Comment by fps-hero
13 hours ago
A lot of the conversations around AI in the past years have been “we will delegate almost all work to AI, but the most decisions will be left to humans.”
I’m fairly confident that the opposite will be true. The most important decisions will be made by AI, and humans will only be left to guide decisions as a matter of taste. AI has the ability to be impartial, and immutable. You can endlessly probe and reason its decisions.
This isn’t true of our current human decisions. Where we see red tape, bureaucracy, rent seeking, status quo. AI will see through these human constructs.
I do like the idea that we will need more mathematicians, physicists, and scientists to understand the discoveries of AI. That might be the best possible outcome of AI, but I fear the opposite and we are painting ourselves into a corner of which we no longer have the knowledge to sustain ourselves and society itself collapses.
> red tape, bureaucracy, rent seeking, status quo. AI will see through these human constructs.
Why would an LLM care about eliminating any of these things? When you say "red tape" and "bureaucracy" you are, in that very statement, applying emotional labels to what are actually just systems working as designed. There are the rules, so we follow them. LLM decision-makers will happily enforce and perpetuate bureaucracy and red-tape. If the rent-seeking is legal behavior then they will fully protect a big corporation's right to engage in it, they don't care about the feelings of the little guy. If a similar situation was decided a certain way in the past, then yeah let's decide it the same way now and maintain the status quo; LLMs very often think that way, they don't care about human ideals like "change" or "progress".
> AI has the ability to be impartial, and immutable.
Which AI has this ability? LLMs definitly don't.
With an open set of weights, fixed seeds and parameters, recorded inputs and feedback loops, the entire AI decision making process is auditable.
It also lends itself nicely for the ability to adjust the AI systems when deficiencies are found. You can tweak the AI systems to align itself with the desired output, and check for regressions, much like tests in a codebase.
Human decision-making lacks this thoroughness. I’ve scarcely come across rigorous documentation of decisions and how they were reached professionally.
I recommend you the book the rational optimist.
Not saying you’re wrong you just can’t be so certain