AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI

https://hbr.org/2023/08/ai-wont-replace-humans-but-humans-with-ai-will-replace-humans-without-ai

by sahin • 3 years ago

239 232 3 years ago

Kind of a vapid piece overall but I do agree with the thesis. Whatever the limits of generative AI may be, or what adjunct and different technologies may come, I think the future will see something similar to the steam shovel or drill when it comes to AI and other “knowledge” enhancing tech. John Henry managed to beat the steam drill at a great expense, but it didn’t reduce the number of people laboring on tunnels - it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability.

worrycue5• 3 years ago

it just changed the skill set from a strong back to a strong engineering ability.

When you have a machine that can do it all, there will be no skill to change to.

oneeyedpigeon3• 3 years ago

By that point, choosing what the machines should do becomes the skill.

fnordpiglet3• 3 years ago

I’m a pretty big general purpose hyper intelligent AGI skeptic. I think for any practical foreseeable future AI will serve as an adjunct to the human mind vastly improving our abilities, but the overall agency and broad ability to synthesize goals and instruments will be still a human task for some time. To wit, a lot of discussion of AGI essentially boils down to how to keep agency in the human domain permanently by lobotomizing AIs enough, ala LLM safety finetuning today. I’m more a fan of broad general AI open models mostly because I think they’ll stay within the bounds of adjunctive tools for some time, and any threat they may serve to humanity and it’s reliance is best obviated by everyone everywhere having access all the time. Similar to how we keep order by pitting humans intelligence against human intelligence. Etc.

Lazare_• 3 years ago

And Human with AI will be more efficient than human without AI. So there will be need for less humans for a given task. Therefore AI will replace humans, just not all of them. And that's not new. The same thing happened with softwares and with machines. The solution : produce more goods or services. Until we have an energy crisis and we need to rationalize all this.

hereforcomments• 3 years ago

It's true in 2023.

digitcatphd2• 3 years ago

This may be the case with AI today, but I’m doubtful it will be in the future.

Many of the problems with AI the author is using as premises to justify his thesis are already being addressed and working towards a solution for daily.

Nonetheless, even if humans are required, it would be 1/50th or 1/100th less, a sufficiently high enough reduction that the outcome would remain the same.

ben_w4• 3 years ago

Assuming centaur-dominance in the economy rather than pure-AI dominance, I can easily believe that we can work just as hard to produce 16x as much stuff — that's the income disparity between normal Americans and the recent job posting for $900k in Netflix, implying normal people can be motivated by it, implying there's stuff to care about buying with it.

Steps up from that are plausible, but less certain. Do we all want personal pleasure yachts? Flights on a Dragon capsule or a Starship?

But there are too many paths the future might yet take for me to be confident of anything much.

If the AI are always narrow, but can be made superhuman for any given skill in 6 months, that has one set of issues; if they are fully human-like general but we never make them more than IQ 85 (plus access to whatever narrow AI exist by then that actual humans also use), that's a different set of issues; and that's just off the top of my head.

glimshe• 3 years ago

The 900K salary isn't related to "producing more stuff", but is instead a way to acquire a very rare skill that would unblock their development (in their mind, obviously).

It's basically trying to ensure they get this person away from whatever place or job they happen to be currently working in. If AI was able to empower many people with this skill, they wouldn't be paying anywhere near 900K by simple offer/demand.

xbmcuser• 3 years ago

Produce 10x what exactly? Earth at current consumption level is not sustainable. where the fuck do you have the resources to produce 10x

georgemcbay3• 3 years ago

Yeah people generally gloss over the bit where automation doesn't have to be anywhere close to 100% effective to cause massive disruption (unless we drastically modify our economy which seems incredibly unlikely to happen in any proactive soften-the-landing way).

The unemployment rate at the height of the Great Depression was "only" about 25%. If 3 people doing the work of 4 is already a huge problem, 1 person doing the work of 50 or 100 is massive.

The obvious and oft-repeated response to this would be to point out how automation has been going on for many decades (arguably centuries) and so far people have just evolved into different jobs, which is true, but it seems like a risky bet to me to assume that trend will continue if/when a non-task-specific automation technology has the potential to very quickly cut wide and deep across an awful lot of the job sectors that currently have reasonably desirable jobs.

The speed of disruption, I think, is likely to matter quite a lot.

runeks2• 3 years ago

The unemployment rate at the height of the Great Depression was "only" about 25%. If 3 people doing the work of 4 is already a huge problem, 1 person doing the work of 50 or 100 is massive.

So your hypothesis is that the Great Depression was caused by a sudden 25% increase in productivity?

If so, what data do you have to back this up?

satvikpendem5• 3 years ago

I often see this sentiment regarding AI or automation and it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed.

I disagree with this premise, there is still a lot of work to do. We don't even have space elevators, nanobots, immortality drugs and all other manner of technologies yet, and just like every other technological innovation in history, I assume that we will reallocate people to do said work. Work expands to fill the time and space (and workforce) available.

naillo• 3 years ago

I guess it depends on amount of talent as well. Lots of people are stuck in low end jobs while the demand for high skilled labor is also high. Maybe some argument is that if low skilled workers can do high skilled labor with the help of intelligence augmenting machines that demand can be met finally.

matwood• 3 years ago

it seems to be predicated upon the belief that the amount of work is fixed.

