6 ms·

Hyperbolic Growth

65 points by cachehit 4y ago

mmargerum 4y ago
I reluctantly moved to an architecture position because developer salaries have stagnated and remote work normalization will put even more pressure on western developer wages. Coding isn't nearly as much fun anymore. Agile, CI/CD, Pull Requests, code reviews, constant software updates, locked down laptops put so many barriers in the way of my creative flow. I still code on my own equipment building apps for myself and I still love it but im done doing it professionally
- renox 4y ago
  > remote work normalization will put even more pressure on western developer wages I'm not sure.. 1) The issues with putting developers in 'low-cost' countries are the same as before.. 2) it's true though that there's/will be increased competition with all the devolopers in your country..
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>Creativity is a big part of what I feel defines me, and if that loses all value then it will surely affect me. Isn't that the whole problem with these tools? That they can't capture creativity and context, and therefore only work as augments to competent users rather than replacing users entirely? >What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a “career” even make sense by then? I have no idea, and I am uncomfortable with that. Which is why society should answer this ASAP. It's evident that putting the means of production in the hands of a few becomes a problem for the many, once the many are no longer necessary. This has been going on since pre-industrial. The premise has always been "we will make more jobs than we remove". What if that premise is no longer true? What if that premise wasn't true to begin with?
seibelj 4y ago
Advanced auto-complete and sort-of right concept art is not going to disrupt the world nor the software industry. We have had algorithms trained on machine learning do IMO way more socially affecting things like decide what news and videos we watch, who gets approved for loans, what politicians say - but this gets way less press or thought. You will never replace software engineers just as you will never replace writers and artists no matter how “good” the machine generated stuff gets. There is no soul there and it only appears interesting at a superficial, “that’s sort of neat” level that doesn’t hold up. No one is buying master works of AI, they spend their weekend reading real books and blogs from real people. It’s 2022 - where is my self driving car? Where is the tens of millions of job losses from AI predicted that necessitated UBI (see the entire presidential thesis of Andrew Yang)? It does get a lot of hype and raises a lot of VC money though!
- nmca 4y ago
  https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/ https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  May I ask if you have tried using Copilot? Because this sounds exactly like the kind of response I would have had half a year ago. It makes many mistakes and can by no means write code by itself. But that doesn't change the fact that it's orders of magnitude better at it than I thought possible.
  - copenja 4y ago
    I'm not the parent post and I have not tried autopilot, but I do have a question. Does autopilot make you orders of magnitude more productive?
    - kristiandupont 4y ago
      No, it does not.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    One issue with copilot is that debugging broken code is far harder than writing it in the first place. We've seen similar transitions before though. When good optimizing compilers started appearing you had plenty of programmers like Mel [1] that said 'there's no art in it, a compiler couldn't do the kind of optimizations I do'. And yeah, it's true, but compilers got good enough that 99% of people stopped caring and hardcore optimization became a niche skill few people have. What does the industry look like when all that most programmers know is debugging generated code and what kinds of tools need to exist to support that? [1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
vsareto 4y ago
>What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a “career” even make sense by then? I think AIs have made some amazing incremental process, but I feel like the fears of being made obsolete are still premature. If you needed to pick though, learning the thing that's replacing you is a good start, so pick AI research or development. For that to be non-viable as a job or career, AIs would need to have the ability to build and improve themselves, and at that point, it's game over, man™. None of these AI things are going to replace politicians, governments, or economies, and so you still have a vast amount of soft skill careers available as well.
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Really I would think that politician would be one of the easiest roles to automate. It's a very simple algorithm that votes yes based on whoever gives it the most money.
  - vsareto 4y ago
    Getting them to hand over their jobs is the hard part :)
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Those jobs aren't being replaced by AI because the people in charge don't want them to be replaced. It's not the AI they should be worried about, but society shifting the paradigm and rendering half of all bureaucracy across the globe obsolete. Endless bikeshedding is deemed very important amongst its practitioners, and is pretty lucrative to boot. Even when we never measured the benefits.
- api 4y ago
  Every AI I have tested requires the user to become clever and proficient at getting it to generate good results. Programming with AI is going to just elevate the level of the programmer cognitively just like compilers and high level languages did. It will be an even higher level of abstraction at which developers can operate. These things are powerful tools but just tools. Same with the “art generators.” So far I see nothing capable of autonomous reasoning at a level that would actually replace the tool wielding operator. Someone still has to hold the hammer.
