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Unlike many people, I am definitely on the AI-train: this is a revolutionary technology that will transform the way we live. I do think that people and companies that learn to make use of this technology most effectively will gain compounding benefits over time, just like how it seems households that has a computer 30-40 years ago (either through wealthy parents and/or educated parents) really helped prepare their children for big and better things (although obviously having wealthy and/or educated parents already help a lot too).
If one looks at the AI Index of Ramp (corporate spend management platform), one will find that in monthly AI spend, the top 1% of companies are now hovering close to $10k/month/employee, with a big drop off that follows where top 10% of companies are only spending $800/month/employee, and the median company is only spending $15.70/month/employee. In short, being AI-pilled shows up on the balance sheets. In an interview with Derek Thompson (btw, the other author of Abundance) on his podcast Plain English, Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian says: "All of the companies in that top 1% are extremely technically advanced. They are concentrated in the information sector, so software and media or finance or technical services." I do believe these companies are on to something, these are evidentially smart collective of people with clear objectives (increase productivity, reduce cost, maximize profit, etc.)
On a personal level, after 1 year ish of using Claude/Codex as a software engineer, I've noticed many benefits of AI usage (though . I've shared before that it has freed up time, for example, to engage with this forum. I've also been on and know of multiple projects with which would have never even been greenlit if not for AI-use, such as integrating with an external partner on a legacy platform in a computer language no one in my company knows (tbf, it is a C-family language). There has been many complaints about software reliability in the AI-era, with one poster child being GitHub that got bad enough where prominent projects left for supposedly greener pastures. My company did the opposite in that we are migrating from Atlassian's bitbucket to github, I think in part because of what I summed up in an internal message at the time when asked of should we or not: "a migration to GitHub is essentially a bet on AI, because Microsoft/GitHub for sure will be at the frontier of AI features compared to Atlassian/Bitbucket." Regarding the perception of reduced software reliability in the AI-era, I fondly remember early Q2 this year, when the VP of Support and Operations came to my team and the CEO to complain about the increasing amount of outages; I sat down for about a day, counting up number of changes-features-fixes per release and number of incidents caused by each release before presenting to everyone in a meeting my findings: the rate of errors (number of incident / number of changes-features-fixes) actually reduced per release, but because we were releasing so often due to increased cadence and productivity, the raw number of errors increased. The aforementioned VP btw has come to learn to appreciate AI a lot, even if he doesn't quite understand the terminal still.
This brings me to the thread down low between @RandomRanger and @MaiqTheTrue which provoked this chain of thought, bolded mine:
I found a source for the stat btw.
Why is there more stress and suffering now that would lead to the tripling of teenage suicides? Ask the random person on the street, they'll just point everywhere and tell you to look around and say: "everything is so hard now". I think what is so hard about life in the US, and I guess the modern age, is complexity. Life these days are too complext. It's simple enough (heh) to look at computers as a technology that drives societal complexity. Computers makes certain problems extremely simple ("find the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile using this column of data in Excel"), but then it leads to new problems that are more complex ("now that we know the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile, what does that mean to us?"). Fifty years ago, it was simple enough to understand your own finances, at most you had a bank account, paper checks for the monthly payments on car and your house, and pay in cash for everything else. Now consumers look at managing multiple credit cards, point rewards and loyalty programs for various companies, managing their own IRA/401K/brokerage, etc. Fifty years ago, you marry the person you met in school or the person you met at work, now gotta navigate dating apps, hookup culture, shifting and varied interpersonal relationship expectations, etc. The following statement from @FCfromSSC points to it well:
And of course btw, complexity is a subsidy for the rich, because only the rich can afford to navigate all the complexities.
So what will AI do to/for us? Personally again, I think AI has greatly simplified my life. There are many questions that I wouldn't even know where to begin to ask, now I just ask. But a colleague has recently confided in me that he thinks of quitting before the year ends, "the rate at which we're going, it's just too fast". I was perplexed at that because I thought AI would have made his life easier like AI did mine. But maybe it wont? what do you think?
I think an under-acknowledged challenge of AI is that it will dramatically increase the opacity of systems that everyday people use. There are already reports that much of Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha are computer illiterate, likely due to the prevalence of mobile operating systems that do everything they can to obscure technical details from the user. Actual illiteracy also appears to be increasing. I wouldn't be surprised if something like a "knowledge oligarchy" emerges, where the vast majority of the populace is captured by hyper-addictive entertainment technologies, leaving a small group of people who actually know How Things Work.
This is directly counter to my own experience with AI. AI is the best user interface I've ever used. It massively reduces cognitive load for figuring out complex workflows, which in turn makes engaging with those workflows on a granular level much, much less frustrating and intimidating. Whatever convolutions you go through, the AI can always explain how things work immediately and at an arbitrary level of elaboration. This is a complete game-changer, in my experience. It's search that actually works, it's manuals that actually work, it's UI that actually works, and on and on.
Congratulations, you're one of the people who know How Things Work. I think for anyone with a hint of technical expertise, AI is a fantastic teacher and time-saver. However, I think as more and more kids grow up with AI as their native tongue, they will lose the ability to ask the questions that get them to technical expertise in the first place. It won't go extinct, to be clear, but I suspect technical knowledge will be deemed unimportant and wither over time.
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"Knowledge oligarchy" implies the people who know How Things Work will be better off than the ones who don't. That's true now and it will be for a while longer, but mature AI simply renders human intelligence obsolete. The computer is faster than you and smarter than you and way cheaper than you; you simply won't be able to compete, and even trying means wasting effort that could have gone into... whatever does matter in this new world. Social status games, probably.
