Didn’t read your whole post, but the first point is wrong.
“Plotting with natural language: "Create a scatter plot of column A ver….”
No, the tedium of boilerplate code was a feature. Charts were generated by template so styling was consistent, making charts a bit more bland but easier to consume and check. You cannot achieve that same level of consistency or predictability with ai without reinventing a wheel. The models change too fast, and they all want to differentiate themselves for brand reasons, and the emphasis is on fast and easy, not on slow and foolproof, there’s no documentation of the work the way code provides documentation and an easy audit trail. You can restrict the ai by giving specs (use ggplot, use color template foo, create readable code with unit tests), but these are all similar tradeoffs as you might make with human labor too.
What llm do is to simply lower human value, not remove it entirely.
Just as results needed checking and replication before llm, they will continue to need checking and replication by humans. The humans won’t be compensated nearly as much, but humans are humans and so are not.
> Charts were generated by template so styling was consistent, making charts a bit more bland but easier to consume and check
This is why reading the whole post is important :)
You seem to think I'm suggesting the use an image generator for plotting. Don't do that, it will screw that up, image models are not made for that. The use for AI here is to save 5 minutes writing the code to generate the plot, or to edit the style (again via code) of the plot.
If you do plt.scatter(x,y, c="blue", marker="o") that is a function call in Matplotlib. Its API notoriously sucks. Most Python plotting libraries just create convenience functions around this library because although the API (actually there are two and the documentation is not consistent on which to use) is hot garbage, and the documentation is labyrinthine, the plotting engine itself is powerful.
> What llm do is to simply lower human value, not remove it entirely.
The value in a plot is not the exact code used to make it (beyond the code being correct). The value is in the visualization giving the reader an "ah-ha" moment. I would much rather take the 5 minutes I save writing a function call, and use it to spend more time examining the plot itself.
Not to imply any particular comparison to less serious websites where the karma system over time may have resulted in a disproportionate surplus of one liner jokes and other spammy low quality posts.
There are people whose livelihood depends on them not getting it. There are people whose worldviews depend on them not getting it. Denial is a part of grieving. There are also people who like to troll the ai maniacs because ai maniacs are easy to troll. It has been curious to me to see all this as well, smart people who seem oblivious feels strange.
Just to flip it around on you, what do you think would happen if Anthropic and OpenAI agreed to stop working on AI altogether?
I'm not arguing about the consequences or responsibility. I'm asking which humans would be capable of stopping the development of AI at this point in history.
The comments on this are interesting. There are a lot of assumptions from different people speaking about humanity as a single entity that decides how to operate as one. A lot of others act as though it’s really easy to get world governments to all agree to not develop a technology through treaties and agreements. One person below is arguing with me by saying that we “just” need to get China and the US to agree to halt AI and the problem is solved for the whole world.
It’s difficult to understand where this all is coming from because it’s so strangely disconnected from history. It’s not even consistent with current world events. The US is in a war with Iran over nuclear proliferation while also worrying about North Korea’s nuclear program. China and the US are in a trade war and Taiwan is under threat due to semiconductor capabilities (among other things, obviously). Open weight models allow anyone in any country to do AI work on their laptop. The top story on HN yesterday was a small team of academics making some cool discoveries on improving LLMs without frontier lab level compute.
How anyone can see all of this, in addition to decades of history of attempted nuclear diplomacy and wars, and posit that the whole problem is easily solved by simple agreements is confusing to me. The confidence with which these alternatives are being proposed and the unwillingness to acknowledge second order effects (like AI researchers moving to a different country and continuing to work) is baffling.
8 billion people. Almost all of them aside from a negligible fraction believe in at a fundamental level completely mutually incompatible fairy tales, a single digit or so fraction of them are killing each other over these tales. And some people think the world over would simply get on one page over AI?
hn is full of technical people that like to believe that they behave logically (they don't), and that others would change their behavior if the logic was explained to them (they won't).
