If/when the AI music gets good enough, how will you know the difference? I find small artists on spotify all the time that I enjoy and there's no way to know anything about their creative process.
I think what you describe is different than the level of joy/enjoyment I seek and am talking about. Sure the AI song can be pleasing to the ear, much like a catchy pop song or jingle at a grocery store is pleasing to the ear.
The level of enjoyment I get from art is looking into the artist, their background, and anything else surrounding the work that can add meaning to it for me. Even small artists have these, and it's easier than ever to connect with artists on this level thanks to the internet.
All to say is sure at a glance it may sound/look the same, but that's only part of the joy of art.
And how is the quality of life for those factory workers? It's almost like the craft of making physical things has been devalued even if we're making more physical things than ever.
If you live in a country where worker's health and lives are valued, pretty good. 98% of them are in a union, so they can't get fired from nowhere, they have reliable salary each month, free healthcare (as everyone else in the country) and they can turn off when they come home. Most of them work on rotation, so usually you'd do one week of one station, then one week of another station, and so on, so it doesn't get too repetitive. Lots of quality of life improvements are still happening, even for these workers.
Of course, I won't claim it's glamorous or anything, but the idea that factory workers somehow will disappear tomorrow feels far out there, and I'm generally optimistic about the future.
Most grocery stores in every place I have lived have security cameras so that if you did something illegal you'd be identified very quickly. At this point this is even true of small bodegas.
Also scammers can't waltz into my grocery store from the other side of the planet and wreak havoc.
Ultimately you can use privacy enhancing tools, just like servers can choose to block them. I wish there was a better system but that's what we've got.
A security camera, on its own, doesn't tell the grocery store who you are. There was a time when CCTV didn't even exist and yet we still had commerce.
"What we've got" isn't "the best we can do". There absolutely are better possibilities that would protect consumers. The best way to ensure we never get to experience those better systems is to shrug our shoulders and passively accept whatever treatment we receive.
There are very very few places in nyc not accessible via some combo of bus, metro and ferry. It's not as reliable as say Japan but the public transit network is pretty extensive.
Not everyone who drives through NYC lives in NYC. Even if it were, those transit hops add time. Now you're forcing people to choose between paying money they don't have or spending time they don't have.
If you're driving through NYC you probably have enough money for gas and $9 and all the other tolls on the road. No one is driving around on their last drop of gas going "gosh I could just get out of Nyc to Long Island if I just had that $9 for gas".
The poor car owner who can't afford $9 stories are all made up nonsense. "Not everyone has $9 to spend to drive their tens of thousands of dollars car."
I think the AI advice is pretty important. You say you should understand and question everything the lawyers do but where do you even start without an AI to read and explain thousands of pages of contracts and legal process. Nevermind all the case law and it's trained on and has access to.
I think if he tried this ten years ago he'd have a pretty hard time with it.
At the rate they're going it'll just get cheaper. The cost per token continues to drop while the models get better. Hardware is also getting more specialized.
Maybe the current batch of startups will run out of money but the technology itself should only get cheaper.
I think articles like this have the big assumption under them that we are going to plateau with progress. If that assumption is true, then sure.
But if it's false, there's no saying you can't eventually have an ai model that can read your entire aws/infra account, look at logs, financials, look at docs and have a coherent picture of an entire business. At that point the idea that it might be able to handle architecture and long term planning seems plausible.
Usually when I read about developer replacement, it's with the underlying assumption that the agents/models will just keep getting bigger, better and cheaper, not that today's models will do it.
There is a high risk that the systems that AIs build, and their reasoning, will become inscrutable with time, as if built by aliens. There is a huge social aspect to software development and the tech stack and practices we have, that ensures that (despite all disagreements) we as developers are roughly on the same page as to how to go about contemporary software development (which now for example is different than, say, 20 or 40 years ago).
When AIs are largely on their own, their practices will evolve as well, but without there being a population of software developers who participate and follow those changes in concepts and practices. There will still have to be a smaller number of specialists who follow and steer how AI is doing software development, so that the inevitable failure cases can be analyzed and fixed, and to keep the AI way of doing things on a track that is still intelligible to humans.
Assuming that AI will become that capable, this will be a long and complex transition.
There are parts of this I agree with and parts I do not. Being able to "talk" to documentation rather than dig through it to try to understand a concept feels like a way more efficient way to get to the same end.
I think digging through forums or comments or SEO garbage to try to find answers is a nightmare compared to having a solid llm do it for you. Being able to ask to explain a concept 5 different ways or compare concepts is incredible.
Or say - knowing nothing about 3d printing and being able to just ask it about current capabilities, materials, costs etc as an entrypoint. There are whole business ideas I wouldn't even consider exploring without it because it would be so overwhelming to research from scratch.
I believe we're already using llms to evaluate llm output for training, I wonder if there's some variation of that which could be used to identify when one llm gets "stuck".
I guess chain of thought in theory should do that but having variations on prompt and context might behave differently?
