Personally, it depends. If I could automate taking the trash out, I would do probably want to do it (not sure though). But what remains when everything is automated ?
Well, so far we have been automating many things, and we are still busy working and living as always. It's of course impossible to automate everything - we always have things to do, by necessity by also by choice ; do we really want to be idle and contribute nothing to society ? I don't, and I am sure nobody does. Being useful is an essential need.
Is it pointless then, to automate more and more ? No. It's a way to move forward, and not necessarily a "bad" way. Just not the only way.
I want us to automate food production and distribution. I want us to automate creation of building materials and creation of buildings. I want us to automate power generation, and see the marginal cost of power drop to zero. I want us to automate clean transport. I want us to automate cleaning up the planet.
Beyond the face that these are all already highly automated, this isn't what TFA is saying. People aren't angry there are planting machines or whatever; they're angry they're forced to forego anything you can't put in a DB, like their jobs or the texture of their lives. Ironically, you have a huge case of software brain.
> Beyond the face that these are all already highly automated
Nonsense. To take first two examples:
Power plants may run mostly automatically, but humans decide how/where/when to build new plants, and humans build them. I'll be satisfied when we see 100% automated manufacture, transport, erection, and maintenance of solar farms (or similar) and all associated power storage and transmission.
Humans are still hugely in the loop on food production despite machine assistance, and the current world's systems are hugely wasteful in sharing out food production. I'll be satisfied when we have 100% automated farms, and automated transport and distribution of food such that we use what we've grown efficiently, and no-one can even imagine food shortage ever again.
> they're angry they're forced to forego anything you can't put in a DB, like their jobs or the texture of their lives. Ironically, you have a huge case of software brain.
Maybe you're missing the point.
I'm strongly aligned with this famous-ish tweet: "You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I just have a vision far beyond laundry and dishes. Automation (with or without AI) offers us a chance of a future utopia. Unfortunately, the current direction seems to be a corporate-owned AI-driven dystopia. I want the Culture, not Robocop.
Human beings mostly are. People mostly support their neighbors, and selflessly help each other in times of crisis.
The problem is the 5% of us are sociopaths. We let them have all the money and power because they're the only ones that want it. Then we let them use that money and power to convince us that the "REAL" problem is the people with no money or power in the neighboring political region (the border having been drawn by a sociopath).
Regular people, not sociopaths, are responsible for most of the evil in the world.
There is no tiny minority of 'evildoers' that we could root out and be pure from.
Other bad things happen because of unintended consequences or the collective behavior of many people. Climate change or deforestation are not caused by greed or scheming CEOs; it's a side effect from the actions of billions of people individually trying to better their lives.
I'm familiar with it. The "banality of evil" in that book isn't about regular people, it was about the leadership of the Nazi party willing to go along with the Holocaust for personal power, then trying to get out of responsibility for it by claiming they were "just following orders". Those aren't regular people, those are sociopaths.
Regular people don't all independently decide to "do evil". There is banality in the ones that agree to go along with it, to save themselves from being ostracized or mildly inconvenienced. Do they perpetuate evil? For sure. But are they the villains responsible for it?
The "evildoers" are the tiny minority of sociopaths doing the convincing, because it nets them more personal power, and they don't care who they hurt along the way.
There is a huge amount of injustice in the world, morally speaking I should be out there fighting against it with everything I have. But I'm also the sole breadwinner for my family and I have a mortgage, so I mostly keep my head down and try to survive. Does that make me an evildoer? I sure hope not.
Maybe on doctornews, but this is hackernews. To us, Baumol's disease means your job, which has increased productivity, disappears, while your costs, which don't have increased productivity, go up.
Agreed for cheaper prices and more flexibility. At least this is what we think we want. But do we actually want it ?
A computer 40 years ago was way more expensive than now. How did people do it ? They managed. How do we do it now ? We manage, similarly.
Was there an improvement in things ? Obviously, computers are more powerful for example. But with less powerful computers, people could also be happy I believe.
I remember 15 years ago, tech has obviously evolved a lot since then, and I have learned to use more and more tech tools. But am I more efficient than then ? Happier than back then ? More skilled than back then ?
- More efficient for some things, less efficient for others.
- Happier ? no. Not sadder either, similar. If anything, it's not related.
- More Skilled ? No. Skilled at other things. For example my handwriting is still ok but I believe I won't be able to write so much or so quickly or so well as I used to (I should try though).
