Of course you might be right. But if we look at our past ability to predict the future by extrapolating from the present and recent past, you might also say it is naive to think that _this time_ is somehow different, that this time the future is clear.

Also, I think you've set up a straw man. I haven't seen anyone arguing that this future isn't possible. What I see is resistance to the idea that we can have any certainty about the future by drawing a straight line from the past.

Because most systems in nature and society, including technological progress, aren't linear.

It's certainly plausible that improvements will continue, but the pace is completely unpredictable. It's also plausible that the training material is polluted and progress will not continue. I'm just saying that predicting the rate of technological progress is not easy, and historically, it's rarely been smooth in the long run.

There are many complicating technical factors, but also non-technical ones. Technological improvement in the short term will not necessarily yield commensurate economic gains, in which case, investment may not grow enough to sustain the progress.

As for the recursive part, currently it's either hypothetical or based on too few data points. Not saying it won't happen, but it's far from being the only plausible trajectory.

it doesn’t have to be that deep or specific.

all things decay on a curve. pretty much all things in life are not modeled by a straight line.

so you’re saying no theres still more UP. sure, but that’s a tale as old as time. when where and how much in how long is the reality piece.

Most people are not against AI getting better per se. They’re about AI boosters not able to prove their outlandish claims.

We’ve seen a lot of claims over the years substituting one metric (amount of code written) for another (useful code produced) to justify that AI are getting “better”. We just want a proper definition of better.

> At least I have trends backing up my claim

No, you don't have trends backing your claims that we are going to add 10,000 IQ points to the average person. Anymore than the S&P 500 is going to 100x in a decade years.

People with money to invest will throw money at it to build it, but who is the customer base after that? So one guy eventually controls the stock market, why would I as a human want anything to do with that market? Why would I invest my earning into sustaining a machine that ideally is extracting every cent possible without leeway and funneling it up the pyramid? Unless I start at the top, ill never really go meaningfully higher.

Instead I can spend far less to use my 200 iq machine that already exceeds everything I could ever want. Im not ever going to personally fund a war of intellegence against other intellegences so anything more is of marginal value. The same reason I don't own a 2,000 horsepower truck or tractor, there are almost no uses for me to want it.

I've been thinking about this quote a lot:

> [...] we are living in a society [that is out] virtually to satisfy and gratify each and every human need, except for one need, the most basic and fundamental need operant in man, the need for meaning.

https://youtu.be/GTbliwS0gS4?t=153

Maybe the Amish had it right, after all.

<< Because most automations never capture the complete scope of the job/task ( not even close ).

Management likes to think otherwise for a variety of reasons and peons such as myself know it is rarely that simple. Case in point, our team uses Jira, but Jira is not great at.. capturing efforts that are umm.. less code oriented. In fact, there are times when it is genuinely better to leave some details out for considerations that may simply not be part of coding considerations.

In other words, automation assumes proper capture of the entirety of the task, but, I have seldom seen it capturing anything but simple workflows well.

I agree with that, and that’s why it’s better to ask an AI and improve your prompt, instead of hiring a human that will disappear and you will loose all institutional knowledge

If AI is not beneficial, then those humans could be re-hired soon.

Big companies are always doing bad things, but not because they use AI, because they have legal protections which prevents small companies (which could be anyone like you and me) to compete. The same small companies who could also benefit from using AI.

> If AI was beneficial, no one would profitize it

What? How does that follow?

200 years ago 75% of the population in western Europe were farmers. 100 years ago 41% were farmers. 10 years ago 1-3% were farmers.

We are looking forward to bring the same productivity gains to logistics and manufacturing (look at the advancements done in the last few decades!).

Why not bring this to white collar work too? I get so much more shit done today than I did a few years ago. It's a great time to be alive!

I don't think anyone ever really believed it would replace ordinary jobs. That angle was meant to appeal to emotion and distract the public from the shady deals and big defense spending.

Think about all the security clearances no longer required to aggregate big data into intelligence reports. The conditions and incentives for LLMs seem almost laser focused on replacing those particular jobs.

It wasn't but ~20 years ago that people were concerned about Google slurping up all the world's data into spying programs. Now that the hardest part to hide is happening, people have forgotten or assumed it already had. Many other smaller and far less capable businesses have come and gone and taken tiny bits of blame until the public was satisfied they knew who the "real" scapegoats were. What they really had were overcomplicated theories built on a nebulous cloud of debatable evidence that led nowhere. This is how it succeeds in plain sight every time.

I don’t think humans workers should be cogs in the machine, but from my experience unfortunately that’s how people want to be treated. One simple explanation is that there is no freedom / creativity without responsibility, and the latter is extremely expensive in brain resources

Do you actually talk like this?

It never was... tools and automation have been central to humanity's progress.

Since the luddites at least

"Computer" used to be a job title for a human. Was it sociopathic to introduce mechanical calculators because it made those jobs unnecessary?

> Perhaps we can get to a system that produces not just the binary but also a machine-verifiable proof that the binary implements some higher-level language description of the program.

We don't even have a solution to the halting problem, and it probably can't be solved. "Proof it implements a spec" is pure science fiction.

Hard agree that we'd all be better off muting Elon Musk though.