The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write that subjugation of women is a "core value", simply because it has been for so many time periods.

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality.

John Henry is not going to beat the steam shovel any time soon.

> For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.

It's not an anomaly; rather, it's the other way round. These used to be highly specialized skills that carried significant status, and got democratized by mass education in the 20th century.

We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

To extrapolate from fewer people were formally educated or literate to intelligence wasn’t valued is absurd.

As for your part about reading and writing. Literacy has always been a very valuable skill that would increase your social standing. It was scarce and difficult to acquire before the printing press, but it was always valuable.

This is a "noble savage" conception of the past. Thinking/cleverness/craftiness was highly rewarded even in preliterate societies. Even in war, "polytropos" Odysseus comes out ahead of the dumb brutes with bigger spears.

You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

People seriously underestimate how underpowered and tiny llms are for the tasks they need to solve.

A trillion parameter model can't tell the difference between left and right. We will need to grow them millions to trillions of times before they are half as good as AI boosters claim they are.

This isn't the end of thinking any more than the watt steam engine was the end of horses. It will be centuries before we get there. And by that point the difference between man and machine will be at best academic.

"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]

Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.

I'm kind of baffled by how regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

This is some weird manosphere bullshit. Pre-industrial societies invented philosophy and writing. People across the world know the name of Socrates from 2500 years ago. They know stories from Homer 2800 years ago.

It's a mistake (a) to think pre-industrial people were grug-brained cavemen (b) that we're going to revert into the same cavemen because a computer can do your pointless six-figure office job.

Then consider the role of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and say nothing of Rome and large bureaucracy (Roman engineering alone).

On top of this you need to ignore very large bureaucracies and trading networks in Asia to go far with your narrative (Persian, Turkish, Mongol, Indian and Chinese).

There were a good deal of powerful nerds before the 1700s.

Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!

The same goes for other occupations, and...farming. Breeding cattle is a complex science, so is growing crops consistently and valuing the production.

It’s ownership of capital and technology.

Plumbers aren’t suddenly getting rich. At best they’re not losing jobs at the rate everyone else is, but once so many people lose jobs then they can’t afford plumbers either. So even plumbers are worse off even if they’re not as badly off as the rest of us.

And all this assumes that humanoid robots don’t develop and succeed which is a major assumption.

  > So what was valued? ...

Sorry but that is just not true.

Sure farmers aren't academics, but the sheer number of tasks, and tools required to efficiently do those tasks were vast. Innovation in winnowing was literlly life and death, as was plant/animal breeding traits.

Observing and reacting to changes in plants, lands, water, animals was critical to getting a good harvest. Packing and storing food was critical to surviving the winter.

Sure, the lack of literacy hampered knowledge recording and dissemination.

BUT, if we look mine the vast memory that is classics, knowledge, wit and cleverness were prised as often as strength and beauty.

Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.

The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.

(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).

Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it

There are jobs that demand robustness, but they are about applying knowledge in extreme conditions, not about letting an AI do the thinking.

AI is not a problem because it is AI. It is because of political circumstances.

Think beyond the small worldview where technology and valuation are everything and you are just a pawn. Then you see that a better world is possible. The first step is then to not give up.

The premise here is that AI works well enough to automate the “smart” people jobs. No one but delusional workaholics are afraid that their job will get automated because they cling to the job in itself. So clearly, this is not about the tech itself.

There wasn’t a college boom post-WWII because technology came and demanded it.

> That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

Take me by the hand, circumstance. I am yours to be swept away.

Knowledge is a unique resource compared to the other traditional factors of economic production (land, labor, and capital). It is often invested in with capital (education and tools), but it is carried with the human, and leaves with them. It is always decaying - knowledge workers should be in constant learning mode, and stale knowledge eventually becomes a drag on performance.

I'd argue the future is about knowledge workers all becoming managers. When you use agentic AI, it has the flavor of the skills of management. Management is "a practice and a liberal art", according to Drucker, one that has been in poor supply for some time. LLMs are have somewhat stale knowledge and require the human, tools, and RAG to freshen it. And LLMs will always regress to the mean. It is pretty good at pattern analysis and starts to get shaky and mediocre with synthesis. It requires very nuanced, and elaborate prompting to shape its token output towards insightful results that aren't a standard answer. For coding exercises, that can be fine, but at high complexity levels, or when dealing with issues of strategy or evaluation, it is a platitude generator and has no unique competitive advantage.