Am I saying that progress is not real ? No, of course not. Progress happens. But is it what "people" want or need ? Taking my own perspective : if it happens (and it does), I adapt - no problem.
If it does not happen somehow - then I would adapt too. That's what we do.
I want to automate scientific research. There are too many problems, too much data and not enough scientists. We could find cures to cancer, rare genetic diseases, new forms of energy, better batteries, better every thing.
Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials.
Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.
Automated drug discovery is already a thing. The proceeding steps are the issue, clinical trials, formulation, safety testing, etc, economies of scale etc.
True automation of scientific research requires true AI.
I'm not really sure why tech people keep suggesting scientists aren't incorporating the latest tech.
We are all about automation. The issue is funding.
"
Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.
"
I mean, even going back, people had all kinds of problems with all kinds of automations, e.g. Luddites and the subsequent starving in the streets.
I mean, I would think the opposite it the truth.
Other than a few masochist CEOs, most people don't like having to work for a living to ensure they don't starve and are homeless. It's just in the current paradigm it's what we have do to. And because we have to do it, people get really nervous when rich people attempt to replace human work with automation. Not because we won't have to work, but because we will have to starve.
People not wanting their jobs be automated is different from not yearning for automation as a principle. Most people want or (at least don't mind) elevators, tap water, dishwashers, traffic lights, electrical fuses, sliding doors, etc. Its a very general term
People want their bills and chores eliminated. Show them tech that does that and you'll be every working person's favorite human being. They'll be naming their kids after you.
They wouldn't mind their jobs being eliminated, except for that whole bills thing. Eliminate their jobs without eliminating their bills and they'll hate you.
A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
I've been listening to the Verge podcast and I've listened to Nillay refine this article piece by piece for weeks. He had the headline in mind for a long time and I've heard most of the points addressed in this article. It's now interesting to see all that distilled into this single article.
It's definitely not poorly thought out article. People want to automate away the boring parts of their work and life but, as the meme says, people want AI to do their dishes and laundry so they can do writing and art but instead AI does their writing and art so they can do the laundry.
I'm not sure what you think the straw man is here. I think he already addresses this in the article: "I’m not saying regular people don’t use Excel or Airtable to plan their weddings or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won’t be useful to regular people over time [...] Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and shouldn’t be."
Nilay has been discussing these ideas on podcasts hosted by The Verge over the last few weeks. I can tell it's something that's been top of mind for him especially on his podcast series Decoder where he interviews CEOs about their approach to integrating AI in their products and how consumers feel about this.
Working in IT and AI related fields I made the opposite observation. Taking as HR an example, professionals there wanted to keep the boring reporting tasks and automate the human part, e.g. career guidance, mediation etc.. At the time I could not understand the reason why. In hindsight it was a reward driven decision. Human to human interaction is rarely instantly rewarded. Producing reports on the other hand is measurable and mostly rewarded right away.
This is compounded by many managers not understanding the details of what their direct reports actually do. I've had so many supervisors in my career who just have no concept of what I really do in IT, though it's pretty obvious to me and my coworkers. So when it comes to review time, I'm always having to walk them through what I actually do.
Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.
> A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life.
mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written.
In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load.
> The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.
I think there's a more general negative sentiment against AI (a specific type of automation) in recent months. I mean, people are trying to burn down Altman's house. The average person who follows tech news might be more reluctant about automation than before. But there'll always be technologists who push for automation at any cost.
People totally do want to offload the drudgery. That's why there is such a thing as dishwashers, and why OpenAI has 90 million users. But they also want the drudgery to be done reliably and not require as much work checking as it would have doing it in the first place.
Labor-saving devices don't save labor at work. They increase productivity rather than reducing hours, and the extra value is captured by the employer.
That's the difference between your home dishwasher and the means of production.
It's also probably a big part of what worries Gen Z about when it comes to AI. They're thinking about their own employment and employment prospects, where most people probably understand they have little to gain from it long-term.
You missed the part in TFA where Amodei talks about gazillions of jobs going away, or literally any AI CEO saying the same thing over and over again, or mass layoffs all blaming AI.
I disagree. In college, I worked at a bagel shop, and one of my favorite parts of the job was washing the dishes and cleaning the equipment. It was incredibly therapeutic to have my headphones on, listening to music, and think about whatever, while also getting paid to clean.
I do use my dishwasher at home, and I love that dishwasher. However, I also cook and I want to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
Funny enough, I have come across many people in my life who usually only use their dishwashers as drying racks. It's a bit odd whenever I see it, but I get it.
