I don’t think natural language is efficient enough. Whether that be text or voice.
I imagine the Star Trek vision is pretty accurate. You occasionally talk to the computer when it makes sense, but more often than not you’re still interacting with a GUI of some kind.
The law has yet to catch up to the idea of vibe coded software. I see significant problems.
Example: the other day someone was promoting their saas. They proudly advertised that they knew nothing about technology, and that AI created everything.
Yet their saas had a detailed privacy policy describing how your data was used. Of course the problem is, they have no way of knowing that their privacy policy is at all accurate. After all they don’t even know how to read their product’s code.
This undoubtedly exposes them to legal issues. I can imagine software being more tightly regulated as this spirals out of control.
We’ll hit a point soon where there’s so much dangerous and untrustworthy AI slop software on the market, that people will actively seek out and pay a premium for software created by professionals at reputable companies.
It’s also called Major depressive disorder. It’s basically depression that isn’t a temporary response to something. It’s long lasting depression that doesn’t go away.
You can easily look up the diagnostic criteria online.
Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.
As a candidate I find them to be a huge overstep and will almost never provide them.
No, I’m sorry. I’m not going to pester my friends and colleagues to “hop on a quick call” or fill out a 2 page survey every time I interview somewhere.
Quite frankly, I really don’t need or want my friends to be intimately involved in my job search.
This poor guy had to have all his references book a call, only for them to all be notified shortly after that they weren’t needed any more, because he flunked the interview.
> Sure. From the employers perspective, I get the appeal of references.
Respectfully, it doesn't seem like you do. References in many cases are actually needed for compliance purposes. An example for Anthropic is if the employee might be exposed to medical data, then reference checks can be used as part of a larger validation of employee identity to satisfy HIPAA requirements.
Amazon and others have the importance of reference checks baked into their agreements for those who work with them.
It's the exact same checks. I know this because I've had to fill out some of these compliance documents and implement similar sorts of procedures with the legal dept. In addition to background checks, candidate reference calls prior to onboarding are becoming a checkbox that must be ticked by various external groups.
And to clarify, it's not something I support or that I find it makes a lot of sense to me -- it's just an unfortunate situation of where things are currently at.
You run legal compliance on everyone interviewing for a job? What a waste of everyone’s time. Very inefficient and expensive. Do it after an offer is extended.
The position is more extreme than that. It’s your SaaS without its UI is nothing more than a database.
> The underlying SaaS platform is reduced to a “database” or “utility” that an agent can switch out if needed.
I agree that UI isn’t going away completely. Language is a slow and imprecise tool. A well developed UI can be much more efficient. I think it will be much more like the Star Trek universe, where we use a blend of the two.
In any case, if the AI agent can generate UI on the fly, it seems their point still stands?
Oh yeah I can't wait for the AI to layout the UI in an arbitrary fashion, put buttons wherever the hell it feels like it (even in a place you can neither see nor click on.). Yes please, also I would like to automate the customer service for said product so it can be a complete black box of uselessness.
For a reductio ad absurdum that might illustrate where your analysis falls down, consider how someone with net worth of $0 and someone with net worth of $100k would each be differently affected by getting a $5k handout, accompanied by a 10% decrease in the purchasing power of a dollar. The end result is not the same as the status quo.
The intent is not to make everyone richer, but to redistribute wealth in an equalizing direction. (In fact this might also make everyone slightly richer on average in real terms, because of second-order effects related to economies of scale that make it slightly easier to meet the growth in demand when wealth is distributed more evenly).
Of course, the decreasing value of the dollar is an undesired side-effect of any government spending; this is why you counterbalance it with taxes to pull money back out of the system and control price growth. These taxes don't exactly cancel the UBI if they disproportionately fall on the wealthy; this is why I like consumption taxes, which fall more heavily on people who have more money to spend.
To clarify. If everyone in the US is given an extra 5k a month do you believe that the price of goods and services remain the same as they are at present?
If my landlord is charging me 2k for rent, does she not increase it knowing I now have an extra 5k of UBI monthly?
Or, if there’s a bidding war on a home that might typically sell as high as 300k, does that still hold true now that everyone has an extra 5k, or does the house sell for more?
