I've noticed something about people's reaction to AI. People who view themselves mainly as engineers or craftsmen are threatened by AI, understandably. People who just want to make cool stuff, solve real problems or just have fun are not threatened, but love it.
And I get it, an expert furniture craftsman will not have respect for IKEA furniture, and that's fine. But it means I can affordably furnish a new apartment for $2k instead of $20k. Of course it's even more threatening because there is the risk that the AI will actually do a better job in the future. But people still play Chess and have fun with that, and people enjoy watching Magnus Carlsen play even though he can't beat the AI on a phone.
In the end, we will all have to adapt, and for your own sake I don't think it helps putting your head in the sand and being bitter. Instead of being bitter, try thinking about all the cool stuff you can make now as a one person team.
The trouble right now, in the context of engineering, is that it is terribly difficult to get AI to produce something you can be confident in. We've been burned by the human junior engineer who produces something that gets things done in the present, but two-three years down the line becomes a nightmare liability, and AI is now that same junior engineer.
It is too early to tell if what AI produces will also become that terrible nightmare in a few years, or if AI will also become the saviour to make what would have been a nightmare a delight. So, one has to be in defence mode in case the nightmare reality is the one that comes to fruition, which limits how far it can be taken. Unless you just want to produce cool stuff that you plan to throw away tomorrow. That is perfectly valid! But not usually what engineers get to work on.
Industrial invention used to be judged by actual usefulness. If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish. Same with computing. But now we're two years after the first release to the general public of LLMs and no one can provide an actual, reliable use case for it. Instead, it's mostly about destroying values, hindering workflows, and crippling the internet.
A few years will start to show if what AI is producing is a lability, or if it is just fine, methinks. If you haven't felt any pains from its legacy cruft by that point, it isn't apt to magically appear a long way down the line.
> If we take space exploration as an example, at every stage, we have actual usefulness for what the technology so far was able to accomplish.
When Archytas propelled a wooden bird with steam, the first recognized step towards building the rockets that got us to space, what usefulness was found in that?
It offered a basic foundation on which we were able to consider other solutions and the concept in general. But couldn't you say that is, at very least, where we are at with LLMs right now too?
Let's ignore the hype and marketing and truly consider LLM as the first stage of "something". The truth is that I've heard a lot of speculation, but no inching towards any of the speculated objective on a practical scale.
For anything else, any such first stage was usually constrained on a very small scale while the glaring issues were ironed out. Now a lot of us are being forced to tolerate what is essentially a prototype or toy in tools and systems that were fine before.
Perhaps LLMs are in the Model T stage? The experience is terrible. Its slow. The roads are muddy and full of ruts. You are bound to break your arm when you spin the crank. But, still, it offers something ever so slightly more than the horse that you put up with it anyway.
More like a Model T that goes fast in the wrong direction, don't respond to the steering wheel, decide to reverse on random occasions,... The road may be bad and the horse is not that great, but no one would hop on that particular model unless for entertainment purposes.
There is nothing fast about LLMs. That is their biggest pain point of all when used in an engineering context. Even if they offered perfect production, you can still do it faster yourself by a significant margin.
> but no one would hop on that particular model unless for entertainment purposes.
Sounds about right. It might be the "in" thing in tech circles, but the people I encounter on an everyday normal basis have never used LLMs. Many of them don't even know what an LLM is. And that's with LLMs being freely available! Imagine if you had to pay to use them. It would be a handful of people at best.
> Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer
And period. It is terrible when interacting with people to. Its only saving grace is that it is widely supported.
> You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.
It will when we flip the script. The trouble right now is that we're trying to do it backwards. Eventually we'll settle on a programming language as the de facto language of LLMs, that can be translated to natural language for interfacing with the pesky humans still running in legacy mode. That is when transformation will occur.
The whole education system and its purpose is crumbling. Not just the universities but all the way down to preschool. It started with the internet, gained steam with top notch content being available on YouTube, and it's properly dying with the advent of AI.
If the purpose is to learn, you can do it better with YouTube and AI. If the purpose is to have fun, socialize and network, that is better done elsewhere, doing sports or other hobbies with other people. If it's babysitting you need, there are cheaper, better and more fun ways for the kids to spend their days. If the purpose is to learn a job, again, education is a terribly wasteful way of achieving that.
Then there's the fact that we'll all soon have to come to terms with, which is that most people are already barely able to contribute value to a white collar job, and in 20 years I'm pretty sure that number will be down 99%.
To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low, just like STEM as developed by humans will be in the future. I think universities may play a role in the future, but more as something people do for fun as a hobby, and not mainly for its superior teaching capability, but for the social experience.
