Comment by alex-robbins
18 hours ago
You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.
18 hours ago
You think that the farther in the future you go, the less likely it is that any existing population will know how to fix what breaks? That strikes me as oddly pessimistic, and frankly unlikely.
I wouldn't be so sure, it's wildly common. Reverse engineering products to figure out how to make them again is its own sub-industry in every manufacturing field, especially anything tool & die.
There's an enormous chasm between when companies started mass producing things and the digitization of blueprints. More often than not it isn't even the original company, it's one of their customer's customers 50+ years after they went out of business.
Im more convinced we are heading that way every year. Certainly not anytime soon, but 100, 200, 1000 years from now? Seems plausible to me. Most people don't even know how their house electricity system is setup or works, or how their plumbing system works despite being incredibly simple, not to mention more advanced technologies. We are surrounded by internal combustion engines and yet less and less people actually understand them each day and it becomes more and more specialized knowledge. How many people know how a refrigerator works despite being incredibly simple technology and the basics necessary to understand it covered by atleast freshman highschool science class if not earlier?
We have built a disposable society so people most people never have to learn how anything works. They press a switch or button and it doesn't work? Throw it away and buy a new mass-produced model. And as time goes on we only need less and less people to understand a technology to mass produce it and sell it.
Who cares what most people know about plumbing and electrical wiring? It's not most people's job to fix it when it breaks.
What a strange attitude. It certainly is not anyone else's job to maintain the home I own and live in. That is my job. If something breaks, I don't get to tell someone else that they have not done their job. I am responsible for fixing it. Yes, I can delegate a specific fix to a professional electrician or plumber, but that is a project-by-project choice.
If people want to approach life by hiring out every little thing, they can certainly do so, but those choices do not make my home maintenance someone else's job.
I guess his point is
what happens if there's no one left who knows about plumbing and electrical wiring?
but yeah, i dont think that's gonna happen like that
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Well big tech wants to replace all the white collar jobs with their bullshit ChatGPT wrappers, so it wouldn't be surprising if actual skill vanishes.
Isn't that a bit pessimistic? Assuming machine natural language understanding and general reasoning improves dramatically (which seems possible, based on recent history), it is likely that (given that we still have the data) at some point in the future anyone will have the ability to acquire these skills, or that machine agents will be skilled enough to guide human or other types of agents to do things.
The post is about solar events, good luck getting machine agents working in case this happens... It is pessimistic yes, but what in recent history did happen to not have a pessimistic outlook on things?
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With the state of how the ai agents stuff already is, if you don't think that most tech jobs will be automated away in our lifetime, I don't what to tell you.
Within 10-15 years, AI research automates itself and no one ever has a software engineering job ever again.
I think sometimes of how crazy it would be if we could send GPT 4.5 in the past somehow, what effect that could have, just a magical almost all knowing being from the future
My 3 month old son is twice as big as he was when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10!
do you see meaningful reasons for it to not get there or are you just making a snarky comment
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I feel like you're coming from a place where GPTs value lies only in coding. I use it for planning all the time, saving me hours per week.
For example, the security team gave me a list of 100s of policies that need to be implemented. I was able to dump that list in and get a rollout plan over the next two months in a matter of minutes. This would easily have taken me half a day before GPT.