Comment by zdragnar
6 days ago
The average person is bad at literally almost everything.
If I want something done, I'll seek out someone with a skill set that matches the problem.
I don't want AI to be as good as an average person. I want AI to be better than the person I would go to for help. A person can talk with me, understand where I've misunderstood my own problem, can point out faulty assumptions, and may even tell me that the problem isn't even a problem that needs solving. A person can suggest a variety of options and let me decide what trade-offs I want to make.
If I don't trust the AI to do that, then I'm not sure why I'd use it for anything other than things that don't need to be done at all, unless I can justify the chance that maybe it'll be done right, and I can afford the time lost getting it done right without the AI afterwards.
Which proves my point precisely that unless you’re superhuman in this definition, you’re obsolete.
Nothing new really, but there’s no where left to go for human labor and even that concept is being jeered at as a fantasy despite this attitude.
I really don't think it does, because we disagree on what the upper bound of an LLM is capable of reasoning about.
An average human may not be suitable for a given task, but a person with specialized skills will be. More than that, I believe they will continue to outperform LLMs on solving unbounded problems- i.e. those problems without an obvious, algorithmic solution.
Anything that requires brute force computation can be done by an LLM more quickly, assuming you have humans you trust to validate the output, but that's about the extent of what I'm expecting them to achieve.
Think beyond LLMs
You need to think about what comes after LLMs that look nothing like LLMs
You need to think about what robots with human capabilities, which are improving multiple times per day, is going to do.
Now add LLMs back in as your HMI
"The average person is bad at literally almost everything."
Wow... that's quite a generalization. And not my experience at all.
The average person can’t play 99% of all musical instruments, speak 99% of all languages, do 99% of surgeries, recite 99% of all poems from memory etc.
We don’t ask the average person to do most things, either finding a specialist or providing training beforehand.
One cannot be bad at the things one doesn't even do. None of this demonstrates that humans are bad at "literally almost everything."
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More than 50% of people cannot write a 'hello world' program in any programming language.
More than 50% of people employed as software engineers cannot read an academic paper in a field like education, and explain whether the conclusions are sound, based on the experiment description and included data.
More than 50% of people cannot interpret an X-ray.
> More than 50% of people employed as software engineers cannot read an academic paper in a field like education, and explain whether the conclusions are sound, based on the experiment description and included data.
I know this was meant as a dig, but I’m actually guessing that software engineers score higher on this task than non-engineers who hold M.Ed. degrees.
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