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Coding, Data Science, A.I. catch-All | Grok update goes MechaHitler

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Good news: AI is going to advance biological research and drug discovery.

Bad news: it is going to replace lots white color jobs if we have enough energy to power it. Anthropic AI folks were discussing the odd upcoming era in which AI would be making business decisions instead of humans, but robots aren't advanced enough yet to implement the AI agent's desires so humans would just be grunts.

A guy at the company where I work has been hand-feeding and fine tuning something Claude oriented which is really impressive and definitely going to make my job much easier and more efficient. If I can be more efficient then they can afford to lay me or my cohorts off.

I need to learn more about the prompt engineering and tuning side for the sake of job security.
 
Anthropic CEO was interviewed and some of his thoughts could be hyperbole, especially regarding timing, but on the general long-term impacts I think he's probably right. He's warning of a white-collar job truncation, especially for entry-level, and stating that public and gov aren't talking about this enough.

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www.axios.com

Some of the interesting parts are his ideas for solving this dilemma:

  1. Speed up public awareness with government and AI companies more transparently explaining the workforce changes to come. Be clear that some jobs are so vulnerable that it's worth reflecting on your career path now. "The first step is warn," Amodei says. He created an Anthropic Economic Index, which provides real-world data on Claude usage across occupations, and the Anthropic Economic Advisory Council to help stoke public debate. Amodei said he hopes the index spurs other companies to share insights on how workers are using their models, giving policymakers a more comprehensive picture.
  2. Slow down job displacement by helping American workers better understand how AI can augment their tasks now. That at least gives more people a legit shot at navigating this transition. Encourage CEOs to educate themselves and their workers.
  3. Most members of Congress are woefully uninformed about the realities of AI and its effect on their constituents. Better-informed public officials can help better inform the public. A joint committee on AI or more formal briefings for all lawmakers would be a start. Same at the local level.
  4. Begin debating policy solutions for an economy dominated by superhuman intelligence. This ranges from job retraining programs to innovative ways to spread wealth creation by big AI companies if Amodei's worst fears come true. "It's going to involve taxes on people like me, and maybe specifically on the AI companies," the Anthropic boss told us.
A policy idea Amodei floated with us is a "token tax": Every time someone uses a model and the AI company makes money, perhaps 3% of that revenue "goes to the government and is redistributed in some way."
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gregh1 said:
Good news: AI is going to advance biological research and drug discovery.

Bad news: it is going to replace lots white color jobs if we have enough energy to power it. Anthropic AI folks were discussing the odd upcoming era in which AI would be making business decisions instead of humans, but robots aren't advanced enough yet to implement the AI agent's desires so humans would just be grunts.

A guy at the company where I work has been hand-feeding and fine tuning something Claude oriented which is really impressive and definitely going to make my job much easier and more efficient. If I can be more efficient then they can afford to lay me or my cohorts off.

I need to learn more about the prompt engineering and tuning side for the sake of job security.
Click to expand...
And where else are all those displaced white-collar workers going to get jobs that pay an equivalent amount of money? We've already seen what automation has done to manufacturing jobs, what happens when large numbers of white collar and service industry jobs also disappear? Not a pleasant thought.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
And where else are all those displaced white-collar workers going to get jobs that pay an equivalent amount of money? We've already seen what automation has done to manufacturing jobs, what happens when large numbers of white collar and service industry jobs also disappear? Not a pleasant thought.
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I am guy that tries hard to avoid automated self serve check outs at stores. Cause it crushes the damn minimum wage jobs the checkout folks have.......
 
I work in a mid-career position in finance (fairly specialized) and I could absolutely see my job completely replaced by AI in 10 years, assuming incremental improvements. I believe this will ultimately lead to UBI, but how does that work in practice? Does the 45-year-old displaced attorney with a $5K mortgage receive enough benefits to service his debt? What should I encourage my 2-year-old to focus on academically? I don't think white collar jobs will exist in 25 years.
 
jobs? it wont matter once specialized AI gets into the hands of the many nations and people who would love to see an end to America....and theres lots of them.

live day to day.....its just a matter of time
 

Carolina AI Literacy

cail.unc.edu cail.unc.edu

"The Carolina AI Literacy (CAIL) initiative provides leadership, research expertise, and resources as the UNC-CH community integrates AI into its work. CAIL offers literacy programs focused on the intellectual and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. We also engage in research investigating the uses of AI tools in writing and communication. We bring together faculty, instructors, library experts, and students to better understand the key challenges linked with artificial intelligence, and then develop interventions and research programs aimed squarely at addressing these concerns."
 
Willy said:
I work in a mid-career position in finance (fairly specialized) and I could absolutely see my job completely replaced by AI in 10 years, assuming incremental improvements. I believe this will ultimately lead to UBI, but how does that work in practice? Does the 45-year-old displaced attorney with a $5K mortgage receive enough benefits to service his debt? What should I encourage my 2-year-old to focus on academically? I don't think white collar jobs will exist in 25 years.
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Something related to energy (engineering) or Computer Science I guess, or some type of mechanical engineer? It is going to take massive energy to keep all these things running. Then some software/devOps folks MAY still be needed to cobble together the pieces or approve the AI-generated cobbling. Then mechanical engineer to assist the robots as they replace the mechanical parts at the data centers which are doing the white-collar processing when they wear down?
 
OGtruthhurts said:
jobs? it wont matter once specialized AI gets into the hands of the many nations and people who would love to see an end to America....and theres lots of them.

live day to day.....its just a matter of time
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America needs to be the land of efficient data-centers... whether that means inexpensive construction/land, cheap energy, or efficient labor to keep them running.
 
