What was hard to define thus hard to automate thus a comparative advantage for humans was precisely that capacity to understand and work with humans. This is the last nail in the coffin of those careers.
"Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?" - "Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers." ... "What would you say you do here?" - "Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
I wonder about that a bit. I work in that gap of “what does the user actually want?” and “what does the system designer do?” and there is still a lot of gap there. I have been involved in a lot of ERP/MRP implementations, and the most notable thing is that the designers of said systems clearly have never used nor intend to use their products, and users often have a really hard time understanding their processes at an explicit level. That leaves a lot of figuring between what do we even want and what can it even do.
I wonder how long it will take for a teenager to make a movie with the production value of Avatar or a comparable big budget film using just a home computer and some AI. I'm thinking of those graphs showing the declining cost of some consumer good, like computers, or VHS players in the 90's, and that in time we'll see how it took $240 million to make Avatar in 2009, but by 2029 or 2039, that kind of production could be available to most people with a computer.
I think we’ve been there for a while. Back when I was teaching I often gave tests that were 30-60% homework questions, and pretty reliably there would be a bunch of students that couldn’t answer them despite having done so on the homework. The internet already did a good job of answering every question, and working with classmates went the rest of the way. I think that, assuming we care about measuring competence, we will move ever more to direct testing and not homework. Whether we will care about assessment and standards is an open question, however.
Grading and feedback are certainly big aspects of teaching that a good LLM can help with.
In Slovakia, most BS & BA & PhD testing is done with oral exams. My professor wife is not happy about the idea, but in the near future the written work of students will be converted by LLM into a set of questions that the author of the paper would know. Directly in the work or the references, as well as reasonable speculations. The examiners will then be asking the questions and grading the answers, or letting the LLM grade.
I’m slowly going thru Quantum Country, the ml q&a online book by Andy Matushak; machine learning assisted, not yet ai (I think). An interesting step away from current linear books. But not yet too close An Illustrated Primer, just as no LLM is yet talking like HAL 9000 (not 2000). Written chat is not quite yet the superpower of talking back and forth, but a huge step, maybe 80%.
Managers using internal LLM assistants will soon be far more productive than those which don’t, which will a big increase in the searching for good tutorials on how to use llm.
Imagine a quiver of robots that tend a vegetable garden or a farm. Each of these robots has specialized tools and means of moving about the garden. One might fly like a drone; another might roll like tank; another might crawl like a spider. One might pull weeds; another might remove or zap pests; another might water plants or apply fertilizer.
Pulling weeds in a vegetable garden is an extremely difficult task for a robot. Using herbicides and pesticides is much easier, but think about the environmental benefits of using robots. No more harmful chemicals. Robots can be taught which plants are weeds and which are food; which bugs are pests and which are ladybugs and honeybees. Each of these robots would need a camera, ideally multi or hyper spectral to help identify weeds and pests. An LLM is essential for this application because every vegetable garden and farm is different. Variations include shape, topography, obstacles, weed type, food plant type (grapes vs carrots vs apple trees), and pest type. And look at the upsides for the farmer and farm workers. More time to read and learn; less time doing mindless work. Politics should improve. Poverty will be reduced. Life expectancy will increase.
Likewise, mowing the lawn with gas-powered mowers pushed by humans will become a thing of the past. Each homeowner will program with a LLM his or her electric mower. This means mom and dad spending more time with kids, less inhalation of combustion exhaust fumes, and more time reading and learning. It also means quieter neighborhoods.
Likewise imagine the benefits of LLM robots to clean house, cook dinner, fold laundry, get groceries.
Classrooms will change too. Imagine a classroom of 20 students, one teacher and a number of robot teaching aids. One robot will lead a group of 4 students in a Socratic dialogue about minimum wage. Each student will have ample time to participate in the dialogue receiving answers to his or her own specific questions, gaining practice speaking, questioning and being respectful.
Makes me think I should get to work building robots.
It’s not all positive though. Might robots be used to sabotage, murder, indoctrinate, harass, injure, steal, and humiliate? Yes, but overall things will get bette.
I am by no means industrious all the time; but a day spent doing just the sort of tasks you wish to automate, or indeed more physical ones still, is a day when I feel most content, least fretful, and following which I tend to sleep the best.