But yeah, there are a lot of comments from genie-rebottlers that are not very grounded in reality. They're functionally equivalent to saying "hey, everyone in the world, let's not actually use electricity after all" in 1905.
People don't understand the prisoners dilemma, or they think it is some kind of psychological pseudo science trumped up to make fun pop-sci articles for social media.
Was it? We nearly destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons several times in the last century. I don't think it was a good call just because we've gotten lucky so far.
Sort of, although didn't Von Neumann package it slightly differently - less personal (someone else) and more about the evolution of science and separation of roles of scientist and politician... basically science is going to happen, and it's not for people like us (scientists) to be worry about what happens as a result.
Still seems a moral cop-out, and while true, the timeline would certainly have changed, if not the inevitability, if key figures such as himself had opted out.
The development lead to it being dropped on two cities followed by an arms race that put global civilization at permanent risk, with several incidents already that could have launched a nuclear war between superpowers.
It's likely stopped lots of large direct wars between the biggest nation states. Instead it's much smaller proxy wars.
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Simply put humans are at risk of any power scaling. We exist safely in a very tiny temperature and energy environment and the rest of the processes in the universe operate widely out of that strict safe area.
It's also a catch-22. There are large rocks in space that will eventually end us unless we do something about that. But having the power to do something about that gives us the same power to also end everyone on the earth.
After the war, it turned out that the Nazis weren't even working on a nuclear bomb. So had the US not done it, nobody might have. Other nuclear powers did it only because the US had them and had shown that it was possible.
> Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. [...] The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) while continuing to fund the activity.
> The program was split up among nine major institutes where the directors dominated research and set their own objectives. Subsequently, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission began to diminish as many researchers applied their talents to more pressing wartime demands.
> [...] Heisenberg said that in 1939, the physicists at this second meeting concluded that "in principle atomic bombs could be made, but they also emphasized that it would take a number of years",[24] certainly not less than five. He also said that he "didn't report it to the Führer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Führer also reacted that way."
> [...] Speer states that the project to develop the atom bomb was scuttled in the autumn of 1942. Though the scientific solution was there, it would have taken all of Germany's production resources to produce a bomb, and then no sooner than 1947.[39] Development did continue with a "uranium motor" for the navy and development of a German cyclotron. However, by the summer of 1943, Speer released the remaining 1200 metric tons of uranium stock for the production of solid-core ammunition.
There are ways of calling this "weren't working on a nuclear bomb", but it seems to me like "they wanted to, were moving in that direction, and would have done it if they had the resources and weren't distracted by shorter-term considerations".
Imagine a bag filled with marbles. We can't see inside the bag, we can just pull marbles out of the bag. Some marbles are white - they improve the world in some way. Wifi. Trains. Electricity. Some marbles are grey - they are useful but dangerous. Firearms. Nuclear weapons. Gene editing. And some marbles are black. If we pull a black marble out of the bag, we hurt or destroy ourselves.
Humanity's strategy so far has been to pull marbles out of the bag as fast as we can. And that's been working out, because most marbles are white. But we're insanely lucky we haven't had a nuclear war. The USSR's early warning systems picked up 5 incoming american missiles in 1983. They didn't fire back because one of the officers on shift didn't believe the reports (why only 5 missiles?), and he declared the reports were fake.[1] If a different person was on shift, there's a good chance nuclear war would have broken out because of a sensor glitch. And that's far from the only instance. The list is terrifying: [2]
And now we're improving AI capabilities as fast as we can, despite it being pretty clearly another grey ball. AI has a lot of amazing uses. But why are we rushing so much? Doesn't seem wise.
> Humanity's strategy so far has been to pull marbles out of the bag as fast as we can.
> But why are we rushing so much?
Talking about these things with elaborate analogies only obscuring the point you already stumbled into: Humanity advances because humans are curious, driven, like to discover things, and like to push the boundaries.
Talking about humanity like one entity that operates together misses the point: There are billions of people in the world and some of them are going to discover new things.
