Comment by suncemoje
4 days ago
> You are made one step closer to complete worthlessness, which will surely continue as AI becomes a more satisfying personal companion, a more worthwhile friend, lover, etc.
I recently thought about this and fear that AI may further drive us humans apart.
Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
I would recommend the work of Sherry Turkle, specifically her new book "Artifical Intimacy" - she is quite opinionated on this, in the sense that the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being. No real quick solution outside of deep, fearful caution when using these things - and we're not going to see that from John Q Public
> the role that AI play as a conversation partner is so frictionless, so controlled, that we get none of the rough edges of human interaction that form us into a functional social being.
I wonder if there's a tangent with social media here, at least some of it, where in my experience "a perfect life lived by influencers" is portrayed to us.
IMO, I think that frictionless experience comes at us from a bunch of angles - finding yourself in an echo chamber (by choice or not) online means that you may find yourself less comfortable talking with people you don't agree with, things like that. I grew up in a small town pre-social media, and that meant I didn't have much of a choice about who I was surrounded by. If I was growing up today, what would stop me from retreating to a comfy social media-mediated environment without any challenge or friction? If I was growing up 5 years from now, what would stop me from retreating even further to the comfort of my LLM "friends" who can be shaped to me perfectly? That world sounds terrifying to me.
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Human meaning arises in conversation between humans. In them reaching a shared understanding of the world and their perspective upon it.
When you talk with machines, you "outsource" that central human society-building element.
But machines never socialize back in any meaningful way. You gradually lose yourself.
Machines could socialize back in a (more) meaningful way. But to do so, they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).
I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.
[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)
I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.
> they would have to not lose context (or at least keep some).
I guess you can start to see that happen (for a while now) with e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc. keeping persistent memory of you, automatically.
Personally, I often find these memorization features annoying, because - more often than not - the persisted context is outdated because something in my real life changed that ChatGPT & co are not aware of.
In some very very distant future we might someday have your typical sci-fi Data/R2-D2/Johnny 5/EDI style AI and yeah, at that point it'd be weird to not treat them as people, give them rights, etc. It'll take a lot more than solving the context problem to pull that off, and LLMs will never be that, but I agree whatever that technology ends up being it'd pretty much have to be able to hold onto memories. I doubt we'll ever see it in our lifetime, but who knows.
What an absurd premise. And not because it was "impossible": rather, why would you want that to begin with?
There are billions of real-life humans already there with you. Why do you need different ones exactly?
I presume, you don't like those already around. Fair point, they have many flaws for sure.
But that's the reason you interact with them in the first place? To learn and make not only other's flaws go away, but also your own?
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> Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time.
That's a feature, not a bug. But infinite context is probably something we will see at some point and then you'll have your wish granted.
Losing context is only part of the issue. LLMs don't have the rich connection to the world that humans have. The only connection LLMs have with anything is streams of text. Not only don't they have eyes, ears, smell, taste, touch--they don't have bodies. They don't have to deal with the real, physical world and have it push back on them.
That is so utterly different from what we humans are used to that we can't even comprehend it, and we anthropomorphize LLMs because we can't make any sense of them otherwise. We can't comprehend that these things that emit text that looks like human text don't have all of the other things that lie underneath our words when we humans talk.
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Horrifying.
> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
This is why I see myself leaving dev within a year. Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health and I've be unhappy in work much of the time since 2020 largely due to that, AI will finish me off.
Career suicide and going of to wait tables, or be a hospital porter, or anything else with people even if I'm going to hate those people, with the massive pay cut that entails, will be better than actual suicide after a couple more years trying to stick at it.
There came a point a few months ago where I realised that I had to either accept becoming obscelete or change my while outlook on using AI and trying to catch up. I didn't choose the AI option.
It is frightening that it took only a few comments from the top of the page to the first mention of a suicide and also that it doesn't look out of place at all.
dspillett wrote that they would rather wait tables or be a hospital porter than commit actual suicide.
What else do you think will happen when you rob people of what for a very large portion of us is their feeling of self worth.
These AI characters are too busy saving the planet to care about the people.
I wonder how Hinton feels about his brainchild, I can see an Oppenheimer moment in his future and I hope that he's mentally prepared for that.
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> Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health
Where I work we have a 100% office policy. And while that sometimes feels hilarious, I am also somewhat glad about it because I like working and connecting with people physically.
However, as mentioned, I do notice that even though I am physically in the office most days, I spend an increasing amount of time alone on my computer and work with my agents. It’s satisfying in it’s own way, and I am definitely more productive. But it’s also worrisome. The pace of this development is picking up, and I don’t yet see where this is going exactly, or if I like where what I can see is going.
