?

I don't agree that running a frontend application with NextJS SSR, lazy loading, etc. is "easy" compared to the days where you just wrote HTML, JS and CSS. The level of complexity and the expectations of users are in totally different places.

Not to mention there are 1000X as many skilled engineers and you are competing with a global market. In the early 2000s there was very little competition. The skills of workers are loosely going to correlate with the demands the market puts on them, and it is extremely competitive now.

Reminds me of Moravec's paradox, that it is easy to get computers to ace complex math tests but difficult to teach them to walk. We are very excited that computers have mastered the "know the recipe" step and are underplaying the complexity of actual intelligence required to really replace people.

My fear in your above example would be that we offload more and more of the "know the recipe" intelligence to computers and humans are slotted in as replaceable manual labor and are left arguing with a computer about whether the starter needs to be fed or not (or whatever equivalent scenario).

In the early 2000s major sports didn't even want to run "enjoy a vacation to Las Vegas" ads because of the loose connection to gambling.

Now they encourage users to bet as part of the commentary.

Market makers are not going to let anything collapse, there is not going to be a "storm".

The government and everyone with any money/power are fully invested in keeping the market going regardless of any kind of reality.

"Every American child under 18 with a Social Security number can have a federally recognized "Trump Account," a one-time $1,000 IRA seed deposit"

By doing this every citizen will personally have skin in the game and want markets to continue to rise.

That is a sort of a nightmare. On demand sex work for extremely low cost with 0 risk of disease...

We are slowly stripping everyone of the will to build meaningful lives by fulfilling all wants with soulless instant gratification. No perfection of AI/sex work or whatever can match actual intimacy with someone.

That is at the root of most of our current societal ills I believe. Bad economy, Bad job market, etc. are all a smokescreen over the fact that people can escape their problems. You can live a numb half-life and avoid any crisis that might trigger real change.

If a bad economic outlook was all it took to wipe out the birth rate we would never have survived the great depression or other 10,000 hard times we have endured as a species.

I always wondered if you could compare odds on the most advanced sports betting apps and those on futures markets and exploit any big diffs between the two.

Well now the tools are butting up against the limits of what humans can do, and the people they are going to displace aren't just picking up boxes.

Workers who will be replaced now are already specialized and highly educated in a specific skill. Remember when Obama said that displaced miners and factory workers should "learn to code"? Well where do coders and other highly educated knowledge workers go once we get displaced? I am not disparaging miners more just wondering like... can you squeeze much more cognitively and emotionally out of workers?

It feels like we are closing in on the endgame of 100s of years of improving the tools.

It is just really hard to be valuable as a person anymore.

In the 1800s if your body/mind worked relatively well you had value. That was all it took.

Then we industrialized everything and having a body wasn't worth much anymore, You needed to have a healthy body/mind and educate yourself in a specific skill.

Now we are staring down a reality where having a healthy body/mind, an education and skillset isn't worth much. So what is next?

At the end of the day we all just want to feel like we have a place, but our kids are looking at a future where they can prepare themselves 24/7 and still be easily replaceable. We probably need some kind of post-capitalist view of human value or people if we keep raising the minimum requirements to have worth in society.

Isn't this an attack on transcribers? Not on "Voice AI systems". ASR transcribers predate LLMs and all the AI hype.

If you are transcribing audio from unknown sources and feeding the output to agents that can perform authorized actions on your behalf you are kind of screwed anyway. I guess it would be dangerous if you tricked authorized users to play the sounds in the background while transcribing something.

Or like... getting money is a big filter and any normal person who hits it stops working and disappears from the corporate world.

Yeah that was my point, it needs to be taught.

The article seemed to indicate that humans have some innate goodness: "Our internal intuition about right and wrong seems to leave us at an early age". If you agree with that then why do the parents around you need to teach your kids to be good/care.

>> "Again, it doesn't feel that hard to me, but I'll respect that it feels alien to other's nature."

Thank you for "respecting" that being a good person is "alien" to me and my kids.