So, people DO like drudgery. People even seek out drudgery. There is no one-size-fits-all of what it means to live a life, and as the article states, the biggest problem for adoption is that AI is so flattening as product.
I mean look at some games like farming simulators. I have only played Slime Rancher. Sure the Slimes are cute and fun and there is a background story, but it also gets quite repetitive...
My job is to improve workflows with automation and analysis, I preach progress, but in my daily life I enjoy shifting gears in my ice car, taking time to make a coffee, developing photos from an analogue camera, listening to music on physical media, all things that could be automated away...if we read stories for the ending we could flip to the last page and get it.
There are a lot of managers out there (my own included) that would automate every aspect of their own life just so they can sit around and wait for death, and assume that is what everyone else wants.
Drudgery is not as much drudgery when there is variety. I think a lot of people who see their work as "drudgery" actually just are forced to do one thing and never even think about doing a second thing during their day.
The purpose/results of the work matter just as much. Take restaurant work. Making meals people enjoy is less drudgery. Making meals you know are good versus making low quality slop. Working at a basic but locally appreciated breakfast place versus making breakfasts at Denny's even though you are making basically the same thing.
Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
A million percent. I would love to offload the shit parts of SWE to a model. But models are wildly unreliable (hallucination rates are sky high, insignificant differences in prompts create hugely different output, etc) so I can't trust them to do it.
It's amazing to me that people believe a company is easier to run than a robot. Several people try to start business every year, most of them fail. The lesson is right there.
Before the Mayflower Compact and the Magna Carta, there was the Casual Shirt Manifesto.
Irish monks kept it safe during the dark ages, along with the rest of written histories deemed critical to continued evolution of mankind.
It was there, in Dublin, in The Stag’s Head at 3 a.m. that I traded my treasured duster for the only remaining copy (still in Latin so please allow me some paraphrasing)…
“Find Henley and wear it. It won’t make you look crisp. Nobody looks crisp in Temple of Dendur. So, look good. When you wear something unstructured, relaxed, something that makes you feel good – you look good.”
Vintage Henley (No. 7129). Classic European military henley style in heavyweight rugby slub jersey. Created with siro yarns for high character and texture. Unique woven bib facing with button closure behind placket (keeps the chill out, looks more interesting than the neckline of your other henleys). Woven cotton twill bib facing and placket. Shell buttons. Flatlock stitching. Reinforced box stitch at placket end. Imported.
It's the kind of job you can do on autopilot and then work on your novel later.
So much of advancement has gotten rid of jobs you can sort of half-ass, while you put most of your energy into something that advances culture in the off hours. Think of like, photographers and school photos or weddings, poets and copy editing, etc.
This is what happens when one thinks "tech=good" no matter what. I'm not saying we need something like a huge investigation to see if something will disrupt the fragile ecosystem of artists, but I'm not not saying it.
This article is the first that I’ve seen that hits on a theme I’ve been pondering for a long time. And that is that everyone super bullish on AI assumes that there are enormous real world gains to be had by existing companies automating software tasks- building software, using software- essentially moving bits around. I’ve been very skeptical of this.
We’ve had the ability to automate work between systems with bots and even regular jobs that automate certain repetitive tasks with APIs for years. Yet there’s been a relatively small uptake of bots and there is still a very large market for vendors an SIs who can improve existing processes.
I think it’s pretty clear why this disconnect exists between “regular people” and the people Patel describes as having software brain. And that is that the nature of LLMs is that they are limited to the digital world. At the core they really only do one thing and that is take some text, overlay it with digital representations of the world and try and find the one that most closely matches.
The inborn assumption is that they will get better and better and climb the corporate ladder, starting in the call center but climbing the corporate ladder to replace everyone’s jobs like Michael J Fox in the Secret of my Succcess. But I’m skeptical. Automation always starts in call central customer service use cases because that is one of the few use cases where humans are involved, they are supposed to follow a script, and take actions entirely inside software applications. But it always seems to stall out. Because once you move from jobs where a script can be provided to ones where ambiguity is a constant factor and judgments and decisions have to made that don’t have exact precedents you need humans. LLMs are backwards looking. Humans can consider things that have happened previously as guidance but critically, can also imagine a future state where things operate differently all why considering multiple competing factors, all of which are unique to that situation. They don’t always do it well but LLMs are incapable of doing it in any case.
People hate AI because it doesn’t really do that much for a regular person, is massively hyped by people who look shadier and less credible by the day and has some vague threat of destroying civilization or at least making you homeless.
