| ▲ | dfee 3 hours ago |
| your sister offloaded to her plumber. her plumber offloaded to chatgpt. "i just think it's good for humans to know how to do stuff." are we talking about your sister or her plumber? |
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| ▲ | jessetemp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The plumber obviously. Not everyone needs to know how to be a plumber, but a plumber should know how to be a plumber |
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| ▲ | danielbln 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Im a software engineer and know how to be a software engineer, yet I find LLMs quite helpful. Why should a plumber be any different. | | |
| ▲ | daveguy 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because if a plumber moves fast and breaks things, I've got shit all over the place. | | |
| ▲ | enraged_camel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That, and also the plumber loses their license. So perhaps the solution is professional licensing for software engineers. | | |
| ▲ | bigfishrunning 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I feel like a licencing process for software engineers would A) test lots of skills that are common but not universal. I'm thinking javascript trivia here, where I don't write any javascript in my professional capacity as a software engineer; but there are many people who think Software Engineer == Javascript Programmer B) shine too much of a light on the fact that this industry is full of people who demand high salaries but can't program their way out of a paper bag | | | |
| ▲ | davidkhess 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think that's coming regardless. AI just might be the perfect storm to bring the timeline in considerably. | |
| ▲ | c-hendricks 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Engineer is a protected title in Canada after all |
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| ▲ | dfee 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the question was rhetorical. but, since you responded – do you think that there are limits to who can or should use ai? if the plumber's use of ChatGPT improved outcomes, isn't that preferable? some knowledge is likely "cached" in the plumber. maybe he doesn't ask the same question twice. i'm sympathetic to the plumber, but i think your concerns of erosion of knowledge or skill are worth pushing on further. | | |
| ▲ | jessetemp an hour ago | parent [-] | | > do you think that there are limits to who can or should use ai? I don't think there should be imposed limits, but there might be an upper bound where expertise becomes atrophied by depending on AI too much. > if the plumber's use of ChatGPT improved outcomes, isn't that preferable? In the short term sure, and maybe even in the long term for the customer. I think the risk to the plumber is losing some of their expertise by outsourcing to AI. But who knows, maybe the plumber has excellent memory and only accumulates knowledge each time they use AI. Some of the article is lost in the plumber example. I doubt plumbers are spending much time exploring new ways of solving problems, and might even benefit from having a narrower range of outcomes. Other fields that require both expertise and novel solutions will be at a disadvantage if they become more homogenized by depending on AI. Not only is the range of solutions reduced, but getting there is faster, so people end up in a local maxima. Maybe they get stuck there, maybe not, but that's the risk I see. You don't imagine any long term risks by outsourcing expertise to AI? | | |
| ▲ | dfee 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I do, but again, it was a rhetorical question; a paradoxical thought experiment. |
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| ▲ | pixl97 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which part of being a plumber? Was the house installed with something non-typical? Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual? Without further knowledge of what was going on it's hard to say why they used ChatGPT. | | |
| ▲ | b2ccb2 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Would you rather have them take an additional 30 minutes looking up their technical manual? Yes | | |
| ▲ | NiloCK 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You know that plumbers charge by the hour, right? | | |
| ▲ | neetle 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | How do you know ChatGPT is referencing the right information if you need to look it up in a manual? |
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| ▲ | thwarted 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The issue here is that the sister could have used ChatGPT herself, so why bother hiring the plumber. The plumber has provided less value than was expected. But make no mistake: the value the sister was looking for was to have someone else deal with it, and there's a price that the sister was willing to pay for the service of having someone else deal with it. In the comments of this HN post, there is a dead comment from someone who posted an LLM's summary of another comment. It's dead because it offers very little/no value: that summary could be obtained directly from ChatGPT by anyone who wants a summary. The sister offloaded plumbing to the plumber under the economic principle of comparative advantage. The plumber undermines the value they provide by outsourcing yet again. What value is provided by the middle man who does nothing but proxy the issue? Is the person who does this really a plumber? Is a plumber merely someone who has plumbing tools like wrenches and pipe tape? That the plumber also wanted to outsource it is the concern: right now, the plumber is able to make money because of the difference between what is charged to deal with a problem and what it costs for them to deal with it. Knowledge and experience has become a commodity, which we probably can't do anything about, but along with that comes all the drawbacks (and advantages) of things, and humans, being comoditized. |
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| ▲ | cortesoft 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is assuming that ChatGPT had everything needed to do the work. If the plumber was asking specific questions, based on their previous experience and knowledge about what needed to be done, the sister might not have been able to get the same result from her use of ChatGPT that the plumber received. Experts look things up all the time, because no one can hold all the knowledge of a field in their head. Being an expert means being able to know what to look up and how to use the information retrieved from looking something up. In the plumber example, ChatGPT is going to tell them to do things using the terminology that plumbers know, and tell them to do tasks that plumbers know how to do. The sister would have to continually look up more and more things about how to do basic plumbing tasks, rather than just looking up particular novelties. | | |
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| ▲ | askonomm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| So you are saying that a plumber does not in fact need to know how to be a plumber? |