I've mentioned this before in other AI threads, but humanity has an uncanny ability to use all resources available. As you say, the amount of work will only grow with the increased productivity from AI.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

The amount of work isn't fixed, but the definitions of useful work have changed.

AI threatens to make all human-sourced work redundant. Because AI is really an automated culture machine - in the widest sense. It will eventually be able to innovate, rather than replicate, culturally ground-breaking work in art, science, engineering, business, politics, and media.

What jobs are humans going to do then? All that's left is manual labour - and eventually that will be automated too.

This isn't exaggeration. It's already happening in a very limited way with today's super-crude AI 1.0. AI 5.0 won't be a step change, it will be something entirely new.

yobbo• 3 years ago

the belief that the amount of work is fixed.

You would have to define work for this to be meaningful. Generally, demand for "work" is unlimited if the price is zero, but demand falls to zero as price increases. Humans are willing to work for at least what buys them "bare necessities", food and maybe shelter (in a madmax-style world.)

In these discussions, it is suspected that AI will "underbid" larger groups of workers than in previous waves of automation.

sainttookmoon• 3 years ago

Yeah, thats spooky, because the next step is Humans with neurochip will replace Humans with AI, and then AI will replace everything

ImHereToVote• 3 years ago

This is such a catchy term. Copium usually sounds very catchy.

concordDance• 3 years ago

AGI will replace humans when it eventually arrives. The ability to copy paste and backup minds is too strong.

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

I don't really know why people think AGI would be some type of static event. Like there will just be this thing called AGI, that is some type of mind, who mindlessly lives forever backing itself up to the cloud? It truly seems absurd ? "Minds" are useful for humans and biological creatures to support and protect their bodies. It's yet to be seen how much need there is for a mind outside of this context.

swexbe• 3 years ago

This take is so 3 months ago.

achrono2• 3 years ago

That's really generous.

The top comments in here are taking this article at face value and non-ironically. We love to occasionally question the quality of minds on HN "these days", but this time it just seems... quite severe.

huijzer• 3 years ago

I think Jensen Huang (or his sales team) came up with this quote first:

"While some worry that AI may take their jobs, someone who is an expert with AI will."

He said this at the NTU Commencement Speech in May 2023.

croes7• 3 years ago

The problem is this expert will not take one job but ten, so thousand experts kill 9000 jobs.

gmerc• 3 years ago

At a ratio of 10:1. This is bullshit framing designed to refocus people on human competition (which everyone gets trained for from school), just don’t look over at the robots who never sleep, never get worse, rapidly expand their capabilities, don’t need vacation, etc. Once people understand the robots will never stop replacing them, shit will get much more real.

Proof is in the earnings calls - see IBM dangling firing 30% of backoffice because of AI and begging shareholders to stick around for the payoff.

pydry4• 3 years ago

It's amazing how more people dont see that theyre confusing whipped up shareholder FOMO with reality.

I couldn't believe it when I read the Economist gushed over Copilot replacing programmers last year.

I can see why their investor audience is into the concept of swapping programmer salaries with margin and theyve clearly watched movies like the Terminator or whatever. But, their "journalists" were clearly oblivious to the reality that copilot offers incremental gains in productivity at best.

theLiminator4• 3 years ago

The caveat being for now. No one knows how much better the LLM paradigm can get.

GJR• 3 years ago

Someone has been reading Iain Banks.

detourdog4• 3 years ago

For the most part maybe tru but at the low end of yhe job market I disagree.

My current robo/vac/moo does a better job more frequently than any human I paid to sweep the floor. The robot is less than a months wages and no paperwork.

One of the large employment sectors in our area is landscaping landscaping and I could see 75% of that labor going away.

The amount of manual repetitive labor available for humans is probably already dropping.

gitfan862• 3 years ago

A lot of landscaping is conspicuous consumption. Just like a 50k Rolex, people buy it because it makes them seem rich.

detourdog4• 3 years ago

I guess that is a good argument that the people paying for landscaping always find things to pay for.

keiferski3• 3 years ago

This is only true in markets in which increased efficiency = more success. Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you.

I would bet that more markets become like the art market: dependent on "intangibles", nepotism, personality, and other qualities that have nothing to do with efficiency, and therefore, won't benefit that much from AI tools.

urduntupu• 3 years ago

Very good. There will be an increasing demand for pure human beings. Those who can practice divine creativity, due to their pure personality, body and spirit. The "intangibles".

johnnyanmac4• 3 years ago

Many markets do not function this way; e.g., the art market. Making more paintings more efficiently does not make you a better-known artist. In many cases, it actually hurts you.

Art is also a good argument for where this is a good argument. More art =/= more success, but the ability for an artist to quickly make good art == more success. Be it for iteration or production (especially 3d models). You still can't guarantee success, but if you can use less artists to make more art it tips the scales.

keiferski3• 3 years ago

No, I don’t think that is true at all in the traditional fine arts market, which is what my comment was referencing. Scarcity is a major factor and putting out tons of AI-generated art is basically the opposite work process of the highest-priced artists.

diego_moita3• 3 years ago

I'll use analogies with previous technologies.

Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes. Gradually these grew up became empires and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions.

The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc).

Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam.

Radio, television and publicity shaped our daily lives to consume a lot of crap we don't really need, from cigarettes to diamond rings.

Social media shaped our political discourse into tribal stupidity and paranoia.

So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message. Technology shapes humans and culture. AI will shape humans and culture. We just don't know how.

visarga2• 3 years ago

I see all this as the evolution of language, because that's how ideas are preserved and replicated. Ideas evolve over time. They form an evolutionary system, moving much faster than biology. Humans and AI both rely on the corpus of language to learn and apply ideas.

We're no longer the only way ideas can replicate - LLMs have joined the party. Language gained a new mechanism for self-replication. We should focus less on humans vs AIs, and more on the language corpus itself, the true source of intelligence.

This corpus was built through experience, slowly and collaboratively, by billions of people in parallel. No single human could have done it alone - it's smarter than any one of us, the product of our collective work and luck.

When you train an LLM on it, the model becomes generally competent. But did the competence come from the model or the data? Should we obsess over architectures, or look to our datasets?

diego_moita3• 3 years ago

I've heard that before, mostly on Ray Kurzweil talking about singularity.

But I have a problem with this usage of the "evolution" and "evolutionary system" expressions. I believe that it entails "improvement", that it is judgmental.

I think it is self-centred and presumptuous to imply that the world improved toward us.

I don't think Darwin used the expression "evolution" with a judgmental meaning. He only meant that it was an adaptation to existing environmental conditions.

diminish• 3 years ago

Controversially, agricultural societies late to industrialization, have more population now and are replacing early industrial societies due to lower birth rates in industrial workers.

So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.

satvikpendem5• 3 years ago

What does the population have to do with the parent's point?

wiseowise3• 3 years ago

Now compare quality of life between both.

darkclouds3• 3 years ago

Controversially, agricultural societies late to industrialization, have more population now

If you pointed the above out 123 years ago, would the British Empire change your mind?

Population is just one metric of success.

So I doubt humans with AI will replace humans without.

But they might out live them whilst the manmade chemicals that affect health, like (per|poly)fluoroalkyl (PFAS) that took decades for the law to recognise and legislate against, in much the same way understanding dialects of RegEx in conversation becomes more common place in every day conversation, in order to understand the evolving world we live in.

Has survival of the fittest evolved into survival of the intelligent?

Blikkentrekker• 3 years ago

and created monotheist religions to substitute animist religions

I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly? Because Christianity and Islām became so popular?

Buttons840• 3 years ago

Maybe by creating more unity in their societies?

r00fus2• 3 years ago

It’s that way in the Civilization tech tree, so it must be true!

rsynnott4• 3 years ago

Arguably the key point for Christianity and Islam wasn't that they were monotheistic, but that they were _proselytising_; their adherents had a strong incentive to spread them. Granted, a polytheistic religion is probably less likely to be proselytising; "those people over there have our gods and we have our gods, that's fine" is an easier proposition if you're okay with multiple gods in the first place. But it's not universal; notably the Romans tended to actively try to spread aspects of their religion to other polytheists (while also adopting foreign polytheistic concepts; Roman religion was messy). Conversely, Judaism does not proselytise.

darkclouds3• 3 years ago

I often see this interpretation that monotheism is somehow more “advanced” than polytheism, even Age of Empires suggested so but why exactly?

In your life of plenty, poor people with nothing, were being ritually humiliated several times over, damming their mental health in hell. One god is less harmful to mental health.

Considering religion is psychological warfare in the absence of todays personal surveillance technological world, you would have thought some religions could be more forgiving for peoples misfortune, but is polytheism a classic example of power unchecked?

Hinduism was designed to normalise human deformities in a region struggling with environmental toxicity and poor health.

Christianity is best for a European climate, Islam is best for a Middle Eastern climate.

Religion was an attempt in the absence of simple items like pen and paper or infrastructure like schools and roads, to educate people through story telling & place names in order to protect them from harm.

Thats why all Christian churches are typically built on natural healthy springs and is considered holy water.

Christian churches are typically in the shape of a cross, Knights Templar churches are round.

And dont look a gift horse in the mouth when its smuggling gold to and from the Crusades! Has anyone tried that in their computer games or is that a knight mare?

brazzy• 3 years ago

Analogies are treacherous. There is absolutely no guarantee that just because all these technologies shaped humans, this new one will shape them in similar ways and scope.

einpoklum3• 3 years ago

governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes.

More like it facilitated small groups taking over larger communities or communally-usable resources, creating governments to manage their wealth and underlings and armies to attack and loot other tribes.

shafyy4• 3 years ago

I think that homo sapiens was happiest in the hunter gatherer era, right before we've started to think more and more in abstract and conscious ways. Sure, it's cool we can fly humans to the Moon and robots to Mars, but everybody is miserable in the capitalist hamster wheel and an increasing number of people are getting depressed and committing suicide.

The other day I was at the lake and looking at ducks, contemplating this. Is a duck really less happy than an average human? Sure, they can't buy fancy iPhones and might get eaten tomorrow, but it's all relative anyways, right?

