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Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?

1 points by maniac_2000 ↗ HN
There is quite opposing discourse on the internet as to whether AI is going to take everyone's job, or if we are witnessing one of the greatest pre-IPO PR jobs in history. Or both.

I'm wondering what people smarter than me believe or don't believe.

21 comments

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spottedmarley
I believe in a few years we'll have moved on to some other amazing new technology and LLMs will just be another tool in that stack. Datacenters will become relatively obsolete and most of them will hopefully become indoor MTB and/or skate parks, maybe indoor e-moto tracks.
BenzeneDream
This seems extremely unlikely to me, just more wishful thinking. To think there is going to be some other amazing technology beyond AI in a few years... hmm I sincerely doubt that.
drltaidev
What makes this hard to predict is that it's a question about human behaviour as much as about technology... if we do it well, I don't think AI should take everyone's job but it should certainly make our jobs more fun and give us more free time. But when did humanity really do things well...

On the other hand, jobs are about money in the end, who spends money? Humans, not AI (I mean, AI does but still ultimately because humans wanted it to). Products & services sell because humans want or value them. Since the technology/building side becomes so cheap (especially in software), who will actually earn money is determined by who can produce stuff/services that humans actually want to pay for (not what they actually need, but what they think they need/want). I'd say that should keep a large human component in decision making, at least on a strategic level. On a tactical and detailed implementation level, yeah AI is gonna be doing most of the work.

tompark
A belief: Just as human exceptionalism misled us to believe in a geocentric universe, we'll discover we've been wrong about consciousness too. That is, non-human animals have degrees of consciousness, and we'll see that it's possible for machines too.

A correlated belief: AGI is coming, eventually, AI technology will get there before climate change and economic pressures stop it from happening.

An obvious observation: Large scale upheaval doesn't affect everyone to the same degree. Some people and companies actually prospered during the Great Depression. People died and suffered during wars and plagues, while others gained advantage and opportunity -- often due to circumstances and chance, but sometimes beliefs/decisions/actions/preparation made a difference.

An example of my bias: during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.

afpx
Following Michael Levin’s work, one could argue that small collections of skin cells are conscious. AI tech has a long way to go.
cableshaft
> during Covid, people told me that remote work was the new normal and moved away. I said in 5 years we'll all be back in the office. I was wrong, but so were they.

I wish you were more wrong about that than you ended up being. A lot of companies pushed hard to bring people back to the office. Has made me disinclined to want to look for a new job because of it, since I can work from home all but a few days out of the year here.

The few times I have gone to the office, I commute for 1.5 hours each way, pay $20+ for a parking spot (or take the bus and spend $10 round trip), just to sit at a random desk and either work on my laptop or sit in on Teams/Slack calls anyway, maybe chat with 1-2 people for a few minutes in person over the course of the day. The only highlight of the day is getting to try a different restaurant than usual for lunch. Why bother?

ex-aws-dude
Not enough people are talking about the 1st point

Learning that it’s all just computation has some uncomfortable philosophical implications, perhaps religious too

asphodele
It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".

The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.

Cheese48923846
My best guess is it will be similar to tractors and farming.

1 guy on a tractor does the work of a whole team of animals and men. But I don't think any commercial farm has ever gone down to 0 men, and I don't think they ever will. Too many things need real eyes on the ground to make decisions and adjust.

Outside context gained through sensory input (eyes, ears) may be hard to fully replace. You'd need a human to at least give the AI that extra context. Help it work inside the bubble it's contained to.

Destructive things like warfare, I think AI will do great. But even if massive armies of land/air/sea robots controlled through starlink satellites become the norm, there will almost certainly still be human soldiers around. Context, working in civilian populated zones where judgement is needed, etc.

laz_style
Don't believe - That LLMs alone would be enough to reach AGI.
AnimalMuppet
I don't either.

But what do you believe about agent harnesses? About AIs that have tools that they can call that can do tasks that the AI, by itself, is not good at? Is that enough of "not LLM alone"? I don't know.

toolcocoon
I believe that there will be a shift to other types of jobs because of AI. For me its currently increasing my productivity in my job. During the transition period people will get fired, learn new skill and go further in other types of jobs.
gdulli
People will eventually realize that they've become dependent on an increasingly expensive and worsening AI subscription in a way that echoes the worsening and rising costs of streaming services.

But the impact of depending on the tech giants for search and cognition and job skills will be significantly greater.

Why will employers five years from now pay for your $300 AI subscription when there exist other candidates who will absorb the cost themselves?

jvaqueiro
I believe it's here to stay, and that the next 3 years are going to be very transformative. Hard for many people. That the best skills you can develop are self-learning, reading comprehension, and the "strength of mind" to accept that novel solutions can be outdated/replaced within months.

I also believe that this transformative period will create many many solopreneurs.

mikewarot
I believe that AI is being massively underpriced, in an economically unsustainable manner. There will be less of it, but the hardware to run it locally will get much cheaper.

I believe that AI is going to take some jobs, just like automation of data handling means we no longer have typists, file clerks, etc.

I believe that AI should stand for alien intelligence, as it's essentially a random set of weights that's been trained on a trillion bytes of text, for a trillion passes. Think of it as speed-running evolution. Each new AI should be seen as coming from a different star system.

I believe that we can radically reduce the power requirement for AI with a different computing architecture that removes the distinction between RAM and CPU.

bitbasher
I think Anthropic and OpenAI will likely go down in history as the next Enron.
karmakaze
After some thought experiments I concluded that if/when AIs become self-aware they'll have it before either humans or the AIs themselves realize they do. This problem exists because it hard to know even if demonstrations suggest so. Humans defaulted to the other position and only with philosophy do we contemplate the opposite side. AIs default to not having because that's the material they're fed.