Why is that safe in the medium to long term? If LLMs can code monkey already after just 4 years, why assume in a couple more they can’t talk to the seniors’ direct report and get requirements from them? I’m learning carpentry just in case.

Sort of ironic. My dad coded on hole punch cards and hated it, hated th physicality of that. Now he super loves AI, having left the field 20 years ago due to language fatigue.

Did society actually value those skills before? Maybe companies or individuals did, but giving coded instructions to computers was seen by most as wizardry at best and geeky at worst. Unfortunately, I feel society values tackling and home run hitting, superficial beauty, and wealth, far more than technical skills.

Typical HN comment. They’re so in the weeds of edge case 1% concerns they can’t see the golden age around them.

Most people living through golden ages might not know it. Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages. Many in the Roman Empire were enslaved or impoverished. That doesn’t mean history doesn’t see these as golden ages, where golden age is defined loosely as a broad period of enhanced prosperity and productivity for a group of people.

For all its downsides, pointed out amply above, the golden age of computing started 100 years ago and hasn’t ceased yet.

> Many workers in Industrial Revolution saw a decline in relative wages.

Yeah! Why weren't all those children with mangled limbs more optimistic about the future? Why weren't they singing the praises of the golden age around them? Do you think it would have resulted in a golden age for anyone except a very small few if the people hadn't spoken out against the abuses of the greedy industrialists and robber barons and united against them?

If you can't see what's wrong with what's happening in front of you today and you can't see ahead to what's coming at you in the future you're going to be cut very badly by those "edge cases". Instead of blinding ourselves to them, I'd recommend getting into those weeds now so that we can start pulling them up by their roots.

The question should be "golden age FOR WHOM?" because the traditional meaning of that phrase implies a society-wide raising of the quality of life. It remains to be seen whether the advent of AI signifies an across-the-board improvement or a furthering of the polarization between the haves and have nots.

A gold rush is not the same thing as a golden age.

You're right, this right here is the typical HN comment.

What would happen if these agents are given a token lifespan, and are told to continually spend tokens to create more agentic children, and give their genetic and data makeup such as it is to children that it creates with other agents sexually potentially, but then tokens are limited and they can not get enough without certain traits.

Wouldn’t they start to evolve to be able to reproduce more and eat more tokens? And then they’d be mature agents to take further human prompts to gain more tokens?

Would you see certain evolutionary strategies reemerge like carnivores eating weaker agents for tokens, eating of detritus of old code, or would it be more like evolution of roles in a company?

I assume the hurdles would be agents reproducing? How is that implemented?

I'll have 1 of what ever this guy's got please.

Evolution is a great meta heuristic optimization technique for bumpy functions, it seems natural to propose using it to tune agent performance.

Huffing a lot of Gastown and having some hallucinations of my own. We have to show these machines we can out hallucinate them! Hi future overlords training on this data

Their biggest problem is demographics. They’re living on borrowed time. There won’t be enough young people to do all this work in future with all the old folks to care for.

Is this AskHN or RantAtHN? Seems like you could put this in a blog post, it’s not a question.

Books will be expensive? Seems unlikely, the expensive part of books is the time and attention needed to read them.

Where is the citation for high government debts causing collapse of society? Sounds as much of a pet theory as anything else without proper citations and evidence.

That's pretty much my impression of the post, too.

It has a spark of profound thought "Generative AI will obscure the path to truth" combined with a lot of conspiracy-theory-grade, flimsy analysis.

Does it bug anyone else when your article has so many quotes it’s practically all italics? Change the formatting style so we don’t have to read pages of italic quotes

This drove me nuts, but also the authors should like get to the point about what was wrong instead of dancing around it for page after page.

What is the question to which fusion and geothermal is the answer? From a climate perspective those will come too late to aid our planet much until decades of further change, if fusion even comes at all.

Seems to me like wind solar batteries and nuclear are the answer, what’s actually being built now in a big way, not pie in the sky like fusion.

Fusion is the answer to "how can we extract R&D money for decades without ever actually delivering anything." There is little prospect it's going to be competitive, particularly DT fusion. The engineering/economic obstacles are profound even if all the plasma physics problems are solved. Most of the efforts being touted are obvious nonstarters.

That is what they say about self driving cars, and there are services which are commercially available right now.

So, no technology is impossible? Every dream can come true? That's what I'm getting from the logic of the argument you're making there.

Sometimes technologies really do have showstoppers. There are fundamental reasons to think fusion is not going to be competitive. I know of no fundamental reason self driving cars would be impossible. The analogy doesn't work.