Ask HN: Are we losing our engineering literacy?
I can very clearly remember how this kind of mystification looked like back in "hacker era", "web", then "Web 2.0", then "Web 3.0", then "crypto / crypto flavor of Web 3.0" - during all of those waves hackernews and, earlier, slashdot communities stayed mostly sober and grounded. It was most often the non-engineering crowd mystifying things right and left, opening doors to "societal changes" level of interpretations and guesswork. I remember how any hype creating or mystic news were rejected at the level of basic engineering intuition: that's bull, because that's not how this works.
This is totally not the case with LLMs. We get links like "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?" going viral, we have discussions in every second thread about who gets replaced and in what exact way, we get fear mongering posts upvoted that preach AGI and call for AI regulations. Which is the same exact content we had during Web etc times about "dangers of the machine" from people who have no idea how "the machine" works.
But we do.
What is happening, HN? Has society changed? Has the engineering part of this community been diluted so much? Are engineers intentionally or unintentionally being manipulated into this kind of reactive and mystical thinking?
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadWhat it has been replaced with is greed, bean-counting, and more recently (2012+) fanfic writers who taught themselves the bare minimum. What the OP is mostly picking up is the fanfic writers.
I mean, none of these people actually have much of any personal projects, and the few that do mostly got the ideas out of a list of "great beginner projects to make your CV look good"... Not out of curiosity, passion or fun. Nobody tinkers, hacks, explores...
Of course that's an over generalization, there's still a few young hackers here and there, but we're a very small minority.
It's sad to see, I always thought that college would be the place where I would finally find passionate people who could talk about computer science for hours and hours, but so far I haven't even met one.
LLMs are a real, genuinely-useful technological innovation that happens to have arrived first in software engineering. Lots of SWEs spend their whole day talking with LLMs and feel a personal connection/expertise with the thing that's also at the top of the hype cycle for non-technical news
But do we really know how LLM's(and the layers above, harness, RL, etc) work, or is there some emergent, surprising phenomena in those systems?
What is different about LLMs? Is it their social aspect and influence? All three examples above were also social to a different extent.
List the things you want people to know and they can use AI to learn them
"One note on wording. Below, I write that these systems “seek” or “try” things. This is shorthand for a mechanism rather than a claim about consciousness or human-like intent. We use similar shorthand when describing many other situations, like a plant seeking sunlight. A system trained by trial and error behaves as if it were pursuing whatever its training rewarded, and that as-if description is what makes its behavior predictable."
https://yoshuabengio.org/en/publication/why-are-ai-agents-ly...
So there is some attempt to remain grounded. Using shorthand wording makes it easier to reach more people with your message, the whole goal of writing a post like that, but also likely means more people are mislead into treating the short hand as the truth rather than for what it is.
At my place of work we've recently hired several 'engineers' who have been exposed as frauds who know nothing but how to beg the chatbot to do things. When you bring actual issues that require critical thinking or technical knowledge, they fold like a stack of cards and meat-proxy a Teams reply to you.
Why would this be a symptom of losing engineering literacy?
lots of people (such as yourself) who think they are really smart with no understanding of how consciousness works, confidently proclaiming what does and does not count as consciousness
“it’s just glorified autocomplete”
ok, so prove to me that the post you just wrote with your brain was doing something differently than glorified autocomplete
Prove to me that autocomplete contributes even 2% of what we write here, if you are so trigger-happy to assign the burden of proof to someone else.
But we understand the world better than anyone before us, most big breakthroughs have been made, and in a lot of engineering fields we reach the limits of what is possible with the resources we have at our disposal.
So our lifetime is an age of refinement, and a lot of the engineers understand this, and how the world works, and are fine with getting large amounts of money for being more or less ok with being lazy and just solving problems to refine already available tech.
For a long time, engineers had the carrot.
Now the computer has the carrot, and it dangles the tasty promise of being able to invent new things out of thin air again in front of the engineers eyes. No more refinement, it’s eureka time, baby. AGI, the holy grail of engineering is upon us or so they say.
And engineers are now willing to pay handsomely from all the years of getting money thrown at you for doing boring refinement, for the illusion of being inventors again.
I think it’s kinda beautiful. Engineers refine the machine by sharing the only thing the machine can’t replicate by itself to teach it to solve problems better than them, so they become obsolete.
This is like watching the dinosaurs talking about the water temperature while the giant extinction-level tsunami wave is slowly crawling to landfall.
Everyone has a different way to deal with reality. I think all the events of the past few years just let more people realize how the world really is, they use the way of expression available to them to make sense of it, and society definitely had a vibe shift.
We are fighting for resources again, when did that ever go well in the last 2000 years for everyone? It is what it is.