I deliberately used non-emotive language and didn't explicitly hint at how I see things evolving with AI – otherwise what's the point if it's just telling me what I already know?
Instead I tried to stick to my view on both current and future capabilities of AI, and how it's likely to progress in the coming years.
My result was closed to Hinton which isn't that reflective of my actual view (I'd put doom at around 99% at this point). But that's probably just because of how I answered.
I like it though! Especially how it clearly exposes how unreasonable Ed Zitron is, and perhaps myself =)
> Undoubtedly, a transition of this magnitude could be enormously disruptive. But there is another possibility worth considering: that the extraordinary speed of progress itself compresses the period of disruption.
> To me and to our team at Infinite Ascent, this future of expanding abundance driven by an explosion in intelligence is something we deeply believe in, and something toward which we have chosen to direct our resources.
> But our underlying belief is one of profound optimism: that greater intelligence can ultimately produce a world of greater abundance, greater knowledge, and greater possibility, while allowing us to build in a way that benefits both intelligent life and the natural world around us.
I typed out a much longer comment going over some of my extreme disagreements with this article, but it's all so pointless. I'm just yelling at the clouds.
I just hope when this doesn't work out as planned these people reflect for a minute on their contribution to the suffering they have caused.
I guess I'll just remind people that thanks to technology we already live in a world with an abundance of food. What we don't live in is a world in which people would rather save a hundred starving kids over taking their family to Disney Land for a week. And so people die in completely avoidable ways every day, and we don't even lose sleep over it. That is why this article is wrong. If you make people economically worthless in a matter of years, I assure you, that will not end well. And that certainly isn't the only risk of ASI.
Apple is a private company. They don't have to comply with these demands if they don't agree with them.
I'm a Brit and I've advocated that Apple pull out of the UK over this. It annoys me that these companies seemingly have no principles and will just comply with our government's authoritarian demands. As a citizen there's nothing I can do, so it's really annoying that those who could be doing something choose to do nothing for a little extra profit.
As others have noted it's obviously more productive to use AI to write most of the code and for you to focus on the areas where you can add value.
However soon you will find have no real advantage over AI in any task. Therefore caring about the skills which are of fading value today makes almost as little sense as caring about the skills that mattered yesterday.
> What is gonna be sought after in the coming years: someone that persevered with manual coding and debugging but is slow and uncomfortable around agents, or someone that has little coding and debugging skills left but knows how to orchestrate dozens of agents effectively?
Neither. If your concern is your career or income then you should have a real plan based on how the world is realistically going to look in the future.
I disagree. Taste is different between two different people, so even if AI develops taste, it may not be your taste. Part of product design is knowing which features to say no to, which compromises are necessary, and which parts to never compromise. Two people will have different ideas about what those should be.
This ain't it. Machines don't have taste. They try to emulate the taste of people, which creates a terrible feedback loop. This is exactly why I made this post.
You'd be surprised how much money companies throw at very simple products, I'm working for a company making 100k mrr and was virtually entirely vibe coded by one dev until very recently
My guess is that this is half the story. It seems like there would be some advantage to some creatures of not aging, or having individuals who have significant longer life spans.
This is common in evolutionary algorithms anyway so it's notable we don't see it in nature, at least not in the form of extended lifespan perhaps measured by average lifetime heart beats. It's easy to imagine a world where nature might want to keep the alpha lion around longer than the others so it can have more offspring, for example.
> There is, if there were no advantage a whole lot more species would die immediately after reproduction like the octopus.
I didn't just meant extending lifespan, I meant extending the time an individual is fertile.
> The utility of genetic diversity puts a lot of pressure against this.
High levels of elitist selection lowers diversity and can have a negative impact on a population's adaptive ability, but there is a sweet spot to diversity. Maximally diverse is just noise after all.
