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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25155 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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What would be a good outcome for the automation of knowledge work?

Every man a project manager!

No, seriously - if AI trends continue, it might be good at writing memos, doing research, constructing arguments, finding citations, booking meetings, constructing presentations, drafting architectural plans, etc. If every office worker gets that capability at his fingertips, it (in theory) means that pretty much anyone who is decently literate and competent can then supervise loads of AIs doing loads of work - because AI ain't gonna prompt itself. Competition will keep the price down on AI, whereas if each man is suddenly 8x as productive he might be able to bring home a managerial salary.

I suspect things won't turn out quite this way (or at least not for a while) but hey it wouldn't be so bad an outcome.

I have project managers who work with me. I don't want to become one.

Every man a project manager!

I do think AI has made programmers more productive, and that it is about to make them much more productive to the point where they might be essentially project managers.

What remains to be seen is what economic benefit that will have. For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.

As the economy becomes more digital, it becomes a lot harder to quantify gains in GDP. In 1987, Legend of Zelda might have cost $50. Today, for almost the same price, you can buy a Zelda game with far better graphics and a much longer story line. But does the consumer today get more enjoyment from 2025 Zelda that from 1985 Zelda? I don't think so. The hedonic treadmill is real.

Similarly, does the economy grow from making TikTok 20% more addictive. Does it grow from adding AI-generated thots to Instagram? Or from making AI girlfriends? A lot of the stuff that happens in software, maybe even most of it, is just not that important or even counterproductive.

Somewhat related...

The dream of reducing drudgery by offloading it to AI might fall flat too. AI will make it possible for a human lawyer to easily glean information from a 1000 page document. But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.

What remains to be seen is what economic benefit that will have. For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.

Video games are (mostly) saturated, although I think that AI can reduce the amount of manpower required to make a AAA game and therefore encourage experimentation and proliferation in ways we haven't seen since the 2000s.

More importantly, though, there are huge realms of software development that are mostly untouched because they're tedious and uninteresting to skilled, highly-paid software engineers. I think that AI-driven software development could vastly improve the quality and user experience for 99% of the software that ordinary people (not tech bros) use.

Anecdotally, I'm making good progress on some personal software projects now I don't have to write all the tedious bits after work.

I won't consider video games saturated until developers can create faster than "content locusts" want to consume. Currently games that provide a lot of playtime relative to developer time still have significant gaps between major deployments. Path of Exile for example had approximately three minor and one major release per year. Given that most players play 1-2 weeks after a release this produces 4-8 weeks of player time per year of development time. If you're into a more niche genre you might be looking at one or two good titles per decade.

I won't consider video games saturated until developers can create faster than "content locusts" want to consume.

Some people might argue that we already quietly hit this point well before the current AI craze. The struggles of the modern gaming industry and the indie scene are partly because it's (perceived as) hard to peel chronic Minecraft/Fortnite/COD/etc. players away from their comfort games.

That might be what people say but the real issue is that the games are mediocre trash. As soon as anything decent actually is released people flock to that game.

All this is (almost) only cope for bad developers.

Even if you're in a major genre like RPGs you might still only get a good game once every couple of years. That there is a sea of uninspired and boring shit out there doesn't really matter.

The only parts of the market that really are closing in on being saturated are the ones where the playtime is essentially infinite, like competitive multiplayer games.

What is happening is perhaps comparable to the book market. Does there being practically no barrier to entry mean that the market is saturated? No, it means the market for mediocre slop is saturated, which is of so low quality that the vast majority of prospective consumers have negative interest in it, or only use it as a sort of background noise to fill time. Some might even argue that there are less worthwhile books to read despite there being more words written than ever before.

For example, if there are 10x as many video games as there were before, do they create 10x the economic value. Of course not.

Bingo.

I am slightly hopeful that 3D printing (and I guess 3D printing + AI) will get us to some good places in the tangible meatspace. I also suspect that, if Space Economy becomes real, there might be a lot of possibilities for material improvement (some of which might be tied to white collar type jobs, like Martian Rock Rover Supervisor).

But it will also make it possible for that same human lawyer to produce a 100,000 page contract of dense legalese. Existing improvements in technology have seemingly only increased the demand for lawyers.

Yes, and this is a horrible thought. I would be quite happy with a law banning contracts that cannot be meaningfully understood in 5 minutes. That's not a law banning even per se 100,000 pages of dense legalese but I should be able to read a contract in one sitting with no surprises. Same with a law.

(Lawyers will love this once they realize it means litigating over whether the fine print was adequately represented by the topline!)

