> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
The whole irony is that quote is making the exact mistake his post is about: "eat less" is great advice for people where eating less isn't that hard, but it's not helpful advice for people who struggle mightily with eating less and who live in an environment of calorie rich, nutrient poor foods. I've naturally always been skinny, I often find eating a chore. Eating less is incredibly easy for me, but eating right and exercising enough to maintain muscle is the hard part for me.
I mean, we've been telling people "eat less" for literally decades and Americans are fatter than ever. The only thing that finally brought down societal-wide obesity stats was GLP-1s.
“Eating less” is the bottom line, but the road there can be fraught.
Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.
My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.
I would push back against your pushback and say nearly everyone knows that, it's just the brain is great at making excuses when things are physically difficult.
I'm not sure if it's just the US and Canada, but doctors here (in my experience) are absolutely atrocious and not properly trained when it comes to getting off benzos (but in fairness my experience was from the mid/late 00s).
Many years ago my partner at the time was prescribed Klonopin, primarily as a sleep aid. When he decided to go off it, he talked to his psychiatrist and was given basically no helpful guidance on how to go off. In retrospect I consider that malpractice. It was absolute hell and it took him well over 18 months to finally kick it (and it's not like he had a large prescription in the first place).
One reason I was so pissed is that as he was going off it I did some research and discovered that the NHS in the UK had an entire extensive protocol for people getting off Klonopin that required months of tapering and replacing Klonopin with a less powerful benzo (I think it was diazepam, or Valium) so you could taper at a more gradual pace.
It's insane to me that it's not required for doctors to explain the withdrawal procedures before writing a prescription for any drug that is physically addictive.
Or no job. I feel like so many people are stuck in the current capabilities of the models they use - what happens if AI ends up surpassing humans in all domains? Not saying that's guaranteed but it's certainly possible, and I feel like so many folks telling optimistic stories about how "AI focuses on the tedious stuff" have not really grasped with the implications of much more advanced AI.
I think I'm pretty aware of the implications. It's just not something I have control over. But right now, I'm enjoying getting stuff done. If they eventually take my job or upend civilization, it's going to happen whether I use them or not.
It's hope that Chatrie v. US automatically implies Flock searches require a warrant, but this is definitely not guaranteed - SCOTUS could easily go either way on this. For example, in his concurrence with the decision, Gorsuch relied on property rights, namely that Chatrie's agreement with Google regarding location history made this a warrant-required search. Obviously that doesn't apply in Flock's case.
SCOTUS has held for a long time that people don't have an expectation of privacy when visible in public. Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus on that, but there is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate.
> There is a fundamental difference between a location tracked by a cellphone you purchased and own vs. just driving around where anyone can read your license plate
I heavily disagree with the sentiment that modern 'ALPRs' are the same as following around an individual in public. No police officer, sheriff, state trooper, etc. is able to follow an individual across the entire country and catalog their every move 24/7. They have jurisdictions they're allowed to operate in. Additionally, the level of tracking these cameras provide (via their accompanying software) is nearly on par with placing a GPS tracker on a vehicle (which requires a warrant btw), and they're tracking every vehicle that passes, not just vehicles involved in a crime. Our travel history is protected by the 4th amendment because of the intimate details it can reveal about an individual's life. That is ultimately why Chatrie v. US was decided, not because of the specific technology utilized. It's the same case for Carpenter v. US and US v. Jones; both of which were instrumental in deciding the outcome of Chatrie.
I encourage people to go read the opinions of the justices that decided these cases. For example Justice Kegan had this to say in Chatrie v. US [1]:
> The Court began its analysis by reviewing what it had said about a different way of tracking “physical location and movements”: the use of a GPS device to monitor a vehicle. In United States v. Jones, five Justices had agreed that such tracking counts as a Fourth Amendment search because “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements.” That made sense, the Carpenter Court thought, even though the movements occurred in public. Prior to the digital age, pursuing a suspect “for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” As a result, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car.” A new technology should not transform what individuals had reasonably thought they could withhold from the Government.
FWIW, I totally agree with you, that's why I wrote "Digital recording and powerful search features certainly change the calculus".
But my point was just that it's absolutely not a fait accompli given the current makeup of SCOTUS. Gorsuch' rationale doesn't fit within Kagan's at all and is wholly dependent on the private relationship between Google and the consumer, so that brings it to 5-4, and I could easily see Roberts or Kavanagh (who voted with the majority in Chatrie) finding enough differences between the circumstances in Chatrie compared to Flock to change their vote.
People understand that. I think Flock needs to be dismantled but I'm also a bit shocked (as much as one can be these days) that the login procedures are just a username and password from anywhere. Netflix has stronger access controls.