I have concluded that I am not like most people, but given the population, I am very much like, probably exactly like, a huge number of people. And I don't think the way in which I may be an outlier, is described by the above.
Now I do think the Really Unusual People might benefit in just the way you describe, from freedom from tasks.
But even there, the guy we often think of as the Most Unusual of all, Einstein - seems rather to have enjoyed his mundane work, or at least made it compatible with the programs he was running in his mind. I think this may be true of Newton, too, at least in later life - although I have read no biography.
*if* it knew to go around the evening primrose and the grape hyacinths and the sedges that have edges, the ruellia and the Venus looking glass and the fall aster, etc (or whatever is your local equivalent) …
Because even today, poverty is mostly an individual lifestyle choice, like promiscuity or crime, but is blamed on society; those moral agents choosing the bad behaviors are also often victims of their parents’ bad choices, and friends’ bad choices. With more absolute wealth available to redistribute, more will go to undeserving poor, who will have higher income poverty vices, but not choose to get out of poverty by being more responsible.
Think SF drug use in most major cities, and government programs to make sure the problems don’t really get solved, since solving the problem ends the need for the govt program.
Still, for most folks living in nice places, a lot of stuff will get a bit nicer.
The fact that more poverty survives in some places than in others suggests cultural and geographic causes rather than human or technological, since technology spreads more easily than human relationships and moving can be tough. The challenge thus becomes how to use technology to support humans and to reduce cultural and geographical wealth disparities. The research, assembled by the poster of this, https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1733482350892171368, increasingly shows that given feelings of security and potential, humans tend to act in ways that reduce their own and everyone else's poverty. In other words, poverty is NOT a lifestyle choice, but the consequence of not having better choices. The data for UBI just becomes stronger and stronger. Thanks, Milton Friedman, for the original kernel of NIT, and thanks to his successors for realizing that using consumption taxes instead of work taxes to fund UBI is an even better idea.
The minimum material circumstances will improve. Poor people will no longer live without indoor plumbing, and electricity. They will eat regularly. They will still be poor. Most will not be valued by the people around them. They will not value themselves.
The first part of your response sounds like a relative definition of poverty. There will always be 10% of people who are the 10% that are the poorest people. The second part of your response sounds like you are talking about something entirely different from poverty.
Poverty doesn’t seem to depend on absolute material conditions. The richest people on earth in the 1400s couldn’t get antibiotics. They didn’t have indoor plumbing or central heating. Very few people in the USA go without those things, except by choice. Yet we are told that poverty is a problem. What, then, is the difference between rich and poor?
"What if a student uses an AI to write an essay? ...if the student... reads the essay and also reads the feedback it receives from an AI grader, the student can learn something."
What if a student cheats and plagiarizes? While in graduate school, I had a student in a 200-level course who plagiarized. It was obvious from the content, so I failed him on the term paper. Now, I'm guessing that A.I. can detect plagiarizing in seconds and even identify the source material. Will make plagiarizing almost impossible!
A danger of AI. Creation of a new "AI Astrology" that is very believable, but totally false.
With AI being based upon neural networks like animal brains including human brains, they are very powerful pattern matching devices. The human brain looking at the random pattern of lights at night (a true 3-D pattern viewed in a 2-D slice) created a complete set of meaningless correlations with human events and human behaviors in all societies around the world we now call Astrology.
As the number of possible hypothesis for pattern matching correlation analysis is almost infinite it is hard to separate valid relationships from nonsense in a complex neural network ( the 2 sigma used by social science is clearly inappropriate and even the 5 sigma often used by the real sciences -- like with the Higgs particle -- is questionable).
I had someone give me a search via AI for a very specific highly technical issue and it generated two references with abstracts that were spot on. I was familiar with the authors and the journals, so everything looked OK with the abstracts proving a technical point in a legal case. Doing a lot of peer review in this area provided my access to the relevant journals so a client asked me to get copies of the journal article for the details. However, neither article existed and I even checked the Russian Sci-Hub for the reference (they have most of the real scientific literature of the world).
Getting built in scientific and critical thinking in AI may be as hard as getting human to think scientifically and critically. In academia, humans in the soft areas have already changed the meaning of critical thinking into a form of Astrology that ignores relevant variables like culture in their pattern matching.
