10 ms·

> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do. Too true. This isn't limited to

by mjr00 1mo ago

> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do. Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database. The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.

bewareofscams 1mo ago
This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.
bazoom42 1mo ago
Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
- mjr00 1mo ago
  > Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood? I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools. I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry.
  - nubg 1mo ago
    He might be off by a decade, but isn't necessarily wrong.
    - card_zero 1mo ago
      Is that a prediction about where "Hollywood quality" is heading?
    - mrhottakes 1mo ago
      When someone makes a prediction but is off by a decade+, that prediction is, necessarily, wrong.
    - bazoom42 1mo ago
      By that standard, no prediction can be wrong.
  - jnwatson 1mo ago
    We're at the point now where we're seeing 30 second commercials that are mostly GenAI. In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category.
    - ben_w 1mo ago
      Degree is the entire problem. I mean, four years back I was thinking: I don't know how long it will take, but Hollywood is obviously screwed the moment something like Stable Diffusion gets temporal coherency and stops randomly adding limbs, because the energy cost per image on my laptop multiplied by how many frames in a film and $0.1/kWh, is ballpark the same as the cost of a cinema ticket. Right now temporal coherency is still quite limited, and the models still do enough daft things you can't easily take the first version even when cutting every 5 seconds. I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster. Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted".
      - bazoom42 1mo ago
        But why is Hollywood screwed then? Same thing was said when cameras became cheap, when editing became cheep, and when internet made it possible for anyone to distribute movies: Now the movie industry is screwed because anyone with talent and an iphone can make and distribute a movie. Turns out there is more to it than that.
        ben_w 1mo ago
        Like I said, "Writing it is a separate problem". From what I've seen while experimenting with "creative" writing, I think they'd struggle with writing an episode of a kids TV show with a short running time in length (anything over about 9 minutes); and even then I would also doubt it would write correctly for a specific audience based on my experience while experimenting with writing myself educational apps (in my case to help me learn German, I'm extrapolating from that to not overburdening kids with too-complex vocabulary). But do also consider that when cameras became cheap, *painting* is what became somewhat less valuable, and cinema became possible in the first place. And consider that when cinema got sound, live musicians in theatres went away: The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement. - 2012 reporting on 1927, even the reporting well before AI could do any of this at an interesting level; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-against-evil-robots-92702721/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag... If the AI could write… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough; if the AI could make coherent videos… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough. "If". It's a matter of degree, but functionally the answer *today* is "no", because today when some humans make a video with AI, they need to put in a lot of effort to throw out the rubbish attempts by the AI. When it stops being "no", and not before, is when Hollywood is screwed.
  - ben_w 1mo ago
    In fairness, I agree that end-of-2025 AI probably could make a film so badly that 41% of the crew get cancer within 24 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film)
    - opo 1mo ago
      Considering that about 39.2% of the population is expected to get diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, do you actually think a rate of 41% is statistically significant? https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
      - extra88 1mo ago
        It is significant because cancer is much more detectable today than in 1956-80, both because of better tests and more testing being conducted. In that earlier era, if you knew you had cancer, it was likely because it was already bad. I also expect that of the 39.2% of the population, the cancer is diagnosed much later in life than it was for the 91 movie crew members, I doubt 41% of the crew was over 50 in 1956.
        opo 1mo ago
        Think about this for a minute. If three months of filming actually cause an increase in cancer rates the long-term residents of St. George (the downwinders), would have have devastatingly high cancer rates, right? The nearby residents were exposed to fallout from 100+ above ground nuclear tests and they were exposed for multiple decades, not just three months. This issue has actually has been studied and published in peer reviewed journals. A paper that studied the mortality of residents in that area concluded: >...There was no excess risk of cancer mortality in southwestern Utah, for single or grouped sites, with the single exception of leukemia which showed statistically significant odds ratios of 1.45 based on 62 deaths at all ages, and 2.84 based on nine deaths at ages 0-14. The finding for childhood leukemia was based on different time periods and geographic comparisons from those of two earlier studies in which no such excess was found. Mortality from all cancer sites combined was significantly lower in southwestern Utah than in the remainder of the state, even after adjustment for the higher proportion of (lower risk) Mormons in southwestern Utah. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3788954/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3788954/ Trying to figure out when this strange idea about The Conqueror first appeared, I saw references to a 1980 article in People magazine. People magazine is not actually a peer reviewed journal.
- theappsecguy 1mo ago
  they might manage to get a semi passable AI movie... but will people pay to watch it? I certainly would not.
- bwfan123 1mo ago
  AI is just another tool in the arsenal of tools for both developers (Linus [1]) and movie makers (Ben Affleck [2]). These are expert practitioners in their fields intelligently opining on AI, and they are promoting it not as a magic machine, but as another tool in the toolbox. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s
n0rand0 1mo ago
[dead]
MattGaiser 1mo ago
The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations. On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.
amelius 1mo ago
> inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)
modeless 1mo ago
The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.
- glimshe 1mo ago
  I've seen people saying that with other technologies. Years later, they are still in the same job but a lot richer.
- palmotea 1mo ago
  > The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs. Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome for everyone else? Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?
  - oaweoifjwpo 1mo ago
    > Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome? Yes. Basically based on my conversations with coworkers who went to these frontier AI labs: this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.
