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The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
- qoez 5d agoCollaborative research is a dual purpose existensial safety hazard, it's better to keep all results locked up away from public use for the public's own benefit.
- mosura 5d agoThere's a general point here which is that the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people. The flip side is the people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways, which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it.
- watwut 5d agoWut? AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people". Instead we are all having to deal with negative side effects of AI. AI is imposed on us, whether we want it or not. >which is why so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it. Like, OpenAI and Antropic? Because these two are the primary entities a.) pushing for regulation of their competitors b.) doing their best to convince us that AI is oh so dangerous and will kill us all as vengeful AI god is about to wake up any day now c.) openly bragging about using AI to hack other companies.
- mosura 5d ago> AI do absolutely nothing in terms of "avoiding the negative side effects imposed on me by other people" Quite literally the subject of the article.
- watwut 5d agoArticle: someone enjoys being alone in the car, because they dont want to talk and find it impossible to be in the same space as other people without talking. And apparently end up arguing over radio each time they are on the 20min long car drive or something. I think I would prefer to be alone rather with them too based on that.
- mosura 5d agoSo basically you don’t understand english and/or don’t have the life experience to understand the context of the article. But you are very angry about it. Being able to avoid people like you is the entire selling point. No wonder it annoys you.
- watwut 5d agoI am not angry about article. I am saying that following claims are bullshit: 1.) the primary use and appeal of AI is to use it to avoid the negative side effects imposed on you by other people. 2.) people with the biggest problems with AI are those that survive by imposing themselves on others in unnecessary ways 3.) so many bureaucrats are so enthused about regulating it. The article car example was stupid nonsense, but not angering. It was overly long tho. Other people in discussion guess this was ai generated and it is indeed quite possible. > No wonder it annoys you. What annoys me are people who are a.) unable to be silent and projecting it on others b.) who somehow always end up in inane arguments wherever they go. Article author literally described himself as such.
- mosura 5d agoYou have proved my point beautifully.
- ozlikethewizard 5d agoRight all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats? This is a ridiculous take, large swaths of the population are against AI, most people are concerned about resource use, their livelihoods, and a destruction of the human element in so many crafts.
- mosura 5d ago> Right all those people protesting outside data centres are bureaucrats? Not what was claimed.
- Tanjreeve 5d agoSo just dismissal via association or what was your point?
- mosura 5d agoThe absolute trolling that goes on here is related to the point. You are entirely capable of checking what I wrote but insist on trying to drag this out with straw men and misinterpretations. Of course people like you have a problem with AI since it will help everyone else move on and ignore you.
- Tanjreeve 5d agoYou are reacting emotionally and making baseless accusations about how I’m somehow going to be “left behind” based on nothing much in particular. And this is in response to me questioning it’s not a bit absurd to dismiss thousands of members of the public turning up and participating in local democracy opposing data centres with “faceless bureaucrats”. I’d take your flailing insults to heart if I respected your opinion but you already discredited yourself before you reached for the boring “luddite” accusations. As for you complaining about straw men and misreadings etc, If you aren’t able to communicate clearly that’s a you problem.
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- spongebobstoes 5d agousing AI makes an individual more capable and empowered. this views AI as an accessible tool, like AWS or a nail gun individual empowerment threatens institutions
- saltypixel 5d ago[flagged]
- meowface 5d agoThis article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)
- SirFatty 5d agoand silently.
- s08148692 5d agoAnd I read it by asking an LLM to summarise it
- bayindirh 5d agoCan you share me the summary? I'd like to read a LLM summary of your summary. Things are bit tight today.
- NotSuspicious 5d ago[flagged]
- scronkfinkle 5d agoI wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct. I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I think it's something about these phrases being taken away from us more-so than the AI inventing them.
- fithisux 5d agoThe social content or science of development vanish. People become islands working on something without the bigger picture. This is very dangerous.
- chrisjj 5d ago> the Waymo effect is what happens when a technology removes the friction of dealing with another human being Some mistake, I think. Removing that friction would ease the interaction. This effect eliminates it.