If you want to insult me just do it. I guess a snark filled "clever" backhanded insult does track with your self-important view of your child-rearing abilities. Are you teaching your little angel those skills as well?

Hard disagree, have you ever seen a group of 5 year olds interacting?

We are little monsters without our parents literally berating us until we develop shame.

Small kids left to their own devices will gang up on anyone different or weak and antagonize them to raise their own social standing. They respect strength/power and have little empathy.

The "intuition" the author refers to only exists because the scoldings he received during his formative years conditioned him to behave "right".

Yesterday it got completely tangled trying to fix a dependency issue across different platforms in react-native. I had to manually undo Claude codes shit, read the docs and install deps in a certain order to make it work correctly.

I have no idea what a junior/non-tech person would have done. Like I have wrangled with JS dependencies for 10 years so so I very quickly identified Claude was about to create a tangled nightmare.

Maybe across the whole population because most people were struggling to eat enough and received almost no education.

If we compared average modern humans against average well fed and educated ones from 200 years ago would that still hold up? I suspect the average college educated human from 1800 would obliterate the average college educated human from 2026.

You don't think inundating the media with footage of young (specifically black) men dealing drugs and being in gangs in the 80s/90s had any impact on those young men?

Cool take.

That doesn't sound as good in meetings. The person who can cut scope and get everyone to the "we did it" back patting phase makes everyone feel warm and cozy.

Now combing through analytics to determine whether or not what we did was actually good? Less warm and cozy.

Not to mention men in their early 20s now hit puberty during the height of the #MeToo movement. Then they aged into their late teens watching Epstein and all the other creepy men taking the spotlight.

Super necessary and important movements but it had to be confusing going from a 13 year old to a young man while being barraged with how evil men can be.

In 2018 I was in my mid 20s living in San Francisco and "white men are evil and are the problem" was the accepted stance. Like disagree with that statement at your peril. In my mid 20s I could contextualize it as a passing a phenomenon, but could a 16 year old?

Should be easy, just need to figure out which sequence forces it to produce the tokens you want it to output.

These articles don't mean anything unless we get info about what steps humans needed to perform.

If the steps to hire an applicant are:

A human asks AI to write a job posting.

Human posts output.

Human gathers candidates.

Human asks AI "which of these 40 applicants should we hire".

Then an AI isn't managing the cafe at all. I am super dubious that they created some huge LLM orchestration context management monstrosity, gave it access to their bank account and then told it to go.

Marketing team can vibe out PRs that engineers have to review and then shepherd out to production?

Sounds tight I love the direction industry is heading lol.

I still play Starcraft 2 & some other games with my friends 1-2x a week when we have time.

We do not fear cognitive decline during retirement.

Yeah but I mean...

My dog gets excited and barks to let me know whenever someone is at the door. It might crush his spirit if he knew he is just a useless pet and his contribution is meaningless.

That's enterprise tech also?

I wonder what adoption is like at older non-tech companies.

The office next to mine is being used to teach a bunch of 20-30 year olds how to be insurance brokers using a powerpoint presentation. Copy paste the presentation into an LLM and you just replaced them all. It feels like... things might be kind of dark in 10-20 years if we just keep barreling down this road.

I... am not sure. Computers are machines that create order (like db tables) from the chaos of reality. Now we have LLMs that make computers spit out chaos as well.

They don't have to though, we can still leverage LLMs to organize chaos, which is what I hope they ultimately end up doing.

For example an AI therapist is a nightmare, people putting the chaos of their mental state into a machine that spits dangerous chaos back out. An AI tool that parsed responses for hard data (i.e. rate 0-9 how happy was the person) and then returned that as ordered data (how happy was I each day for the last month) that an actual therapist and patient could review is the correct use of AI and could be highly trusted. The raw token output from LLMs should just be used for thinking steps that lead to a parseable hard data answer that can be high trust.

Of course that isn't going to happen, but I can see some extremely cool and high trust products being built using LLMs once we stop treating them like miracle machines.