Horses: AI Progress Is Steady. Human Equivalence Is Sudden

Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?

This is an assumption for the best-case scenario, but I think you could also just take the marginal case. Steady progress builds until you get past the state of the art system, and then the switch becomes easy to justify.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine

AI, at the limit, is a vampiric technology, sucking the differentiated economic value from those that can train it. What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood? This, to me, is a big problem, because a model will tend to drift from reality without more training-blood.

The owners of the tech need to reinvest in the hosts.

Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became more responsive and served their customers better. And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.

There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having humans do them makes administration slow and expensive. Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this meeting never happened at all because the person making the decision just told the LLM and it did it".

You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better.

I can’t help but smile at the possibility that you could be a bot.

https://time.com/archive/6632231/recreation-return-of-the-ho...

turns out the chart is about farm horses only as counted by the USDA not including any recreational horses. So this is nore about tractors for horses, not passenger cars.

So thats an optional future humans can hope for too.

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City horses (the ones replaced by cars and trucks) were nearly extinct by 1930 already.

City horses were formerly almost exclusively bred on farms but because of their practical disappearance such breeding is no longer necessary. They have declined in numbers from 3,500,000 in 1910 to a few hundred thousand in 1930.

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1930/...

I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who don't have their boots on the ground.

I have noticed, however, that people who are either not programmers or who are not very good programmers report that they can derive a lot of benefit from AI tools, since now they can make simple programs and get them to work. The most common use case seems to be some kind of CRUD app. It's very understandable this seems revolutionary for people who formerly couldn't make programs at all.

For those of us who are busy trying to deliver what we've promised customers we can do, I find I get far less use out of AI tools than I wish I did. In our business we really do not have the budget to add another senior software engineer, and we don't the spare management/mentor/team lead capacity to take on another intern or junior. So we're really positioned to be taking advantage of all these promises I keep hearing about AI, but in practical terms, it saves me at an architect or staff level maybe 10% of my time and for one of our seniors maybe 5%.

So I end up being a little dismissive when I hear that AI is going to become 80% of GDP and will be completely automating absolutely everything, when what I actually spend my day on is the same-old same-old of trying to get some vendor framework to do what I want to get some sensor data out of their equipment and deliver apps to end customers that use enough of my own infrastructure that they don't require $2,000 a month of cloud hosting services per user. (I picked that example since at one customer, that's what we were brought in to replace: that kind of cost simply doesn't scale.)

I don't think you can characterise it as a sentiment of the community as a whole. While every AI thread seems to have it's share of AI detractors, the usernames of the posters are becoming familiar. I think it might be more accurate to say that there is a very active subset of users with that opinion.

This might hold true for the discourse in the wider community. You see a lot of coverage about artists outraged by AI, but when I speak to artists they have a much more moderate opinion. Cautious, but intrigued. A good number of them are looking forward to a world that embraces more ambitious creativity. If AI can replicate things within a standard deviation of the mean, the abundance of that content there will create an appetite for something further out.

But the temptation of easy ideas cuts both ways. "Oldsters hate change" is a blanket dismissal, and there are legitimate concerns in that body of comments.

Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they’re in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the US.

Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...

This is a recent development where the median wealth of citizens in progressively taxes nations has quickly overtaken the median wealth of USA citizens.

All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right? Yet things gave consistently been going the other way for along time in the USA.

physical products & energy are the two things that are relevant to people's wellbeing.

right now A.I is sucking up the energy & the RAM - so is it gonna translate into a net positive ?

That's just an example, but the pattern will easily repeat. One thing that came out of the post-pandemic era is that the lowest deciles saw the biggest rises in income. Consequently, things like Doordash became more expensive, and stuff like McDonald's stopped staffing as much.

This isn't some grand secret, but most Americans who post on Twitter, HN, or Reddit consider the results some kind of tragedy, though it is the natural thing that happens when people become much higher income: you can't hire many of them to do low-productivity jobs like bus a McD's table.

That's what life looks like when others get richer relative to you. You can't consume the fruits of their labor for cheap. And they will compete for you with the things that you decided to place supply controls on. The highly-educated downwardly-mobile see this most acutely, which is why you see it commonly among the educated children of the past elite.

Think of it another way. It's not that these things are more expensive. It's that the average US worker simply doesn't provide anything of value. China provides the things of value now. How the government corrected for this was to flood the economy with cash. So it looks like things got more expensive, when really it's that wages reduced to match reality. US citizens selling each other lattes back and forth, producing nothing of actual value. US companies bleeding people dry with fees. The final straw was an old man uniting the world against the USA instead of against China.

If you want to know where this is going, look at Britain: the previous world super power. Britain governed far more of the earth than the USA ever did, and now look at it. Now the only thing it produces is ASBOs. I suppose it also sells weapons to dictators and provides banking to them. That is the USA's future.

The key issue upstream is that too many good jobs are concentrated in too few places, and that leads to consumerism stimulating those places and making them further more attractive. Technology, through Covid, actually gave governments a get out of jail free card by allowing remote work to become more mainstream. Only to just not grasp the golden egg they were given. Pivot economies more to remote working more actively helps distribute people to other places with more affordable home. Over time, and again slowly, those places become more attractive because people now actually live there.

Existing homeowners can still wrap themselves in the warm glow of their high house prices which only loses "real" value through inflation which people tend not to notice as much.

But we decided to try to go back to the status quo so oh well

Pretty much everything gets more expensive, with the outliers being tech which has gotten much cheaper, mostly because the rate at which it progresses is faster than the rate at which governments can print money. But everything we need to survive, like food, housing, etc, keeps getting more expensive. And the asset class get richer as a result.