Crazy how many people have their heads in the sand.
I'm glad you could think of a couple examples where AI might not replace humans. It's almost an entirely useless point to make.
The cat is already out of the bag. The information is out there and the models are trained. Even where we stand today will bring massive disruption in time.
The economy is being propped up by the wealthy few that have money to spend and now their legs are being cut out from under them with this technology. We're in for a reckoning.
> The single biggest potential productivity gain though I think is being able to do something else while the agent is coding, like you can go review a PR and then when you come back check out what the agent produced
Ugh, sounds awful. Constantly context switching and juggling multiple tasks is a sure-fire way to burn me out.
The human element in all of this never seems to be discussed. Maybe this will weed out those that are unworthy of the new process but I simply don't want to be "on" all the time. I don't want to be optimized like this.
Often when you are solving a problem, you are never solving a single problem at a time. Even in a single task, there are 4-5 tasks hidden. you could easily put agent to do one task while you do another.
Ask it to implement a simple http put get with some authentication and interface and logs for example, while you work out the protocol.
I've shifted my mindset to abandon this idea that humanity will survive forever, or that we should strive to live as long as we can.
Intelligence is a scarcity and it cannot overcome the majority of people that are incredibly stupid or ignorant. So accepting that we are doomed relieves some of the stress. I won't have children to worry about their future, either.
I still live my life in such a way that minimizes my impact on the world as much as possible. I still surround myself with folks that want a better world. But there is no stopping the impending doom and I'm trying not to be miserable with the time I have.
Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.
If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
I agree that human extinction is very unlikely on anything like historical timespans. Maybe in a few million years, like any other species.
I do think there's a decent chance of civilizational collapse in the near to medium term. It seems like everything is getting very fragile. So much economic activity revolves around extremely sophisticated machines with many critical components that are manufactured in just a few locations, sometimes a single location. A major war could shatter that, or climate change could push us over a tipping point where those capabilities can no longer be maintained, or it might just be a cascading random breakdown due to the modern economy being so complicated.
If it happens, then I'm very pessimistic about the ability to ever come back from it. With all the easily accessible fossil fuels gone, getting industry going again is going to be a really tall order. So humanity might survive a long time, but it may consist of life the way it was in prehistory.
Excellent attitude. This needs to be adopted by more people IMO.
Why are people trying to keep the earth the same as what they think it should be forever? We are a blot on the history of the earth, The human race will perish when considtions on the planet no longer suit us, just like many other large species before us. The planet will warm and cool over millions of years long after we are gone, and nature will continue to evolve many more wierd and wonderful things.
Humans need to hurry up and accept that they really dont matter at all to the planet.
Eh, I’m not convinced it won’t be an extinction event. We need a pretty narrow band of CO2 and Oxygen to live. Unclear if a lot of plant life dies off if it takes us with it
I mean, all of humanity has lived in the period between two glacial eras, I don't expect us to go beyond that. This should be clear even to people who choose to ignore the facts about climate change.
You convey tone through word choice and sentence structure - trying to convey tone through casing or other means is unnecessary and often just jarring.
Like look at the sentence "it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible." The casing actually conflicts with the tone of the sentence. It's not written like a casual text - if the sentence was "ppl talking about this are crazy" then sure, the casing would match the tone. But the stodgy sentence structure and use of more precise vocabulary like "veered" indicates that more effort has gone into this than the casing suggests.
Fair play if the author just wants to have a style like this. It's his prerogative to do so, just as anyone can choose to communicate exclusively in leetspeak, or use all caps everywhere, or write everything like script dialogue, whatever. Or if it's a tool to signal that he's part of an in-group with certain people who do the same, great. But he is sacrificing readability by ignoring conventions.
That's politicians and media influencers of all ages, not the general public
The new generation of tiktok / podcast "independent journalists" is a serious issue / case of what you describe. They are many doing zero journalism and repeating propaganda, some paid by countries like Russia (i.e. Tim Pool and that whole crew that got caught and never face consequences)
Just sounds absolutely miserable to prioritize that way of living that is so car dependent. So many negatives come from it:
- pollution
- traffic deaths
- heat generation from all the infra
- inefficient use of space
- ugly aesthetic of strip malls and parking lots
It doesn't have to be this way. We can do better to build diverse housing in our cities, leverage space at the ground level for businesses, invest in our transit to make it safer and more convenient.
Instead we just go with what's easy and continue to build roads and sprawl.
How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?
IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.
> How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?
How many humans drivers would pass it, and what proportion of the time? Even the best drivers do not constantly maintain peak vigilance, because they are human.
> IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.
In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust. And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.
I think "better than the average performance of a 75th or 90th percentile human driver" might be a good way to look at things.
