I think it’s way older than that. Evolution is all about adaptation and survival. When thick armour and large sharp teeth get replaced by soft skin and abstract thinking, anticipating danger and mitigating it and preparing for it becomes a full time job of every waking hour. Everything else is luxury and almost an act of mini-suicide
>anticipating danger and mitigating it and preparing for it becomes a full time job
For most of humanity's history, these tasks weren't so labor-intensive. So, evolutionarily, perception of these tasks evolved as a form of relaxation, not a job.
It is like you have a full time job of every waking hour, but that job on 80% consist of scrolling tik-tok, hanging out with friends and playing sports
Wow especially the last one doesn’t look like a hallucination. It’s very distinct, untypical, specific, both in form and content. It’s even a running joke and a huge annoyance by now that it’s very hard to get AI to produce text that doesn’t sound generic. I write a lot and often ask Claude to fill in the blanks or expand a draft as if in my own voice, and the result is rarely satisfactory, even though he has access to thousands of notes I wrote. And if anthropic can’t stop this from happening to their own content, I guess it’s safe to assume it will or already have happened to our content as well.
AI will probably end up reducing lots of firms productivity because costs to defend against cyber attack is gonna skyrocket. Even for tech firms writing more code (the only thing AI is really good at so far) doesn't scale linearly with profits
Why would it obviously give attackers the upper hand? If we accept the premise that AI helps find vulns more efficiently, shouldn’t this be at least equally helpful in securing against attacks and make that increasingly efficient?
It won't do that for free, companies (and open source maintainers) will have to pay for the tokens used finding vulnerabilities in their own software. That increases the cost of releasing the same product/feature/amount of code vs what it was before.
everything you build potentially increases the surface area of attack. If the benefit of building it is zero or negative then all you've done is increase your risk profile.
Particularly when you can't use Fable 5 to secure your software, you don't have access to Mythos 5, and you got your access to GLM-5.2 and other Chinese and/or open models capable of doing so taken away.
Good point. Within the next few years black hat open models will be able to do a lot of damage for very little cost.
It could easily turn into a Red Queen situation where companies that don't spend hard on security are going to face huge potential losses, and both sides will be scrambling constantly to get an advantage.
Here’s what I’ve seen: it can make skilled people more productive by acting like a “mech suit for your brain.”
For unskilled people, it creates a false sense of productivity, but if the user of the tech does not understand what they are doing they can’t apply the tool productively or judge its output or deal with the things beyond its ability.
So like all other tools before it: it works best in the hands of a skilled user.
Just like in all other fields.
There is no tool that makes an unskilled user skilled, but there are many that can amplify or extend the capability of skill.
Problem is AI weakening our brain, arguably the only thing that distinguish us from animals. As if decreasing brain size of modern humans was not enough.
A lot of people are slowly realizing that code generation was not the bottleneck in their internal development process, and waving a magic wand to make that go faster doesn't actually lead to more revenue.
One of the weirdest things about the whole AI boom is the mass formation psychosis where everyone started acting like lines of code written was an important metric for software development productivity.
We've known for decades that more lines of code isn't good. Bill Gates was joking about it in the OS/2 days!
We've known for decades that the actual creation of the code is the smallest part of an actual software developer's job.
We've known for decades that "every line of code is a business decision" that has to be written with an understanding of the underlying goal, and the hardest part of training up software engineers is making them understand that.
We threw all that out because "the chatbox writes code really fast, software is a solved problem!"
This is a rewriting of history that I don't really like. Back before LLMs and before that again, it was very hard to write code. That's why so many people asked questions and figuring out how to write a piece of code was a big part of the value add of a programmer. It separated the ones who knew their stuff from the ones who didn't. Yeah sure software design was also important but it was less important than the actual writing of the code, which is why a lot of old code had bad designs. It took decades to figure that stuff out.
> Back before LLMs and before that again, it was very hard to write code. That's why so many people asked questions and figuring out how to write a piece of code was a big part of the value add
This may be true if you work in unfamiliar area or on frontier of programming. But this is not were most of programmer jobs are. That writing code itself is hard is a view of non-programmer. Programmers know that past some threshold of familiarity designing and weighting decisions becomes central problem.
Sure it may be that way now. But if you go back 20 years to for example video game programming, the hard part was figuring out how to solve the problem, not spend weeks or months trying to figure out the abstract design of the code itself. 10-20 years ago a lot of the value of programming was figuring out how to do something, which is by its nature about writing the code, I would argue.
Edit: Also, even outside of video games, I don't remember people being obsessed about software design 10-20 years ago the way they are now. You had some design principles of course and there were obviously bad or redundant ways of doing things, but it's on a whole other level the past 5 years at least from what I remember.
10 years ago was the peak of DDD and Context Mapping, 20 years ago was when The Wiki ruled and everyone was obsessed with design patterns, 30 years ago was UML and Object Mapping... and on, and on, and on.
Fashions change, but one of the few constants in our industry is that everyone has always been obsessed with software design.
So from the top it doesn't look like much has changed, whereas workers are trying to offload as much work as they can onto their claude subscription.
People in desperation to min/max work per unit dollar, will leverage AI to free themselves from as much work as possible, while still claiming credit for the work.
So as the labs start ratcheting up the price, people will pay more and more to keep their "secret" assistant.
Wouldn't that explanation predict that lower ranking employees would be more impressed with AI than higher ranking ones? Because what we actually observe [0] tends to be the opposite. Executives are the most bullish on AI, followed by Managers, with employees having the least adoption.
Those studies are of workers using company provided AI.
They call out the MIT study in the article, which found very low adoption of corporate AI initiatives.