And before you start suggesting that I'm depressed: I'm not, I have been lucky. I have a happy life, great job, great friends and family. But still, one can't stop and wonder about these things...

52-6F-622• 3 years ago

There’s nothing odd about that thinking. You’re just scratching the surface of philosophy and you should continue.

Nothing is an inevitability and tomorrow will look different than anyone here or anywhere else tries to predict.

Don’t stop wondering. But I definitely recommend exploring others’ wondering. Especially when it has nothing to do with tech and all to do with your own existence.

krona• 3 years ago

homo sapiens was happiest in the hunter gatherer era

I get the point you're making (progress is an illusion etc.) and have some sympathy with it, but starvation and the constant threat of being killed or dying slowly of a toothache is surely not a 'happy' life.

Personally I think a fulfilling life doesn't need much happiness at all, just contentment with your situation. There isn't much contentment these days, it seems.

b112• 3 years ago

https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/minutes/marshall-...

euroderf• 3 years ago

So just use basic Marshall McLuhan: the media is the message.

Also McLuhan: every communication medium is an extension of man.

AI is a turbo extension of man's ability to string noises together into meaningful phrases: phrases which, like language in general, project the speaker's thought into the mind of the recipient.

AI magnifies this into a stream of babble that can be generated at zero marginal cost and at light speed, altho with the caveat that the stream may have self-reinforcing perturbations (internal feedback loops ?) that may or may not refer back to "reality".

darkclouds3• 3 years ago

Agriculture shaped humans to create buildings, create social classes with different levels of power, create armies, governments and rulers to protect themselves from other tribes

When looking at Europe and all the different languages spoken, along with the over arching religion of the region if not the world, Catholicism, headquartered in Europe, are you not left wondering why they didnt put more effort into getting different tribes to communicate in a common dialect to break down barriers?

Or if Latin was their common dialect, then does it show that royalty and govt's are the divisive one's pitting people against each other, continuing to get a free pass whilst their atrocities are airbrushed out of history?

p0w3n3d• 3 years ago

Agriculture did not shape monotheism. It happenrd both on nomadic and non nomadic nation's, as well as polytheistic religions of Asia. No correlation here.

Meanwhile currently AIs are just an empty linguistic models that have no proper knowledge, nor can tell what's true from what's fully BS, and will defend both or ask for forgiveness for telling both: truth and rubbish hallucination

4h53n• 3 years ago

Indeed oldest known surviving buildings are thought to be of religious and monumental in nature.[1] As far as we know it could be the religion which made people settle and do agriculture. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_known_surviving... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/gobeki-t...

armada651• 3 years ago

Cars shaped human society, governments and urban plans to be heavily dependent on roads and all the car assistance economy. Think Houston/Los Angeles vs. Copenhagen/Amsterdam.

Copenhagen and Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city. It's not just that those cities were built before the car, it's that at some point they decided to stop shaping their city for the car.

OfSanguineFire2• 3 years ago

Amsterdam were well on their way to becoming as car dependent as any other American city.

This claim gets trotted out quite often, but it is only valid if you are specifically referring to the development of Amsterdam’s bicycle infrastructure. Even during those years when Amsterdam saw a rise in car traffic, the city never stopped offering public transit of the sort that most Americans could only dream of. So, the average resident was not forced to own a car.

malaya_zemlya• 3 years ago

monontheism is far from an universal consequence of agriculture. It's really limited to Abrahamic religions and religions influenced by them.

Pre-christian Roman empire, Ancient Greece, China, India are all examples of advanced ancient civilizations that were happily polytheistic

PurelyApplied• 3 years ago

The Industrial Revolution shaped humans and culture to move to cities, work in factories/offices instead of home/fields and to think in more abstract terms (math, written words, etc).

Surely you aren't suggesting that mathematics, language, philosophy, or abstract thought in general is only 300 years old. Surely not.

zehnfischer• 3 years ago

These ideas becoming mainstream - that's what is just 300 years old. Before few people could read...

narrator2• 3 years ago

AI will change society by getting rid of the necessity of vast numbers of people to be involved in production. Factories will become like farms, which need few people to produce goods for billions thanks to combine harvesters and so forth that were 20th century inventions. You'll have auto plants out in the middle of nowhere overseen by a few technicians. Cities will be for the poor. People will be stacked and warehoused on UBI. This is "Ze Sustainable awwnd incluzive fewcha [said in a thick german accent]."

Here, let me pull up Klaus Schwab's "Covid-19: The Great Reset."

"As far back as the Black Death that ravaged Europe from 1347 to 1351 (and that suppressed 40% of Europe’s population in just a few years), workers discovered for the first time in their life that the power to change things was in their hands. Barely a year after the epidemic had subsided, textile workers in Saint-Omer (a small city in northern France) demanded and received successive wage rises. Two years later, many workers’ guilds negotiated shorter hours and higher pay, sometimes as much as a third more than their pre-plague level. Similar but less extreme examples of other pandemics point to the same conclusion: labour gains in power to the detriment of capital. Nowadays, this phenomenon may be exacerbated by the ageing of much of the population around the world (Africa and India are notable exceptions), but such a scenario today risks being radically altered by the rise of automation, an issue to which we will return in section 1.6. Unlike previous pandemics, it is far from certain that the COVID-19 crisis will tip the balance in favour of labour and against capital. For political and social reasons, it could, but technology changes the mix."