In other words, competent, talented management mixed with knowledge work is the scarcity we are heading towards. This is arguably why you're seeing the rise of "markdown frameworks" that people swear improve performance, it's the beginnings of management scaffolding for AI.

Technical folks struggle with valuing management skills, and I expect this will increase its value and scarcity.

As for "Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks." I think the robots will be replacing that pretty shortly.

"Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values."

Ehhhhh not really? What about Christianity, where the meek shall inherit the Earth, and love is the core value (putting aside modern day Pharisees and Charlatans that twist the underlying value system)? Or Islam, whose core value is submission to God? While there have been Societies that valued parentage and birth order, that's far from universal.

Here are some words to live by[0]. I don't agree with everything Derek Silvers says, esp about philosophy. Its more of a guiding principle that drives rather than divides.

[0]: https://fluidself.org/books/self-help/how-to-live

You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

The different however is network effects. When we make a place better for cars, I make it worse for pedestrians. Your adoption of the car, and its pressure on my lived environment, has effects on me. Same as, say, people joining facebook or twitter. But do LLMs create network effects that are directly harmful, or is it just a matter of making it harder to compete, just like a mechanical watchmaker has less business now that it's so easy to have a reliable clock? Because the first case is a problem, but the second one... that's competition. It's civilization. And then it's not really a matter of cars vs pedestrians.

An analog might be the push for banning phones in schools. Setting apart times and spaces where serendipitous human interactions are encouraged by the lack of distractions.

> Now might be a good time to call your representatives.

Well, not that must-read I guess

Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go.

Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want some kind of compute but its like with 4k; We have 4k for ages now but it is not the default resolution on all displays sold. We stoped pushing the boundaries because invest is not here. People do not bother too much with it.

With AI and the richest companies and people want to see what happens, pushes the envolope a lot faster, pushes us to find solutions.

This AI Compute based on ML/Neuroal Networks can also be used for physics simulation, protein folding, and everything else.

Stoping technology is not an option and not a solution. Education is. We need to educate people.

It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.

It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replacement are a fuss, a pile of lies to justify layoffs and worsening financial situation.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...

If AI is smart enough to replace the 99.999% it's also smart enough to replace the 0.001%.

  General strike and bank runs.

This only works if people with "secure" livelihoods not just participate, but drive the effort. Getting paid six figures or more in a layoff-proof position? Cool, you need to be the first person walking out the door on May 1st (or whenever this happens), and the first person at the bank counter requesting your max withdrawal.

2. Dynamics - https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

4. Information Ecology - https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

6. Psychological Hazards - https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

This is in jest right? Yesterday hn posted a paper from 1983... I regularly see 20 year old articles reposted, you've even got a section in your code of conduct arguing how you aren't Reddit despite the apparent nature of this site....

Let's presume there's a series on re-making the antikythera mechanism:

1. Metallurgy: finding, mining and smelting the ore

2. Building the tools (files, molds, etc)

3. Designing the mechanism

4. Making the parts (gears, bearings, etc)

Am I wrong or there's no repetition, except maybe the title and calling it a series? Why reject parts 2, 3, 4?

* They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse.

* In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had.

* Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before their eyes.

* Blue collar jobs are already gone and white collar jobs have no certainty because of AI. Almost all of the money has already been sucked out of artistic professions and what little is left is quickly evaporating because of AI.

Imagine you're 17 like my daughter and trying to decide what to major in in college. You want to pick something that you think is likely to give you some kind of decent career and sense of stability. What do you pick?

Because, I'll tell you, she asks me and I have no fucking idea what to say.

Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight.

Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding.

Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again.

This effort is a feature, not a bug, it's how you experientially acquire skills and understanding. e.g. Linux kernel: learnt about Makefiles, learnt about GCC flags, improved shell skills, etc.

With AI on a gnarly problem: It does this all for you! So no experiential learning.

I would NOT have had the mental strength in college / grad school to resist. Which would have robbed me of all the skill acquisition that now lets me use AI more effectively. The scaffolding of hard skill acquisition means you have more context to be able to ask AI the right questions, and what you learn from the AI can be bound more easily to your existing knowledge.

Now, part of me thinks 'is not letting students having AI like not letting them have a calculator'. On the other hand, if I just let the AI do the exam, well I don't really need the student at all do I?

Like years of manually studying, fixing and reviewing code is experience that only pre ~2020 devs will have.

The intuitive/tacit knowledge that lets you look at code and "feel" that something is off with it cannot really be gained when using Claude Code, it takes just 1000s of hours of tinkering.

