iprayiam3
5d ago
I think so too, but how many AI washes before it really gets to people heads?
iprayiam3
5d ago
With that being said, im of the opinion that the "AI will take our jobs" schtick is slightly overstated
Maybe so; my post is explicitly agnostic to this. I am noting the toll of the social perception that is here today. Let’s assume it’s more than slightly overstated and straight FUD.
Still, right now articles in the MSM are openly pondering the possibility and whether there will massive economic fall out, “influencers” have viral doom posts, AI leaders go on popular podcasts and doom speculate, and then we see real world shake up’s at least being attributes to AI job displacement.
This is all happening today whether or not it’s based on hype, an my point is that this is going to affect decisions and cause aggregate mental and systemic stress in the immediate term, whether or not the tech pans out.
iprayiam3
5d ago
To be clear, my thesis is not whether this is a bubble or not, rather the fact that already today, the fear is in the water and causing a mental toll on people and will affect decision making. Even if it pops in a few months, 1. That’s enough time to compound effects and 2. Does the shift in perspective just disappear?
Consider AI videos. That is certainly going dissuade may people from going to Hollywood or from seeing filmmaking as a career. Even if AI video capability stops right here and never completes the full verisimilitude, it is a bus stopped right on the edge of a cliff, and the will have a psychic toll.
iprayiam3
5d ago
No, I don’t think it’s a fire Alarm. I’m not making a claim about the actual immediate affect of AI, but about the perception and how it is going mainstream. A few weeks with 1-2 headlines a week, and I think we get some level of self-fulfilling prophesy as the aggregate behaviors of worried citizens has a material effect
iprayiam3
5d ago
The psychic cost of AI is already here
Ugh, another AI post.
Today Block laid of about half its 10k employees for AI reasons and the sock soared. Was this pr cover for shedding bloat? Maybe. Elon famously slimmed down Dorsey’s crazy bloated twitter, no AI cover story needed.
But still, the market loved this and will demand more.
Earlier this week IBM stock dived on some Anthropic COBOL skill. Was this premature doom? Maybe. But still.
Let’s put aside whether AI will destroy white collar work in a short term time horizon. Despite the outcome, the idea that it very much might is already mainstream. It’s in the water. How much is the impending fear already shaping decisions? How much psychological weight is it already causing? How much will it accelerate
Certainly people are already changing career plans, college plans, savings strategies, family planning, etc. and it will only get much worse. New broadly available opportunities in AI are not going to open up faster than the fear of AI disruption will spread; we are already in a spiral.
Like many in these spaces, I’ve been worried for a while now, but now it’s going mainstream and will cause aggregate changes in behavior which will have their own effects on society and the economy regardless of the first order effects of AI disruption.
As a minor example, my wife has wanted to move for a few years now. Unfortunately, we’re chained to a 3% mortgage without enough income to achieve escape velocity beyond moving sideways to pay more. We’re finally in a spot this year where we could be a little indulgent and justify moving into a house the right size for a young family of 7, even if means taking on some unoptimized mortgage rate increase.
But I can’t imaging compounding that risk with AI disruption. The music could stop and never start again. Our marriage is good, but my resistance causes its own minor stress. How many marriages aren’t so good, break down over things like this?
How many people don’t get married altogether, etc.
Regardless if Covid was just a flu, the real world response to the percieved threat was transformative. Regardless if AI is just a fad…
iprayiam3
8d ago
Ok I’ll try in good faith to explain a final time.
You are asking the would be contestants to pick a challenge they think the AI is in capable of, but they have to guess within the bounds of what you think they are capable of. Yes, I get why you set it up this way, but it creates an extreme cherry-picking filter, which will naturally limit the amount of “updating”, which is going to occur.
There are other ways this “experiment” could be designed to avoid the cherry picking.
Joey Sportsdoer claims to be a great athlete, better than people give him credit for. And one of the ways he’s constantly underestimated is in how “broadly” athletic he is. So he lines up the doubters and says, start naming athletic feats you think I can’t succeed at, and then I’ll choose one I think I can do and do it.
This is not the best way to go about convincing folks of his general athletic prowress.
Of course neither is attempting feats he knows he can’t accomplish nor ones everyone agrees he can, but luckily these aren’t the only three ways to design his demonstration
iprayiam3
8d ago
I do not see how you can interpret us in that manner.
What I’m saying is you are asking users to come up with examples that they already by definition don’t believe it can accomplish, by definition of their skepticism.
But regardless, either of my two examples would greatly impress me. The former (nes video game), I would not update by the ability to write 80s console code within the limits of a NES performance specs. (I would be impressed but not update).
Specifically I want to see it plan and execute a full coherent game AND code it. It doesn’t need to one shot, but shouldn’t take creative inputs beyond the general concept and considerations.