carapace 4y ago
Mark Miller said something like, "Moore's law from the CPU's POV: humans are getting exponentially more expensive." The fundamental shape of the future is clear: either you have some sort of legal claim on or equity in the primary producers and/or "rent extractors" or you don't. As a programmer, the next iterations of e.g. GitHub Copilot will eventually eat my career. Large corporations are effectively already AIs, and they have much more ability and capacity to leverage technology advances than the little people. I don't really know what to do about any of it, even assuming I could... I've thought about trying to start a kind of member-owned "general automation" corp that builds houses and neighborhoods and ecologically savvy farms, but the simple fact is, I'm not a people person. I've also thought about buying one of those cheap desert plots, a couple of acres for a few thousand dollars, and going out there with a "kernel" or "seed" of, y'know, solar panels and chickens and a little earth-mover, etc. I could pretend it was like I was colonizing an alien planet and make a kind of performance art piece out of it, I dunno.
dasil003 4y ago
Being made obsolete by technology is nothing new (see the Luddites). But regardless of how replaceable any individual is, we're still in a human society. Maximizing profits by laying off humans can work for a while, and systems can rebalance, but if prevailing dynamics collectively lead to a large percentage of the population being "unemployable", then the political situation will become very explosive. People need to feel some purpose in life. Once things destabilize to a certain point, the global productivity that allows for the enormous compute power behind modern tech and AI will come crashing down pretty fast. Sure, there are authoritarian scenarios to worry about, but I have a hard time convincing myself that tech enables authoritarian control beyond what was possible throughout history.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Why? Tech enables a small group of people to have extreme power/leverage. In the case of military/control you don’t even need the labor class to serve in the military in large numbers anymore for global supremacy.
  - dasil003 4y ago
    For all the leverage the US has militarily, what control did it actually exert in Afghanistan? What about Russia in Ukraine? War and occupation is one thing, but I'm speaking more of the consent of the governed. Do you think the billionaire class can keep hoovering up all the economic gains as jobs are automated based solely on their self-interested narrative of capital ownership? What happens when unemployment hits 20%, 30%, 50%? Are they going to send drones against the populace? Even in China, the CCP's policies only work as long as they deliver a certain measure of prosperity to the people. Propaganda and police brutality can only take you so far before the people have had enough.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Yeah, I’m fairly certain things will be fine. Everyone’s consuming curated propaganda on their phones every single day. The little people won’t be doing much.
- warent 4y ago
random314 4y ago
Why the word hyperbolic. It doesn't seem to make sense. Exponential automation seems better.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  Hyperbolic growth has a singularity in finite time. I.e. there is a "crucial" point where things truly go haywire. Not a very important distinction in a philosophical discussion like this, but that was the reasoning.
  - random314 4y ago
    This seems like a novel definition I have never heard before and is very different from the dictionary definition that does not have any reference to any singularity https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyperbolic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyperbolic
Negitivefrags 4y ago
There is a famous quote from Douglas Adams: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. These feelings are just the cohort of which we are a part getting older.
- kristiandupont 4y ago
  I guess that is comforting in a way :-)
- luis_cho 4y ago
  There is a famous quote from Kenneth Boulding “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist."
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    In my opinion, if we want progress, there is no other way but to believe we can achieve infinite growth, because even if we can't, we are forced to innovate along the way. I sure don't want to live in an agrarian society just because we don't have infinite resources.
    - As_You_Wish 4y ago
      All we need to do is invent replicators like they have on Star Trek and we're home free. Just jigger atoms around and we're gold. Plus the transporter where we can just instantly transport anywhere we want to go in the world instantly. It's all really simple when we finally get that going.
- draw_down 4y ago
alexpotato 4y ago
Good time to mention the story "Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future" https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 It essentially offers two different futures: 1. A dystopia view of the current trend of having more and more things automated 2. A utopian view #1 is decidedly more Black Mirror and #2 is more Star Trek: Next Generation
- goatlover 4y ago
  The real world always seems to be a mix between the two. Technology does transform the world and make some things better, but it’s a double a edged sword and has unintended consequences that make some things worse, or creates new problems.