Assign ChatGPT to proofread your Substack posts. A brilliant writer should at least get the first word right. You wrote, "The quickly understand what you want." I think you mean, "THEY quickly understand what you want."
I am, as always I know, skeptical of the move from LLMs grading to the real world. One advantage the grading and other in computer tasks have is that they allow for “machine intensive debugging”, that is, you run the program, see the results, tweak the program, run again, etc. until all the problems are solved. That works well if your machine is fast and cheap, but not so well if it is slow or expensive. You no doubt remember clearly the pain of submitting a punch card program with errors and not finding out till the next day, let alone being able to fix it.
When it comes to expense, that will be an interesting problem too, as if the process you are trying to iteratively get the machine to understand costs a grand in materials every time you try, and it takes a lot of tries, that’s a problem. The key there will be whether you can figure out the right prompt and then set it and forget it in the factory, because every situation is similar enough to not require tweaks, or if situations are different enough that unique tweaks to code will remain and remain expensive.
I agree however that LLM are a big step forward in getting the machine to understand generally what you want, and lowers the investment in person-machine translation that it takes to use the machine significantly.
Maybe - yet if anything, in my region the experience of being "served" and the food product of the "service" industry (basically the only service, apart from auto maintenance and receiving mail, that I personally am familiar with) seem if anything, less reliable, less consistent, more chaotic, and where food is concerned - not as good - as it used to be.
I don't know whether automation was meant to improve anything quality-wise - have not heard that claimed - but this phenomenon overall is hard to reconcile with the hordes of people coming in. Unless they are coming for vastly different reasons than they used to.
What was hard to define thus hard to automate thus a comparative advantage for humans was precisely that capacity to understand and work with humans. This is the last nail in the coffin of those careers.
"Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people?" - "Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers." ... "What would you say you do here?" - "Well--well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
I wonder about that a bit. I work in that gap of “what does the user actually want?” and “what does the system designer do?” and there is still a lot of gap there. I have been involved in a lot of ERP/MRP implementations, and the most notable thing is that the designers of said systems clearly have never used nor intend to use their products, and users often have a really hard time understanding their processes at an explicit level. That leaves a lot of figuring between what do we even want and what can it even do.
Top 10 in my all-time favorite movies!
I wonder how long it will take for a teenager to make a movie with the production value of Avatar or a comparable big budget film using just a home computer and some AI. I'm thinking of those graphs showing the declining cost of some consumer good, like computers, or VHS players in the 90's, and that in time we'll see how it took $240 million to make Avatar in 2009, but by 2029 or 2039, that kind of production could be available to most people with a computer.
Homework produced by and graded by LLMs. What could possibly go wrong?
I think we’ve been there for a while. Back when I was teaching I often gave tests that were 30-60% homework questions, and pretty reliably there would be a bunch of students that couldn’t answer them despite having done so on the homework. The internet already did a good job of answering every question, and working with classmates went the rest of the way. I think that, assuming we care about measuring competence, we will move ever more to direct testing and not homework. Whether we will care about assessment and standards is an open question, however.
Arnold
Interesting to use this to analyze the “Sermon on the Mount”.
Thanks
Many types of communication are inherently one-sided. Scoring those for balance will produce nonsensical results.
Grading and feedback are certainly big aspects of teaching that a good LLM can help with.
In Slovakia, most BS & BA & PhD testing is done with oral exams. My professor wife is not happy about the idea, but in the near future the written work of students will be converted by LLM into a set of questions that the author of the paper would know. Directly in the work or the references, as well as reasonable speculations. The examiners will then be asking the questions and grading the answers, or letting the LLM grade.
I’m slowly going thru Quantum Country, the ml q&a online book by Andy Matushak; machine learning assisted, not yet ai (I think). An interesting step away from current linear books. But not yet too close An Illustrated Primer, just as no LLM is yet talking like HAL 9000 (not 2000). Written chat is not quite yet the superpower of talking back and forth, but a huge step, maybe 80%.
Managers using internal LLM assistants will soon be far more productive than those which don’t, which will a big increase in the searching for good tutorials on how to use llm.
