Your kids forwarded you Matt Shumer's Something Big Happened article. Your feed exploded with the Citrini 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis and its artful, immutable chain reactions. The key leaders of the AI labs struggle openly with the morality of what they are building as their safety leaders quit in frustration. Policy leaders strive to regulate AI as if it were atomic weapons (thanks Oppenheimer).
What are the best psychological coping mechanism for this stage of the S-curve?
Asking for a generation...
I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now.
I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.
All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasible. There's so much new to explore and build.
We get to reinvent how software is written. The field is wide open - anyone can be the first to find a new pattern that works, or figure out a new way to apply this tech to real world problems.
There are a thousand reasons to be negative about the implications of this technology, and many of them are legitimate. Don't let that distract you entirely from the parts of this that are genuinely inspiring, enabling and fun.
You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing?
I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.
> I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them.
> side project ideas from the past few decades
This joy seems to apply to a lot of people who don't need to worry about silly unimportant things like money anymore.
(I'm still personally optimistic that software engineering careers will have a bright future, for what that's worth.)
It's a great deal easier than managing people! Agents don't have ambitions and fears and opinions and egos to take into account.
Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival? To whom are we going to sell those side projects? To the 1% with their soon to crash stocks? To the disappearing white collars? To the proles that only spend on food, alcohol and gambling?
Is that where the joy is? In seeing the hope fading away? In our stolen future? Tell me, so I too can be joyful like you.
Everything is awful for almost everyone. I expect even the ultra wealthy will find their lives significantly less pleasant than they were before.
I hope that doesn't happen. That's why I don't write much about "AGI" - I'm unexcited about the concept, at least until someone can convincingly explain how the economy doesn't collapse for regular humans as a result.
I maintain my joy partly by not believing the AGI hype. I refer to that as the science fiction version of AI. I don't think that's what we have today.
We're three years into the ChatGPT revolution now and so far the main observable impact on the craft that I care about is that I can build more ambitious things.
People who doomscroll rarely recognize it as doomscrolling because they only think of the term as something that happens to other people. They see their own consumption as accurate and important. They don’t see their sources as doomerism, they think they have identified the real truth that others don’t see yet.
They have a short memory for the gross inaccuracies of their doom bubble, such as when everyone thought the AI2027 project had accurately predicted the arrival of evil AGI next year. Remember when that was everywhere and the doomers cited it in every topic until suddenly it became useless to their cause and disappeared?
Much has been written about doomscrolling and you can find some good sources for help. Conceptually it’s simple: You need to greatly reduce your consumption of these sources and, very importantly, replace time spent doomscrolling with something healthier for you. Try reading a book, visiting the gym, going outside and walking, or even playing video games or watching movies.
In fact, if someone were to tell me that a mediocre candidate was chosen over a widely appraised candidate (open source contributions and all) because the former was more familiar with prompting while the other wasn't... I'd fully believe it.
This is how cooked the job market is, and everyone telling me it's not due to LLM usage is in denial.
It’s amazing how quickly we forget how this works. Only a few years ago you could doomscroll your way into believing COVID was the end of the world and life would never be the same again.
Deleted Comment
Seriously. I've been through too many hype cycles to count. In a few years we will look back on this and see three things:
* Both the downsides and upsides were exaggerated
* A lot of VCs lost money and many of the trillion dollar buildouts didn't happen
* after the hype died down we figured out what AI was actually good for, and what it wasn't.
I have a claude "skill/program/mega-prompt" for health: https://github.com/nexivibe/md/blob/main/DOCTOR.md
I gave it absolutely everything, and praise be to the machine I get the best debate and recommendations I've ever seen. I check what I know to be true, and it's there. I check the logic, and it is sound. I check the medication recommendations and they are legit. I bet in 2030, AI will be able to prescribe medicine.
How are you going to follow that up with a single anecdotal example?
Respectfully, shame on you.
That said, summary (information compression) along with low-level inference does seem to be the tasks that A.I. is best at right now. Little surprise there. Information compression is the sole purpose of the attention transformer in the first place.
My way of coping with it is to just go with the flow and learn all the new technics there is to learn, until the machine replaces us all.
From her perspective:
1. Radio
2. TV
3. Internet
4. ?
Then, maybe when I'm on the verge of death due to old age, the entire society will adapt around using their creative juices in proompting the next big LLM model version, while schools teach about the years where people talented were allowed to study and make a living out of their talent.
I’m going to add “stop reading Hacker News comments” as advice for addressing this problem.
Basically it. Don't look up. Read some books, go offline, chug along and try to be zen. If the doomers are correct, there is exceedingly very little I can do about it today.
Dead Comment
Seriously, turn off the screen, go into the real world and try to mingle with humans you like.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn0nrSd4xjjaSLBSzmno-...
Allen Newell, 1975 ACM A. M. Turing Award Recipient: “Desires and Diversions”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCe0ZPGap_k
Wisdom from the previous AI era.
Yes, there is a lot of hype, wailing, gnashing of teeth, but if it is good enough to be a worry, it is also good enough to empower the individual to survive it.
Ultimately, if it is all hype, it will soon crumble; if it is not then productivity will increase by leaps and bounds. The only key issue is to make sure that all the gains aren't taken by a small group of people (whether the current rich and powerful, or those that displace them using new paradigms).
I suggest getting comfortable with the idea of a UBI.
I'm going to start raising cattle since I effectively burnt out of having a career, and AI was the finishing move.
The thing is, if you enjoy making things, then this is a great time. I'm currently teaching the machine how to code the language I invented, and it is surprisingly working. Coding is... a bit of a meta skill.