It will suck if the job shifts to reviewing and owning whatever an LLM spits out, but I don't really know how effective new juniors are going to be.

If they do it entirely using AI to code, and the end output is good enough, they'll learn all the right skills to do this.

Human's always think everything is sliding into doom, and inevitably, it doesn't.

https://gist.github.com/aphyr/6f0cd6910ccfe2cd7828d1ade2eac5...

For my blog, I write posts in Markdown. Then the build process uses Pandoc to convert the posts into web pages and, for certain pages, PDF files typeset with TeX. For example, here is a post in both web and PDF versions:

(Web) https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....

(Typeset PDF) https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-2024060...

> That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well.

Her kids will be fine, its the vast majority of other, non wealthy, kids who are in trouble.

Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.

I will encourage my kid to gain independence, but of course I'm worried about it! The fact that there is uncertainty in her independence and that I can imagine bad outcomes does not mean I'm working against her interest by encouraging it.

"I don't know what jobs there will be to do" is a statement of uncertainty, and, given how you are relaying it, there must have been fear there as well. But it doesn't seem like it's a statement that the world will be worse. You can be fearful and hopeful at the same time, and fear tends to be the stronger of the two, and come out more strongly, again especially in parenting I find, even if you find the hopeful outcomes more likely.

(note that even the "her kids will be ok" isn't true at the limit. If wealth concentrates sufficiently enough it will lead to societal collapse)

If we make it easier for people to drive and have cars, isn't that a net positive? If we make it easier for X, isn't that better? No, not necessarily, that's the entire point of this series of essays. Friction is good in some cases! You can't learn without friction. You can't have sex without friction.

The regulators of OSA say otherwise. Or at any rate, they refuse to agree and won't rule it out.

____________

For the geo-blocked, reproducing relevant content [0]:

> A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom [1] that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act.

> [...] This blog has the same problem: people use email addresses to post and confirm their comments. I think my personal blog is probably at low risk, but a.) I’d like to draw attention to this legislation, and b.) my risk is elevated by being gay online

[0] https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-...

[1] https://blog.woof.group/announcements/updates-on-the-osa

I think we'll settle into a new norm over the next few years, but the role of software engineer will change though. Ultimately, always remember (and remind your boss) that you are in charge and, more importantly, responsible.

The only one who's written thus is Marx, but those ideas has not found broad socital support.

Room temperature superconductors don’t enable THz chips with no heat output.

If superconductors broadly allowed this, we’d already have such chips available because we could super cool them and keep them at that temperature easily.

No. I resisted for a bit but have started using it at work. Mostly because I believe usage is now being monitored. I'm in a very high-scale engineering environment involving both greenfield and massive brownfield codebases and the experience is largely a net loss in productivity. For me and some others who I've spoken to in my org, opting in is a theater that we're required to engage in to keep employment and not a genuine evolution of our craft.

These tools struggle with context once you get deep into a codebase with many, many millions of lines of code and sprawling dependencies. Even for isolated Python scripts or smaller, supporting .NET apps, the time spent correcting subtle bugs or bullshit, or just verifying the bullshit, often exceeds the time it would take to have written it from scratch.

Regardless, what I've observed is that these tools do nothing for the actual bottlenecks of software engineering: requirements gathering (am I writing the right thing?) and verification (does it work without side effects?). Because LLMs are great at generating text, they're actively exacerbating these issues by flooding our process with plausible looking noise.

Ideas are mediocre. Plans are arbitrary. Research is untrustworthy. But telling it "generate me 100 ideas for X" feels really productive.

I think a version of me with no access AI will not just stay competitive, but even outcompete the version of me with unlimited access to AI.

I always preferred this take:

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” ― Alfred North Whitehead

It's both opposite and complementary to your Frank Herbert quote.

On one hand I intuitively think this is correct, on the other hand these very concerns about technology have been around since the invention of... writing.

Here is an excerpt of Socrates speaking on the written word, as recorded in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus - "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom"

It's the first step on the road to hell.

Situations vary, obviously! I'm no stranger to rural life, I wound up in a car-dependent suburb with terrible bus service for a bit, and my partner is in the trades. Private vehicles are sensible and essential answers to lots of problems.

But as the Netherlands illustrates, it's not all-or-nothing: reductions in car utilization and car infrastructure have real benefits. Broadly speaking I think we can and should disincentivize private car use, increase public transit frequency, and build networks of protected infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-car means of getting around.