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

[Mulberry Heel]

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.

A couple of former executives for one of Musk's enterprises has set up an AI school near the SpaceX complex in Texas. There are no human teachers at the school - the students are taught solely by AI programs. The teachers are called "facilitators" and their only function is to monitor the programs and classrooms and encourage the students, otherwise they do nothing a teacher traditionally does - no lesson plans, grading, teaching, nada. The 2 executives have openly said that AI teaching programs are already superior to human teachers and that human teachers are basically obsolete. I'm not so sure I want to live in a world where most jobs are going to be taken over by AI and humans are left to do - what? Monitor the machines? People think things are bad now under Trump (and they are), but just imagine what will happen if AI begins to rapidly displace most workers. It's going to get very ugly in many ways, very quickly.

 

[1moretimeagain]

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.

At least they’re not going to leave behind a large national debt and failing social security apparatus.

 

[hedge]

And where else are all those displaced white-collar workers going to get jobs that pay an equivalent amount of money?

Ideally we will evolve into a post-labor, post-capital society and economy. People's entire identity will no longer be "worker" regardless of what type of job they had. Better yet, the idea of "worker" won't even enter their minds when pondering their own identity. I think that would be great although I doubt I'll live to see it...

 

[Mulberry Heel]

Ideally we will evolve into a post-labor, post-capital society and economy. People's entire identity will no longer be "worker" regardless of what type of job they had. Better yet, the idea of "worker" won't even enter their minds when pondering their own identity. I think that would be great although I doubt I'll live to see it...

I agree that would be ideal, but given the current state of our society it's going to be a long, long time before something like that happens. I've seen some people mention that we'll have to go to some kind of basic universal income, but right now Republicans are trying vigorously to abolish what little social safety net we already have, and I don't see them or our plutocratic bosses ever agreeing to such a concept. We've lived in a society all our lives in which tens of millions of people (perhaps a majority) believe that if you're poor or jobless it's just because you're lazy or you "earned" your poverty, and no one else owes you anything. It's far more likely that we'll simply experience riots and violence all over the globe than adopt some kind of Star Trek ideal. Again, this is assuming that AI takes hold the way many think it will and does replace a very large number (perhaps a majority) of people's jobs and careers. Given human history, and especially what we're seeing now with Trumpism, I'm much more inclined to pessimism and cynicism than optimism regarding our future for the next few decades.

 

[nrsair]

We had a new head of R&D start at my company. His introductory email was very clearly written by AI. Em dashes and odd sentence structures all over the place. We’re cooked, I’m afraid.

 

[BlooVooDoo]

I’m not sure lacking something you have to do, for at least 25 hrs/wk would be a positive environment for most people, particularly those in the 18-30 range.
Maybe our AI overlords will require that we run on a treadmill or ride an exercise bike for a couple hours each morning and evening. Keep humanity fit and moderately busy while generating electricity to feed the monsters we’ve made.

 

[tarheelbillie]

We had a new head of R&D start at my company. His introductory email was very clearly written by AI. Em dashes and odd sentence structures all over the place. We’re cooked, I’m afraid.

AI? Sounds like my style…odd.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

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.

I am 53 but need to at least double (probably more) my 401k before I could consider retiring.

My hope is that I am close enough that the economic boom from increased productivity due to AI will increase my net worth enough to be able to retire. I sort of feel like it is a race. If I lose I could easily live my last decade in poverty. If I win I might be fine (though at that point things just become very unpredictable).

I figured I can still do some manual labor if I need to. It wouldn't pay what I make but it would suppliment.

I honestly think that if worse comes to worse, the government will have to remove the 10% penalty from early withdrawals.

My son isn't going to be able to have a job either way so I am not concerned about that for him.

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

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.......

Interesting. I kind of view it the opposite. I choose self service because I don't want to make the checkout person do more work. You are definitely taking a bigger picture approach to it.

This reminds me of something my dad did about 20 years ago. We stopped at McDonalds for breakfast. When done he threw the bag of trash into the parking lot. I couldn't believe my eyes and after I got out and took the trash to the trash can, I told him this isn't the 1970's. People don't just throw trash on the ground anymore. He said, "I am providing someone a job." That is clearly not the same thing. SMH

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

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?

If we get near AGI, the robots will build and maintain the robots. At that point the only jobs that will remain are those where human interaction is important

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

Anyone watch the movie Mountainhead? It touches on some of these issues. I didn't really like the direction the story took about half way through but it was at least thought provoking.