    - palmotea 1mo ago
      > this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can. There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it. Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators.
      - redsocksfan45 1mo ago
        [dead]
      - Laurel1234 1mo ago
randusername 1mo ago
Some of my coworkers will complain that management is short-sighted for trying to automate programming work they don't understand then immediately suggest we automate management because nobody knows what they do all day. Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.
- superjan 1mo ago
  Careful what you wish for…
- bee_rider 1mo ago
  They are currently experimenting with replacing engineers with LLMs, so it would at least be interesting to try the flipped experiment. It seems like, at least for tasks like distilling the work done at lower levels and passing it up the management tree, LLMs should be good at that. Maybe they could take out some levels at least. And they can be programmed to be 100% selfless and on-mission: no turf battles or other internal politics. Everybody’s job involves office politics of course, but my gut says management has a lot more of it than engineering, so zeroing that out could be more significant.
  - harikb 1mo ago
    Aren't LLM's mostly overconfident? If they are independent entities/agents, they may be tempted to try to sabotage the less performing teams to take over their projects - just like in human world.
  - robotresearcher 1mo ago
    The models are trained on data that encodes hundreds or thousands of years of turf battles and office politics. The model is shaped by the script of ‘Succession’, the history of the English monarchy and the Chinese Communist Party, and the biographies of Steve Jobs and Alexander Hamilton… The models don’t generate what’s right and good: they generate what people are likely to generate.
    - bee_rider 1mo ago
pinkytoes 1mo ago
Every time I've done that, the people were so ignorant that they still didn't recognize that expert judgment was required... they just had the LLM make some slop.
palmotea 1mo ago
>> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do. > Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Engineers-Disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
- pphysch 1mo ago
  I wonder if it was (ironically) coined by nonengineers who don't understand how engineers (or other high-stakes professionals at Pareto boundaries) solve problems: by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances. I have seen this personally, where merely identifying a possible solution (harmless, reversible) is misinterpreted as selecting and implementing that solution (may be irreversible).
  - fmbb 1mo ago
    > by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances. This is how all people solve problems. Now everyone are not great at all parts, but this really is what anyone does. Surely the title ”engineer” means something else?
    - pphysch 1mo ago
      Ideally, but this is not at all taught or incentivized in (American) schools. We're taught to "hack it" which means getting to a solution without much regard for how we got there.
      - sporadicism 1mo ago
        Even if engineers were uniquely capable in this regard it still wouldn't equip them to solve problems in fields where they lack domain expertise.
AngryData 1mo ago
Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job. "You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to? Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.
- piker 1mo ago
  I felt this watching the recent season of Clarksons Farm which had some nice product placement for what looked like automation startups. It was hard to watch as a software person as these farmers see the best part of their jobs automated away, but there’s also the rub: nobody wants to spend on automating that part. Eventually economics will require them to but perhaps the way to get started today is to focus on the stuff they actually don’t like doing.
- mrhottakes 1mo ago
  Reminds me of the engineers/designers who regularly announce they've created a new revolutionary form of bicycle. Turns out the bicycle is a (nearly) perfect design and making it more complicated and expensive and less efficient is not an improvement.
pj_mukh 1mo ago
>>fully replaceable by AI I am trying to fathom a more catastrophic failure in communications than the lab CEO's using this narrative. The reality ends up being closer to Radiology jobs [1], but we're never able to fully realize this because the press is running around like headless chickens and unloading the fear on a public that then reaches for any leverage they can get (see: Datacenter NIMBY-ism). Any short term FOMO valuation bumps they got from this narrative has to now be liquidated into paying premium for server racks in a warehouse. Reminder folks: There is no evidence that AI is not normal technology [2] [1]: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/the-radiologist-paradox https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s... [2]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
- HDThoreaun 1mo ago
  The radiology stuff is just jevons paradox combined with liability issues. No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease, the issue is that the ai boosters didnt realize that healthcare providers number one priority is not getting sued so they cant get rid of the radiologists until the government says so. Radiologists at this point are effectively just rent seekers taking advantage of slow government regulatory updates while they sign off on work done by AI. That doesnt mean the future is bright for radiologists, at some point the government will give the green light to do radiology work without human involvement.
  - pj_mukh 1mo ago
    >> "No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease" Literally the Godfather of AI did [1]. The rest is pablum, Radiologists do far more than just protect against liability. I hope you never find out why they are so critical to vast number of patients getting the worst news of their lifetime. As OP lays out, life and its professions is just not as simple as these narratives would like us to think, and we keep backfilling reasons for why all dooming and glooming consistently comes up wrong. Just selective memory writ large to keep the literal infinite scroll of doom going. [1]: https://www.auntminnieeurope.com/imaging-informatics/advanced-visualization/news/15746091/hinton-acknowledges-mistake-in-predicting-ai-replacement-of-radiologists https://www.auntminnieeurope.com/imaging-informatics/advance...
pdonis 1mo ago
> As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database. As I understood it, the attraction of blockchain was more that the money could get moved around without Bank of America and Capital One knowing about it, and therefore without those financial institutions reporting the transactions to the government as they are required to by law. Which of course screams "money laundering" and "tax evasion" to the government. Yes, there are possible legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to move cash around anonymously and invisibly, but they're basically rounding error compared to the ones mentioned above. In other words, blockchain on this view was a classic example of the old saying that you can't apply a technical solution to a social (or in this case political) problem.