Schwab, Klaus; Malleret, Thierry. COVID-19: The Great Reset (p. 39). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.

bufferoverflow• 3 years ago

These are all bad analogies, because they are just better tools. They help with manual labor or the speed of transmission.

Computers actually did replace human computers (literally the origin of the word, people who sat all day and did math).

But now we're creating artificial minds. And I haven't heard a good argument why they can't replace humans pretty much everywhere.

Human minds are limited by the size of the skull. Digital minds don't have that limitation. They can, seemingly, be arbitrarily large (and maybe arbitrarily smart, as a result).

CatWChainsaw4• 3 years ago

Everyone who says AI won't replace humans conveniently ignores the fact that Homo sapiens is the only member of the Homo genus left. Because we out-smarted, out-bred, and out-killed all the others.

devjab3• 3 years ago

For the most part I think it’ll mainly further Microsofts dominance in the office space. You can see this with the recent EU anti-trust and Teams, where it makes little sense for enterprise organisations to not chose Teams when they already have Office365 licenses. You see the same to some degree in RPA (robot process automation ) already. Why would your organisation shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for UIPath licensing when Power Automate is $15 a month and $250 for the big VM bots?

I think it’ll be the same with AI. GPT writes all our non secret documentation and it has a lot of options for use in non-programming automation as well. I know Microsoft is a major investor in it, but once those tools become basic Office365 tools then every other AI seller is going to become obsolete in many cases. It’ll be interesting to see how the world handles that dominance in the office space, because so far, we really haven’t.

So I think this is going to be much more a question of how we’re all going to be paying a Microsoft “tax” to use AI efficiently, than it’ll be about non-AI vs AI. I mean, you could probably use iSheets (or whatever the Apple Excel is called), Google Sheets, LibraOffice or similar, but I’ve never heard of an EU enterprise org that doesn’t use Microsoft Excel.

ezoe2• 3 years ago

GPT writes all our non secret documentation

Who read it? LLM may be great at coughing up seemingly good long chunk of text, but human is not capable of reading all of these verbose text because of the simple fact that GPT can generate texts faster than human reading speed.

So I bet what will happen in that case is, humans use LLM to summarize these LLM-generated verbose documentation. What a wonderful bureaucratic world will that be?

devjab3• 3 years ago

It writes better JSDoc than any of us. Anyone who consumes a Typescript method is likely to read it, it’s the tiny text that pops up if you code in VSC.

If you go through my history here on HN (you don’t have to I’ll sum it up), you’ll see that I’m not a fan of LLMs for code generations. In fact I’m not convinced they will ever be good enough to be useful for it. For documentation, however, at least for JSDoc GPT is incredible. I really mean it when I say that it writes it better than we do. It’s able to figure things out and describe it in ways that still amazes me from time to time.

It does require you to be good at naming things.

bombolo7• 3 years ago

That was google's demo for the AI in gmail. You write 3 words explaining what you want to say to an AI, which inflates it; and on the other side another AI goes back to hopefully the same 3 words that were originally written.

Tons of pollution for this shit.

einpoklum3• 3 years ago

This is an opportunity to mention that LibreOffice constitutes a solid and worthy alternative to MS Office, which does not require you to be chained to Microsoft or any sort of licensing. It will also _not_ send your data silently to MS or the US government or any other third party.

For online versions, Collabora (a commercial company) offers a FOSS online office suite based on LibreOffice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online

and if anyone wants to integrate AI use in an office suite, those are the most interesting avenues. Perhaps together with free LLMs.

Caveat: I ain't seeing that the LO code is very pretty, mind you (they like ABI stability so many things aren't allowed to break.)

devjab3• 3 years ago

I wish we’d see more adoption of alternatives, but I work in non-tech enterprise where it’s not even called “spreadsheets” but rather “excels”.

I’m not sure the value is really there in the office platform if it wasn’t because it’s what every new hire is used to. This is very anecdotal but I’m really not a very good consumer of IT, to the point where I often stun people with my profession because I really suck at using digital devices for most things, and I never had a hard time using one of the office alternatives. The tie in with Teams and OneDrive/Sharepoint is nice and all, but it’s also often sort of terrible.

I don’t expect things to change though.

ezoe2• 3 years ago

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer?

Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these?

It doesn't and it won't happen in any time soon.

How could humans with probabilistic LLM which cough up hallucination replace humans without it when the answer to my previous two questions are NO.

theLiminator4• 3 years ago

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer?

Certainly for a whole host of tasks.

Did programmers with google search and stack overflow replace programmers without these?

Also true for many tasks too, a programmer who refuses to use these resources for certain types of work will be an order of magnitude slower in many cases and will be replaced by programmers who aren't.