But- I have zero doubt that if these same companies did actually excel at providing real world value, nobody would care about the negative implications. For example if they produced robots that could automate aspects of your life like cleaning your house, getting your groceries and doing it very inexpensively, I have no doubt the popularity would be off the charts and a bona fide bubble would ensue.
This is plainly true. First off, Waymo is one of the few companies successfully using AI to operate real world objects at enormous complexity and risk. Talk to anyone who just used Waymo for the first time and they will be almost euphoric. It’s amazing technology with overwhelming utility. There are also several examples of companies with less than stellar images who consumers were told they should boycott but most users couldn’t have cared less. Uber in its earlier days and Facebook coming out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal come to mind.
> The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.
This is sophomoric. This person is the "editor in chief" and I'm guessing that no one had the job security to tell them that this article was silly on the face of it.
The title is good rage bait: "People Do Not Yearn for Automation". Obviously false, and it draws in the readers that want to say "Nuh uh!".
But the meat of the article is on how the seeming disconnect between technological elites and other people has lead to them touting AI when they should consider other alternatives.
This premise is shown to be dubious by a statistics in the article:
> In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI ...
> That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month.
So, a simple question, why are so many people using something they claim to hate? Doesn't that spark a bit of interest in the author? No? They would very much like to blame industry leaders, rather than take a more nuanced view.
That said industry leaders suck. They seem to entertain magical thinking that AI will somehow replace labour. And they seem to deploy it with that end in mind. That's a stupid thing to do, but they have the money so they make the rules.
But this idea that they have "software brain" is just laughable.
> You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences.
intermitent wipers IS automation , and it fails every single time it is used. Causing distraction and exasperation.
This is no cutsey joke, it is a simple strait forward absolute test and proof, the day there are 100% perfect and reliable intermitent wipers that never make things worse, then we can talk about automation.
Next up, folding chairs and tables, go ahead, you and ALL the ai, design something that is easy, self evident, and will eliminate the significant number of people sitting, now, in a hospital waiting area to get a finger looked at. PROVE IT , NOW!
Simple eh?, nope !, applied geometry and routine tasks,many thousands of things that are never quite right and need to monitored adjusted, calibrated, repaired, replaced, and reinvented,figured out, explained, trained and everything else!, go ahead, you and AI fix one thing in such a way as to cause total wide spread adoption of your refinement and the worlds little sigh of relief from knowing that something works right, everytime is yours.
Ahh yes. AI is polling worse than ICE. Doesn't mean much since ICE would be polling quite well with much of the country. Typical low-quality journalism.
Personally, it depends. If I could automate taking the trash out, I would do probably want to do it (not sure though). But what remains when everything is automated ?
Well, so far we have been automating many things, and we are still busy working and living as always. It's of course impossible to automate everything - we always have things to do, by necessity by also by choice ; do we really want to be idle and contribute nothing to society ? I don't, and I am sure nobody does. Being useful is an essential need.
Is it pointless then, to automate more and more ? No. It's a way to move forward, and not necessarily a "bad" way. Just not the only way.
> But what remains when everything is automated?
The answer has been perfectly captured in this czechoslovakian cartoon made in 1984. https://youtu.be/6Mo8gQ89aEA?feature=shared
I shouldn't admit it, but when you described a czechoslovakian cartoon about automation, my first thought went straight to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI&t=14s
There is also the film Zardoz.
I want us to automate food production and distribution. I want us to automate creation of building materials and creation of buildings. I want us to automate power generation, and see the marginal cost of power drop to zero. I want us to automate clean transport. I want us to automate cleaning up the planet.
Beyond the face that these are all already highly automated, this isn't what TFA is saying. People aren't angry there are planting machines or whatever; they're angry they're forced to forego anything you can't put in a DB, like their jobs or the texture of their lives. Ironically, you have a huge case of software brain.
> Beyond the face that these are all already highly automated
Nonsense. To take first two examples:
Power plants may run mostly automatically, but humans decide how/where/when to build new plants, and humans build them. I'll be satisfied when we see 100% automated manufacture, transport, erection, and maintenance of solar farms (or similar) and all associated power storage and transmission.
Humans are still hugely in the loop on food production despite machine assistance, and the current world's systems are hugely wasteful in sharing out food production. I'll be satisfied when we have 100% automated farms, and automated transport and distribution of food such that we use what we've grown efficiently, and no-one can even imagine food shortage ever again.