Hyperbolic Growth

65 points by cachehit 4y ago

I reluctantly moved to an architecture position because developer salaries have stagnated and remote work normalization will put even more pressure on western developer wages. Coding isn't nearly as much fun anymore. Agile, CI/CD, Pull Requests, code reviews, constant software updates, locked down laptops put so many barriers in the way of my creative flow. I still code on my own equipment building apps for myself and I still love it but im done doing it professionally

renox 4y ago
> remote work normalization will put even more pressure on western developer wages I'm not sure.. 1) The issues with putting developers in 'low-cost' countries are the same as before.. 2) it's true though that there's/will be increased competition with all the devolopers in your country..

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

>Creativity is a big part of what I feel defines me, and if that loses all value then it will surely affect me. Isn't that the whole problem with these tools? That they can't capture creativity and context, and therefore only work as augments to competent users rather than replacing users entirely? >What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a “career” even make sense by then? I have no idea, and I am uncomfortable with that. Which is why society should answer this ASAP. It's evident that putting the means of production in the hands of a few becomes a problem for the many, once the many are no longer necessary. This has been going on since pre-industrial. The premise has always been "we will make more jobs than we remove". What if that premise is no longer true? What if that premise wasn't true to begin with?

seibelj 4y ago

Advanced auto-complete and sort-of right concept art is not going to disrupt the world nor the software industry. We have had algorithms trained on machine learning do IMO way more socially affecting things like decide what news and videos we watch, who gets approved for loans, what politicians say - but this gets way less press or thought. You will never replace software engineers just as you will never replace writers and artists no matter how “good” the machine generated stuff gets. There is no soul there and it only appears interesting at a superficial, “that’s sort of neat” level that doesn’t hold up. No one is buying master works of AI, they spend their weekend reading real books and blogs from real people. It’s 2022 - where is my self driving car? Where is the tens of millions of job losses from AI predicted that necessitated UBI (see the entire presidential thesis of Andrew Yang)? It does get a lot of hype and raises a lot of VC money though!

nmca 4y ago
https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/ https://bounded-regret.ghost.io/ai-forecasting-one-year-in/
kristiandupont 4y ago
May I ask if you have tried using Copilot? Because this sounds exactly like the kind of response I would have had half a year ago. It makes many mistakes and can by no means write code by itself. But that doesn't change the fact that it's orders of magnitude better at it than I thought possible.
- copenja 4y ago
  I'm not the parent post and I have not tried autopilot, but I do have a question. Does autopilot make you orders of magnitude more productive?
  - kristiandupont 4y ago
    No, it does not.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  One issue with copilot is that debugging broken code is far harder than writing it in the first place. We've seen similar transitions before though. When good optimizing compilers started appearing you had plenty of programmers like Mel [1] that said 'there's no art in it, a compiler couldn't do the kind of optimizations I do'. And yeah, it's true, but compilers got good enough that 99% of people stopped caring and hardcore optimization became a niche skill few people have. What does the industry look like when all that most programmers know is debugging generated code and what kinds of tools need to exist to support that? [1] http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html

vsareto 4y ago

>What will be a viable career in 20 years? Will the concept of a “career” even make sense by then? I think AIs have made some amazing incremental process, but I feel like the fears of being made obsolete are still premature. If you needed to pick though, learning the thing that's replacing you is a good start, so pick AI research or development. For that to be non-viable as a job or career, AIs would need to have the ability to build and improve themselves, and at that point, it's game over, man™. None of these AI things are going to replace politicians, governments, or economies, and so you still have a vast amount of soft skill careers available as well.

chrisco255 4y ago
Really I would think that politician would be one of the easiest roles to automate. It's a very simple algorithm that votes yes based on whoever gives it the most money.
- vsareto 4y ago
  Getting them to hand over their jobs is the hard part :)
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Those jobs aren't being replaced by AI because the people in charge don't want them to be replaced. It's not the AI they should be worried about, but society shifting the paradigm and rendering half of all bureaucracy across the globe obsolete. Endless bikeshedding is deemed very important amongst its practitioners, and is pretty lucrative to boot. Even when we never measured the benefits.
api 4y ago
Every AI I have tested requires the user to become clever and proficient at getting it to generate good results. Programming with AI is going to just elevate the level of the programmer cognitively just like compilers and high level languages did. It will be an even higher level of abstraction at which developers can operate. These things are powerful tools but just tools. Same with the “art generators.” So far I see nothing capable of autonomous reasoning at a level that would actually replace the tool wielding operator. Someone still has to hold the hammer.