> To be blunt, the current economic value of the humanities is pretty low,
Oh it's pretty high, especially when people fail to realize the meaning of tariffs, what's inflation, how the government works and the role of due process.
The bill usually comes due when we faithfully recreate failures of the past while failing to learn from others' experiences in the present.
There are two types of people in the world; those who can understand the humanities without the help of an instructor, and those who are incapable of putting such abstract knowledge to good use. Zero overlap.
Don't matter for what: thinking, aesthetic appreciation, insights on humanity, knowledge of what came before, understanding current events, questioning the status quo, what is it that they don't matter for?
It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking. This stream of essays by humanities profs isn't a good advert for their own thinking abilities, let alone their ability to teach it. In fairness this specific article isn't too hard on the phones, but the essay could have been shrunk to one sentence: we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study. That the entire explanation needed. Everything else is just flavour.
So if they're all about teaching how to think, where are the brilliantly thought out ideas for tackling their problem? Surely that's where their own skills should be valuable?
> It's questionable that the humanities teach thinking.
Philosophy is an obvious counter to that claim. It's hard to see how anyone could major in a humanities and not think, even with LLMs. But perhaps the problem is thinking that requiring everyone to take a sampling of intro humanities courses will force them to think instead of just getting by.
> we aren't allowed to fail students so they see no reason to study.
But that wasn't the issue previously for a majority of this professor's 30 years teaching, it's something that changed recently.
"If you do something you love, you will become good at it much faster than something you don’t love, and when you are good at something you will have some opportunity to commercialize it."
This sums up my life philosophy very well at this point. It also applies to kids and education, as I encourage my boy to do the things he loves (happens to be Minecraft and its thousands of mods, commands and other things to learn), and gently guide him over time to a place where he might be able to commercialize his skills in the future. It's amazing to see what a child is able to learn when they are obsessed.
Exactly. I think the people who oppose this do it for sentimental reasons. Either because they want the prestige of a place like Stanford on their resume, or they enjoyed the social milieu. A social network of similarly ambitious people is also arguably more important than the actual knowledge. The knowledge is already available for free online, and like Bryan Caplan points out: at many universities you can just go and sit in class, but nobody does it because what you actually want is the credentials, not the knowledge.
How would it make people dumber? Students provably forgets 90%+ of what they learn, and education is massively inefficient today, which can also provably be improved by virtual tutors (see Bloom's two sigma problem). Your reaction seems knee jerk instead of thinking through this from first principles. Something like this is likely to happen whether you like it or not.
Last summer I put together a flag quizzing game with my niece, who's a geography nerd: https://flagsaroundthe.world/
I think minimally contrastive examples work well for learning, i.e. you want to first learn to distinguish between broadly different categories, and focus on more and more similar examples over time. This little app doesn't have scheduling at all, it just samples examples based on previous responses, so sampling examples you got right exponentially less often as you keep answering correctly. I think sampling has some interesting advantages to SRS scheduling actually. Add new "items" becomes a straight sampling problem, where you can set a constant probability for each item that hasn't been seen yet.
China's economy is more state owned than not. The private market is strictly controlled with socialist ideology. The difference between Chinese markets and liberal markets is that the state there controls the capitalists, in the US the capitalists control the state.
Xi has been moving in that direction yes, but generally that has not been true. Also, it sounds like you greatly sympathize with Chinese authoritarianism, maybe you need to do a reality check. You can always go live in China if prefer that. I've been many times, for months at a time, since I have in-laws there. Lately I would describe it as a high-tech North Korea.
I honestly would prefer moving there but it's pretty hard to attain citizenship. I believe the US is going to collapse and potentially balkanize in the coming years and don't want to witness it firsthand.
To someone who thinks "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes." are "very Marxist", China is indeed Marxist.
I know you're not the person who responded with that conflation, but if you were, to ask if Lenin would agree with that assessment is a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
I could keep up side projects before I had kids, but now... I've learned you have to focus on your health with whatever time you have left in the day/weekend, no matter how excited you are about some idea.
It’s possible to have both kids and side projects, just involve them. I used to hang around my dad’s shed doing random stuff when he would do his woodworking side projects, and sometimes he would show me cool things and let me cut wood. It probably helps though if you have the “right” kind of kid for this stuff.
I was thinking in the context where you'd like to potentially monetize the side project as some point. But definitely, I spend a lot of time supporting my son's Minecraft obsession, and since he's already expressed great interest in building mods I think that's something we'll do together that could be considered a side project.
In fact... I see a possible future where I have a collaborator worth his salt :)
No, we can hate Musk all we want, but we shouldn't rewrite history because we despise him. He is a complex individual, and he still deserves the credit for founding SpaceX and being chief engineer.