 

[Geisterfahrer]

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.

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

1h 24m

www.imdb.com

I think he also means that we can’t just keep throwing compute at it because the energy supply won’t scale to it.

I think there’s a growing recognition that truly transformative day-to-day business use cases are not falling out of the sky and jacking enterprise productivity. And if that doesn’t get unlocked then large scale job loss can’t happen.

 

[gregh1]

My son isn't going to be able to have a job either way so I am not concerned about that for him.

Maybe one day we'll have great AI agents that could be fine-tuned personal therapists for folks having trouble due to autism and any accompanying feelings, behaviors, disorders. Some AI are already becoming great personal teachers due to them being able to get personalized feedback to morph their personalized didactic approach and material. I mentioned the DeepMind "training" in novel worlds, and if you could create a world in which sensory perceptions were randomly overstimulated in some cases and understimulated in others, where humans had trouble with emotional regulation, where humans were easily distracted, where expressive and receptive lang were a challenge, where visuals are more powerful than vocal instructions... if that AI could learn to navigate that world AND learn theraputic skills you could have a pretty nice counselor if you could afford the compute power. I'm sure this is what Kennedy is working on.

 

[Zoo_View]

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.

Train him/her to be John Connor.

The machines will go after us at some point.

 

[tallheel95]

Train him/her to be John Connor.

The machines will go after us at some point.

Why wouldn’t they? Humans are basically self-centered and short-sighted, and we are on a path to destroy the planet. Any machine using basic logic would figure that out and try to limit our impact by whatever means possible. We have had the luxury of being an apex predator for about 300,000 years. Not sure how much longer our luck is going to last.

 

[sringwal]

Every once in awhile, I will give ChatGPT an offbeat prompt. Today, I tasked it with "create something unexpected"

Here is what it wrote:

A Conversation Between a Forgotten Sock and a Microwave


Sock:
"Do you ever feel abandoned?
Like one moment you’re part of a pair,
And the next—
You’re stuck under a bed, collecting dust bunnies and existential dread?"


Microwave:
"Try being expected to reheat existence
One soggy burrito at a time.
No one thanks me when I radiate time itself.
They just slam the door and curse when cheese explodes."


Sock:
"At least you get attention.
I was worn on a rainy Tuesday in 2017,
Dropped during laundry, and left to contemplate mortality
beneath a radiator."


Microwave:
"...I envy your stillness."


Sock:
"...I envy your heat."

 

[mpaer]

A couple of former executives for one of Musk's enterprises has set up an AI school near the SpaceX complex in Texas. There are no human teachers at the school - the students are taught solely by AI programs. The teachers are called "facilitators" and their only function is to monitor the programs and classrooms and encourage the students, otherwise they do nothing a teacher traditionally does - no lesson plans, grading, teaching, nada. The 2 executives have openly said that AI teaching programs are already superior to human teachers and that human teachers are basically obsolete. I'm not so sure I want to live in a world where most jobs are going to be taken over by AI and humans are left to do - what? Monitor the machines? People think things are bad now under Trump (and they are), but just imagine what will happen if AI begins to rapidly displace most workers. It's going to get very ugly in many ways, very quickly.

This scares the hell out of me Teachers do a lot more than impart knowledge or stimulate responses. They provide an emotinal adult connection to students. Teachers are part time Social Workers, part time Psychologists, part time Nurses I don't see AI doing any of that.........ugggh

 

[ChapelHillSooner]

This scares the hell out of me Teachers do a lot more than impart knowledge or stimulate responses. They provide an emotinal adult connection to students. Teachers are part time Social Workers, part time Psychologists, part time Nurses I don't see AI doing any of that.........ugggh

I would take AI over some of my elementary teachers. Two or three of them were themselves very emotionally disturbed. They tended to take it out on kids who were not at smart, came from the wrong side of town, or had what would be considered ADHD today. Those kids were verbally abused daily and would likely be considered physically abused as well.

My sister who was six years older than me would get enraged when thinking of the small town school we went to. She told the story about how she and her two friends were getting a spanking in high school and the teacher had a hard on while doing it.

 

[ZenMode]

 

[gregh1]

Probably a deepfake^

Regardless i think he's partly right, but there are folks who have chosen to believe bat-shit crazy straight out of tabloids for decades. People see, hear, believe what they want to believe. And i think it will be younger generations who jump to skepticism more quickly than older.

I look forward to the internet cesspool no longer being a source of truth but the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" type stuff makes you wonder will fill the void.