Have you ever seen a combine harvester kill animals sheltering in a crop during harvest, or considered how many animals are killed by the pesticides used in crop production?
It always amazes me how some vegans go into a frenzy over animals being slaughtered for meat while completely ignoring the bloodbath caused by farming practices used to produce vegan-friendly crops. Not to mention the pesticides that damage ecosystems and contaminate groundwater. The selective outrage and hypocrisy are jaw-dropping.
The problem isn’t the law. The problem is that wealthy companies can use lobbying, political donations, and influence to avoid or weaken enforcement. In other words, the problem is corruption.
If you or your software hacks a website, the law will hit you hard. But powerful AI companies have the money and influence to avoid the same consequences.
The US administration just needs to enforce existing laws equally. Do that, and AI companies will suddenly have a very strong incentive to take safety seriously.
Yep, because private enterprises never go bankrupt, commit fraud, mistreat customers, bribe politicians, put profit ahead of safety, hack websites, etc. etc.
Not my experience at all (30+ years of pro experience). I love the fact that LLMs can take care of the low level coding while I focus on the fun stuff.
I hope the threat of LLMs making much of our existing software dramatically easier to hack will finally push the software community toward formally verifying security-critical software.
Ironically, LLMs are also dramatically lowering the cost of doing exactly that.
Formal verification isn't a panacea, of course. You can prove the wrong specification correct. But for the small, security-critical foundations that everything else depends on, I think the economics are becoming much more compelling.
My take: I don't think recursive self-improvement (RSI) will happen with current LLM architectures, even if they become 1000x "smarter".
RSI requires more than being better at solving problems. An AI needs to decide what is worth improving, come up with genuinely new ideas, and decide which ideas are worth pursuing.
Current LLMs are still weak at two of these: judgement (what matters) and new ideas. They're very good at combining and developing existing ideas, but that's different from independently finding important new directions.
That's also why I don't think most knowledge workers can simply be replaced by LLMs. Many tasks can be automated, but the most important ones can't.
I don't think this article adds anything that hasn't already been discussed to death on HN.
LLMs are powerful new tools, and we're all figuring out how to use them effectively. Some developers are getting great results, others aren't. Some instinctively love them, others hate them. Pretty much like every other developer tool HN has argued about, from Lisp to Emacs.
And yes, management often doesn't get it. But that's hardly new either.
> YouTube recommends videos designed to keep us watching
Yes, but you don’t have to subscribe to what it suggests. I keep a carefully curated list of subscriptions and very rarely look at recommendations. That gives me a high-quality filter without all the algorithmic BS.
I disagree. Software developers seem to have adapted to AI much faster than the maths community.
There are certainly still strong opponents of AI, but they seem to be a small, vocal minority. Most developers seem to have simply adapted and moved on.
It's possible and I dare say even likely that you are missing nuance and observing bias from your bubble. It's possible to avoid being an AI "opponent" while still being a sceptic. It's possible to use AI reluctantly and with tact instead of going all in.
The whole thing is far from over when we haven't experienced the worst of the technology yet: deskilling, concentration of power, extreme imbalance of wealth, military and surveillance uses, etc.
Of course, sorry if that came across as more combative than necessary. I was trying to point out two things I guess:
1. "Your experience is not universal from my perspective, and I offer my experience as evidence"
2. The possibility that this adaptation you are observing is neither a stable equilibrium given future developments, nor is necessarily an indication that the people using AI have bought into it fully. I use AI heavily while remaining a sceptic.
Hey, no problem, and thanks for the level-headed response. We need more of that in this world.
And yes, I agree that we still don’t know the long-term consequences of AI. But current LLMs are nowhere near good enough at judgment or new ideas to replace most jobs.
I expect they’ll mainly automate parts of jobs rather than replace them entirely. That’s exactly what I’m seeing as a software developer. I use an LLM to write my code, but it only works well when I apply good judgment and shape the context and prompts to remove ambiguity and then carefully review the results.
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