It's wild how much weight "they're destroying jobs" has.
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
I think that that the "they're destroying jobs" or even then "they're stealing intellectual property" argument overshadows or distracts from the more important issues. What really concerns me is the large scale erosion of truth and reliability. Codebases and the internet at large are being flooded with less and less accurate information, with more bloat, and with more errors that will exponentially increase as more and more is built on them.
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
Yes, while I personally believe this is a problem to solve, not an insurmountable obstacle, I cannot ignore this kind of harm. I do think this will be outweighed by all the instances where they improve decision making, dig up
obscure information, correct errors, etc. I can’t see any fundamental reason a near future AI system has to hallucinate anything, and when we also have people complaining in thread that LLMs are dumping out song lyrics verbatim…well, it’s an amusing contrast to say the least.
handoflixue · · focus · HN ↗
I dare say that car manufacturers are aware of their impact on the horse and buggy industry. Calculator manufacturers wrecked the livelihood of mathematicians and accountants.
Technology is in the business of putting people out of work, by inventing better ways of doing things. Or rather, any time you invent a better way of doing things, that's fundamentally going to disrupt all the businesses built around older technologies.
adamddev1 · · focus · HN ↗
Faulty decisions based on patterns (and prejudice) will be made by models trained on a mixture of truth and falsehoods. These decisions will affect, and even kill people. There have always been some people who choose quick results and productivity over truth, but now we are seeing a mass scaling and automation of this mentality. But when people just hear "they're taking jobs" it's easy to dismiss those with concerns as Luddites.
ChickeNES · · focus · HN ↗