Imagine a quiver of robots that tend a vegetable garden or a farm. Each of these robots has specialized tools and means of moving about the garden. One might fly like a drone; another might roll like tank; another might crawl like a spider. One might pull weeds; another might remove or zap pests; another might water plants or apply fertilizer.
Pulling weeds in a vegetable garden is an extremely difficult task for a robot. Using herbicides and pesticides is much easier, but think about the environmental benefits of using robots. No more harmful chemicals. Robots can be taught which plants are weeds and which are food; which bugs are pests and which are ladybugs and honeybees. Each of these robots would need a camera, ideally multi or hyper spectral to help identify weeds and pests. An LLM is essential for this application because every vegetable garden and farm is different. Variations include shape, topography, obstacles, weed type, food plant type (grapes vs carrots vs apple trees), and pest type. And look at the upsides for the farmer and farm workers. More time to read and learn; less time doing mindless work. Politics should improve. Poverty will be reduced. Life expectancy will increase.
Likewise, mowing the lawn with gas-powered mowers pushed by humans will become a thing of the past. Each homeowner will program with a LLM his or her electric mower. This means mom and dad spending more time with kids, less inhalation of combustion exhaust fumes, and more time reading and learning. It also means quieter neighborhoods.
Likewise imagine the benefits of LLM robots to clean house, cook dinner, fold laundry, get groceries.
Classrooms will change too. Imagine a classroom of 20 students, one teacher and a number of robot teaching aids. One robot will lead a group of 4 students in a Socratic dialogue about minimum wage. Each student will have ample time to participate in the dialogue receiving answers to his or her own specific questions, gaining practice speaking, questioning and being respectful.
Makes me think I should get to work building robots.
It’s not all positive though. Might robots be used to sabotage, murder, indoctrinate, harass, injure, steal, and humiliate? Yes, but overall things will get bette.
I am by no means industrious all the time; but a day spent doing just the sort of tasks you wish to automate, or indeed more physical ones still, is a day when I feel most content, least fretful, and following which I tend to sleep the best.
I have concluded that I am not like most people, but given the population, I am very much like, probably exactly like, a huge number of people. And I don't think the way in which I may be an outlier, is described by the above.
Now I do think the Really Unusual People might benefit in just the way you describe, from freedom from tasks.
But even there, the guy we often think of as the Most Unusual of all, Einstein - seems rather to have enjoyed his mundane work, or at least made it compatible with the programs he was running in his mind. I think this may be true of Newton, too, at least in later life - although I have read no biography.
I agree. There’s peace in mundane work, but having a robot mow the lawn would be nice.
*if* it knew to go around the evening primrose and the grape hyacinths and the sedges that have edges, the ruellia and the Venus looking glass and the fall aster, etc (or whatever is your local equivalent) …
Great ideas, like I’ve also had.
But, sadly, poverty is more likely to increase.
Because even today, poverty is mostly an individual lifestyle choice, like promiscuity or crime, but is blamed on society; those moral agents choosing the bad behaviors are also often victims of their parents’ bad choices, and friends’ bad choices. With more absolute wealth available to redistribute, more will go to undeserving poor, who will have higher income poverty vices, but not choose to get out of poverty by being more responsible.
Think SF drug use in most major cities, and government programs to make sure the problems don’t really get solved, since solving the problem ends the need for the govt program.
Still, for most folks living in nice places, a lot of stuff will get a bit nicer.
Wanna bet on it? :)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-living-in-extreme-poverty-cost-of-basic-needs
The fact that more poverty survives in some places than in others suggests cultural and geographic causes rather than human or technological, since technology spreads more easily than human relationships and moving can be tough. The challenge thus becomes how to use technology to support humans and to reduce cultural and geographical wealth disparities. The research, assembled by the poster of this, https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1733482350892171368, increasingly shows that given feelings of security and potential, humans tend to act in ways that reduce their own and everyone else's poverty. In other words, poverty is NOT a lifestyle choice, but the consequence of not having better choices. The data for UBI just becomes stronger and stronger. Thanks, Milton Friedman, for the original kernel of NIT, and thanks to his successors for realizing that using consumption taxes instead of work taxes to fund UBI is an even better idea.