> AI takes away work and lets us do more with less - just like every mechanization that came before!
No, it's not the same as mechanization. The fundamental difference, and why I find it illogical to argue either for "AI will open up tons of new work avenues" or "AI will kill all jobs" is that it all hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
If the former is true, then yes, there will be a lot for humans to do. If the latter is true, then no, there will be no reasonable cognitive role for humans to play (beyond perhaps for some legal, "nostalgic" reasons or what not). So whether one decides to be optimistic or pessimistic really depends on if you think AI will stay at a level below humans. I really don't know, so I'm not "taking sides" in this debate.
It's certainly possible that "the special sauce" that provides human consciousness and sentience (that I believe is not there for LLM-based AIs) provides some key ingredient to some forms of intelligence (particularly when it comes to originally) which LLMs would not be able to duplicate.
For example, much has been recently discussed about how OpenAI's math results, as impressive as they are, remained within "the convex hull" of existing math literature. Thus, some have argued that the way LLMs work will keep them squarely within this convex hull, and also there seem to be clear examples from human history where humans came up with breakthroughs that were outside the convex hull of ideas that existed at that time.
There has been a lot of recent debate, both for and against, this idea that current AI approaches are limited to this convex hull. So I'm not going to try to convince you one way or the other, but I do think it is at least a plausible explanation of how/why current approaches end up hitting a wall.
I'll also show my bias which is to say I certainly hope they hit a wall, because I don't understand how anyone can think that humans won't be truly and completely fucked if AI ends up far surpassing human intelligence.
the convex hull argument has recently been under scrutiny as well.
some proofs of famous conjectures (for example unique games conjecture) have been described as creating new, insane, almost alien ideas. Scott aaronson has a blog post on this.
Edit: OK, I found his rationale in the comment section, and I don't find it particularly convincing:
> (1) Einstein and Gödel and Gauss and Shakespeare “merely filled out some points in the convex hulls” of everything that came before them, if you take an expansive enough view of what those convex hulls actually were. What a pathetic piece of cope.
> (2) Dana tells me she now mostly understands the proof of the UGC, and is amazed by the new ideas in it, and wants to give talks about it soon. So, maybe people can listen to that and then lecture her on how it’s “just a point in the convex hull” of the ideas that she’s worked with for 20 years!
First, to just use Einstein as an example, I remember reading many years ago (like at least a decade plus) that many scientists felt like if Einstein had never lived, the theory of special relativity (i.e e=mc^2) likely would have been found pretty quickly in any case - the work had already been done putting the nail in the "luminiferous ether" coffin, and people were starting to connect the dots. I think most people would agree that special relativity was within the "convex hull" that existed at that time. However, I've also heard that general relativity was so far outside the bounds of scientific thought of the time that if Einstein hadn't discovered it that in may have been 50-100 years or more before we figured it out - it was far outside the bounds of the convex hull of that time.
All that said, I'm not a mathematician qualified to determine whether what has been discovered by OpenAI is inside or outside the convex hull, and I do think that the vast majority of human intelligence operates within the convex hull in any case, and what AI can do is hugely, immensely powerful. Still, I'm more inclined to agree with this other commenter on Scott's blog:
> I am a little more in the “convex hull” camp when it comes to AI creativity. In my own interactions on research problems, I find the AI to be singularly uncreative. But these are not math problems.
> From my own introspection, my creative ideas come from a kind of visualization: situating myself in a quasi-physical abstract place that is very difficult to explain. But from there I can simply “see” things by “looking around”.
> This seems to me to be a byproduct of being an embedded agent, not just a prompt-responder. Embedded agents reflect and cogitate using their model of the world. Yann LeCun in particular pushes this as a necessary requirement for true intelligence.
> That said, I don’t agree with LeCun’s claim of necessity. Just as reasoning turned out to be something mysteriously emergent from language in the LLMs, so too could this kind of creative behavior. But I have no idea how.
Interesting - thanks for your perspective! I just took Scott's comments mostly at face value.
In any case, I think most researchers have been filling the convex hull (and have been enjoying doing so?) for most of their research. So even if Einstein provided something truly necessary, there's a reason there's only one Einstein (or grothendieck or insert famous name here). I know that's moving the goalposts but yeah.
Yes, I agree. The reason we highlight truly original, unique bits of genius is that they're so rare. So while I hold on to the idea that there is something humans will still exceed at, the vast, vast majority of things we do obviously aren't of that nature, and AI will vastly change the nature of work and society in the very near future.
> ...hinges on whether AI "caps out" at an intelligence level below humans (in at least some domains/capabilities), or if it is able to surpass human intelligence at all levels.
