All of this stuff is so new, and we're supposed to hand wave away quality and maintainability?
My initial reaction to reading this is not "oh great analogy", it's "please have higher standards for your quality of living"
this is why i try to avoid analogies whenever i can. we've cycled through like 3 different iterations of the analogy in 5 comments, just to land on this question.
For corporations, sales, probability and feature release cycles take priority over maintainability or code quality. AI is allowing businesses to build features faster than ever, so management is happy.
By the time maintainability issues hit, they've either pivoted, raised more capital or can throw money at the problem.
You can find example of this in all of the trades. Often, these are also talked about as "safety improvements" - which they sort of are. Given the same baseline intelligence, it's harder to dangerously fuck up plumbing or electrical in 2026 than it was in 1926.
(1) We help you
(2) We undercut you
(3) You go out of business
(4) Your buddies go out of business as well
(5) Prices start rising
Supermarkets, restaurant chains, mathematicians or programmers it makes no difference.
I wondered if many a press article seen in media re security breaches and LLMs based hacks are not in part at least campaigns to legitimize regulation.
How would regulatory capture of LLM realistically look like? Do you have any ideas here?
<https://chinaselectcommittee.house.gov/media/letters/moolena...>
Let's flip this around. What do you imagine the most likely form that regulatory capture crafted by the major LLM Manufacturers would be?
When rolling this question around in your head, remember that the US Congress gave the telephone companies that blatantly and knowingly violated FISA retroactive immunity for their crimes in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. Congress will move mountains if the majority of its members are scared enough and/or see enough profit in something.
Eh. Transhumanism is very good. Every medical intervention that improves or consensually prolongs the life of a human is transhumanist. Our natural state is incredibly godawful. [0] The best future for humanity is one where one need not work, need not get sick, need not die... where all of the awful parts of life are optional.
What the TESCREAL cult is peddling is incredibly bad. They have folks believing that not only are they ushering in the arrival of Robot Jesus, that nearly any terrible thing done now to speed up the project is justifiable because it hastens Robot Jesus's arrival. In actuality, the only thing that's hastened is the accumulation of wealth of awful humans like Altman, Amodei, Huang, and many others.
The core tenant of Rationalism [1] is great. It's just a huge shame that so many of the folks who were attracted to the philosophy ended up being so bad at learning how to do the one thing it tries to get you to do.
[0] Remember that it wasn't that long ago that humans had a 50/50 chance of dying before the age of five!
[1] Your brain is really bad at thinking carefully. You have to train yourself to think carefully despite how shitty your brain is at it. You will inevitably fail at this, but that's no reason to stop trying to get better at it.
[1] in theory.
The difference with those is that they're systems of governance... which means that they must scale if they're to be applied to large groups of people. And -well- they scale very poorly.
One of these is not like the others.
> Your brain is really bad at thinking carefully. You have to train yourself to think carefully despite how shitty your brain is at it.
What is "you" in this scenario if not your brain?
Nah. All three are covered by my original statement:
The best future for humanity is one where one need not work, need not get sick, need not die... where all of the awful parts of life are optional.
> What is "you" in this scenario if not your brain?
That's an excellent question. Are we the blob of fat that hangs out in our skull, our entire body (because of how changes in "distant" parts of it affect what our brain does), the parts of the patterns in our brain that seems to correspond to our conscious mind, some other thing or things?
I am utterly unequipped to answer that question, but hope that we collectively get around to trying in earnest to answer it. Maybe we might even do that before we get around to collectively deciding that it's a catastrophically bad thing for people to go without food and shelter? [0]
[0] Given what I see here in SF and elsewhere, it looks like we currently collectively consider it to be somewhere between "Not at all a problem" and "Yeah, maybe we should get around to fixing that some day. I _guess_.".
Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ca7ufSI1Qxg&ra=m
Most depressing part is humans are training robots to replace themselves
The truth is no one knows how much the robot costs, and we probably won't know until its too late. Its extremely naive, though, to simply buy into the PR from the peddlers and redistribute their propaganda verbatim in the way you are doing. Although none of us know for sure, considering R&D, infrastructure capex and externalities, the robots are most definitively _not_ cheap.
OK, so don’t buy their PR, and try it yourself.
But if you do this, you will find there is a lot of evidence for the economic argument.
I tested out Google Argon 4 release by having it build a Web app to replace a binder I have for reconciling payments with reimbursable expenses.
It did it, as well as I would have and in much less time. I just set it to high and supervised it, it cost about $2. Even if you throw in a “supervision cost” to account for the time I had to spend interacting with it, it was substantially cheaper than had I done it at normal salary rates. Probably 2 orders of magnitude cheaper, even.
In this analogy, we human software devs are the artisanal homebuilders and the fancy LLMs are the robots.
And yes, there's quite a cost to build all the datacenters for all the AI that Big Tech believes that people will want. But as you mention, the cost savings are enormous for even despite that, and will make a much larger set of problems accessible to real software solutions, that previously either stayed on paper, in peoples' heads, or maybe an Excel sheet somewhere.
If someone complains they take pride in understanding and designing deterministic processes, you can't reply that this is just like when robots took over manual labor.
No, because it is not manual labor, and robots hasn't taken over. Robots are computers. Robots are deterministic.
A better comparison would be an artisan architect, a blueprint designer being replaced by a special paint splatter, which when thrown against a piece of paper looks almost exactly like a blueprint of an almost completely liveable house. Great! What's not to like? It will allow anyone to design a house.
iunno about that boss...
That is not what's happened at all. That's the entire point of the discussion. The robots aren't as good as humans, they can't follow specs or instuctions as well, and their output is markedly worse than human output in a lot of ways.
The only difference is that the robots are faster and don't need rest. And we're discovering now that that is not good enough.
The carpenter is free to exercise his craft as he see's fit, but it's going to take place mostly in his personal workshop, for personal reasons, not to develop homes or run a business in the way he did before.
We can talk for ages about the quality of the robot's work, the maintainability of the resulting home, etc. But it's clear that, at this time, the market and ecosystem are embracing the robots whole-heartedly so those of us used to the old ways are having to rapidly adjust.