Like, the vast majority of people used to be involved in agriculture. Over the past couple centuries there's been a precipitous drop in general farming acumen. So is there now a 'farmer oligarchy?' Not even close. In fact, the skill set of the people who do farm is enormously different from the farmers of the past -- the only people keeping that tradition alive are irrelevant hobbyists and idealogues.
So, yes, systems will become more opaque to humans trying to understand them personally, but why would you ever do that? In practice they'll be much more transparent, because you'll just ask your own AI to figure it out for you.
I’m skeptical, because intelligence includes just knowing what to ask the AI or dealing with whatever it inflicts on you.
It’s true that in an AI dystopia, intelligence won’t stop you from being tortured or gunned down by an AI drone, but this is true today and was true s/drone/barbarian/ millennia ago.
Those who have any opportunity, intelligence still matters. And the only way everyone will have zero opportunity is if AI kills us all. Even if it fully provides for you, there’s still opportunity in self-actualization (which includes things like, figuring out your favorite food) that I doubt ASI can completely provide. And even if it can self-actualize you, even if it can fully simulate and predict your brain, then you still have “intelligence” in every meaningful way, just simulated by the AI (in the same way we could be or not be living in a perfect simulation, but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t change anything).
Well sure, human intelligence is only obsolete to the extent artificial intelligence is available as a replacement. There are scenarios where it's not that widely available, but I don't think they're very likely (possibly besides AI killing us all). As we transition to a bread-and-circuses model for keeping the useless masses content (which we probably will because it will be cheaper and less risky than other approaches once AI drives the marginal cost of labor down far enough), direct AI access provides good bang-for-the-buck.
In terms of self actualization: people can self-actualize by doing things inefficiently -- say, playing chess without an engine -- but that doesn't make it not-inefficient. When I say 'obsolete' I mean 'devoid of instrumental purpose,' not necessarily any purpose. Though I suppose playing chess well without an engine, while not high-status in any absolute sense, is certainly higher status than playing it well with one, so maybe that is a flaw in my definition or reasoning.
Human intelligence is valuable even with artificial intelligence, unless it's practically omniscient, because intelligence includes the ability to prompt the LLM correctly. Even if it's perfectly aligned, unless it's practically omniscient, it can't know what you truly want, part of self-actualization, you must figure that out on your own.
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AI is simultaneously the best tool for learning, and the best tool to avoid learning that mankind has ever devised.
What one chooses to do with it just depends on the individual's personality. It will supercharge conscientious people, while being yet another "skip" button for the lazy. The internet was the same way -- a portal to infinite potential learning and skills for some, while little but the latest vector for proleslop for others.
This exactly. I expect that in 5-10 years at the latest we'll have computers / phones that are essentially nothing but an AI that simply directly does what you tell it to do, maybe even with no fixed structure or UI. Everything can be tailor-made for you. Basically Alexa supercharged.
If you're conscientious, curious and intelligent, you'll use this to improve your life, to learn as much as possible, and to fix issues with common apps that have always bothered you, or generate new kinds of apps that beforehand had a terrible ratio of #customers/(complexity of app), or maybe even nobody had thought about. If you're none of those things, you'll use it to serve yourself a stream of slop, levels of sloppiness never before though possible.
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YEP
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Even for things I am competent at, i still succumb to the laziness aspect. This is why even mathematicians are using AI for papers, like on arxiv. these are experts, but they still outsource.
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Interesting: my guess would have been the other way in practice. Not that the full stack will be better understood necessarily, but because AI as a personal assistant may cut through existing red tape and friction. "Make an appointment with my dentist" is much easier than going through a phone tree and waiting on hold, and not even necessarily worse for the counterparty if they automate their answering service. I expect it to be better than static text for things like tax forms in answering "are my prediction market winnings 'gambling'?". But I will admit it's a bit of a loose prediction.
In software land, I see that early predictions of opacity armageddon aren't fully panning out. You can vibe code things, certainly, but in complex products it really works well in well-written software. It helps to have good, accurate comments and traceable links to requirements and documentation. In my usage I largely try to clean up things it found confusing, which I think has strong overlap with naive human developers.
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AI at this point does everything better. Everyone will use it to save time and outsource their thinking. The only thing it lacks is agency but even that may change.
AI doesn’t do everything better. It writes better code, but its taste is still horrible and I suspect hasn’t really improved. From my perspective and what I hear online (I consider the contests that awarded AI to be exceptions).
Even when AI art is popular (e.g. Malfoid pics) it’s because a human came up with the idea and heavily curated if not edited its output. I think AI photos and videos are improving, but only in production (no more weird hands). Because it has not stopped being generic to the point of blandness, even when prompted to be “creative”.
Even in software, its architecture is over complicated and probably slower to implement or buggier than human-designed, its explanations are worse than an expert’s because it doesn’t know what to include or leave out, and non-trivial UX you need humans at least to review. There’s a simple way to judge when AI really starts to eclipse humans in software dev: when a large project that is not just some port is created entirely with AI, that competes among the best human alternatives (to be clear, the ports are very impressive especially when combined. But I notice, even in the combinations, the interactions are lazy and not particularly deep, compared to e.g. Order of the Sinking Star).
everything minus some epsilon?
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Praise be the Ommnissah! The Sacred Liturgies of the Machine God are reserved for the priests of the Valley of Silicon. If you want your light bulb turned on please consult your local Ad-Mech tech priest in the sacred operation of illumination.
The machine god will anticipate whether you want or need your light bulb turned on. If you disagree, you're wrong, at least within the constraints of what best delivers shareholder value. Now go back and play your gacha game, there's a new weekly prize.
The Huxlean Capitalistic Ommnissah is a new liturgical schism that I was not aware existed. Please tune in to your local MMORPG streamer to know more about exciting shareholder value increasing opportunities near you. Flesh is weak brother, not like this new artificial endocrine system.
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