Will a plumber still charge $30 an hour when he has a guaranteed 5k on top of what he’s making? Or will he start to bump his price up to make it worth his while?
I really don’t see how prices don’t just climb and re-equalize so that we’re back at square one. And your response didn’t address that concern.
There's a lot to unpack here, so I hope you don't mind a long and nuanced reply.
UBI on its own is obviously inflationary, like any other government spending. But it can be combined with taxes to reduce the growth in the money supply, as necessary to keep prices stable. Those taxes will tend to be aimed at the wealthy, and will take more than $5k/month away from them, so people bidding for a $300k home might have less purchasing power, not more.
But also, AGI-fueled unemployment is likely very deflationary, and that is the premise of this conversation. Let's talk about your landlord's situation. Sure, your tenant is now getting $5k/month UBI, but they've also lost their job, and so has most of the population. There might not actually be more juice to squeeze out of that lemon than there used to be. Plus, workers won't be bidding up rents in (formerly) high-wage cities for jobs that don't exist anymore. Your unemployed tenant is only staying in town because they like the weather. They could move elsewhere if you charge too much rent; it won't affect their commute.
The effect on prices will really vary a lot by type of good. For things that get effectively automated by AGI (let's say, for example... legal services and architectural drawings), the price may drop precipitously due to increased productivity. For other things (plumbing), the price would go up a lot. It would become quite rewarding to be a plumber.
Lastly, depending on the types of goods demanded, prices can be quite stable. If you give everyone $1k and they use it to buy an iPhone, the price of iPhones might not even go up that much, because it gets cheaper to produce in large quantity. In fact, they may even get cheaper. However, if you give one person $100M and they use it to buy a yacht, you don't get the same efficiency benefits from economies of scale. A more even wealth distribution favors mass production of goods, which keeps prices low.
We don't end up back at square one because:
1) The goal of UBI isn't to make everyone $5k richer, but to shrink the gap between rich and poor in a world where a few people are very rich from owning capital and many are poor due to a decrease in demand for labor.
2) We don't end up back at square one because at the end of the day, an unemployed person getting $5k/month has more purchasing power than if they got $0/month, even if prices do increase.
3) But aggregate prices don't even necessarily have to increase, because of changes to taxes and productivity, and also because of economies of scale.
Prices would climb, but not "re-equalize." Let's say everything got 2x more expensive. People currently making very little could still afford much more. People currently making a lot could afford less.
Right now you are correct that giving everyone 5k would not produce more stuff so the dollars would devalue.
The idea however is that at the same time as giving everyone 5k, AI workers would produce more than an extra 5k/head of stuff.
As an alternative having the AIs produce all the cars and houses we need but giving all the money to Sam Altman wouldn't make sense as no one would have the money to buy them apart from Sam who couldn't use them all.
I firmly believe AI will become heavily taxed and regulated.
It would be foolish to ban it, but equally foolish to allow it to replace a large percentage of your country’s workforce. It would completely destabilize the economy and society as a whole.
AI can do a lot of great things for humanity. Putting vast amounts of people out of a job is not one of those things.
There needs to be more smart people talking about and studying what the future realistically looks like.
Taxing and regulating the AI itself wouldn't work very well as competitors abroad or who skirt the regulations would be able to use it. You might be able to require human supervision so rather than AI replacing a programer who was laid off, the human would become the AIs supervisor.
The world’s richest man has been empowered by the US government to gleefully lay off thousands of federal workers with no published plan beyond “delete government agencies” and his team is using AI as part of the execution. I’m skeptical that there are people in charge who think about anything other than consolidating their own power and lining their own pockets. I think the only AI taxes that might come into play are those that steer people towards services run by those already in power and disincentivize setting up your own AI infrastructure.
The world’s richest man got handed this mandate by someone that was elected by millions of US citizens and he explicitly told them he will do this. Enough people in the US want to see this happen.
I don't know if enough people would not agree to highly tax the corporations if they're themselves out of work and need the money to survive.
I imagine the Star Trek vision is pretty accurate. You occasionally talk to the computer when it makes sense, but more often than not you’re still interacting with a GUI of some kind.