It's going to be a weird thing, because odds are the distribution of accidents that do happen won't look much like human ones. It will have superhuman saves (like that scooter one), but it will also crash in situations that we can't really picture humans doing.
I'm reminded of airbags; even first generation airbags made things much safer overall, but they occasionally decapitated a short person or child in a 5MPH parking lot fender bender. This was hard for the public to stomach, and if it's your kid who is internally decapitated by the airbag in a small accident, I don't think you'll really accept "it's safer on average to have an airbag!"
The parent comment said the bar should be "significant improvement" over the average performance of human drivers.
Then you said, "this isn't reasonable", and the bar shouldn't be "slightly better" or "barely better". It should be at least better than the 75th percentile driver.
It sounds like you either misread the parent comment or you're phrasing your response as disagreement despite proposing roughly the same thing as the parent comment.
All depends on what you read as "significant improvement".
A 20% lower fatal crash rate compared to the average might be a significant improvement-- from a public health standpoint, this is huge if you could reduce traffic deaths by 20%.
But if you don't get the worst drivers to replace their driving with autonomous, that "20% less than average" might actually make things worse. That's my point. The bar has to be pretty dang high to be sure that you will actually make things better.
> In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust.
Sadly, you're right, but as rational people, we can acknowledge that it should. I care about reducing injuries and deaths, and the %tile of human performance needed for that is probably something like 30%ile. It's definitely well below 75%ile.
> > And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.
It's only if you get the habitually drunk (a group that is overall impoverished), the very old, etc, to ride Waymo that you reap this benefit. And they're probably not early adopters.
Uber and Lyft were supported by police departments because they reduced drunk driving. Drunk driving isn't just impoverished alcoholics. People go to bars and parts and get drunk all the time.
You also solve for people texting (or otherwise using their phones) while driving, which is pretty common among young, tech-adopting people.
> Drunk driving isn't just impoverished alcoholics. People go to bars and parts and get drunk all the time
Yes, but the drivers who are 5th percentile drivers who cause a huge share of the most severe accidents are "special" in various ways. Most of them are probably not autonomy early adopters.
The guy who decided to drive on the wrong side of a double yellow on a windy mountain road and hit our family car in a probable suicide attempt was not going to replace that trip with Waymo.
The signal-to-noise ratio is going crazy. How do you stand out when there are 10x as many people trying to make the same buck as you? There is so much garbage being created, it's insane.
Or from a users perspective: Why bother looking for software that fits your purpose, when you can just let the AI write one from scratch that does?
A lot of what makes software complicated is that it has to serve thousands of users with different requirements at once. With AI on the other side, that's not something a user has to worry about, they can just let the AI spawn a much smaller special purpose tool that solves exactly the problem they are having.
We might be entering the age of disposable software, where software isn't a product, but just something your AI system produces temporarily in the background for the task at hand.
For example, you tell the AI you're looking to buy an apartment, show some options.
It'll spin up an interactive map with layers of prices, amenities, etc.
Ask it to warp the map projection to show walk-times to metro stations, and it's do that.
Ask it to add some sliders for price range, walk-distance, 'social class', etc.
Ask to book viewings and it'll spin up a calendar, and web form (if it needs more information from you), and then send emails or fill agency booking forms with that data.
All highly personalized, created for the moment, and potentially disposable.
For years the size of the market grew as more as more people came online. The competition also increased. But now it seems the competition is increasing while the market size is stagnating or even shrinking. By competition I mean everything competing for attention.
In software, we often talk about tackling the hardest problems our industry has to offer. In marketing, what you just described is the hardest problem that industry has right now. Somebody who can come up with a viable solution will change the game completely, and not just in software. In music, books, movies, TV, videos, video games, etc.
I'm double replying to you since the replies are disparate subthreads. This is the necessary step so the robots who can turn wrenches know how to turn them. Those are near useless without perfect automated models.
Anything like this willl have trouble getting adopted since you'd need these to work with imperfect humans, which becomes way harder. You could bankroll a whole team of subcontractors (e.g. all trades) using that, but you would have one big liability.
The upper end of the complexity is similar to EDA in difficulty, imo. Complete with "use other layers for routing" problems.
I feel safer here than in programming. The senior guys won't be automated out any time soon, but I worry for Indian drafting firms without trade knowledge; the handholding I give them might go to an LLM soon.
I'm glad you could think of a couple examples where AI might not replace humans. It's almost an entirely useless point to make.
The cat is already out of the bag. The information is out there and the models are trained. Even where we stand today will bring massive disruption in time.
The economy is being propped up by the wealthy few that have money to spend and now their legs are being cut out from under them with this technology. We're in for a reckoning.
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