The second is about writing enterprise reliable IT infrastructure software that would make a lot of Software companies obsolete immediately.
iprayiam3
8d ago
Your Bull and moderate option seems to miss an important middled. We go from ASI imminent to 'useful tool. I want to see a - will likely disrupt the economy and culture and society, regardless of whether AGI or ASI is coming.
Anyway:
we want a task that we agree is probably feasible for an LLM, and where success will change your mind significantly. By which I mean: "If it succeeds at X, I will revise my estimate of LLM capability from Y to Z."
This seems extremely, self-servingly narrow and contradictory. We want to show you how much an AI can do, in order to change your mind on it's limits. But please, do only pick something that it can do. This isn't question begging, but something like it.
Anyway, anyway.
How about an 8-bit side-scrolling video game with the relative complexity of Super Mario Brothers 3? If it can go write a full 'feature length' NES game, I'll be quite impressed. (But I'm playing more skeptical than I am)
Or more real world related:
A data replication tool that can move data from a SQL Server to PostGres database. It has to be able to use both time stamp incremental replication or log-based Change Data Capture on selection. You should be able to customize batch size, hard deletes, time-out, and activity on failure. I want a gui that allows me to select tables and ordering to schedule replication intervals, and to select columns on the table. Bonus points if it allows rows filtering conditions or other in-flight transformations.
If it does this latter one, I will beleive that most of IT infrastructure employment is over in 18 months.
iprayiam3
8d ago
I mean, realistically, this is a very old debate. St. Bernardino (~1400) had writings and sermons criticizing older men marrying very young women. So, I think any explanation that treats it as a novel phenomenon is wrong.
It's more something that will slip in an out of the overton window as cultural and social dynamics shift.
I think there's a reason you're missing in your list, that at least explains why young men would support / go along with prohibitions. Older men taking younger women is fishing in their pond. I think there is some inherent disgust to it, that from an evopsych perspective comes from resource protection.
There is absolutely a social effect with the practice widely tolerated, on the shape of mating and family formation, and whether one finds those effects net ill or not, trying to handwave feelings about it as arbitrary is the most incorrect response.
There also multiple comments saying that this question is irrelevant because it's orthogonal to the capabilities of the model that will cause Mustafa Suleyman's Jobpocalypse.
Let's talk about the Jobpocalyse. I feel like much of the discourse comes from abstracted 'thinkers', who are already independently elite, wealthy or both, and plugged deeply into the discourse. Or it comes from rootless circles -> young tech-adjacent (or at least tech competent) terminally online people without too much to lose anyway.
I live in the center of middle-class striver-ism. If we disrupt the job market in such a short time (anything less than 5 years), even in the most well executed UBI transition scheme, I don't see how it isn't anything but apolocyptic. There's no preserving the social order. I think we'll get suicide on extreme levels. Whether it's virtuous or not, I don't think that you can tell the middle class "every sunk cost you've ever made in your life has been worthless" and have them take it on the chin.
And yet, I see no real effort to address anything like this, so I'll just live like everyone else, and assume it's not real. Whether my life as I know it is fucked or not, is orthogonal to whether I destroy myself with stress in the meantime.
And stuff like that viral blog's - get your financial house in order, anything beyond general good advice, is not really helpful to folks in the middle of life. If 1/2 your neighborhood gets laid off inside 18 months, whether you squeezed an extra few grand into a mutual fund is going to be less than irrelevant. YOLO is probably better advice. Whether that means, make big gambles now because hey, there's every chance the board will be cleared anyway if you lose, or if that means enjoy the normalcy LARP while you have time left, and don't suffocate it with preparing for a future you can't predict
iprayiam3
23d ago
This is extremely confounded by selection bias. Sure the kind of person who ends up in that orbit ends up going along for whatever reason of being ok with it, accepting social signals instead of reasoning from other principles etc.
But to extrapolate that to 97% of the population is a farce. This is ignoring all the other decisions and avenues that a person who said no also would have taken to avoid (intentionally or more likely completely unintentionally) ever being in the place to “tell Jeffrey off” in the face of an invitation.
Plenty of people quietly lived lives that didn’t get them into his invitation list in the first place
iprayiam3
25d ago
Contra a few posters below, this isn’t nutpicking, and I consider that term to be more often an asymmetrical dodge than helpful clear thinking.
Why isn’t this nutpicking? Because it is pretty within the general zeitgeist of what is currently happening. It’s not some outlier story that doesn’t fit or alters the narrative.
Nutpicking would be focusing on the schizophrenic protesting ICE because Zorblog, king of the lizard people is behind it.
We have a coordinated group of activists doing stuff like this, at enough of a scale that it is controlling a large portion of the media and political reaction. This example might have some outlier characteristics, but it doesn’t distort, change, or amplify what’s in the water. And to dismiss it as an anecdote is to attempt to tell people that the clear pattern in front of the can’t be extrapolated from or examined.
We just had a comment about some apparently prominent guys blogpost about how him and his wife are basically spending their winter vacationing through these protests.
