Will AI Be the Basis of Many Future Industrial Fortunes, or a Net Loser?

The classic “refactoring is the answer”.

Maybe offloading software engineering thinking to AI will be a net good for humanity. If it atrophies engineering thinking in tech bros, perhaps they’ll stop believing that all societal problems can be solved by more tech.

I think in this case you're actually advocating for "the devil" - that man is not using his money or voice for a better society, to put it mildly.

I mean just a few days ago, we got "the left is the party of murder" - super helpful in terms of turning down the heat in the US. And of course that was without knowing what we now know about that situation...

I worked in weather for a while and the forecasters might as well have been betting on the horse races, the interpretation of the charts was very much the same psychology.

The model did its thing but there was still an aspect of interpretation that was needed to convert data to a story for a few minutes on TV.

For longer range forecasting the task was quite easy for the meteorologists, at least for the UK. Storm systems could be tracked from Africa across the Atlantic to North America and back across the Atlantic to the UK. Hence, with some well known phenomena such as that, my meteorologist friends would have a good general idea of what to expect with no model needed, just an understanding of the observations, obsessively followed, with all the enthusiasm of someone that bets on horses.

My forecasting friends could tell me what to expect weeks out, however, the exact time the rain would fall or even what day would not be a certain bet, but they were rarely wrong about the overall picture.

The atmosphere is far from a closed system, there only has to be one volcano fart somewhere on the planet to throw things out of whack and that is not something that is easy to predict. Predicting how the hard to predict volcano or solar flare affects the weather in a few weeks is beyond what I expect from AI.

I am still waiting for e-commerce platforms to be replaced with Blockchain dapps, and I will add AGI weather forecasting to the queue of not going to happen. Imagine if it hallucinates.

Will AI put bookmakers out of business? Nope. Same goes with weather.

Your response is, that you don't understand, so nobody else should.

Chaos theory says "nope". It's never going to be fully modelled, straight up.

It very much does. When I commission a piece of art, I am not the artist. Art without intention, without an artist, is not art.

Initially the printing press resulted in LESS writers, because people just copies others works. In fact, they had to establish something called intellectual property law in order to encourage people to write again.

Printing a book, either by hand or with printing equipment, is incomparably different to authoring a book. One is creating the intellectual content and the other is creating the artifact. The content of the AI-generated slop books popping up on Amazon by the hundred would be no less awful if it was hand-copied by a monk. The artifact of the book may be beautiful, but the content is still a worthless grift.

What primarily kept people from writing was illiteracy. The printing press encouraged people to read, but in its early years was primarily used for Bibles rather than original writing. Encouraging people to write was a comparatively distant latent effect.

Creating text faster than you can write is one of the primary use cases of LLMs— not a latent second-order effect.

You think vibe coding web apps, and by proxy most other coding, will pay anything more than whatever the cheapest developer in Vietnam is willing to charge for it? I definitely don’t think so. AI is killing the labor market for all of these skills. Right now it can only actually replace the lowest end of both fields, but as people upskill trying to outrun it (and then those above them, and then those above them,) and the tools get better, most of the market will get flooded and all of our pay will drop off a cliff. If ideas are so cheap to execute that anyone can do it, and everything is apparently fair use if you pass it through an NN somehow, then anyone can copy it, just as easily, and that will be a FAR more profitable business model. If that’s true, then once again, the only people with successful products are the ones that have the money for giant marketing expenditures. So pretty much exactly like today except a fraction as many people get paid to do it.

I haven’t spoken to a single developer that doesn’t believe they’re too special to have to worry about that. There’s going to be a lot of people that think they’re in the top 5% of coders at their totally safe company that suddenly realize door dash is their best bet for income.

The idea that having more web apps is always a benefit to people assumes a never-ending demand for more web apps. The economy and job market aren’t jibing with that assessment at the moment. Fewer people getting paid for this stuff is just going to mean that the people on top will just get paid more.

But it's not technical, it's due to uber having spent incredible amounts of money into marketing.

Interesting. For me knowing that any form of entertainment has been generated by AI is a massive turn-off. In particular, I could never imagine paying for AI-generated music or TV-shows.

No idea why this is downvoted, making AI music customized to your exact situation/preferences is very addictive. I have my own playlist I listen to pretty frequently

And I instantly switch off any YouTube video with either "AI"-plagiarized background music or with an "AI"-plagiarized voiceover that copies someone like Attenborough.

I wrote the above paragraph before searching, but of course the voice theft is already automated:

https://www.fineshare.com/ai-voice-generator/david-attenboro...

Sometimes the AI art in an advert is weird enough to make the advert itself memorable.

For example, in one of the underground stations here in Berlin there was a massive billboard advert clearly made by an AI, and you could tell noone had bothered to check what the image was before they printed it: a smiling man was standing up as they left an airport scanner x-ray machine on the conveyor belt, and a robot standing next to him was pointing a handheld scanner at his belly which revealed he was pregnant with a cat.

Unfortunately, like most adverts which are memorable, I have absolutely no recollection of what it was selling.

> For ads especially no one except career ad-men give much of a shit about the fine details, I think.

You think wrong.

This stuff is easy to measure and businesses spend billions in aggregate a month on this stuff. It’s provably effective and the details matter.

the feudalism model required that it be enforced with violence. As a peasant, you are not allowed by your feudal lord to move (migrate) away.

This is not so for internet. You can _choose_ not to shop at amazon, search with google, or watch videos on youtube.

Very thought out reply on the nuances around this. Thanks for generating insight on this topic.

I think our society is being broken by focusing too much on metrics.

Also the idea of breaking windows to generate more income reminds me of the kind of services we have in modern society. It's like many of the larger encomic players focus on "things be broke", or "Breaking Things" to drive income which defeats the purpose of having a healthy economic society.

> the "Two Income Trap" identified by Elizabeth Warren

This is addressed here: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/05/06/the-two-inco...

childcare is not usually a lifelong cost, so the advantage of working anyway is to develop a career that persists after children no longer need a full-time parent. And incomes usually go up over the course of a career, so if the income matches those costs when the parent goes to work, that is likely to change.

> the net real result is that the kids are raised by someone other than their parents

this is the genuine argument for staying home, but to counterpoint that, it still traps the homemaker with less work experience as a result, meaning they are potentially worse off in case of a divorce, though maybe that's an extension of the "welfare" argument i.e. divorce settlements.

That sounds very Black Mirrory.