> they're angry they're forced to forego anything you can't put in a DB, like their jobs or the texture of their lives. Ironically, you have a huge case of software brain.
Maybe you're missing the point.
I'm strongly aligned with this famous-ish tweet: "You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I just have a vision far beyond laundry and dishes. Automation (with or without AI) offers us a chance of a future utopia. Unfortunately, the current direction seems to be a corporate-owned AI-driven dystopia. I want the Culture, not Robocop.
100% agree. These are the kinds of things I would love to work on, not like, "never schedule a haircut appointment again!"
Well ultimately I want human beings to not be so tribal and apathetic so that they'd actually care about the things above and learn to compromise.
But that ain't happening anytime soon.
Human beings mostly are. People mostly support their neighbors, and selflessly help each other in times of crisis.
The problem is the 5% of us are sociopaths. We let them have all the money and power because they're the only ones that want it. Then we let them use that money and power to convince us that the "REAL" problem is the people with no money or power in the neighboring political region (the border having been drawn by a sociopath).
You should read up on the banality of evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem
Regular people, not sociopaths, are responsible for most of the evil in the world. There is no tiny minority of 'evildoers' that we could root out and be pure from.
Other bad things happen because of unintended consequences or the collective behavior of many people. Climate change or deforestation are not caused by greed or scheming CEOs; it's a side effect from the actions of billions of people individually trying to better their lives.
I'm familiar with it. The "banality of evil" in that book isn't about regular people, it was about the leadership of the Nazi party willing to go along with the Holocaust for personal power, then trying to get out of responsibility for it by claiming they were "just following orders". Those aren't regular people, those are sociopaths.
Regular people don't all independently decide to "do evil". There is banality in the ones that agree to go along with it, to save themselves from being ostracized or mildly inconvenienced. Do they perpetuate evil? For sure. But are they the villains responsible for it?
The "evildoers" are the tiny minority of sociopaths doing the convincing, because it nets them more personal power, and they don't care who they hurt along the way.
There is a huge amount of injustice in the world, morally speaking I should be out there fighting against it with everything I have. But I'm also the sole breadwinner for my family and I have a mortgage, so I mostly keep my head down and try to survive. Does that make me an evildoer? I sure hope not.
Power generation is largely automated !
I'd like to not die of Baumol's Cost Disease along the way, though.
Baumol's cost disease also benefits you, because it makes your wages go up even if you haven't increased productivity.
Maybe on doctornews, but this is hackernews. To us, Baumol's disease means your job, which has increased productivity, disappears, while your costs, which don't have increased productivity, go up.
Same here. Then let's automate building vast O'Neill cylinders and habitats we can live in.
Why
Why not? Humans are awesome and should colonize the universe. There is much science to do and there are many things to build.
Obviously not.
People don't care about the tech, they care about the second-order effects like cheaper prices, and more flexibility.
Also, the article is way too broad, you can't treat automation and it's applications in law along with just "vibes" about how people feel about AI.
Agreed for cheaper prices and more flexibility. At least this is what we think we want. But do we actually want it ? A computer 40 years ago was way more expensive than now. How did people do it ? They managed. How do we do it now ? We manage, similarly.
Was there an improvement in things ? Obviously, computers are more powerful for example. But with less powerful computers, people could also be happy I believe.
I remember 15 years ago, tech has obviously evolved a lot since then, and I have learned to use more and more tech tools. But am I more efficient than then ? Happier than back then ? More skilled than back then ?
- More efficient for some things, less efficient for others. - Happier ? no. Not sadder either, similar. If anything, it's not related. - More Skilled ? No. Skilled at other things. For example my handwriting is still ok but I believe I won't be able to write so much or so quickly or so well as I used to (I should try though).
Am I saying that progress is not real ? No, of course not. Progress happens. But is it what "people" want or need ? Taking my own perspective : if it happens (and it does), I adapt - no problem. If it does not happen somehow - then I would adapt too. That's what we do.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if journalist are getting high on their own supply of resentment and fear mongering
I want to automate scientific research. There are too many problems, too much data and not enough scientists. We could find cures to cancer, rare genetic diseases, new forms of energy, better batteries, better every thing.
Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials.
Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.
Automated drug discovery is already a thing. The proceeding steps are the issue, clinical trials, formulation, safety testing, etc, economies of scale etc.
True automation of scientific research requires true AI.
I'm not really sure why tech people keep suggesting scientists aren't incorporating the latest tech.
We are all about automation. The issue is funding.