LLMs are just beginning to become useful, but there will be a point where they're indispensable, those who refuse to use them will eventually find themselves falling behind. It's will eventually become equivalent to a programmer who refuses to move off punch cards or refuses to use modern version control.

pydry4• 3 years ago

We're peak hype cycle for LLMs right now so we have an order of magnitude more ridiculous shit said about them than would otherwise be normal. The trough of disillusionment has yet to set in.

They will be useful for a set of tasks but all of the people hyperventilating over this being the new industrial revolution might consider calming down a little.

The high priests of capitalism have been blaming lost jobs on automation since forever - largely because this narrative makes a convenient, impersonal scapegoat.

softsound• 3 years ago

As someone who somewhat works with AI it's good if your data is good and terrible if it's not, my job is literally to clean up AI failures, and due to bad data or dealing with interpretation a lot can be done with data good or bad. My work helps retrain the model, but sometimes because of bad management we have unclear answers on how to interpret the data and this leads to some coworkers training it wrong and you'll see this linger between projects. Now if the people were better trained the data would be too but oh well. Someone wants to cut costs. I think this kind of issue will always exist no matter the model, you can't really make up data you don't have (I mean you certainly can but it all has to be figured out how to fix it when it does just start guessing poorly) and sometimes there are no answers but bad answers in some edge cases.

wruza• 3 years ago

Text editing and version control solved very specific problems. E.g. the former allows quick iteration and the latter allows to analyze changes and work in parallel.

Which problems do programmers have that only AI could help with?

Kiro• 3 years ago

What? The answer is obviously "yes", especially to your first question. Your whole premise is wrong.

senectus1• 3 years ago

If you exchange the word "replace" with "Displace" then it works better i think.

Humans with AI wont cause the extinction of humans without it... but there will be a elevation of "class" for those with it.

diego_moita3• 3 years ago

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer?

You're obviously not aware that "computer" was a profession, a job before becoming a machine, just watch the "Hidden Figures" movie. Have you seen a human computer later?

beebeepka• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

probably_wrong• 3 years ago

Did humans with computer replace humans without computer?

Yes, they did. Or rather: everyone was forced to catch up and those that didn't just got left behind.

Those of us who saw the PC revolution still remember the time when typewriters were an everyday artifact. We also saw how everyone was forced to choose between updating or being left behind - no matter how fast your secretary was, a human with carbon paper is no match for a human that slightly tweaks a template and sends 10 copies to the printer. And a human with a calculator will always be slower than a human with Excel.

thefz• 3 years ago

Yes, they did. Or rather: everyone was forced to catch up and those that didn't just got left behind.

Do a plumber, a baker, a policeman need a computer to do their job? That's right, they don't. So men with computers did not "replace" those without.

gitfan862• 3 years ago

The only important caveat here is that businesses and organizations tend to become inflexible over time. For example there are plenty of businesses that still use fax machines today. Obviously that is inefficient and that businesses should be at risk of competitors undercutting them.

But in reality you'll see that poorly run businesses can end up continuing for decades.

So we have entered into this weird situation where Hollywood actors and writers are demanding huge compensation for work that is becoming relatively cheap to produce with new technology. It is going to be interesting to see this play out.

mettamage• 3 years ago

My grandparents can’t fill in their taxes because they don’t know how to use the internet. That’s the only way you can fill in taxes as far as I know (in The Netherlands). They rely on me to do it.

Some people don’t have that luxury.

croes7• 3 years ago

The problme isn't if humans get replaced, some will, but that the value of the single human drops.

Humans become the expandable operator of the tools that do most of the work.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

if anything the opposite is the case. As tools get more sophisticated and potent the value of human judgement goes up given the increased leverage of tool use. Tools are force multipliers. Humans today are much less expendable, and much more valued, than they ever were historically. (on display in just about every profession, even on battlefields)

kristianpaul• 3 years ago

Too soon to answer, but LLM provide advantages, yes

mbernstein• 3 years ago

Quite easily. Everyone is fixated on LLMs delivering a complete product or providing 100% accurate information. Too much of a focus on hallucinations.

First, humans don't deliver 100% accurate information, so let's keep the bar at something reasonable. Secondly, complete products are not necessarily the only value of LLMs. LLMs are pretty solid when it comes to helping break out of some sort of creative block. Think about it this way - when you're trying to creatively solve a hard problem, what is one of the best mechanisms to help? Perspective changes. LLMs are extremely helpful when assisting with perspective changes (driving/helping iterate on different creativity tools like combination, association, etc).

I can't get the full article to load for some reason - but so far I seem to see people mostly arguing that LLMs will do the work for us and it will be amazing or subpar, etc - but neglecting, which I assume is the point of the article, that LLMs will be a co-pilot for humans and assist in ways like perspective shifting to find faster/better/more innovative solutions.

nojvek• 3 years ago

Fundamentally what do we need to survive?

Water, food, clothing, a place to call home, dignitary.

Replacing is a strong word. There are many people who live Tech agnostic lives.

When I leave Seattle and SF, most strangers I talk to haven’t even heard of GPT.

This is HN so we’re biased towards specific problems.

However access to quality food, water, electricity, internet, shelter, sanitation, opportunity still remains a problem for a large chunk of the population.