There is no general counsel where humanity gets together and decides what humanity works on. There is no singular bag with a singular “humanity” pulling marbles out one at a time.
The analogy is too broken to be useful for the discussion.
There’s a point at which logic/reason/wisdom overrides our curiosity, and there are quite literally multi-nation groups that collaborate on matters of global importance.
There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.
> There are plenty of examples of this, e.g. when we discovered how to harness nuclear energy, we quickly realized that extreme measures needed to be taken to ensure we don’t collectively destroy ourselves.
You’re speaking of “we” as if the whole world was operating in unison, while there’s a war going on in Iran over nuclear disagreements.
The nuclear situation only reached stability after multiple countries fully developed it. I don’t see the parallels to halting AI.
It's hard for me to understand how the parallels wouldn't be abundantly clear.
The nuclear stabilization that occurred was the result of a collective understanding of the existential risk it posed leading to anti-proliferation agreements and superpowers going to great lengths to prevent nations deemed as unstable from obtaining such technology.
Some portion of the global community may collectively discover/decide that the risk AI presents is worthy of anti-proliferation treaties and wars may be fought over it.
The main gap in the comparison is that we have a much clearer understanding of the risks of unchecked nuclear weapons use than we do about what current and future AI tech might or might not unleash.
The underlying point is that we have historically placed limits on our curiosity when we deem certain paths of exploration existentially dangerous. It has yet to be seen if AI will reach those levels of existential risk, but if they do, there is plenty of precedent for stepping on the brakes.
And countries still violate these treaties. See Iran and NK.
Also the bio/DNA ones are quickly falling apart as the technology to do these kinds of things on a small scale are readily available. To the point where we're finding illegal wet labs in the US.
Nuclear was more of an exception because of many of difficulties in purifying stuff for weapons and its detectability.
AI is a much, much, much harder problem is it uses the already existing infrastructure as a base. Unless we regulate, monitor, and ban all private usage of technology AI can be developed at a small scale.
Is your argument essentially that because global treaties haven't been universally effective in all cases, we should just YOLO AI even if it has the potential to cause great harm?
It's not about merely knowing how to build a "badthing". It's about knowing why not to.
With AI, the point is who uses it for what.
Think about it like a magic wand that makes your wishes come true. Would you really want everybody to have one? Who should and who shouldn't? Who gets to decide?
And this sort of blanket argument is how you get bad science on the order of Prison experiments to Nazi scientists. Yes, academic research that pushes boundaries can be a $badthing
Bonds. If you don’t think bond prices have any relation to the economy you don’t understand basic economics. Gas prices. If you don’t think a hike in oil is a leading indicator, you don’t understand economics. Debt. If you don’t see the fiscal health of the government, including its debt level as part of the economy then you probably don’t understand macro. The economy has not been well for years. Arguably a decade of zero out interest rates that exploded into sustained inflation that continues intentionally to this day.
Taxpayers have a right to scrutinize how their tax dollars are getting spent. When the government acts like it doesn’t derive its power from the citizens, people will revolt. It’s what DOGE was all about, the resistance.
“Plotting with natural language: "Create a scatter plot of column A ver….”
No, the tedium of boilerplate code was a feature. Charts were generated by template so styling was consistent, making charts a bit more bland but easier to consume and check. You cannot achieve that same level of consistency or predictability with ai without reinventing a wheel. The models change too fast, and they all want to differentiate themselves for brand reasons, and the emphasis is on fast and easy, not on slow and foolproof, there’s no documentation of the work the way code provides documentation and an easy audit trail. You can restrict the ai by giving specs (use ggplot, use color template foo, create readable code with unit tests), but these are all similar tradeoffs as you might make with human labor too.
What llm do is to simply lower human value, not remove it entirely.
Just as results needed checking and replication before llm, they will continue to need checking and replication by humans. The humans won’t be compensated nearly as much, but humans are humans and so are not.
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