| ▲ | mjr00 2 hours ago |
| > It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do. Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database. The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence. |
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| ▲ | randusername 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Some of my coworkers will complain that management is short-sighted for trying to automate programming work they don't understand then immediately suggest we automate management because nobody knows what they do all day. Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | They are currently experimenting with replacing engineers with LLMs, so it would at least be interesting to try the flipped experiment. It seems like, at least for tasks like distilling the work done at lower levels and passing it up the management tree, LLMs should be good at that. Maybe they could take out some levels at least. And they can be programmed to be 100% selfless and on-mission: no turf battles or other internal politics. Everybody’s job involves office politics of course, but my gut says management has a lot more of it than engineering, so zeroing that out could be more significant. | | |
| ▲ | harikb an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Aren't LLM's mostly overconfident? If they are independent entities/agents, they may be tempted to try to sabotage the less performing teams to take over their projects - just like in human world. | |
| ▲ | robotresearcher an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The models are trained on data that encodes hundreds or thousands of years of turf battles and office politics. The model is shaped by the script of ‘Succession’, the history of the English monarchy and the Chinese Communist Party, and the biographies of Steve Jobs and Alexander Hamilton… The models don’t generate what’s right and good: they generate what people are likely to generate. | | |
| ▲ | bee_rider 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | They managed to fine-tune models to be good at math and coding, despite the vast majority of humanity being awful at those… I dunno. You are probably right. But it’d be an experiment. It wouldn’t be an experiment if it was a sure thing. |
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| ▲ | superjan an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Careful what you wish for… |
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| ▲ | pj_mukh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >>fully replaceable by AI I am trying to fathom a more catastrophic failure in communications than the lab CEO's using this narrative. The reality ends up being closer to Radiology jobs [1], but we're never able to fully realize this because the press is running around like headless chickens and unloading the fear on a public that then reaches for any leverage they can get (see: Datacenter NIMBY-ism). Any short term FOMO valuation bumps they got from this narrative has to now be liquidated into paying premium for server racks in a warehouse. Reminder folks: There is no evidence that AI is not normal technology [2] [1]: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s... [2]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology |
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| ▲ | palmotea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do. > Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee... |
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| ▲ | alexalx666 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, if one has a solid physics + engineering background, he is potentially equipped to solve many problems from other fields. | |
| ▲ | pphysch an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wonder if it was (ironically) coined by nonengineers who don't understand how engineers (or other high-stakes professionals at Pareto boundaries) solve problems: by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances. I have seen this personally, where merely identifying a possible solution (harmless, reversible) is misinterpreted as selecting and implementing that solution (may be irreversible). | | |
| ▲ | fmbb an hour ago | parent [-] | | > by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances. This is how all people solve problems. Now everyone are not great at all parts, but this really is what anyone does. Surely the title ”engineer” means something else? | | |
| ▲ | pphysch an hour ago | parent [-] | | Ideally, but this is not at all taught or incentivized in (American) schools. We're taught to "hack it" which means getting to a solution without much regard for how we got there. | | |
| ▲ | mrhottakes an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I have a bachelor's and masters in engineering and was never taught to "hack it" without regard for how a solution is reached. Documenting and analyzing your solution is an extremely important part of managing risk, which is what engineers actually do. | |
| ▲ | sporadicism an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Even if engineers were uniquely capable in this regard it still wouldn't equip them to solve problems in fields where they lack domain expertise. |
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| ▲ | modeless 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs. |
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| ▲ | HarHarVeryFunny 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | If Karpathy's "auto-research" is at all representative of typical "AI research", then presumably it will! | |
| ▲ | glimshe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've seen people saying that with other technologies. Years later, they are still in the same job but a lot richer. | |
| ▲ | palmotea 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs. Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome for everyone else? Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist? | | |
| ▲ | oaweoifjwpo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome? Yes. Basically based on my conversations with coworkers who went to these frontier AI labs: this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can. | | |
| ▲ | sigbottle an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | But making money isn't enough, though? If you think about it from this perspective, what matters far more is connections with the wealthy, or enough power to defend yourself. Which is different from just being rich and chilling. Rich and chilling implies a stable society. But life isn't a video game where you hit some Absolute Level 99 and are impervious to everything. There's no outside justificatior for you - only you are. In this hypothetical society, when GrokBots rule the world, you think they'll care that you're a millionaire? You need to get into the inner circle. I see some really smart professors/PhDs even, going to SV, starting startups, networking, etc. That is consistent with the worldview. But someone who says that AI can replace them but just works at a lab, at least has the belief that they will be automated last. Maybe they believe they can become friends with the AI, I don't know. But let's stop and analyze the situation with a bit more nuance, for more than like, 5 seconds. | |