And LLMs which are fundamentally next prediction algorithms don’t make a huge difference to someone’s survival ability.

mawadev• 3 years ago

Most people act fairly mechanical at this point. Everyone is so busy out competing eachother, they might as well be sentient bots doing errands from their massive todo lists. Ai is just going to make everything more obscure and absurd.

jatins• 3 years ago

Serious question: has anyone ever read an original/insightful thought in an HBR article?

marban• 3 years ago

HBR is the IBM of business publications. You won't get fired for sharing their articles.

detourdog4• 3 years ago

Many interesting headlines.

nologic01• 3 years ago

These MBA thought pieces are so behind the curve its embarrassing if not humiliating.

When your only real job (conditioned over a near-century of industrial capitalism) is to prepare warm bodies to populate stable corporate power hierarchies but society is reeling from challenge and disruption to strife and malfunction what exactly is your reason to exist?

Just take the very first sentence:

Just as the internet has drastically lowered the cost of information transmission, AI will lower the cost of cognition

Now investigate how the "internet" has worked out for individuals and corporates and apply the same to "AI". What do the authors think about digital oligopolies, surveillance capitalism [1] and all that.

The digital (=information) incompetence of the corporate world is what has ushered the current dystopia in the first place. Business schools have profitably underwritten this gross mismanagement for ages.

Then this:

The best place to learn [...] is YouTube. YouTube has, oh my God, so many tutorials in so many domains.

Can somebody please pull the plug on this joke? Its too painful.

[1] Zuboff joined Harvard Business School in 1981 where she became the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration and one of the first tenured women on the HBS faculty

amelius• 3 years ago

So we will become robots in a Ship of Theseus way.

RyanAdamas• 3 years ago

AI will replace humans. At what rate and when is the only question. The idea we don't want that is only pitched by control hungry authoritarians who need subjects to define their existence by.

baerrie2• 3 years ago

Humans that are just as skilled as the average ones with AI will continue to be in demand. AI levels the playing field for a lot of people but the stars will still shine

croes7• 3 years ago

The stars will be used to train AI and then will be replaced by cheaper employees and the trained AI

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

Which means that the stars will have to keep pushing to stay up to date on the latest and greatest tech that hasn't yet made its way into the AI training data.

CrzyLngPwd• 3 years ago

The net result, as we see with basic skills such as growing your own food, cooking, purifying water, building a shelter, fixing the tools you need, etc. is a bunch of adult babies that are completely dependent on others for their wellbeing.

I'm not saying we should all grow our own food etc. but it does seem as though we are headed to something where we make such a great system that we only breed weakness and helplessness.

Maybe that is the price of progress.

licebmi__at__• 3 years ago

I’m concerned about this ideas about weakness and helplessness. I mean, if we look at history, we can see that these “resourceful” people were often malnourished and victims of natural calamities, although we have a survivor bias as we can only see those who were lucky enough to survive.

I wonder if this romanization of struggle is related to the statistic where 6 percent of Americans believe they can defeat a bear with their bare hands.

hahajk• 3 years ago

Maybe we have skins cells that look out at the freedom and autonomy of some single cell organisms and think to themselves that something has been lost participating in this human project.

croes7• 3 years ago

Even your spam killers. Remember how bad spam used to be for a while, and then overnight it went away? Because people deployed machine learning systems.

Didn't mostly Bayes filter kill spam? Wouldn't call that AI.

theshrike792• 3 years ago

People call anything past a single if statement "AI" nowadays =)

It's like everything was "fuzzy logic" in the 90s.

tjr• 3 years ago

Wow! Not sure I've even heard the phrase "fuzzy logic" since December 31, 1999. What did happen to it?

bombolo7• 3 years ago

I'm still full of spam anyway. Especially in my work email.

georgyo• 3 years ago

The definition of AI is very vague these days.

But Bayes filters are trained on good and bad data, and then learn over time automatically by what people mark and unmark as spam.

This is exactly what things you would call AI do.

A person or team manually creating filters to block spam would have a hard time keeping up with the effectiveness of a learning Bayes model.

detourdog4• 3 years ago

I used to have unbelievable loads and then during covid I sort of forgot to look what was going on. Once I finally checked I could not believe the drop in spam attempts. This was after the war in Ukraine started so I was never sure if that was part of the drop off.

Currently what I have is a a lot of persistent attempts at email delivery or login.

If spam does get through it is usually 2 spams from the same source set on a schedule as to seem inconspicuous.

Has been my experience.

alienicecream• 3 years ago

People mostly don't get replaced, they adapt. LLMs are a faster but less reliable Google search. They will add to your work load because now you do more, faster. Technology increases the work load. Life with technology only gets busier and more complicated.

cubefox• 3 years ago

Am I the only one who finds these rambling interviews hard to read? Many articles already have too much fluff around the core information, but interviews are even worse.

quonn3• 3 years ago

Let‘s assume for a moment that AI will replace humans _in the economy_. Then what? Well, either it fully does that, then it won‘t matter. We will allocate resources in a different way or there will be a revolution. Or it does only partially, leaving some (physical) labor. Then these jobs will pay well and people will go there.