> He is a complex individual, and he still deserves the credit for founding SpaceX and being chief engineer
Musk founded SpaceX. He hasn't been a chief engineer in anything but title for a long time. To the extent he deserves respect, it's in giving its team the insulation he's denied Twitter and the American people.
Who made the bets on Merlin and Raptor engines, Falcon 9, reusability and Starship?
SpaceX employees online say he was heavily involved in engineering, as chief designer; but even imagining he did not, just allowing those crazy ideas to actually happen has incredible merit.
This will go down in history as the most shameful descent into madness of the 21st century. I sincerely hope he gets hospitalized for his drug addiction or whatever is going on, allowing others to take back command of these companies before they run into the ground.
As someone who has followed Musk for some time, I agree. He seemed mostly normal in the early days. But when the money supply became large, he appears to have lost his mind. As many others, I suspect he is on some seriously potent drugs.
His fate may not be all the different from Howard Hughes. A wealthy and influential figure from not so long ago who lost his mind towards the end.
The problem is when someone becomes that rich, they remove anyone from their circle who tells them no. And for Musk, even all legal consequence has been fully removed now. We all need guardrails otherwise our worst basic instincts start to take over. You mention Hughes, but I also think about someone like Hsieh.
Sadly, the similarity is there. Hsieh and Musk were both quite happy nerds and then they became very rich very quickly and drifted off into drugs. Both are/were really into Ketamines and openly talked about it. Both are/were strunggling with depression. Both had friends warn them that they are on a bad path. Let's hope Musk will manage to stop the drugs before they stop him.
There is absolutely no chance Starship is developed using steel without Musk. There is absolutely zero chance that Mechazilla would exist without Musk. These are massive elements of the Starship program.
Now, it's true enough that he didn't literally _build_ these things. He is the CEO. Steve Jobs didn't build the iPhone.
But these programs are very obviously shaped by Musk to a large degree.
> no chance Starship is developed using steel without Musk
What are you basing this on? It was carbon fibre or steel. SpaceX tried carbon. The bake was too inconsistent, so they went with steel. This was the stated and obvious design path since Falcon Heavy’s design trajectory plateaued.
Steel is by no means obvious. No one else in the industry uses it. (No one else in the industry uses carbon fiber, either, except things like fairings).
The obvious choice that everyone uses is aluminum, or various alloys, like aluminum-lithium.
So you think he had no hand in the engineering decisions and work surrounding Starship? On what are you basing this? Because most sources I've seen seem to indicate he is very involved.
I think the most obvious answer is that he was both heavily involved in key strategic decisions and not as technical as someone holding the Chief Engineer title usually would be. And is evidently less involved now, as he's doing more other stuff (SpaceX also appears very focused on "things that make a profit in near-earth space" rather than "things that might be needed for a near tern Mars mission"...)
Certainly he's more useful to organizations when he goes in with the approach of listening to engineers' ideas to build stuff than when he goes in with the approach of gutting the organization in revenge for things he's taken exception to.
Do you think engineering managers are doing a ton of technical work day-to-day? Because a "Chief Engineer" is a level (or two or three) above that. Of course the Chief Engineer isn't doing a ton of low-level technical works, that's not the job.
In a larger company a chief engineer isn't doing low level technical work, but they are normally an engineer with deep domain knowledge of the low level work being done, and not a CEO-type also responsible for other companies and the company's commercial priorities. So no, I don't think the design of Starship looks any different if he decides he's too busy to attend design meetings because of his other five jobs. Their other top level execs are very, very good engineers.
SpaceX also wasn't very big in the early years, and the CTOs and chief engineers of the space launch startups I know absolutely do involve themselves in the low level technical work. I don't imagine Elon did much of that even when he did make a point of interviewing every new hire and sitting in on meetings about low level purchasing decisions.
Musk was heavily involved in the engineering efforts at SpaceX. NASA struggled to keep up with his continual and extremely detailed stream of questions regarding engineering choices, with an obsessive and relentless focus on blueprints.
The list of engineering achievements and innovations (often unorthodox) is too long to list in a comment, but I highly recommend the book The Space Barons by Christian Davenport [0]. It's a fantastic read.
And I get it, an expert furniture craftsman will not have respect for IKEA furniture, and that's fine. But it means I can affordably furnish a new apartment for $2k instead of $20k. Of course it's even more threatening because there is the risk that the AI will actually do a better job in the future. But people still play Chess and have fun with that, and people enjoy watching Magnus Carlsen play even though he can't beat the AI on a phone.
In the end, we will all have to adapt, and for your own sake I don't think it helps putting your head in the sand and being bitter. Instead of being bitter, try thinking about all the cool stuff you can make now as a one person team.
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