| ▲ | palmotea an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can. There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it. Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators. | | |
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| ▲ | jonas21 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I know people who believe the end state is a Star Trek-style post-scarcity world. This is not the same thing as communism. You can still have private ownership, differing levels of wealth, competition, and individualism. It's just that having money is not necessary for survival or to lead a reasonably comfortable life. And they don't believe it will magically happen -- it will take intentional action by governments to get there. This is, perhaps, the reason the AI labs are talking so much about AI replacing people's jobs. It's not arrogance, it's to make sure our leaders are thinking about this now instead of when it's too late to guide the outcome. | |
| ▲ | tokioyoyo an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The former. |
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| ▲ | AngryData an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job. "You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to? Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing. |
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| ▲ | piker an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I felt this watching the recent season of Clarksons Farm which had some nice product placement for what looked like automation startups. It was hard to watch as a software person as these farmers see the best part of their jobs automated away, but there’s also the rub: nobody wants to spend on automating that part. Eventually economics will require them to but perhaps the way to get started today is to focus on the stuff they actually don’t like doing. | |
| ▲ | mrhottakes an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Reminds me of the engineers/designers who regularly announce they've created a new revolutionary form of bicycle. Turns out the bicycle is a (nearly) perfect design and making it more complicated and expensive and less efficient is not an improvement. |
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| ▲ | bazoom42 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood? |
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| ▲ | bwfan123 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | AI is just another tool in the arsenal of tools for both developers (Linus [1]) and movie makers (Ben Affleck [2]). These are expert practitioners in their fields intelligently opining on AI, and they are promoting it not as a magic machine, but as another tool in the toolbox. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s | |
| ▲ | mjr00 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood? I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools. I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In fairness, I agree that end-of-2025 AI probably could make a film so badly that 41% of the crew get cancer within 24 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film) | | | |
| ▲ | nubg 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | He might be off by a decade, but isn't necessarily wrong. | | |
| ▲ | card_zero 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Is that a prediction about where "Hollywood quality" is heading? | |
| ▲ | mrhottakes an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When someone makes a prediction but is off by a decade+, that prediction is, necessarily, wrong. | |
| ▲ | bazoom42 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | By that standard, no prediction can be wrong. |
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| ▲ | jnwatson 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | We're at the point now where we're seeing 30 second commercials that are mostly GenAI. In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Degree is the entire problem. I mean, four years back I was thinking: I don't know how long it will take, but Hollywood is obviously screwed the moment something like Stable Diffusion gets temporal coherency and stops randomly adding limbs, because the energy cost per image on my laptop multiplied by how many frames in a film and $0.1/kWh, is ballpark the same as the cost of a cinema ticket.
Right now temporal coherency is still quite limited, and the models still do enough daft things you can't easily take the first version even when cutting every 5 seconds.I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster. Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted". | | |
| ▲ | bazoom42 23 minutes ago | parent [-] | | But why is Hollywood screwed then? Same thing was said when cameras became cheap, when editing became cheep, and when internet made it possible for anyone to distribute movies: Now the movie industry is screwed because anyone with talent and an iphone can make and distribute a movie. Turns out there is more to it than that. |
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| ▲ | mrhottakes an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hollywood films and 30 second advertisements are different categories. |
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| ▲ | theappsecguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | they might manage to get a semi passable AI movie... but will people pay to watch it? I certainly would not. |
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| ▲ | bewareofscams 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages. |
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| ▲ | MattGaiser 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations. On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related. |
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| ▲ | pinkytoes 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Every time I've done that, the people were so ignorant that they still didn't recognize that expert judgment was required... they just had the LLM make some slop. |
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| ▲ | amelius 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :) |
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| ▲ | n0rand0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dead] |