- wazoox 5d agoI'm pretty baffled by people I hear here and there saying that AI is great because it saves them the hassle of human interaction. "I love Waymo, I don't have to chit-chat with the driver and bear his horrible music". Apparently people didn't get the memo : humans are social animals. Autonomous individuals simply don't exist. Nothing is entirely yours... And AI precisely builds upon that large availability of our common data. That's a modern enclosure movement, at least it would be but fortunately, the Communist Chinese are there to enforce sharing.
- duskdozer 5d agoThis falls short because not being forced into chit-chat and music is very pleasant, but chatting with LLMs instead of collaborating with other people on a project is not. These aren't equivalents. >humans are social animals with varying social needs
- Forgeties79 5d agoA whole idea of a fleet of self driving cars for all of us to use just to further isolate ourselves and clog up our roads is just awful to me.
- prepend 5d agoThe same argument was made when elevator operators went away. Some things work well with automation (taxis, washing machines, copy machines) while others work better with humans (chefs, masseuses). 50 years ago, I would have needed to dictate this note to a secretary who would distribute a memo. Does it further isolate ourselves that we can type and communicate directly? Would 1980 uses think it was awful to us?
- Forgeties79 5d agoPrivate autonomous vehicles are the pinnacle of entitlement. It is one of the single least efficient forms of transportation we could possibly come up with. It is such a perfect example of the public bearing the cost of private gains. I am not against automation. I am against the idea that we are driving car culture forward in this way.
- spongebobstoes 5d agowith AI, one person can accomplish much more collaboration adds overhead, but expands what's possible. need to think bigger to continue to see the benefits
- Forgeties79 5d agoDo we really need to have this debate again? About how the quality of the “what” is the issue?
- maddiaa0 5d agoThis is the exact same thing that we have been seeing in open source software. The amount of OSS is exploding, but the community part of it is not
- skybrian 5d agoFor software developers, the equivalent is writing software without beta testers. If you don’t seek out users, you will likely build something nobody else wants. And, that’s what I do. I’m retired and I use AI to build websites for myself. If anyone else ends up using it, that will be a happy side-effect. If we want to do collaboration, we are going to need to do it intentionally rather than relying on side effects like conversations with cab drivers.
- Xirdus 5d agoCounterpoint: most Open Source projects are (or started off as) programs people built for themselves, and anyone else ending up using them was a happy side-effect.
- skybrian 5d agoAnd yet, many people have ambitions. They will put up a website about how great their software is and how everyone should use it. I usually put a warning that it's experimental and might not be maintained. More users, more problems. (And yet, I'll confess to be slightly disappointed that nobody is using software that I didn't promote.)
- Frost1x 5d agoI work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, with conviction. I also hear a lot more questioning people in their domains and challenging opinions, then hearing what I can only imagine are fragmented pieces of conversations they had with an LLM thinking through some argument. Then there’s silence when you discuss shortcomings, then they come back later with their memorized fragments of what you said, combined with memorized fragments of the LLM response to the argument. It’s occurring, a lot more. People are treating their LLMs in collaboration as a source of truth and using then to focus on their specific path or goals they think or have bias towards going down, vs just opening discussing things, considering tradeoffs from experts multiple disciplines weigh in on and then taking an approach that everyone finds most agreeable. It’s making me want to be a lot less collaborative with such individuals. I don’t want to sit around and refute Claude text outputs all day.
- varjag 5d agoYup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.
- ricardobayes 5d agoHow come self-driving came years before LLMs which seems to me an easier problem? Self-driving seems insanely hard compared to text generation.
- pingou 5d agoWhy would self driving be easier? Good text generation implies some general level of intelligence, while driving is more specialized.
- n4r9 5d agoLLMs require massive datasets and massively parallel algorithms for processing them.
- philipwhiuk 5d agoThere’s lots of ways of attacking the problem sufficiently to get to 95% and we’ve spent decades on object recognition
- ipsod 5d agoNobody knew that LLM's were an option. The architecture was basically waiting there for someone to say, "do that, but turn it up to 11," if I understand right.
- shawabawa3 5d ago> How come self-driving came years before LLMs Did it? Outside of very limited testing zones, self driving _still_ doesn't really exist
- penteract 5d agoa) Self driving was far from completely solved before LLMs. b) Text generation essentially means passing the Turing test, which for a long time was the bar for general intelligence. Locomotion does not necessarily require general intelligence.