In isolation, Pretti is a ‘nut’. Statistically what can we infer from a divorced murse with a gun getting in confrontations with ICE. Good is a ‘nut’, a newly lesbian widow, with children form multiple fathers, who gets involved with blocking ice with her vehicle.
Yes every anecdote has nutty contours, and no nobody here has “statistics” on just how many Karen a Karenchuck can Karen.
But the leap is to then, “you can’t notice what’s happening, who’s doing it, and the effects it’s having” is less than useless. It’s active attempts to disperse conversation from reaching “conclusions”. Some of it is malicious, a lot is “um ackshully autistic im-so-smart contrarianism”, a lot is quokkas gonna quokka.
But this anecdote here is not baseless, not nutpicking, and we’re well past the hour of avoiding noticing social trends and associated demographics by calling it “just a few kids on college campuses” metaphorically or not.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
This is a fair take. Still don’t agree completely but thanks for laying it out
iprayiam3
1mo ago
You’re misunderstanding my point. Trump should go after employers. Im responding to the idea that PMme is steelmanning the protesting side. If his suggested solutions aren’t things the protesting side would support then it’s not really an alternative to placating the protests and undermines the argument that the R model of the protestors simply refusing deportations is insufficient
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Is there anyone on the left actually pushing that, not as a piece of rhetoric? If Trump pivoted to that, would a sustantial portion of the left get on board with deportations and remigrations? If not, it's not a better plan; it's a distraction.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
This forum basically presents the cause of protests in Minneapolis as "blue tribe doesn't want immigration policy enforced". If this claim is controversial, I can back it up by linking several comments from last week saying as such, so I hope you don't feel strawmanned if you're broadly anti-protestor.
I think this is fair, and not a strawman. So,
I want to present the claim that what ICE is doing in Minneapolis is inefficient at its stated goals, broadly unlawful/lawless, and disproportionate.
let me ask, is this actually your point of view? Ok, you've written your reasoned defense of this claim. But is that in alignment with your goals? Do you simply want ICE to become more efficient and lawful in exercising it's deportation goals? Do you think the real disagreement is how to maximize efficient deportations? Or are we right that the blue tribe doesn't want it? If the latter, what's the real value of the rest of the post?
I am not trying to be flippant. But otherwise this reads a lot like that one meme, where the atheist is basically saying: “I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way."
iprayiam3
1mo ago
Parsimony is objectively better. Fewer significant figures for the relevant precision.
We can get into philosophy of good and what not, but this is a silly gotcha. I’m making a point about an objective feature and describing why I think it’s better
iprayiam3
1mo ago
For that attitude, I retract any concession that other metric units may actually have merit. Imperial all the way.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
I can absolutely distinguish a thermostat set 1 degree. Not, I can walk into a room and tell you the temperature to a degree of precision. But in a building that I am intimately familiar with, like my house, I can tell when the thermostat is set differently at night. A degree F happens to be about the amount you can roughly distinguish
You’re conflating two separate points. When setting a thermostat you can tell the difference between 66 and 67. It’s a good increment of noticable but slight. Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.
Separately, 0-100 is roughly human haitable weather
On the metric point, there’s nothing more “metric” about Celsius. It doesn’t math any differently. It’s just set to a different reference point, which is less human centric
iprayiam3
1mo ago
You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.
However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.
The only time these numbers are really relevant in daily life is internal temperature of meats, but it's nearly arbitrary numbers with either measure, so C brings nothing to the table here.
Finally, Farenheit is over twice as precise as C, and right around human noticability. You can distinguish 1 degree F, but not really 1/10th degree Celsius, making F a more useful and intuitive unit.
iprayiam3
1mo ago
No I don’t think this or any specific instance is a moral conundrum; my point is that it can’t scale infinitely. At scale illegal kmmigrants and homeless do take up emergency room resources and cause downstream issues.
Were I in your situation I wouldn’t think twice about resolving some moral tradeoff over whether to help him. My issue is the system that grows the problem or anyone trying to frame this is as a contradictory wordview, as your OP pondered
You're missing the point of my post. I am emphatically not making any prediction about AIs first order effect on anything, including the market, much less an individul company's stock price. I am pointing to examples where it's already producing mainstream headlines, and (although early) seems to be quickening and broadening in it's reach. I am suggesting the depsite the realities, the costs of the narrative are surely already affecting real people.
Do you not thing there weren't CEOs out there who are udpdating on these stories? Hiring manager who update or hesitate on this news? White collar workers, who rethink their savings plans?
My whole point is not the effects of AI on the economy, which remains to be seen, but the effects of the anticipation of those effects on society, which is here today.
We don't have to agree on the CFR rate of Covid to note that schools are already closing, business trips are already being cancelled, toilet paper is already running out. 'Maybe wait a little and see how the CDC responds' is misunderstanding a comment that is specifically - regardless of how and whether this deepens and whether it's overblown, the effects are here and starting today.
You yourself gave an example of making a financial decision based on this news.
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