Ya, while the tools are really solid and have seen huge leaps these past two years, in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years. Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong.
"in no way will an LLM be able to do any of it unguided in two years"
IDK "not any of it" seems a bit strong, especially thinking towards 2028. For a lot of knowledge professions, there is a surprising amount of tasks that are just dumb work compared to the rest.
There's a huge difference between one shot and few shot versus building a robust harness with deterministic and adversarial quality gates. And I'm finding that agents can actually do a pretty good job of a surprising number of things if you are very clear about your dimensions of quality and the rubrics that you get agents to research and then use to validate against those dimensions of quality.
Make sure to use a deterministic pipeline or harness to go step by step so agents aren't checking their own work and I sometimes get alpha from having a codex check the work of a clod but I am seeing pretty good output across multiple domains when I have three independent quality gates and a loop which only spits it out to a human if it doesn't converge at a reasonable cost.
> Just a humble opinion that I would love to see be wrong
Out of curiosity, why would you love to be wrong about that? What possible outcome could you see being a net positive for society if the vast majority of knowledge workers (and ultimately, as robotics progress, most workers in general) are replaced by AI?
I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there. And then you get into second order effects- costs plummet for anything labor intensive, including medical care, prepared food, cleaning, and private tutors. Then onto tertiary effects- if you can spin up a million genius researchers to attack a problem, you start seeing massive progress in every important area and it isn't tied to population growth.
I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing. Of course it would be good! It's just a matter of dealing with the (huge) side effect of lost income.
In that scenario, AI would have to be a public utility, which it is not. Private corporations have no intention to provide services for public good. If they displace a billion jobs, they'll just throw up their hands and go "we're just an Ai company guyz"
> I believe it was Blink-182 who said, "Work sucks". You have to pay people to do that stuff; they don't want to be there.
Believe it or not, some people actually do enjoy their jobs and work they do.
> I get that you might have a 'UBI/alternative general welfare is impossible' up your sleeve, but you've written this like it's somehow unfathomable that not forcing everybody to work just to survive would be a good thing.
UBI absolutely is unfathomable here (US). The USG won't even give people health care. People go bankrupt to afford life saving care on a regular basis. Or just die... Even if those cases are a minority, just the fact that it happens says a lot. So I do think it is unfathomable that UBI would be implemented here. I don't think that's unreasonable to say.
I think a lot of the time when this debate occurs (which, at this point, literally every single day I see something about this) UBI is almost always the contention point but I feel like that's really not the end-all... Like, sure, say there's a miracle and we have UBI get instituted. I think that is maybe 25% of the solution. The other problem is now you're going to have an entire class of people basically living without a purpose. Yeah, I get it, they can go and "explore their passions" and focus on "creative works" or whatever BS people persuade themselves into thinking the vast majority of society would want to do, but realistically I think there would be a huge psychological breakdown in people now living without a fundamental purpose in society.
Somewhat related to that -- I was just this weekend watching a YouTube essay about PTSD in knights back in the medieval times, and the main point made in the video is that the psychological impacts incurred by the knights after battle were not just from seeing fucked up shit... the most apparent and serious cases of "PTSD" occurred when a knight was injured enough on the battle field resulting in them no longer able to be soldiers. Their entire purpose in the world got stripped away resulting in serious psychological stress. I think that same issue would apply to many people today (lawyers, engineers, investment bankers, etc) who would no longer be able to practice their craft. (This is the video for reference, was a good watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=849dmdc-Qf8)
I understand the counter argument to this is going to be some anti-capitalist rhetoric like "Well people shouldn't live to be workers and that's fucked up that they have live that way!" but IMO, some people like what they do and don't want to be made useless. (Not implying that is what you were insinuating, but just in a broad sense I that genera of argument doesn't make sense to me)
In a way, we are betraying something here. My reading is: solving the social problems of capitalism feels so impossible, that reducing the need for anyone to do work is a liability. In a way this sentiment should make extremists of us all?
Unfortunately the fact is that society has some massive imbalances around capitalism
It is not hard for me to imagine a world where if my bosses didn't need me, they would prefer me to be dead than to pay me some kind of permanent income to me. They would prefer to keep that power to themselves
These are already the sort of people who will happily lay you off into a recession, leave you without a way to pay your rent or for food if it improves their bottom line. They do not care if you starve. Or at least they care less than they do about their quarterly bonus
So no, I don't trust these fucks to continue playing nice if they view my value as going to zero
Yeah it can do things unguided if the tests to confirm its correctness are very solid. Thats where a lot of progress has been made and where agents are good, but this is domain specific, and a chance where startups can shine.
Yep! They are rampant on Upwork. You could probably find a cell of them in a day if you wanted, just go looking for jobs with the 'crypto' tag, haha. They have offered me serious sums of money to "simply install RDP and give us access to your network". I imagine people desperate enough take them up on it too.
That... sounds lucrative, and exciting? Use an isolated network, snoop on what device is doing, learn a thing or two about what these threat actors are doing?
Unless done in collaboration with proper institutions, that would be playing with fire. Consequences from letting who-knows-who from who-knows-where do who-knows-what in your name can be life destroying. There are multiple cases about people in USA running laptop farms without asking questions and making good money, but one day ending up on a receiving end of federal prosecution.
So in my case this is partially correct, yes. They did not want access to the actual accounts but it was heavily implied that they would be using my personality, my identity, my Upwork profile (and my PayPal to receive payment). I would do it all for the most part. I think the Upwork jobs were just a front but I can only suspect. They explained it as wanting an endpoint while I did the client facing stuff. It was all strange and vague but you make a great point.
While they were never outward about the end goal it was a mix of money laundering and identity laundering. No joke I stopped using Upwork after the novelty wore off and it was a regular occurrence. Also of note, they almost always said something about how they were Chinese and wanted to do this because they could not get legit work with their identity or some other BS. This was not one time but at least half a dozen. Would love to hear from someone who took them up on these offers.
edit: will add that I speak some Chinese, I had Zoom calls with them on one occasion. I was able to glean that maybe they were not being aboveboard about their nationality and also that there were a bunch of people in the background running the same script. All so bizarre. Best guess? They use compromised PayPals to pay people out without a care what happens, launder some of the money because why not? And then they get access to a Stateside identity with an endpoint they can do god only knows what with.
Very interesting, thanks for expanding. If I were in national security and/or fraud prevention I'd be honeypotting the fuck out of this concept, for sure.
Why the special rules for SpaceX though? I still do not understand why the world’s richest man and one of the most valuable companies needs an exemption? Genuinely confused.
Ya I still have mad love for TPB. My ISP was blocking my private tracker recently and while I would usually just run things through a seedbox it made me happy I could still turn to my trusty ol' friend.
In this vein, I have a system level memory for Claude to push back and give me direct feedback when possible. So far a success as it helps cut through the sycophancy.
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
Ya haha, I was going to say, land destruction is not particularly fun for anyone but the pilot. Never heard of someone getting Wastelanded or Stone Rained over and over with a smile on their face. Lands used to be such a cool deck, too. Loam plus the occasional Marit Lage was such a badass concept.
I just want to add that they are a gorgeous set of books and I am so happy he did this. While a good chunk of the content is above my pay grade it is still enjoyable to flip through them and read about things like MIX. Gorgeous typesetting. And his writing is so very engaging for such a dense topic.
All of his books have been great, and he is the next author whose oeuvre I am going to try to collect (and read) in its entirety --- will finish up Tolkien this year when the second Myths and Legends box set is released in the U.S. and I can replace my ratty photocopy of _The Book of Exodus_ which was sent to me the second time I requested it on Interlibrary Loan.
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