I would be quite happy with a law banning contracts that cannot be meaningfully understood in 5 minutes. That's not a law banning even per se 100,000 pages of dense legalese but I should be able to read a contract in one sitting with no surprises. Same with a law. (Lawyers will love this once they realize it means litigating over whether the fine print was adequately represented by the topline!)

This ties into an axiom of my political views. Give or take:

Once a person is affected by more words of law than it is possible for them to read and understand in their lifetime, corruption is effectively inevitable.

(Which then feeds forward into constitutions, hierarchical laws, kitchen-sink bills, etc, etc.)

Once a person is affected by more words of law than it is possible for them to read and understand in their lifetime, corruption is effectively inevitable.

Aha. I love this.

I expect Prompt Engineering will turn out to be the world's shortest lived career.

I think it'll turn out to be a skill, in the same way that Human Engineering collaboration with colleagues is a skill. Envisioning and describing what you want in reasonably precise terms, then zeroing in on it as part of a conversation, is a skill that many people don't have. It's not going to be enough to sustain a career entirely on its own but it's going to be a big boost for one.

Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.

AI companies have a strong incentive to make prompting easy, and they already have, I recall the days of using the GPT-3 base model and trying to get it to do anything useful. Right now, the models are significantly smarter and in fact are quite proactive in asking clarifying questions and making useful suggestions that the user didn't know. In the limit, this makes prompting beyond a formulation of an initial suggestion redundant.

We're not there yet, but we're close. Eventually the systems will just understand intent or outright demand clarification, and fancy prompting won't add much to the equation.

Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.

I want to switch to whatever programming language this is describing.

I can imagine a language where I just name classes, then write a bunch of short method declarations and invariants and postconditions, and finally the compiler/AI figures out what long complicated algorithms and data structures will satisfy everything most efficiently, but right now it's still just not enough to be merely clear and consistent.

Eventually the systems will just understand intent or outright demand clarification, and fancy prompting won't add much to the equation.

This, though, is hard to argue with. It feels like skill with "prompting" is more like what you need to do to trick a language model into emulating AI, not something you'd need to do to the extent a model is actually AI.

I want to switch to whatever programming language this is describing.

Prolog and similar logic programming languages have provided this for a while.

Huh; thank you. Looking around, I think "The simplicity of Prolog" makes a compelling argument ... but on the other hand it's a little disconcerting not to find any Prolog examples in e.g. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. If it were a new language I'd assume there was a chicken-and-egg problem here, where people shy away from interesting-but-unpopular languages for economic reasons and then those languages don't become popular ... but Prolog is older than I am, as old as C, with open source implementations decades old. What's the catch?

Probably the combination of being notoriously slow and requiring significantly more up-front design than other languages. EDIT: And being more associated with ivory tower academics than "hackers"...

Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.

First off, that's not what he is describing. Secondly, that is only part of being a programmer.

Programming is both a kind of general problem solving related to how software works and can work, and the technical skill of writing the actual code.

I assume the latter part will be the first to be mostly automated away, which will greatly increase productivity, and when the second is automated fully then I'm not sure there will be any more white collar work at any level anywhere.

It's not what he was describing. It was my extension, a claim that sufficiently rigorous and exhaustive "prompt" programming is just regular programming.

I have written a few programs (they compiled! eventually..), and I am aware of all the other miscellaneous errata a competent programmer must keep in mind like dependency trees, versioning, accounting for spaghetti code and legacy code that will collapse if you sneeze at it wrong. That's what I meant

it can't possibly fuck it up

Is what I was gesturing to, taking all of that into account. I should consider myself lucky that I've never had to grapple with legacy code bases.

That's not quite what I meant. I'll see if I have enough time to respond tomorrow morning.

I didn't mean anything so stringent as programming. I only mean that reasonable clarity of thought and expression is a gift that many don't possess; the Motte is very wordcel-heavy and I think people forget this. The AI can only do so much.

My guess is that prompt engineering won't be a career per se at all, except for possibly for artists.

2027 inside a Fortune 500 office:

"What if, hear me out, we just ask the AI which prompts to write and then lay off the Prompt Engineering division."

Isn't that how most AI assistants are structured? You ask the frontend LLM for a picture of a cat dressed as a ninja pirate, it asks the backend network using the whole "exquisite quality, trending on artstation" lingo.

If the AI is not only doing all the work, deciding how to do it and deciding what to do then there is not really a need for humans in any part of the process, not even C-suit.

Why would the government/military uphold the social contract of private ownership at that point? And after that, why not let the AI run the government and military as well? After all, the ones who don't will quickly get outcompeted.

"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

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