by mjr00 1mo ago

bewareofscams 1mo ago

This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.

bazoom42 1mo ago

Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?

mjr00 1mo ago
> Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood? I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools. I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry.
- nubg 1mo ago
  He might be off by a decade, but isn't necessarily wrong.
  - card_zero 1mo ago
    Is that a prediction about where "Hollywood quality" is heading?
  - mrhottakes 1mo ago
    When someone makes a prediction but is off by a decade+, that prediction is, necessarily, wrong.
  - bazoom42 1mo ago
    By that standard, no prediction can be wrong.
- jnwatson 1mo ago
  We're at the point now where we're seeing 30 second commercials that are mostly GenAI. In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category.
  - ben_w 1mo ago
    Degree is the entire problem. I mean, four years back I was thinking: I don't know how long it will take, but Hollywood is obviously screwed the moment something like Stable Diffusion gets temporal coherency and stops randomly adding limbs, because the energy cost per image on my laptop multiplied by how many frames in a film and $0.1/kWh, is ballpark the same as the cost of a cinema ticket. Right now temporal coherency is still quite limited, and the models still do enough daft things you can't easily take the first version even when cutting every 5 seconds. I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster. Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted".
    - bazoom42 1mo ago
      But why is Hollywood screwed then? Same thing was said when cameras became cheap, when editing became cheep, and when internet made it possible for anyone to distribute movies: Now the movie industry is screwed because anyone with talent and an iphone can make and distribute a movie. Turns out there is more to it than that.
      - ben_w 1mo ago
        Like I said, "Writing it is a separate problem". From what I've seen while experimenting with "creative" writing, I think they'd struggle with writing an episode of a kids TV show with a short running time in length (anything over about 9 minutes); and even then I would also doubt it would write correctly for a specific audience based on my experience while experimenting with writing myself educational apps (in my case to help me learn German, I'm extrapolating from that to not overburdening kids with too-complex vocabulary). But do also consider that when cameras became cheap, *painting* is what became somewhat less valuable, and cinema became possible in the first place. And consider that when cinema got sound, live musicians in theatres went away: The time is coming fast when the only living thing around a motion picture house will be the person who sells you your ticket. Everything else will be mechanical. Canned drama, canned music, canned vaudeville. We think the public will tire of mechanical music and will want the real thing. We are not against scientific development of any kind, but it must not come at the expense of art. We are not opposing industrial progress. We are not even opposing mechanical music except where it is used as a profiteering instrument for artistic debasement. - 2012 reporting on 1927, even the reporting well before AI could do any of this at an interesting level; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-against-evil-robots-92702721/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag... If the AI could write… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough; if the AI could make coherent videos… it can, but the degree to which it can is not enough. "If". It's a matter of degree, but functionally the answer *today* is "no", because today when some humans make a video with AI, they need to put in a lot of effort to throw out the rubbish attempts by the AI. When it stops being "no", and not before, is when Hollywood is screwed.
- ben_w 1mo ago
  In fairness, I agree that end-of-2025 AI probably could make a film so badly that 41% of the crew get cancer within 24 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film)
  - opo 1mo ago
    Considering that about 39.2% of the population is expected to get diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, do you actually think a rate of 41% is statistically significant? https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html
    - extra88 1mo ago
      It is significant because cancer is much more detectable today than in 1956-80, both because of better tests and more testing being conducted. In that earlier era, if you knew you had cancer, it was likely because it was already bad. I also expect that of the 39.2% of the population, the cancer is diagnosed much later in life than it was for the 91 movie crew members, I doubt 41% of the crew was over 50 in 1956.
      - opo 1mo ago