- Grimblewald 5d agollms right now work like pre cnn computer vision based on MLP's. By this i mean brute force of a model not really built for the task, and lacking a task specific inductive bias, being made work with unfathomable volumes of data and sheer brute scale. if you look at the damage being done in the name of making this work for nlp, a forseeable situation, then you might also understand why most who could have done this sooner, never did so for fear of repeating mistakes we should be learning from, which we get for free if we just heed history.
- mccoyb 5d agoAI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc. Not many professions are formally trained to be cognizant of this lack of understanding, and how to confront it. Usage of AI in collaborative settings is an amplifier of these issues, especially if someone doesn’t realize they don’t understand: they couldn’t teach or explain the concepts they use, or be forced to work with them malleably in a way that an expert or researcher would. If you are cognizant of your lack of understanding, you can remedy it by slowing down and teaching yourself. This is required to make better use of AI in the domain of interest! But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain.
- kaffekaka 5d ago> But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain. Very well put. You can pick one or two, but not all three.
- teiferer 5d ago> But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain. I think the article's point is more nuanced. Short term, the human brain as the "conductor" can keep up and an expert can see whether the machine did a good job and course correct if necessary. Over time though that degrades more and more.
- FlockisYC2 5d ago[flagged]
- addag 5d agoWell not only research, but also a lot of other aspects of life; it is way easier to interact with something that has always an answer is polite whatever tell them.
- chairleader 5d agoI think this notion of friction vs frictionless is one of the key features of this time in history. To my eye, the whole line from personal technology in the 80s -> through UX on the internet -> through app platform lock-in -> through subscription-centric "ownership" have been providing us all with the promise that we can buy our way into less friction. The next device or subscription solves problems or enables us one way or another. We see this line of history, draw it into the future and see a utopian future with zero friction. Zero friction meaning zero difference between how you want to feel about the world and what you get out of it. More feeling empowered or satisfied or comfortable or right. The parts of our culture that embrace friction are the slow parts - grousing with neighbors, weeding a garden, letting the other car go first. These are the parts where we meet with the reality of other people or nature. Maybe there's a tool or framework or gadget that could help, but we know and accept that there is something immutable outside of ourselves and we have to find a way to flow with it. I'm getting older, I'm finally starting to see the limits of pursuing a frictionless life.
- alex_suzuki 5d agoThis resonates with me so much. One thing I personally have noticed is that very result-oriented people seem to be vastly more optimistic about AI since for them it’s all about getting from A to B as quickly as possible, and AI broadly seems to promise that. Conversely, the people who find joy in what they do, and see the journey and its frustrations as fulfilling and full of learning, tend to be more pessimistic or disillusioned. (sample size maybe N ~8-10, all SWE)
- chairleader 5d agoThat's an interesting observation. I can see both sides of that coin.
- yuzushi-dev 5d ago[dead]
- deleted 5d ago[deleted]
- conductr 5d agoFWIW, this same thing is happening in regular corporate America too. I have all kinds of non-CPA, non-finance background people telling me how I should treat financial transactions, without the nuance of GAAP or how an auditor would handle their reasoning. Everyone has an opinion on what our tech teams should/could allow or enable or create, without understanding the security implications and support it would require or what other projects are already working on. It’s good in a way, because you can certainly challenge people’s answer when an idea gets shot down. But it’s also a bit exhausting that everyone is challenging everything all the time.
- Cribalis 5d agoI think the problem is the same as with any technology: used correctly it adds value, used incorrectly it subtracts from it. LLMs can massively speed up a process, but without control they can turn into social "sources of truth." A research process has well-defined, well-founded phases: you delimit the topic, search for sources, evaluate whether they're suitable, review their content, and place them on the map of the subject. The more sources, the greater the knowledge, and the better the final result — mental, or in the form of a report — is built. For that you have to read, and reread, and think, connect, relate, and conclude. AI can do all of those steps faster than a human. But if we let it do the entire job on its own, its own way, with no checks at each stage, the conclusions can end up distorted. If we know what we want it to do and how we want it done, and we put the mechanisms in place to enforce that, the result is different — better, more reliable. It's worth remembering: it's just a tool, nothing more. The wording of this comment in English has been corrected with AI, I don't have enough fluency to express myself clearly, but I do review the final result. In this case it got the verb tenses wrong, I saw it clearly, but the AI didn't understand it, it took me several instructions to explain it so it would understand. It's a tool, without supervision it can lead to problems, but it has expanded the world for a lot of people.