Mulberry Heel said:
And where else are all those displaced white-collar workers going to get jobs that pay an equivalent amount of money? We've already seen what automation has done to manufacturing jobs, what happens when large numbers of white collar and service industry jobs also disappear? Not a pleasant thought.
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And the rate of change is going to be the doozy. Manufacturing left the piedmont over a period of time and that hurt, but the state of NC has mostly done okay, but can you imagine if if banking or something left Charlotte over a period of just a few years.
 
Geisterfahrer said:
Kind of a counterweight to Amodei’s gloomy scenarios, ☝🏼, a really thoughtful piece by a guy who is also super close to what’s happening:

www.dwarkesh.com

Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner

Continual learning is a huge bottleneck
www.dwarkesh.com www.dwarkesh.com
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That is interesting, and the comments are interesting too. But the result sounds gloomy even if it happens in 2040 instead of this decade.

Lots of this stuff is over my head, like his comment "After 2030, AI progress has to mostly come from algorithmic progress." I think he's saying that our computational power is so amazing now that if we don't have AGI now, we never will without algorithmic progress, but i'd think algorithmic process is a certainty. There was a time before Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) was a thing, and LLMs had just very specific pools of knowledge to dip into, but RAG opened up some gates. I don't see why more novel concepts to chain all these things together, or improve ways of chaining won't easily come out of the woodwork in terms of design.

I saw "The Thinking Game" - documentary about DeepMind, a bit of a bio about their CEO, and the way they move from training against rules-based games (pong, then checkers, then Go) to training about make-believe environments (the way baby humans have to learn from a novel world) was fascinating, and the outcome was an AI that can be competitive in games with loose rules like Starcraft.

www.imdb.com

The Thinking Game (2024) ⭐ 7.6 | Documentary, Sci-Fi

1h 24m
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com
 
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Willy said:
What should I encourage my 2-year-old to focus on academically? I don't think white collar jobs will exist in 25 years.
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1. I know this is a hard projection to make, but I'd say it depends considerably on what you think his or her intelligence level will be in 20 years.

When my eldest son was 3, I started teaching him math and science. In particular, we enjoyed a great game called Crazy Machines 2, which was almost a primer for engineering design. But I was anticipating that he would be brilliant because he has good genes for intelligence and already he was showing precociousness at that age. Well, he developed. He's not gotten a grade lower than a 4.0 in his life, and that has continued at U of M this year. He will be studying computer engineering with a minor or double major in physics, with an eye to quantum computing.

Well, not everyone can do quantum mechanics, or get a straight 4.0. For instance, one of my twins struggles with math. He's the only person in my extended family who isn't good at math; it's probably his autism. What he loves is voice acting -- he's really scary good at impersonations for being 10 years old (he can do a killer Bane, which is a fucking hard accent to do). He also wants to be an author. So will college be worth it for him? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure what he would study. I suspect voice acting jobs (and acting jobs in general) will be relatively resilient to AI, so that's good, but I don't have a clear sense of how you get to that career. It's not my experience.

2. What I would do with a 2 year old is start the kid on math and science at a very young age, the most that they can handle. You'd be surprised what a little kid can do if you set high expectations and offer support. Well, that's my experience, though as noted my eldest son is unusually gifted. Still, get a game like Turing Complete, or Space Chem, or one of any number of factory building games, and play the game with the kid. Those are too advanced for a 2 year old or even a 4 year old, but can a 5 year old learn digital logic? I think so.

Kids' brains are especially plastic at a young age. If you start teaching them math and science, it wires their brain to make those concepts completely intuitive. I taught my son Bayesian Probability when he was four, and it's now the easiest thing in the world for him.

3. And keep in mind the competition. A Yale Law professor tells a story of going on a hike with his eight year old daughter. He asked her how many hikes have they gone on. She initially said two, but revised to 1 with a standard deviation of about one and a half. Age 8. That's your kids' competition, and I worry that increasingly the economy is going to be winner take all. The world will become divided between those who make the robots, and those who work for the robots, and I know which side of that coin I'd like to be on. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to do that.

Biggest point, I think: you need to be involved in your kids' education. If you look at the bios of a lot of the big tech players, you'll often see a professor. That makes sense: professors both a) have a lot of time on their hands and b) are good at teaching (and are quite smart). They start molding their kids at an early age. Sometimes they should pay more attention to ethics than they do (e.g. Sam Bankman-Friend), but anyway -- again, that's the competition. If you aren't a professor it might be harder for you, but if you want your kid to succeed, it's important to start being involved now. Like really involved.

If all of this intimidates you . . . well, it intimidates most people. I don't make the rules; I just play the game.

Note also that college admissions are crazy. My son, the valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA and 5s on every AP exam he took (6 exams; 5 courses) and who got As in the math classes he was taking at the local university as a senior, was accepted to University of Michigan and nowhere else but safety schools. Got wait listed at Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. CORNELL! That used to be a safety school. Got flat rejected at MIT and Princeton. His SAT scores were not the best but they were 1560 or so, which is about median for MIT.

In other words, better get cranking on college application stuff starting in middle school, if not earlier. Planning for college is a decades long job now.
 
Boomers are really the luckiest generation to have ever lived. They grew up in the postwar Pax-Americana, were able to go to college for basically nothing, buy a house for basically nothing (which appreciated tremendously), restructure the tax code to benefit them, and now they're going to reap the capital gains AI is sure to bestow without having to worry about the employment ramifications. Oh, and they will also check out before the bill for the climate catastrophe and national debt they neglected comes due.
 
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