Maybe a nitpicky HN comment, but why are we lumping the term automation with very recent grievances about certain kinds of automation
The article literally draws that distinction in the first paragraph.
It does?
" Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time. "
I mean, even going back, people had all kinds of problems with all kinds of automations, e.g. Luddites and the subsequent starving in the streets.
I mean, I would think the opposite it the truth.
Other than a few masochist CEOs, most people don't like having to work for a living to ensure they don't starve and are homeless. It's just in the current paradigm it's what we have do to. And because we have to do it, people get really nervous when rich people attempt to replace human work with automation. Not because we won't have to work, but because we will have to starve.
People not wanting their jobs be automated is different from not yearning for automation as a principle. Most people want or (at least don't mind) elevators, tap water, dishwashers, traffic lights, electrical fuses, sliding doors, etc. Its a very general term
People want their bills and chores eliminated. Show them tech that does that and you'll be every working person's favorite human being. They'll be naming their kids after you.
They wouldn't mind their jobs being eliminated, except for that whole bills thing. Eliminate their jobs without eliminating their bills and they'll hate you.
A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life. The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
I've been listening to the Verge podcast and I've listened to Nillay refine this article piece by piece for weeks. He had the headline in mind for a long time and I've heard most of the points addressed in this article. It's now interesting to see all that distilled into this single article.
It's definitely not poorly thought out article. People want to automate away the boring parts of their work and life but, as the meme says, people want AI to do their dishes and laundry so they can do writing and art but instead AI does their writing and art so they can do the laundry.
I'm not sure what you think the straw man is here. I think he already addresses this in the article: "I’m not saying regular people don’t use Excel or Airtable to plan their weddings or have fun throwing PowerPoint parties, or even that AI won’t be useful to regular people over time [...] Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and shouldn’t be."
> I've listened to Nillay refine this article piece by piece for weeks.
What do you mean?
Nilay has been discussing these ideas on podcasts hosted by The Verge over the last few weeks. I can tell it's something that's been top of mind for him especially on his podcast series Decoder where he interviews CEOs about their approach to integrating AI in their products and how consumers feel about this.
Working in IT and AI related fields I made the opposite observation. Taking as HR an example, professionals there wanted to keep the boring reporting tasks and automate the human part, e.g. career guidance, mediation etc.. At the time I could not understand the reason why. In hindsight it was a reward driven decision. Human to human interaction is rarely instantly rewarded. Producing reports on the other hand is measurable and mostly rewarded right away.
This is compounded by many managers not understanding the details of what their direct reports actually do. I've had so many supervisors in my career who just have no concept of what I really do in IT, though it's pretty obvious to me and my coworkers. So when it comes to review time, I'm always having to walk them through what I actually do.
Contrast this to when I am tasked with creating a report that they need. They're amazed. Absolutely amazed that I can write something coherent. I can only assume that with the Peter Principle, they're all surrounded by idiots who write emails and reports like Epstein.
Your comment here appears to be a perfect illustration of what Nilay calls "software brain" in the article.
(I have a strong case of software brain as he describes it myself.)
> A poorly thought, as a result, a poorly-written article. Almost everyone wants to automate away the boring parts of their work and life.
mm, the fact that you disagree with the article doesn't make it poorly written.
In my experience no, there are significant limits to how much automation the average person wants in their life. Even if automating something would save time, doing so could be undesirable due to other metrics such as correctness, cost, latency, flexibility, or cognitive load.
> The author created a strawman, but that is not what AI is ("Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.")
In context, what you've quoted there is not the creation of a strawman. In fact you yourself seem to have constructed a strawman out of the article.
thank you, I was hoping to write this but your comment saved me from typing it :)
https://gist.github.com/againpucuk/5007100cca4f5e8caccceb736...
The dream of automation will never die
And our automations dream of electric sheep :).
I think there's a more general negative sentiment against AI (a specific type of automation) in recent months. I mean, people are trying to burn down Altman's house. The average person who follows tech news might be more reluctant about automation than before. But there'll always be technologists who push for automation at any cost.
People totally do want to offload the drudgery. That's why there is such a thing as dishwashers, and why OpenAI has 90 million users. But they also want the drudgery to be done reliably and not require as much work checking as it would have doing it in the first place.
Labor-saving devices don't save labor at work. They increase productivity rather than reducing hours, and the extra value is captured by the employer.
That's the difference between your home dishwasher and the means of production.
It's also probably a big part of what worries Gen Z about when it comes to AI. They're thinking about their own employment and employment prospects, where most people probably understand they have little to gain from it long-term.
