Comment by kenjackson
5 days ago
I went through the thread and saw nothing that looked like this.
I don’t think developers will be obsolete in five years. I don’t think AGI is around the corner. But I do think this is the biggest breakthrough in computer science history.
I worked on accelerating DNNs a little less than a decade ago and had you shown me what we’re seeing now with LLMs I’d say it was closer to 50 years out than 20 years out.
its very clearly a major breakthrough for humanity
Perhaps only for a very small part of humanity...
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you can add an /s to your earlier comment to make it more obvious it was a joke rather than a direct rebuttal that it got taken as
Or I can leave it as is and see who is actually paying attention
Greatest breakthru in compsci.
You mean the one that paves the way for ancient Egyptian slave worker economies?
Or totalitarian rule that 1984 couldn't imagine?
Or...... Worse?
The intermediate classes of society always relied on intelligence and competence to extract money from the powerful.
AI means those classes no longer have power.
Right, if people want to talk about how they are worried about a future with super intelligence AI, that's I think something almost everyone can agree on is a worthy topic, maybe to different degrees but not the issue in my mind.
I think what it feels like I see a lot, are people who - because of their fear of a future with super intelligent AI - try to like... Deny the significance of the event, if only because they don't _want_ to wrestle with the implications.
I think it's very important we don't do that. Let's take this future seriously, so we can align ourselves on a better path forward... I fear a future where we have years of bickering in the public forums on the veracity or significance of claims, if only because this subset of the public who are incapable of mentally wrestling with the wild fucking shit we are walking into.
If not this, what is your personal line in the sand? I'm not specifically talking to any person when I say this. I just can't help but to feel like I'm going crazy, seeing people deny what is right in front of their eyes.
It basically comes down to the fact that the AI that exists now will enrich and empower corporations and the government, but won't do much for anybody else.
The pro-AI astroturfers are building the popular consensus of acceptance for what those in power will use AI for: disenfranchisement and oppression. And they are correct because the capabilities of AI right now will enable that, as stated above.
The AI denialists are correct as well: current AI isn't what it is popularly billed. The CEOs are falling over themselves claiming they can cut headcount to zero because of their visionary implementation of AI. It's the old prototype/demo but not the real system snowjob in software sales, alllll over again.
Any actual benefit of AI to the common man comes with the current state of how tech companies "benefit" a consumer: with absurd degrees of privacy invasion, weaponized psychological algorithms, attention destruction, etc.
Here's a fun startup that in invariably in the works: the omnipresent employee monitoring AI. Every click you make, every shit you take, every coffee you sip, and every meeting you tune out. Your facial expressions analyzed, your actual "passion" measured, etc. Amazon is already doing 80% of this without AI in the warehouses.
The only saving grace to that is Covid and WFH, where they don't have the right to intrude on your workspace. So next time you hear about the return to office, remember what is coming....