- fabsalvadori 5d ago[dead]
- quao627 5d ago[dead]
- khalic 5d agoAh, the ai panic has reached scientists, queue in the 1000s of articles about how it was about people all along and doom is coming to our civilisation because of it.
- gradus_ad 5d agoIf people want to collaborate, they will. If collaboration makes people more effective, they will want to collaborate. The novelty of any new technology is exciting and disrupting to existing habits but as the years pass we will reflect on what works and what doesn't. At least, those who are willing to reflect and adapt. Humans have a knack for this sort of thing...
- illiac786 5d agoThis only works short and medium term. Long term benefits have very little traction.
- claiir 5d agoWas almost going to praise this article for not overtly sounding like Claude, but then I read this: > and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus. So close!
- foolinaround 5d agoBeautifully written essay. The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so). The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output? Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know the author, but lets assume that he is not a good writer but had these valuable insights, did this AI generation not add value here?
- teiferer 5d ago> Beautifully written essay. Agreed! Great flow, structure, no BS, really good! I would wager this didn't use LLM help to be written. Though if I'm wrong I'd really like to know and would be very impressed. (And if I'm right then the article is an illustration of its own message. You don't learn how to write such essays without having practised it for many years without opting for the easy way of letting the LLM do this for you.)
- claiir 5d agoFrom the post, “and the incentive structures we have built are the experimental apparatus.” That’s a Claude sentence.
- teiferer 5d agoWhat is "a Claude sentence"?
- mpalmer 5d agoIt absolutely was used, and heavily. I won't even cover the "it's not ___, it's ___", of which there are MANY in this piece. But beyond that: Count the lists of three: A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger. It costs travel and scheduling and the glacial work of building trust. It costs ego management and compromise and the periodic small heartbreak of the author-order negotiation. Look for referenced to "naming" things, used in the sense of "identify" or "realize" rather than, you know, naming something. It took us slightly longer to name what we had lost. Swap “pilot” for “researcher” and “autopilot” for “agent”, and the mechanism Wang is guarding against is the one Bainbridge named four decades earlier. Look for things being done "quietly": Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone. (ed. - is that *really* Waymo's central feature?) once a frictionless option exists, we take it by default, and quietly surrender whatever the friction was doing for us Every conversation redirected from a colleague to a chatbot is a thread quietly withdrawn while the invisible thing that sustained it quietly falls below threshold competence quietly erodes precisely because it is needed only rarely the quiet risk is that our incentives are training us
- Unified-Mentor 5d ago[dead]
- dandare 5d agoTangential: We need to invent some kind of personal wireless setting that will signal to strangers that you are open to meeting new people or starting a conversation. Otherwise, all this technology will totally isolate us.
- abought 5d agoI'm seeing this on a current academic research project as well- it's like throwing fuel on the fire for all the best and worst parts of working with researchers. First: it's definitely become harder to get people to integrate their work and use standard tools. We're exploring creating AI skills etc for our tooling, simply because the actual audience we need to convince isn't in the room. If the LLM doesn't echo our recommendations, people will go with whatever one off script their personal bad idea bear churns out. Many research software errors are edge cases (scaling, numerical errors, etc), and "works on my computer" syndrome is endemic in the literature. The field has made big strides in enabling computational reproducibility, but lately it feels like we're set to lose ground again. Second: LLMs have a bias to action, and can easily bury the user reporting on whatever. I've seen multiple seminars recently where the Q&A devolves to "Q: What are the implications of this finding? A: I don't know, this is just presenting a report on the results". It seems that humans are still figuring out how to maintain agency and steer the chatbot to the big picture, and unreviewable science is just as likely an outcome as unreviewable code... but with far less automated tooling to help guide the process. Historically, PIs nominally guided the big picture, and the entity who did the work was a participant in the review process; now students are having to look at projects from a new angle with their own (invisible) chatbot underlings. I suspect that the solution will involve a combination of technological change, capturing common expert review checks, and really adjusting the kinds of skills that trainees are expected to have early on.
- NotSuspicious 5d agoIs it just me or did this entire essay feel like it was penned by an LLM?