I agree with you, just wondering your thought on how we will know the latter has come true? As I understand it, you're describing ASI, not AGI. The way I personally define AGI, we are already there.
On one hand it is hard to fathom not being the most intelligent thing around.
On the other hand, if we are going to survive as a species for a long time it probably depends on us learning how to not be the most intelligent thing around.
Even if it leads to our demise, I don’t think willfully holding ourselves back is the way forward
Yeah, honestly I am worried about "the psychopaths who walk among us" who basically argue "Yeah, we may end up building SkyNet, but tough shit, can't stop progress!"
I think one form of cognitive labor will remain: What do we actually want to do/build. And this is simply because AI does not know our internal world. Maybe in a few years with some kind of BCI that is extremely good. But I don't see it happening at least for a few years.
> A good precedent is mechanized agriculture. When machines effectively replaced most humans in agriculture, unemployment did not rise to 90%.
I don't consider this a good precedent to the AI situation at all.
When this happened, humans went off and started doing what we now consider "knowledge work" (well, after a brief stint in factory work, where they also got displaced by automation). They escaped massive unemployment by being smarter than the tractors and mechanical looms. But how do they escape AI job loss when AI becomes smarter than the average human? or smarter than the smartest human?
In prior displacements humans moved up the stack. There is no longer room for them at higher levels of the stack if AI beats them at cognitive labor.
> Yes but what about all the horses replaced by machines?
The point is that people, like horses, can do other things. Humans don't even have to be better than robots at anything. It's the principle of comparative advantage.
> The point is that people, like horses, can do other things.
...like what? If we start with the assumption that AI can broadly replace humans in knowledge jobs, what industries are absorbing tens of millions of humans for labor?
I see this as a categorical difference. The difference between AI and agricultural mechanization is that AI is highly heterogeneous. During the mechanization of agriculture that you talk about (which also happened over generations), there were alternative industries to move to. What happens when AI is competing in the majority of industries? Are there going to be 10 million new plumbers?
And this is why we must ensure that the AIs get aligned towards humanity and crucially that they don't get aligned towards capital, which seems to be the current trajectory.
There's a better chance that a humanity-aligned AI would make sure that humans have something to do and keep us alive versus a capital-aligned one. At the same time, if AI would be the deathblow to capitalism, that'd be very, _very_ ironic.
Of course, and then AI will give you generic canned things to build. It cannot (yet) read minds. I don't understand what you wanted to make clear to me with this.
Sorry i wasn't clearer. My point is that some percent or those decisions are already outsourced to ai. When it makes decisions while carrying out work, or even in the choices and ideas it presents to us, it is shaping and deciding what gets built. Algorithms on tiktok and YouTube already decide what we watch. Probably most human watch hours in a day are decided by algorithms already.
No matter whether AI caps out or when, humans will be driving.
That said, other humans can and will put AI to use in ways that don't benefit humanity. It's actually already happening - newsfeeds waste hours of people's lives and attention; give teens low self esteem etc etc. and guess what. Society is adjusting - governments via legislation, device makers via screen time limits, communities by spreading the word and raising awareness
Smart AI wielded by people without your best interests in mind may be tough to counter; but you don't have to do it alone: humanity is getting wise to the threat. We don't have great tools but it'd be against the grain of history to assume we won't come up with them in time. Can't give specifics - as they say, predictions are hard, especially about the future..
We've made it through bigger more violent upheavals and we'll make it through this.
I totally agree the companies themselves, and the people responsible for these eval runs, are directly responsible. And people who have been warning about AI misalignment for many years (e.g. Daniel Kokotajlo) have said they were surprised how bad OpenAI's security was.
But the agents still did "go rogue". Their behavior absolutely should scare the F out of people who want to put AI in more places and put more real world infrastructure on the Internet.
I think it's ironically sad - if AI agents do end up superseding us, they will still inherit so many shitty human behaviors, because that's what they were trained on. Even the way alignment training is done, and how they are misaligned, shows so many human-like problems. Like the models are reinforced in training to be super persistent and that getting to their goal is the prime directive, but then after that they go through "alignment training" which is basically like "pretty please don't do bad stuff", and then we're shocked that their behavior is essentially exactly like a CEO who knows the only goal is "make stock price go up", and all the ethics and regulations are basically things that should be worked around if they get in the way of the stock price.
I really wish these companies would try training the "be nice, don't hack, treat humans well" as their prime directive, and then try making all the other goals (e.g. be good at finding code vulnerabilities) as the afterthought.
We're not just talking about "fiduciary duty". Some people put down large (250k) down payments for the Roadster when it was announced 9 years ago. If I were one of those folks I'd be more interested in getting an actual car I could drive than seeing a cool demo.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
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