A small amount of elitism is generally what you would expect to be selected for, and we certainly see this other forms in most creatures, but never in the form of extended life span. That makes me suspect there's probably something fundamentally difficult about extending an organism's lifespan given our biological architecture and that's why evolution has favoured other forms of elitist selection.
> On one hand you have AI enthusiasts who are shipping more than they ever have, they are super excited about being able to use the models and build everything they've ever wanted to. Utopia, amazing.
You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Up until the last year the best developers were generally those who valued comprehension and wanted to really understand the libraries, code and infrastructure of their projects because that comprehension was what led to quality software.
Those who didn't care tended to ship buggy crap and weren't great devs.
In my experience those who didn't really care about deeply understanding the systems they were working on are loving AI. But those who did care are now literally unable comprehend the state of the codebase and are being forced to work in a way that's extremely unnatural to them.
I say this because I've personally struggled with this over the last year as I've was one of those people who spent a lot of time building comprehensive mental models for the systems I worked on. Now I just assume the AI understands and just do what I need to do to get whatever functionality I'm working on over the line. I don't like it and I've lost all technical interest in coding at this point, but it is what it is ultimately. Coding is no longer about comprehension, it's just about asking Claude to do something.
>You can't ship faster than you can comprehend, unless you stop caring about comprehension.
Of course you can. "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong. Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time. If it all had to fit in one human's brain, it would quickly stunt the growth of civilization.
The fact that AI agents are really fast at generating code suddenly moves the bottleneck to the review step. The fact that AI agents are great at attacking computer systems moves the bottleneck to log analysis and triage. Neither of these are going to block forward progress for long. AI agents have to be reading the logs, because there are not enough human eyeballs to keep up. AI agents will be reviewing code soon enough, and they already are in high performing organizations.
> Humans have been shipping systems that no one person understands for a long time
Systems of humans have been shipping systems that no one persons can understand. Take the nuclear aircraft, there’s no part on it that you can’t find someone that is accountable for that part. That is why we can still build them and improve on the design.
> "You can't ship a nuclear aircraft carrier because no one human comprehends it all." Again, obviously wrong.
This is a profoundly bad faith argument. Of course an argument is “obviously wrong” if you straw man it.
Your parent comment didn’t say that a single person has to understand the whole system, just that you have to understand the part you’re responsible for (which should be obvious).
If there's one thing that I attribute the relatively modest success I've had in my life it's that I'm consistently predicting where we'll be in 10 years and optimising my life to position myself well when that comes.
Right now I'm strongly advising people not to care too much about narrow academic or intellectual pursuits because I think those skills will be almost entirely redundant to AI in a few years.
Learning to code today seems absolutely insane to me honestly. If you just want to understand at a high level how code works, then cool spend a week or two on it, but obviously outside of very niche edge cases which you can't build a career around humans won't be reading and writing code for much longer.
I'd even expand on this to say people should broadly avoid tech as a sector to learn anything in at this point. There will be a lot of disruption in the coming years. Hardware and software are going to change to better suite an AI-first world and this means almost any tech skill run a risk of disruption.
That said, I struggle predict past 10 years these days. In some ways we're now just weighing different sized infinities. In a world of AI and robotics perhaps the only good bet to make is that human are of no value anymore. This is the world I am personally preparing for. Any skills you learn today would ideally be in preparation for this.
I think he is wrong in regards to studying computer science assuming the objective is to do something that leads to success in a future world where AI is writing 99.9% of code.
Obviously there is some value in learning just about anything, but that isn't actually how people decide what to study in practice.
And do you think you and we all will be able to manage, control or just guide AI without understanding what AI is doing, without understanding the code?
Instead I tried to stick to my view on both current and future capabilities of AI, and how it's likely to progress in the coming years.
My result was closed to Hinton which isn't that reflective of my actual view (I'd put doom at around 99% at this point). But that's probably just because of how I answered.
I like it though! Especially how it clearly exposes how unreasonable Ed Zitron is, and perhaps myself =)
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