        Think about this for a minute. If three months of filming actually cause an increase in cancer rates the long-term residents of St. George (the downwinders), would have have devastatingly high cancer rates, right? The nearby residents were exposed to fallout from 100+ above ground nuclear tests and they were exposed for multiple decades, not just three months. This issue has actually has been studied and published in peer reviewed journals. A paper that studied the mortality of residents in that area concluded: >...There was no excess risk of cancer mortality in southwestern Utah, for single or grouped sites, with the single exception of leukemia which showed statistically significant odds ratios of 1.45 based on 62 deaths at all ages, and 2.84 based on nine deaths at ages 0-14. The finding for childhood leukemia was based on different time periods and geographic comparisons from those of two earlier studies in which no such excess was found. Mortality from all cancer sites combined was significantly lower in southwestern Utah than in the remainder of the state, even after adjustment for the higher proportion of (lower risk) Mormons in southwestern Utah. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3788954/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3788954/ Trying to figure out when this strange idea about The Conqueror first appeared, I saw references to a 1980 article in People magazine. People magazine is not actually a peer reviewed journal.
theappsecguy 1mo ago
they might manage to get a semi passable AI movie... but will people pay to watch it? I certainly would not.
bwfan123 1mo ago
AI is just another tool in the arsenal of tools for both developers (Linus [1]) and movie makers (Ben Affleck [2]). These are expert practitioners in their fields intelligently opining on AI, and they are promoting it not as a magic machine, but as another tool in the toolbox. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s

n0rand0 1mo ago

[dead]

MattGaiser 1mo ago

The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations. On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.

amelius 1mo ago

> inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)

modeless 1mo ago

The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.

glimshe 1mo ago
I've seen people saying that with other technologies. Years later, they are still in the same job but a lot richer.
palmotea 1mo ago
> The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs. Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome for everyone else? Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?
- oaweoifjwpo 1mo ago
  > Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome? Yes. Basically based on my conversations with coworkers who went to these frontier AI labs: this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.
  - palmotea 1mo ago
    > this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can. There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it. Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators.
    - redsocksfan45 1mo ago
      [dead]
    - Laurel1234 1mo ago

randusername 1mo ago

Some of my coworkers will complain that management is short-sighted for trying to automate programming work they don't understand then immediately suggest we automate management because nobody knows what they do all day. Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.

superjan 1mo ago
Careful what you wish for…
bee_rider 1mo ago
They are currently experimenting with replacing engineers with LLMs, so it would at least be interesting to try the flipped experiment. It seems like, at least for tasks like distilling the work done at lower levels and passing it up the management tree, LLMs should be good at that. Maybe they could take out some levels at least. And they can be programmed to be 100% selfless and on-mission: no turf battles or other internal politics. Everybody’s job involves office politics of course, but my gut says management has a lot more of it than engineering, so zeroing that out could be more significant.
- harikb 1mo ago
  Aren't LLM's mostly overconfident? If they are independent entities/agents, they may be tempted to try to sabotage the less performing teams to take over their projects - just like in human world.
- robotresearcher 1mo ago
  The models are trained on data that encodes hundreds or thousands of years of turf battles and office politics. The model is shaped by the script of ‘Succession’, the history of the English monarchy and the Chinese Communist Party, and the biographies of Steve Jobs and Alexander Hamilton… The models don’t generate what’s right and good: they generate what people are likely to generate.
  - bee_rider 1mo ago

pinkytoes 1mo ago

Every time I've done that, the people were so ignorant that they still didn't recognize that expert judgment was required... they just had the LLM make some slop.