You missed the part in TFA where Amodei talks about gazillions of jobs going away, or literally any AI CEO saying the same thing over and over again, or mass layoffs all blaming AI.
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I disagree. In college, I worked at a bagel shop, and one of my favorite parts of the job was washing the dishes and cleaning the equipment. It was incredibly therapeutic to have my headphones on, listening to music, and think about whatever, while also getting paid to clean.
I do use my dishwasher at home, and I love that dishwasher. However, I also cook and I want to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
Funny enough, I have come across many people in my life who usually only use their dishwashers as drying racks. It's a bit odd whenever I see it, but I get it.
So, people DO like drudgery. People even seek out drudgery. There is no one-size-fits-all of what it means to live a life, and as the article states, the biggest problem for adoption is that AI is so flattening as product.
I mean look at some games like farming simulators. I have only played Slime Rancher. Sure the Slimes are cute and fun and there is a background story, but it also gets quite repetitive...
People want to choose what in their life they do.
My job is to improve workflows with automation and analysis, I preach progress, but in my daily life I enjoy shifting gears in my ice car, taking time to make a coffee, developing photos from an analogue camera, listening to music on physical media, all things that could be automated away...if we read stories for the ending we could flip to the last page and get it.
There are a lot of managers out there (my own included) that would automate every aspect of their own life just so they can sit around and wait for death, and assume that is what everyone else wants.
Drudgery is not as much drudgery when there is variety. I think a lot of people who see their work as "drudgery" actually just are forced to do one thing and never even think about doing a second thing during their day.
The purpose/results of the work matter just as much. Take restaurant work. Making meals people enjoy is less drudgery. Making meals you know are good versus making low quality slop. Working at a basic but locally appreciated breakfast place versus making breakfasts at Denny's even though you are making basically the same thing.
Take making software I felt was making the world better versus software that was not. When I knew my work dramatically improved the lives of tens/hundreds of thousands of people and by extensions their families touched hundreds of thousands more versus just a software job in a kind of bad industry. The positive job it was easy to put in ridiculous hours. For the other straight 9-5 felt like too long.
A million percent. I would love to offload the shit parts of SWE to a model. But models are wildly unreliable (hallucination rates are sky high, insignificant differences in prompts create hugely different output, etc) so I can't trust them to do it.
Then use AI to make a dishwasher. Why aim for accounting first?
It's easy to get users. Speaking of accounting we should probably just measure profits.
Because robotics is really hard. Several companies are trying to make kitchen robots, but none of them are close to a viable product at the moment.
It's amazing to me that people believe a company is easier to run than a robot. Several people try to start business every year, most of them fail. The lesson is right there.
We have dishwashers.
We also have accountants. They're not even hard to come by.
Majority of AI use people encounter has zero to do with "automating drudgery" and a lot to do with "producing slop fast and cheap".
I don't think those are always different things. Imagine writing copy for a store catalogue. It pays the bills but probably isn't anyone's dream job.
Vintage Henley
Casual Shirt Manifesto.
Before the Mayflower Compact and the Magna Carta, there was the Casual Shirt Manifesto.
Irish monks kept it safe during the dark ages, along with the rest of written histories deemed critical to continued evolution of mankind.
It was there, in Dublin, in The Stag’s Head at 3 a.m. that I traded my treasured duster for the only remaining copy (still in Latin so please allow me some paraphrasing)…
“Find Henley and wear it. It won’t make you look crisp. Nobody looks crisp in Temple of Dendur. So, look good. When you wear something unstructured, relaxed, something that makes you feel good – you look good.”
Vintage Henley (No. 7129). Classic European military henley style in heavyweight rugby slub jersey. Created with siro yarns for high character and texture. Unique woven bib facing with button closure behind placket (keeps the chill out, looks more interesting than the neckline of your other henleys). Woven cotton twill bib facing and placket. Shell buttons. Flatlock stitching. Reinforced box stitch at placket end. Imported.
It's the kind of job you can do on autopilot and then work on your novel later.
So much of advancement has gotten rid of jobs you can sort of half-ass, while you put most of your energy into something that advances culture in the off hours. Think of like, photographers and school photos or weddings, poets and copy editing, etc.
This is what happens when one thinks "tech=good" no matter what. I'm not saying we need something like a huge investigation to see if something will disrupt the fragile ecosystem of artists, but I'm not not saying it.
Imagine using a store catalog and dealing with the product information being complete bullshit.