For everything else AI will replace nothing. The economy is just a part of life and if AI really takes over it will be an insignificant part.

arbuge• 3 years ago

With a field moving as quickly as AI right now, you should probably take any predictions over what it will be able to do and not do with a big grain of salt, especially if they are made for any timespan greater than the very near term future (months? weeks? That term will itself get shorter and shorter as time goes on).

Very few people, including the author of this study most likely, predicted a few years ago where AI would be today. That should tell you something.

bertil• 3 years ago

The model of how AI would influence work, including splitting work into tasks, classifying tasks by what type of AI could complete it, the complementarity of prediction with other aspects in an organization, etc., all have been studied for decades. The people working on this, including the author of this study, have not changed their conclusion dramatically recently.

What has changed is the apparent capacity of LLMs: they got convincing earlier than other specialists thought possible. However, that timing isn’t the most relevant aspect of industrial economics and transaction cost theory. Many people make that mistake, but Oliver Williamson himself has corrected that misunderstanding in front of me several times.

What matters is that, when the technology is available, people will reorganize functions.

darepublic• 3 years ago

Seems like people who are taller are going to replace me. And post about it on their socials

lvl102• 3 years ago

What AI will do is facilitate the creative process. Instead of painstakingly creating variations. AI will present us with ALL the variations. That, in a nutshell, is the power of generative AI.

johnnyanmac4• 3 years ago

In theory, for the studios who care about good products, yes. I really do look forward to making a good base (say, a rigged 3d model) and having AI fix the seams in a skin or add some extra little flair to an animation. Those will be very nice accompaniments to what is currently very tedious tasks to hand fix.

But I think we both know how and where large copoprate entities are going to use these tools. They made it very clear given their whole refusal to deal with unions thing.

davidivadavid• 3 years ago

I mean, "humans with AI" replaced "humans without AI" the moment AI was invented. Is that what passes for "insights" at HBR these days?

achrono2• 3 years ago

I thought for a second going into this that it might be an interview from at least 6 months ago. But no, it's from yesterday.

As much as I prefer not to criticize the individual, Mr. Lakhani here is clearly not the most insightful person to be speaking about this. The advice he dishes out is objectively no better than the advice I heard a friend's grandfather give a month ago (for context, he is 78 and was a mechanic his entire life & only started using a smartphone 3 years ago).

Going into this I also expected the title itself to be an ironic nod -- but no, seems like they meant this 100% literally. We're only a few days away from having this sentence printed on coffee mugs -- and not because of HBR.

Shame on HBR. Every dog has its day -- and decline.

nektro• 3 years ago

keep telling yourself that

coding123• 3 years ago

There's not much of a distinction, multiple people will still be replaced by one because AI exists. I'm not saying it shouldn't exist, but this sounds like word play to hide the impact.

EricMausler• 3 years ago

People keep saying things like "humans always adapt to new technology"

Is that not the point here? Start at the basics - Agriculture has created a world where I cannot live off the land in my area. I would have to go to a location that is not dominated by an Agriculture focused society (condensed living with farms on the edges supplying food to the population via trade).

Look what happens to people who have nothing to offer for food. They become dependents of the state.

There is no reason to undermine the very real possibility that after another breakthrough or three in AI society is going to fundamentally shift in the impacted areas in a way where if you are not one of the AI people then you will have nothing to offer and thus you too will become a dependent of the state.

Hopefully non-ai society will remain able to function independently - with non-ai-boosted farms continuing to trade with non-ai-boosted workers. Maybe technological middle grounds get eroded and we see an explosion in Amish-style communities.

It is very possible however that the power of ai-based systems takes off and all the people involved with it simply completely ignore the rest of society, and the rest of society will be boxed out of the resources they need to live independently.

For centuries the ultimate reality check for ignore the needs of the many has been revolution. For all that time, surprise attacks, rebellion, physical power in numbers, etc, all existed.

Revolution is not going to be on the table with advanced AI. It's arguably already off the table, but if one side has advanced AI (not even AGI) and the other doesn't- its over. Automatic early threat detection, autonomous kill machines, control over all strategic resource and power generation, etc.

The only revolution still on the table is going to be political. We can absolutely succeed in preventing dystopia if we leverage the power of the state to actually be able to sustain 90% of the population becoming dependents

CatWChainsaw4• 3 years ago

An insightful comment, and one that the majority of the people here choose to be blind to. There is already signs of the bifurcation in technology between 2020s and Amish. It's really hard to live at the technological level of the 1950s or even the 1990s because if you don't have a smartphone you're fucked. And you are also right about the loss of revolution. So many starry-eyed hopefuls here think AI will be a check on power, an equalizer, that reforms will keep us from going down a path of global authoritarianism, but the truth is we will only be free if the power goes out for the last time, or we have a Butlerian Jihad - and although I use the term semi-ironically, I'm also serious.

samstave• 3 years ago

"Humans with AI will heavily profit from Humans without AI"

FTFY

narrator2• 3 years ago

Wait till people start getting cancelled and impoverished by having their AI accounts closed. Sure, they're still free, but they won't be able to get a job.

soultrees• 3 years ago

Llama for the win.

arisAlexis• 3 years ago

I laugh everytime someone posts an article with a definitive title ina field where nobody knows shit about what's coming. Hear me Mr. Krugman?

AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI

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