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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I have considered it, but that's just science fiction at this point. I'm only going to evaluate the implications of Open AI being a private company based on products they actually have, which, as far as I'm aware, boil down to two things: LLMs and image generators. The company touts the ability of its LLMs based on arbitrary benchmarks that don't say anything about its ability to solve real-world problems; as a lawyer, nothing I doing in my everyday life remotely resembles answering bar exam questions. Every time I've asked AI to do something where I'm not just fooling around and want an answer that won't involve a ton of leg work it's come up woefully short, and this hasn't changed, despite so-called "revolutionary" advancements. For example, I was trying to get a ballpark estimate on some statistic where there wasn't explicitly published data that would involve looking at related data, making certain assumptions, and applying a statistical model to interpolate what I was looking for. And all I got was that the AI refused to do it because the result would suffer from inaccuracies. After fighting with it, I finally got it to spit out a number, but it didn't tell me how it arrived at that number. This is the kind of thing that AI should be able to do, but it doesn't. If the data I was looking for were collected and published, then I'm confident that it would have given it to me, but I'm not that impressed by technology that can spit out numbers I could have easily looked up on my own.

The whole premise behind science fiction is that it might actually happen as technology advances. Space travel and colonizing other planets is physically possible, and will likely happen sometime in the next million years if we don't all blow up first. The models are now much better at both writing and college mathematics than the average human. They're not there yet, but they're clearly advancing, and I'm not sure how you can think it's not plausibly they pass us in the next hundred or so years?

I have considered it

I'm only going to evaluate the implications of ... products they actually have

It seems like you have not, in fact, considered the possibility of models improving. Is this the meme where some people literally can't evaluate hypotheticals? Again, doomers are worried about future, better models. What would you be worried about if you found out that models had been made that can do your job, and all other jobs, better than you?

I certainly have the ability to evaluate hypotheticals. Where I get off the train is when people treat these hypotheticals as though they're short-term inevitabilities. You can take any technology you want to and talk about how improvements mean we'll have some kind of society-disruping change in the next few decades that we have to prepare for, but that doesn't mean it will happen, and it doesn't mean we should invest significant resources into dealing with the hypothetical disruption caused by non-existent technology. The best, most recent example is self-driving cars. In 2016 it seemed like we were tantalizingly close to a world where self-driving cars were commonplace. I remember people arguing that young children probably wouldn't ever have driver's licenses because autonomous vehicles would completely dominate the roads by the time they were old enough to drive. Now here we are, almost a decade later, and this reality seems further away than it did in 2016. The promised improvements never came, high profile crashes sapped consumer confidence, and the big players either pulled out of the market or scaled back considerably. Eight years later we have yet to see a single consumer product that promises a fully autonomous experience to the point where you can sleep or read the paper while driving. There are a few hire car services that offer autonomous options, but these are almost novelties at this point; their limitations are well documented, and they're only used by people who don't actually care about reaching their destination.

In 2015 there was some local primary candidate who was running on a platform of putting rules in place to help with the transition to autonomous heavy trucking. These days, it would seem absurd for a politician to be investing so much energy into such a concern. Yes, you have to consider hypotheticals. But those come with any new piece of technology. The problem I have is when every incremental advancement treats these hypotheticals as though they were inevitabilities.

Again, doomers are worried about future, better models. What would you be worried about if you found out that models had been made that can do your job, and all other jobs, better than you?

I'm a lawyer, and people here have repeatedly said that LLMs were going to make my job obsolete within the next few years. I doubt these people have any idea what lawyers actually do, because I can't think of a single task that AI could replace.

In 2016 it seemed like we were tantalizingly close to a world where self-driving cars were commonplace. I remember people arguing that young children probably wouldn't ever have driver's licenses because autonomous vehicles would completely dominate the roads by the time they were old enough to drive. Now here we are, almost a decade later, and this reality seems further away than it did in 2016.

You can order a self-driving taxi in SF right now, though.

I agree it's not a foregone conclusion, I guess I'm hoping you'll either give an argument why you think it's unlikely, even though tens of billions and lots of top talent are being poured into it, or actually consider the hypothetical.

I can't think of a single task that AI could replace.

Even if it worked??

self-driving cars are here but only in some places and with some limitations, they're just a novelty

So they're here? Baidu has been producing and selling robotaxis for years now, they don't even have a steering wheel. People were even complaining the other day when they got into a traffic jam (some wanting to leave and others arriving).

They've sold millions of rides, they clearly deliver people to their destinations.

I can't think of a single task that AI could replace

Drafting contracts? Translating legal text into human readable format? There are dozens of companies selling this stuff. Legal work is like writing in that it's enormously diverse, there are many writers who are hard to replace with machinery and others who have already lost their jobs.

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