The minimum material circumstances will improve. Poor people will no longer live without indoor plumbing, and electricity. They will eat regularly. They will still be poor. Most will not be valued by the people around them. They will not value themselves.
The first part of your response sounds like a relative definition of poverty. There will always be 10% of people who are the 10% that are the poorest people. The second part of your response sounds like you are talking about something entirely different from poverty.
Poverty doesn’t seem to depend on absolute material conditions. The richest people on earth in the 1400s couldn’t get antibiotics. They didn’t have indoor plumbing or central heating. Very few people in the USA go without those things, except by choice. Yet we are told that poverty is a problem. What, then, is the difference between rich and poor?
"What if a student uses an AI to write an essay? ...if the student... reads the essay and also reads the feedback it receives from an AI grader, the student can learn something."
What if a student cheats and plagiarizes? While in graduate school, I had a student in a 200-level course who plagiarized. It was obvious from the content, so I failed him on the term paper. Now, I'm guessing that A.I. can detect plagiarizing in seconds and even identify the source material. Will make plagiarizing almost impossible!
A danger of AI. Creation of a new "AI Astrology" that is very believable, but totally false.
With AI being based upon neural networks like animal brains including human brains, they are very powerful pattern matching devices. The human brain looking at the random pattern of lights at night (a true 3-D pattern viewed in a 2-D slice) created a complete set of meaningless correlations with human events and human behaviors in all societies around the world we now call Astrology.
As the number of possible hypothesis for pattern matching correlation analysis is almost infinite it is hard to separate valid relationships from nonsense in a complex neural network ( the 2 sigma used by social science is clearly inappropriate and even the 5 sigma often used by the real sciences -- like with the Higgs particle -- is questionable).
I had someone give me a search via AI for a very specific highly technical issue and it generated two references with abstracts that were spot on. I was familiar with the authors and the journals, so everything looked OK with the abstracts proving a technical point in a legal case. Doing a lot of peer review in this area provided my access to the relevant journals so a client asked me to get copies of the journal article for the details. However, neither article existed and I even checked the Russian Sci-Hub for the reference (they have most of the real scientific literature of the world).
Getting built in scientific and critical thinking in AI may be as hard as getting human to think scientifically and critically. In academia, humans in the soft areas have already changed the meaning of critical thinking into a form of Astrology that ignores relevant variables like culture in their pattern matching.
Assign ChatGPT to proofread your Substack posts. A brilliant writer should at least get the first word right. You wrote, "The quickly understand what you want." I think you mean, "THEY quickly understand what you want."
I am, as always I know, skeptical of the move from LLMs grading to the real world. One advantage the grading and other in computer tasks have is that they allow for “machine intensive debugging”, that is, you run the program, see the results, tweak the program, run again, etc. until all the problems are solved. That works well if your machine is fast and cheap, but not so well if it is slow or expensive. You no doubt remember clearly the pain of submitting a punch card program with errors and not finding out till the next day, let alone being able to fix it.
When it comes to expense, that will be an interesting problem too, as if the process you are trying to iteratively get the machine to understand costs a grand in materials every time you try, and it takes a lot of tries, that’s a problem. The key there will be whether you can figure out the right prompt and then set it and forget it in the factory, because every situation is similar enough to not require tweaks, or if situations are different enough that unique tweaks to code will remain and remain expensive.
I agree however that LLM are a big step forward in getting the machine to understand generally what you want, and lowers the investment in person-machine translation that it takes to use the machine significantly.
Handle
Basic, fundamental premises are not compatible.
Especially ontological ideas. For example. . .
Are humans chemical robots (Descartes), smarter animals (Darwin), or image of God (Moses)?
No real way to combine.
Thanks
Clay
Demand for immigrant labor will fall, even in places experiencing "fertility crises".
Maybe - yet if anything, in my region the experience of being "served" and the food product of the "service" industry (basically the only service, apart from auto maintenance and receiving mail, that I personally am familiar with) seem if anything, less reliable, less consistent, more chaotic, and where food is concerned - not as good - as it used to be.
I don't know whether automation was meant to improve anything quality-wise - have not heard that claimed - but this phenomenon overall is hard to reconcile with the hordes of people coming in. Unless they are coming for vastly different reasons than they used to.