However if you read that study, they found that almost every worker uses AI heavily, but they just use their personal AI account.
Again, people are using their own AI to benefit themselves, it makes the most sense. Using company AI shows that the AI is doing xyz, and maybe perhaps you aren't that valuable. Using your own AI makes it look like you are doing xyz, and you are the valuable one.
> ...these same executives predict sizable effects over the next 3 years, predicting that AI will boost productivity at their firms by an average of 1.4%, raise output 0.8%, and cut employment 0.7%.
So clearly they're going to spend more on AI.
More concerningly:
> In contrast, employees anticipate that AI will raise employment 0.5% at their firms in the next 3 years, highlighting an expectations gap between employers and employees.
I think what's happened, so far at least, is productivity has been moved around.
Anyone doing consulting has seen it, where now the "I vibe coded this last week" competition is way more intense. Basically the people with the problems now have a chance to spin up something that looks like the solution they want, they then get in trouble and need someone to sort it out.
LLMs _are_ great tools for software development but if you haven't noticed their near complete inability to reason about why what they're doing might work you haven't been trying hard enough.
I guess there is an inverse effect to bubbles (things go linearly up and then abruptly down), where nothing happens for a long time until all things happen at once.
Speaking as a programmer, the net effect so far is that we work more and deliver far more results and get paid the same or less.
And I run my own firm... but I have to compete against a global market of other programmers using similar tools who are also trying to compete on price, and then there are hordes of new entrants who can vibe-code things that superficially look like they'll meet a customer's needs and are better at marketing than I am, so my area of business gets constrained to just customers who need help after the problems with the vibe-coded solution appear, the vendor who made it is long gone, and they already spent an inordinate amount of money on the vibe-coded solution since they thought it was complete and it looked pretty good.
Most of my past roles had very simple code at the important deliverable level, on bizarre and arcane platforms that would have little context for frontier LLMs. Most the creativity and complexity was in tooling for research/development/testing.
Agentic coding could help a lot for the latter, not necessarily the former.
Not really. Most things take more time to transform than people think, even if capabilities exist. Which is not to say that they do exist, but rather, independent of whether they exist, that this is not very surprising.
Look at all those people worldwide “electing” to spend their money to feed and shelter themselves and their families with barely anything else left afterwards. The should’ve elected otherwise!
It’s insane how some people here are disconnected from the realities of the majority of people worldwide. All those years of education and the infinite access to information and still it’s an enigma to them the fact that the majority of people worldwide are just shit out of luck for having been born in places where a full time job just barely gets you by.
So you got lucky, thought it was because you were a genius and now you think everyone who didn't get lucky is just stupid.
A common thinking pattern. To prove it's luck, though, your great-grandchildren will be poor again - that always happens - they say rags to rags in three generations.
Sorry, I misread. Your parents were the first generation to escape poverty. They are the ones who worked hard and got lucky. You are the second generation, the one who grew up middle-class and takes it for granted, and wouldn't be able to climb up out of poverty. Your children will be the ones you spend all the money on and won't have any inheritance left for, and their children will grow up poor. This happens every single time.
"My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel."
Except ADHD was there long before the machines, and stimulants have been scientifically proven time and time again to be helpful in treating ADHD at a very minimal sides effects cost.
TFA links attention on one hand, and social media and LLM use on the other. I'm not making any points about the scientific validity of those conclusions, but that's the context in which this discussion is taking place.
Personally, I find a very strong link between my devices and my ability to focus, as they're the space in which I spaff my time. I do not believe myself to have ADHD, I believe that the machines I use offer limitless ways for me to lose track when I'm tired.
I'm deeply skeptical of pharmacological solutionism, particularly in the domain of mental health. A variety of drugs can be a boon, life-saving to many, but are over-prescribed and treat symptoms not causes.
With regard to amphetamines in particularly (we called it 'whizz' where I'm from, back in the day), we're talking about a class of drug that can cause dependency, problems with sleep and sex, anxiety and plenty more. I would not say they're not without side effects in the slightest.
Sure, great if this sort of stuff helps, but I find the "just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate and borderline disturbing.
I agree that screens contribute to the issues of attention and executive dysfunction. But the thing with ADHD is that there is no "treating the cause", because the cause is genetic and there is no cure, there is only management of the symptoms. As for dependency, people with ADHD report to chronically forget to take their stimulants, so there's that. For me personally, I find things like weed way more addictive, and I didn't notice any issues with sleep or sex (and I think you might be confusing stimulants with SSRIs here in regards to sex).
I agree that not everyone having issues today would be qualifying for ADHD. There are way too many things about the zeitgeist that are overloading everyone. But still:
1. you can't prescribe someone a fixed society
2. what constitutes "over prescription" is subjective, and some increase in prescriptions is to be expected in line with better knowledge and so ability to diagnose people who were previously missed
3. contrary to several other psychiatric medications, stimulants have a known MoA and consistently beat placebo
4. amphetamine taken recreationally is often in different forms and much higher doses than would be taken on prescription, by people who aren't in need. Things like sleep and anxiety can actually be improved by such prescriptions
You don't believe in them, for yourself or others, and you've been trained well enough to couch your disbelief (eg "great if this sort of stuff helps") so as to avoid someone directly addressing your disbelief in them. Yeah there are side effects, but it's a personal choice. No one's going to force you to take them if you don't want them, but for people that find them useful, going around telling everybody that they're over prescribed and have side effects doesn't help people who would benefit from them get access to them.
> just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate
There's an entire industry with licensing boards and factories and regulations. How much more money do you want spent on the problem in order to form an adequate response, and what would that look like to you?
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