- trizoza 5d ago> the driver was, for many of us on many days, the last stranger we were obliged to encounter. The last person from outside our bubble – professionally, politically, socially – with whom we had an unchosen conversation. The last reliable source of a view we did not ask for. We need more encounters like these in our human lives. Burst our little bubbles every now and then.
- jameshart 5d agoThis touches on some of the topics that drove Sergey Karayev to write about ‘multiplayer AI’ - https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/working-with-ai-agents/multiplayer-ai-manifesto/ https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/working-with-ai-agents/mul... The fact that work is retreating into private chat sessions with AI agents is a loss; the idea of bringing those agentic collaborators out into public spaces to collaborate with teams is interesting.
- joshstrange 5d agoI have no doubt AI is acceleration or continuing out march into isolation. I also have no idea how to combat the root issue (since stopping the progress of science has never really worked or been possible). This has been going on for quite some time, you can find lots of people talking about things like disappearing "third place/space"'s [0]. The trend seems to be fewer people know or interact with their neighbors, something I've been guilty of as well. We have unlimited opportunities for both entertainment and pursuing our interests. COVID also was like pouring gas on this with people isolating and some people never "reintegrated" afterwards. A general lack of community is the root issue from my perspective but how to best encourage/build that is something I struggle with. I've seen some theorize the need for everything to be in service of growing the economy, everything needing to be turned into a side-hustle or monetized in some way is to blame. I can believe that, so often things feel like a zero-sum game and the fatigue from that is real. I can't tell you how many times I've started writing software (before or after LLMs) and found myself lost (in the very early stages) thinking about monetization or thinking about "how will this scale?", "How could I make this configurable for people who want to use this differently than I do?", etc, all _before_ there is a viable piece of software to use. Once I realize what I'm doing it's maddening. It's the "planning for how to handle 1M simultaneous users when you don't have 1". LLMs have let me break from that thinking, design software just for my needs, which is freeing in many ways and I love what I've been able to do but also isolating. More and more I find myself wanting to fork "ideas" not code. Why would I want to try to participate in someone else's vibe/llm-assisted project instead of just making my own? I feel that pull and I also feel like it's wrong or misguided. I have no answers here, just noting I'm seeing and experiencing this and I don't know how to stop it. I'll end with a quote that Aaron Sorkin has written into multiple of his TV shows: It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I think that should change. — Aaron Sorkin [0] For those not familiar, my quick summary of the idea is that we normally have home and work but also a third place we go. For some that's a church or similar, for some it's community center, for other's it's some kind of community they are apart of.
- gowld 5d agoAny indictment of LLM needs to distinguish LLM from pocket calculators and books. Calculators and books quietly made reasearch less collaborative. Also, Waymo is an automated taxi service, so it's an exteremly misleading analogy. Taxis existed before Waymo.
- crazygringo 5d ago> The benefits are diffuse and deferred: the driver was, for many of us on many days, the last stranger we were obliged to encounter. The last person from outside our bubble – professionally, politically, socially – with whom we had an unchosen conversation. The last reliable source of a view we did not ask for. This is a very strange take, to me. I have conversations with cashiers, bartenders, servers, baristas, the random person in line in front of me or behind me, the person next to me on my flight (if they seem open to it), barbers, you name it. I've had a handful of interesting conversations with cab drivers, but it's a tiny proportion of all my conversations with people "outside my bubble". So I'm not really worried about this. The idea that cab drivers are somehow the last vestige of someone outside of your bubble is... bizarre to me.
- kelt_row 5d agoLLMs hand people confident-sounding answers in domains they can't judge. The problem isn't the model being wrong, it's that the person can't tell.
- IshKebab 5d agoSometimes you can tell though even if you don't understand the code. E.g. if AI makes a game, just play it. Sometimes code doesn't have to be 100% bug free and in fact humans can't achieve that anyway. I've been using Astra a lot recently and it's really mad good. If you are currently in the "I'm still better than AI" camp (which I was until now) it might change your mind.