carapace 4y ago

Mark Miller said something like, "Moore's law from the CPU's POV: humans are getting exponentially more expensive." The fundamental shape of the future is clear: either you have some sort of legal claim on or equity in the primary producers and/or "rent extractors" or you don't. As a programmer, the next iterations of e.g. GitHub Copilot will eventually eat my career. Large corporations are effectively already AIs, and they have much more ability and capacity to leverage technology advances than the little people. I don't really know what to do about any of it, even assuming I could... I've thought about trying to start a kind of member-owned "general automation" corp that builds houses and neighborhoods and ecologically savvy farms, but the simple fact is, I'm not a people person. I've also thought about buying one of those cheap desert plots, a couple of acres for a few thousand dollars, and going out there with a "kernel" or "seed" of, y'know, solar panels and chickens and a little earth-mover, etc. I could pretend it was like I was colonizing an alien planet and make a kind of performance art piece out of it, I dunno.

dasil003 4y ago

Being made obsolete by technology is nothing new (see the Luddites). But regardless of how replaceable any individual is, we're still in a human society. Maximizing profits by laying off humans can work for a while, and systems can rebalance, but if prevailing dynamics collectively lead to a large percentage of the population being "unemployable", then the political situation will become very explosive. People need to feel some purpose in life. Once things destabilize to a certain point, the global productivity that allows for the enormous compute power behind modern tech and AI will come crashing down pretty fast. Sure, there are authoritarian scenarios to worry about, but I have a hard time convincing myself that tech enables authoritarian control beyond what was possible throughout history.

fullshark 4y ago
Why? Tech enables a small group of people to have extreme power/leverage. In the case of military/control you don’t even need the labor class to serve in the military in large numbers anymore for global supremacy.
- dasil003 4y ago
  For all the leverage the US has militarily, what control did it actually exert in Afghanistan? What about Russia in Ukraine? War and occupation is one thing, but I'm speaking more of the consent of the governed. Do you think the billionaire class can keep hoovering up all the economic gains as jobs are automated based solely on their self-interested narrative of capital ownership? What happens when unemployment hits 20%, 30%, 50%? Are they going to send drones against the populace? Even in China, the CCP's policies only work as long as they deliver a certain measure of prosperity to the people. Propaganda and police brutality can only take you so far before the people have had enough.
- junofan 4y ago
  Yeah, I’m fairly certain things will be fine. Everyone’s consuming curated propaganda on their phones every single day. The little people won’t be doing much.
warent 4y ago

random314 4y ago

Why the word hyperbolic. It doesn't seem to make sense. Exponential automation seems better.

kristiandupont 4y ago
Hyperbolic growth has a singularity in finite time. I.e. there is a "crucial" point where things truly go haywire. Not a very important distinction in a philosophical discussion like this, but that was the reasoning.
- random314 4y ago
  This seems like a novel definition I have never heard before and is very different from the dictionary definition that does not have any reference to any singularity https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyperbolic https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hyperbolic

Negitivefrags 4y ago

There is a famous quote from Douglas Adams: Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things. Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. These feelings are just the cohort of which we are a part getting older.

kristiandupont 4y ago
I guess that is comforting in a way :-)
luis_cho 4y ago
There is a famous quote from Kenneth Boulding “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist."
- cercatrova 4y ago
  In my opinion, if we want progress, there is no other way but to believe we can achieve infinite growth, because even if we can't, we are forced to innovate along the way. I sure don't want to live in an agrarian society just because we don't have infinite resources.
  - As_You_Wish 4y ago
    All we need to do is invent replicators like they have on Star Trek and we're home free. Just jigger atoms around and we're gold. Plus the transporter where we can just instantly transport anywhere we want to go in the world instantly. It's all really simple when we finally get that going.
draw_down 4y ago

alexpotato 4y ago

Good time to mention the story "Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future" https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 https://marshallbrain.com/manna1 It essentially offers two different futures: 1. A dystopia view of the current trend of having more and more things automated 2. A utopian view #1 is decidedly more Black Mirror and #2 is more Star Trek: Next Generation

goatlover 4y ago
The real world always seems to be a mix between the two. Technology does transform the world and make some things better, but it’s a double a edged sword and has unintended consequences that make some things worse, or creates new problems.