Related: We recently interviewed a candidate who worked remotely for the past 3-4 years. He said he'd be looking forward to work in the office again. I could honestly feel that he meant it, and I understand that. I guess some mix of both is the best.
Think carefully. I left high school teaching to become a dev. I would never go back. Yeah, social isolation sucks. But doing a job where your students/clients/patients think you're nothing but a waste of their time is soul-crushing on another level.
I've been thinking about it a long time. I've not been happy in Dev since 2020ish, pre-AI, it is just that AI may be the final bail of hay.
I would not go into teaching, that is something I considered earlier in life and rejected the idea of, and AI is a big thing there too, both dealing with students having it do their work and teachers using it to generate their materials.
Jobs where I'm more-or-less only dealing with people all have the “I dislike the general public” and “the pat is crap” problems, but won't have the “I'm sat on my own”, “everyone who is around me is turning into a meat relay”, and “to even just get by I'll have to interact with the giant purloining polution machines” problems.
> is soul-crushing on another level
They say a change is as good as a rest… :)
I've done sitting/standing in front of a screen for nearly three decades. I'm not looking for something I'll actually like doing to earn a living, it would be the height of naivety to even hope for that, but moving away from more & more of the same in ways I'm liking less & less might be good for me.
I don't have that experience
But my experience as a dev using AI now is that I am a waste of time, because I'm playing second fiddle to a fuckin chatbot
I want a job and career where I feel good about myself, where I feel valuable and useful, not this misery of plugging shit into the bot and listening to what it says
Yeah people here really underestimate how shitty your customers can be.
It’s very Asimov-esque. The Spacers who adopted robots for everything eventually stopped interacting with each other except over video calls.
> Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
I do too, but it means I have more time in my life to spend with people.
Seriously I don't get what everyone else is doing where they say things are getting worse somehow.
There's days I no longer need to sit at my computer: Claude Remote prompts my phone when it needs direction, the hardware stays busy and I can just go out with my family instead.
I am in the same boat as you, but like someone posted earlier in another thread, I concede that a large percentage of my value proposition has vanished in a year. What worries me is that I'm having fun at the bar but have no idea when closing time is. I suspect that same feeling is aching a lot of people. I for one have had multiple discussions with my wife the last 6 months about what we are going to do when I get laid off, especially because we built a life around the notion or remote work in a niche field which seems to be eroding away. Fortunately I've been wise with my finances, so I have options. But I too have considered starting over in another career. Sort of sucks, but I am coming to terms with it.
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Modern day society has normalized being forced to sit in a cubicle or at your desk otherwise face the wrath of managers for not working, despite massive increases in technology that multiplied productivity.
I have no idea where people get this pipe dream that suddenly societal norms will change such that our employers will let us off the hook for most of the day. This should be obvious with the largely abandoned work-from-home allowances.
For me, I can't vibecode everything bc it won't make it past our QC, and the complexity of the work done means I have to babysit and often step in and either do it manually or correct bad assumptions/stuff that isn't sufficient for the task.
I don't know what kinds of work that isn't trivial CRUD work is or isn't so easily streamlined but I do know folks in more complex/more safety critical stuff, we're just having to fucking sit there and babysit. It's so isolating, and even though I spend more time Not Coding than before, team culture and really any feeling of having value, skill, or pride in my work is off the wayside because the retards in management think, since we can do some stuff more quickly now, our human brains will be fine with taking in easily 5x more context for significantly more complex work on shorter timelines.
And unfortunately that often also compounds with the current state of the world in general. It's another straw on the donkey.
It's more important now than ever to hold onto the fact that human beings have inherent value. This exists independent of their ability to generate wealth for an employer. I know HN loves a technical solution for every problem, and so do I, but this is a political problem requiring political solutions.
> human beings have inherent value
I wish, then I'd get a paycheck without having to do any work.
I think that is what we should do. It's called UBI. It acknowledges that everyone has inherent value, at least enough to deserve to stay alive and participate in society.
Only if you sell yourself.
No, you don't work w/ a fleet of agents, you use them to do your work.
This is a general issue that is being forced on us by AI companies; AI is not a human being, it is a tool that we can use to do things. We don't have them as coworkers or subordinates, they're objects specialized in language processing. Thinking otherwise leads people to all kinds of existential and psychological issues that in the end make no sense.
No. If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway. It doesn’t matter at all if they are coworkers or tools (I really don’t see why would it ever matter).
> If these tools could do your work, people would feel existential dread anyway.
That is, if your entire self worth is tied to your work.
I think we should consider moving away from that notion.
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Personally I don’t care about that all that much. I don’t have any “sacred” inherent value for human beings. If they can make robots covered in real human skin, blood vessels and muscles (lab grown over the robot frame) with an LLM brain at some point in the future, I would definitely prefer that to a human lover.