- dannyw 5d agoI’m an introvert who hates small talk, yet across countries; I’ve found the value of human drivers to far outweigh the small ‘cost’. From knowing the area and telling me the Alamo location has moved (and not updating their address on their official website!); to coming back and returning an item I forgot to retrieve; these incidents have helped me so much; not to mention occasionally having deep and meaningful conversations that enriched my life and perspectives. I’ve had some occasional bad experiences too; but that’s life. I took a Waymo twice, and I still go for Uber or Didi every time.
- mannanj 5d agoI think we should describe a new effect infecting mainstream society: - AI companies and the rich have increasingly pushed an agenda on the populace that most people didn't want, and the foundation of work in AI was formed by theft. - Theft of creative work from millions of people, and a selective enforcement of law and compromise of investigatory authorities has demonstrated the law, morals, and the welfare of most people doesn't matter for people in power. - This is the real "less collaborative" nature of the world where we find ourselves in. Add to that the increasing push for war by our leaders and rich too, people often shielded from the consequences, and you have a net less collaborative world. It actually isn't even AI, but the same people pushing it are the same ones compromising collaboration for most people.
- philippemnoel 5d agoThe notion that "every human interaction is worth preserving" is probably not right, and Waymos are showcasing this. As the author mentions, many people don't enjoy the forced small talk with Uber drivers. Interacting with people from different backgrounds and perspectives is important, but I doubt the forced interactions like taxi rides are where we were getting those until day.
- ddosmax556 5d agoCompletely agree. I think there is a danger that we will loose important interactions because we don't need them, but there's also a chance that we skip unimportant ones and focus on important ones. If being in a Waymo alone causes you to be more comfortable to chat with people on the phone, it can even have a positive effect, for example.
- spyckie2 5d agoI think you're missing the point, which is not that every human interaction is worth preserving, but that convenience has a hidden cost. People would rather not spend time and effort to help their neighbors. People would rather not pick up trash they see on the side of the road. People would rather not take accountability. If these things become the default action, then you've traded something for the convenience, and that something might be non obvious until you feel it is missing. The neighbors one, I think a lot of people will admit a certain loneliness and desire to have community back. I don't think a lot of people will actually give up the inconvenience for it though, the sedative nature of convenience is one of its core problems. The number of people I hear say with conviction they can't imagine living anywhere other than CA because they couldn't stand the weather anywhere else...
- theholygrail 5d ago[flagged]
- cmrdporcupine 5d agoMany of the things we now do and valorize as part of our intellectual labours are going to become/seem increasingly vain, pointless, and cargo-cultish.
- xivzgrev 5d agoI wonder if AI is making us dumber I can have AI pull some analysis - sql query, crunch some numbers and bam, some precise sounding number. But then I question it, and then it says "you are right, I didn't check that" How did I know what to question? By doing the friction work of querying myself, calculating myself, and then getting questions from leadership. I worry about the younger generation. They spit out Claude results fast, people question it and they say "ok I'll take that back to Claude". I suppose they'll eventually learn to do their own sense checking because they still have the friction of presenting to others. And maybe my model is a thing of the past. Everyone is now going to be a manager (of agents) fresh out of school. They aren't doing the work anymore but they will need to set clear goals, validate work and hold agents accountable.
- mpalmer 5d agoOh it is, no question. All the people who come to AI with years of expertise are feeling it - what happens to all the people who never get the chance to develop it?
- TaupeRanger 5d agoPre-LLMs: anyone can generate ideas, the implementation is what matters Post-LLMs: anyone can generate implementations, the ideas are what matter
- no_multitudes 5d ago[dead]
- mpalmer 5d agoUnrelated to AI, who is actually stressing about having to talk to drivers? In my experience most drivers are perfectly happy not chatting. This seems like a truly fake concern. Yet the piece literally says Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone Which is simply wrong.
- navaed01 5d agoI agree with a lot of the article, but I want to posit that LLMs can encourage more human interaction by providing people with an information foundation that they might not have gained otherwise. What do I mean… In the past 2 weeks I’ve had human conversations about fleet management and flood insurance that were a direct result of being able to quickly explore these topics with LLMS first.
- thoughtpeddler 5d agoReminds me of what happened once most people and households transitioned to individually-carried cellphones as opposed to the 'house phone' (i.e. landline). You used to have to call 'the house' before you got routed to someone else within it, and that would often be cause for catching up with a person incidentally, and now that's just, totally gone! A great example of the trade-offs to navigate when improving systems for efficiency.