This article is the first that I’ve seen that hits on a theme I’ve been pondering for a long time. And that is that everyone super bullish on AI assumes that there are enormous real world gains to be had by existing companies automating software tasks- building software, using software- essentially moving bits around. I’ve been very skeptical of this.
We’ve had the ability to automate work between systems with bots and even regular jobs that automate certain repetitive tasks with APIs for years. Yet there’s been a relatively small uptake of bots and there is still a very large market for vendors an SIs who can improve existing processes.
I think it’s pretty clear why this disconnect exists between “regular people” and the people Patel describes as having software brain. And that is that the nature of LLMs is that they are limited to the digital world. At the core they really only do one thing and that is take some text, overlay it with digital representations of the world and try and find the one that most closely matches.
The inborn assumption is that they will get better and better and climb the corporate ladder, starting in the call center but climbing the corporate ladder to replace everyone’s jobs like Michael J Fox in the Secret of my Succcess. But I’m skeptical. Automation always starts in call central customer service use cases because that is one of the few use cases where humans are involved, they are supposed to follow a script, and take actions entirely inside software applications. But it always seems to stall out. Because once you move from jobs where a script can be provided to ones where ambiguity is a constant factor and judgments and decisions have to made that don’t have exact precedents you need humans. LLMs are backwards looking. Humans can consider things that have happened previously as guidance but critically, can also imagine a future state where things operate differently all why considering multiple competing factors, all of which are unique to that situation. They don’t always do it well but LLMs are incapable of doing it in any case.
People hate AI because it doesn’t really do that much for a regular person, is massively hyped by people who look shadier and less credible by the day and has some vague threat of destroying civilization or at least making you homeless.
But- I have zero doubt that if these same companies did actually excel at providing real world value, nobody would care about the negative implications. For example if they produced robots that could automate aspects of your life like cleaning your house, getting your groceries and doing it very inexpensively, I have no doubt the popularity would be off the charts and a bona fide bubble would ensue.
This is plainly true. First off, Waymo is one of the few companies successfully using AI to operate real world objects at enormous complexity and risk. Talk to anyone who just used Waymo for the first time and they will be almost euphoric. It’s amazing technology with overwhelming utility. There are also several examples of companies with less than stellar images who consumers were told they should boycott but most users couldn’t have cared less. Uber in its earlier days and Facebook coming out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal come to mind.
Take away automation from our factories and farmers and see how quickly civilisation will fall apart.
> The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.
This is sophomoric. This person is the "editor in chief" and I'm guessing that no one had the job security to tell them that this article was silly on the face of it.
The title is good rage bait: "People Do Not Yearn for Automation". Obviously false, and it draws in the readers that want to say "Nuh uh!".
But the meat of the article is on how the seeming disconnect between technological elites and other people has lead to them touting AI when they should consider other alternatives.
This premise is shown to be dubious by a statistics in the article:
> In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI ...
> That’s with nearly two thirds of respondents saying they used ChatGPT or Copilot in the last month.
So, a simple question, why are so many people using something they claim to hate? Doesn't that spark a bit of interest in the author? No? They would very much like to blame industry leaders, rather than take a more nuanced view.
That said industry leaders suck. They seem to entertain magical thinking that AI will somehow replace labour. And they seem to deploy it with that end in mind. That's a stupid thing to do, but they have the money so they make the rules.
But this idea that they have "software brain" is just laughable.
> You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences.
I beg to differ.
"Stelter: Trump encourages people not to believe their eyes, ears or lungs." https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/04/media/donald-trump-disbelief-...
intermitent wipers IS automation , and it fails every single time it is used. Causing distraction and exasperation. This is no cutsey joke, it is a simple strait forward absolute test and proof, the day there are 100% perfect and reliable intermitent wipers that never make things worse, then we can talk about automation. Next up, folding chairs and tables, go ahead, you and ALL the ai, design something that is easy, self evident, and will eliminate the significant number of people sitting, now, in a hospital waiting area to get a finger looked at. PROVE IT , NOW! Simple eh?, nope !, applied geometry and routine tasks,many thousands of things that are never quite right and need to monitored adjusted, calibrated, repaired, replaced, and reinvented,figured out, explained, trained and everything else!, go ahead, you and AI fix one thing in such a way as to cause total wide spread adoption of your refinement and the worlds little sigh of relief from knowing that something works right, everytime is yours.
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Ahh yes. AI is polling worse than ICE. Doesn't mean much since ICE would be polling quite well with much of the country. Typical low-quality journalism.