palmotea 1mo ago

>> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do. > Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Engineers-Disease https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...

pphysch 1mo ago
I wonder if it was (ironically) coined by nonengineers who don't understand how engineers (or other high-stakes professionals at Pareto boundaries) solve problems: by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances. I have seen this personally, where merely identifying a possible solution (harmless, reversible) is misinterpreted as selecting and implementing that solution (may be irreversible).
- fmbb 1mo ago
  > by decomposing problems and identifying optional solutions and weighing the solutions based on various risks, trade-offs and tolerances. This is how all people solve problems. Now everyone are not great at all parts, but this really is what anyone does. Surely the title ”engineer” means something else?
  - pphysch 1mo ago
    Ideally, but this is not at all taught or incentivized in (American) schools. We're taught to "hack it" which means getting to a solution without much regard for how we got there.
    - sporadicism 1mo ago
      Even if engineers were uniquely capable in this regard it still wouldn't equip them to solve problems in fields where they lack domain expertise.

AngryData 1mo ago

Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job. "You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to? Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.

piker 1mo ago
I felt this watching the recent season of Clarksons Farm which had some nice product placement for what looked like automation startups. It was hard to watch as a software person as these farmers see the best part of their jobs automated away, but there’s also the rub: nobody wants to spend on automating that part. Eventually economics will require them to but perhaps the way to get started today is to focus on the stuff they actually don’t like doing.
mrhottakes 1mo ago
Reminds me of the engineers/designers who regularly announce they've created a new revolutionary form of bicycle. Turns out the bicycle is a (nearly) perfect design and making it more complicated and expensive and less efficient is not an improvement.

pj_mukh 1mo ago

>>fully replaceable by AI I am trying to fathom a more catastrophic failure in communications than the lab CEO's using this narrative. The reality ends up being closer to Radiology jobs [1], but we're never able to fully realize this because the press is running around like headless chickens and unloading the fear on a public that then reaches for any leverage they can get (see: Datacenter NIMBY-ism). Any short term FOMO valuation bumps they got from this narrative has to now be liquidated into paying premium for server racks in a warehouse. Reminder folks: There is no evidence that AI is not normal technology [2] [1]: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-spark/the-radiologist-paradox https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s... [2]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

HDThoreaun 1mo ago
The radiology stuff is just jevons paradox combined with liability issues. No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease, the issue is that the ai boosters didnt realize that healthcare providers number one priority is not getting sued so they cant get rid of the radiologists until the government says so. Radiologists at this point are effectively just rent seekers taking advantage of slow government regulatory updates while they sign off on work done by AI. That doesnt mean the future is bright for radiologists, at some point the government will give the green light to do radiology work without human involvement.
- pj_mukh 1mo ago
  >> "No one said the amount of radiology work would decrease" Literally the Godfather of AI did [1]. The rest is pablum, Radiologists do far more than just protect against liability. I hope you never find out why they are so critical to vast number of patients getting the worst news of their lifetime. As OP lays out, life and its professions is just not as simple as these narratives would like us to think, and we keep backfilling reasons for why all dooming and glooming consistently comes up wrong. Just selective memory writ large to keep the literal infinite scroll of doom going. [1]: https://www.auntminnieeurope.com/imaging-informatics/advanced-visualization/news/15746091/hinton-acknowledges-mistake-in-predicting-ai-replacement-of-radiologists https://www.auntminnieeurope.com/imaging-informatics/advance...

pdonis 1mo ago

> As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database. As I understood it, the attraction of blockchain was more that the money could get moved around without Bank of America and Capital One knowing about it, and therefore without those financial institutions reporting the transactions to the government as they are required to by law. Which of course screams "money laundering" and "tax evasion" to the government. Yes, there are possible legitimate reasons for wanting to be able to move cash around anonymously and invisibly, but they're basically rounding error compared to the ones mentioned above. In other words, blockchain on this view was a classic example of the old saying that you can't apply a technical solution to a social (or in this case political) problem.