Ask HN: Why are so many people in tech in denial about AI?
I have regular conversations with fellow developers and their mindset goes like: today X can't be done so tomorrow AI will also not be able to do X for Y biased reason.
In the meanwhile the most important people in tech including Nvidia CEO, Sam, Hinton, Musk and many others believe that AI will very soon be able to do everything a coder can do today. Why does it matter if it's in 2 years of 5 years? It's much earlier than your retirement date. Nobody is planning for this.
I believe this is a case of "normalcy bias" where crowds refuse to see reality because it's too disturbing.
56 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadNo-one can predict the future. Experts have a slightly better track record than tea leaves – but only slightly. There are experts in $DISCIPLINE, but there are no experts on "the future of $DISCIPLINE".
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
There are idiotic people in all professions, and many of us make idiotic statements from time to time, but that in no way supports your main argument anyway.
It should perhaps give you pause that you’re implicitly conflating a group of arrogant capitalists with historical greats of science. Altman or Musk are not building or researching AI, they are marketing and selling it, and they will continue to do so in spite of the current or future state or capabilities.
I would be careful not to confuse the loudest in the room with the smartest.
Copilot has yet to give me a consistently correct set of "exploited in the wild" list of answers when I give it a bunch of CVEs. ChatGPT gave me last year's tax data for municipalities in Canada.
It baffles me that some people seem to succumb to the "argument from authority" fallacy.
Oh, right, well, then, that makes him an expert on everything, then. Excuse me, I've just got to take a very large dose of Vitamin C; Linus Pauling assures me that it prevents/treats virtually everything.
> Gates has no problems with reality either.
I mean, Gates-era Microsoft was absolutely prone to flights of fancy.
Like, for every hundred things that the industry seizes on as "this will change everything", maybe five ultimately become a thing at all, and maybe one actually does change everything.
What's absent is anything remotely like inductive reasoning and thought.
The others I cannot speak to. Many of them are charletans and exploit what they do not actually understand for the value of speculation.
This is not at all true. There is no consensus here.
Eg you make claims about "all" which are obviously and trivially false.
It's not a good look, and not good for your future IMHO.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
The real bias here is from you, who apparently can't see reality or practice basic cynicism.
"AI can do X" for all X is an unrealistic hope.
My fellow uni students could pass tests on one of my courses by regurgitating the (wrong) answers that had been published and reused for years. I was not popular with faculty for pointing that out, and had most of a year's papers cancelled after the fact...
In other words, consider your own authority bias before worrying too much about the normalcy bias of others, especially when there have been so-called AI winters before and may well be again.
If a significant share of the work today's programmers are doing is routine enough that new automation can handle it, so much the better! Human programmers will simply move on up to the next level of abstraction, as we have done before, and get on with the more interesting work of managing the robots.
I think my attitude is less "denial" than "cautious skepticism". I have heard many, many, many announcements of radical world-changing new technologies over the years, but as bright and shiny as the prospects appear to be, the realities invariably feature shortcomings and inconveniences and new problems that people then have to work around and deal with. I see no fundamental reason to expect that new LLM-driven automations will be any different.
So, two people with a major vested interest, someone who has a past record of making ludicrously over-optimistic claims about this stuff (yes, Geoffrey, we still need radiologists), and, well, do I really need to address Musk?
I mean, if you’re going to do an argument to authority, you can probably do better than this.
People have been claiming that we won’t need programmers anymore any day now for, at this point, about 65 years (entertainingly, this started with COBOL, the theory being that managers could just use COBOL to tell the computer what to do).
Irrelevant (even if true, which is far from established); they're still not going to suddenly become capable of reasoning. They will still 'hallucinate' (terrible euphemism, that, but we are where we are).
> how there is expert consensus on it but still not get it.
Only one of the people you mentioned could be considered an expert (Hinton). And he's an expert his a history of very wrong predictions about this sort of thing. There is _by no means_ expert consensus on this.
They all have a serious financial interest in that being the case, so that's entirely unsurprising and not terribly persuasive.
> I believe this is a case of "normalcy bias" where crowds refuse to see reality because it's too disturbing.
I believe that nobody can actually know what all this will be right now, so what you're seeing isn't one group denying reality and another group accepting it. You're seeing two groups speculating about the future and expressing different opinions.
Either way, it’s all speculation about the future. I think if we’re being truly honest and objective, transformer models are interesting and occasionally useful, but they are still a very far cry from AGI.
I also think AGI will become marketing term. We’re going to see it lose any meaning as the capitalists try to upsell us and convince us “mission accomplished, we now have the world’s first AGI”, at the nearest convenient moment, if it helps them juice short term profits.
perhaps more importantly there have been constant hype cycles of tech CEOs saying the same thing, and plenty of submarine advertising efforts to hype them in the same way OP is.
this skepticism isn't coming from nowhere; plenty of history of CEOs lying through their teeth to the world
nVidia's big spikes paid off my car. run that hype train bro, take it to the moon
If you’re asking it to do something novel, good luck.
The kinds of things AI can do were already offshored long ago. So nope, not worried.
One, the FAANGs have been captured by MBA types, not computer scientists, so they do not have the background to carefully gauge what is and is not technically possible. Given that the C Suite is invested, are you as a middle manager going to speak up. When you have people, even Musk, claiming that X will be possible in Y years, I discount it. Even Hinton isn't close to the tools here.
Two, there are areas that they seem to have genuine use. Boilerplate email generators, musicians, graphic designers, and visual effects people should watch their back. Professors who merely add problems from another textbook than the assigned one are likely also in trouble. Maybe things like logic programming or unit tests, not sure, but those seem harder to mess up.
Three, we are seeing what happens when a statistical engine, and not a logic engine run amok. If you add non relevant information or change the order of elements, AFAIK, these tools cannot incorporate the change in information. So I think that their usefulness as a teaching tool is also overstated. If we ever get an engine that can explain it's choices, well, that is also a difference.
Lastly, tech is really looking for a genuinely transformational technology. They arguably haven't had a real hit since cloud computing. Maybe since the iPhone. Their last few attempts have run into the difficulty that the universe may be harder to model inside a silicon box than is worth it (self driving cars, cryptocurrency, video game streaming), and if they have to go from never ending growth companies to large S&P 500 companies that have to compete... well... things will be different. Especially compensation for medium talent software engineers.
However: Deepmind seems like they are 50 years in the future for all of this, so if someone there says I'm wrong about any of this, listen to them and not me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/s/dOLxoZCgjl
Denial