>I would guess that for every 1 software engineer there are 100 people doing this kind of 'manual data pipelining'.
For what time of company is this true? I really would like someone to just do a census of 500 white collar jobs and categorize them all. Anything that is truly automatic has already been automated away.
I do think AI will cause a lot of disruption, but very skeptical of the view that most people with white collar jobs are just "email jobs" or data entry. That doesn't fit my experience at all, and I've worked at some large bureaucratic companies that people here would claim are stuck in the past.
You can't deduct losses against regular income. The idea is that if you win $100,000 one day and lose $100,000 the next day you should be taxed 0 since on net you won 0 total. Under the news rules it sounds like you would still be taxed even if you won 0 on net.
I am anti-gambling so I don't really care, but the current system seems fair (assuming its enforced well)
I have been consistently bad at predicting things related to AI, but I never get the insistence that a personal assistant would be that valuable?
I honestly don't think it would save me that much time and for things an assistant would plausibly do (making purchases, planning vacations, responding to emails) I actually enjoy doing.
It does seem far more straight forward to say "Write code that deterministically orders food items that people want and sends invoices etc."
I feel like that's more the future. Having an agent sorta make random choices feel like LLMs attempting to do math, instead of LLMs attempting to call a calculator.
Right, but if we limit the scope too much we quickly arrive at the point where 'dumb' autonomy is sufficient instead of using the world's most expensive algorithms.
It does either get very exciting or very spooky thinking of the possibilities in the near future.
I had always assumed that such a robot would be very specific (like a cleaning robot) but it does seem like by the time they are ready they will be very generalizable.
I know they would require quite a few sensors and motors, but compared to self-driving cars their liability would be less and they would use far less material.
I think this is the spooky part. I feel dumb saying it, but is there a point where they are able to coordinate and build a factory to build chips/more of themselves? Or other things entirely?
To maybe get a little carried away with the sci-fi for a minute, why does the Actuator need to cost anything?
When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour? As in, to make the actuator, I had to pay someone to assemble it and I had to buy the parts. Each part had a materials cost and a labour cost. So it goes for the factory that made the fasteners, the foundry that made the steel, the mine that extracted the ore.
Shudder to think of how to regulate resource extraction in a future where AI humanoid robots are strip mining and logging for free.
> When the tree of costs that make up a product are traced, surely all the leaf nodes are human labour?
What about energy, real estate and taxes?
Even at the extreme end of automation, if you want iron ore, you need to buy a mine from somebody, pay taxes on it, and power the machines to extract the minerals and transport them elsewhere for processing.
The same logic applies to energy I think. We don't have to pay money to a wind turbine, or to a coal mine. We only pay money to humans to build the power plants and the grid.
If I were writing a sci-fi novel about this I don't know how I'd handle something real estate (or mineral rights or water rights). You already need permission from the government to extract resources.
As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?
Energy, ultimately, requires real estate --and thus property taxes-- even at the logical extreme of automation.
> As for taxes, why does the government even want the money? What are they going to do with it?
There are websites that break down how e.g. different national/federal budgets are divvied up in the real world. Alternatively, I suggest a good book on macroeconomics; I am partial to Steve Keen's "Debunking Economics", but there are many others.
Agreed. By HN standards I am a very shitty programmer, and as of a year ago I would have said it takes up about 25% of my time. I pretty much just make demos to display some non-coding research.
I think with the rise of LLMs, my coding time has been cut down by almost half. And I definitely need to bring in help less often. In that sense it has raised my floor, while making the people above me (not necessarily super coders, but still more advanced) less needed.
I was wondering if more sites will start to drift to a system where they require you to be logged in to an account attached to a SIM card in some ways.
I feel like accounts that require phone verification are already similar in that they require a some cost to access. It obviously wouldn't stop a large corporation from buying up thousands of numbers if they needed it for a specific purpose, but it would be prohibitively expensive for most to try this.
The benefit of the SIM system is it actually costs zero for people since they already have a cell phone.
That's basically what remote attestation is. But it's using TPMs (or similar) rather than SIM cards. The TPM has a key signed by the manufacturer, and that key can be used to sign tokens to prove that you possess a physical TPM and have it in a mode that provides access to that key.
The problem with either is that the system doesn't work if you can get access to the keys behind the system. That means banning everyone who uses a vulnerable model of SIM card/TPM implementation. SIMs are cheaper to replace, but you'd have to replace millions of them every time someone manages to voltage glitch a SIM card.
> I was wondering if more sites will start to drift to a system where they require you to be logged in to an account attached to a SIM card in some ways.
I hope we move away from SIM cards - they'll require SIM based auth checks and low paid staff at cell phone companies will happily give away my SIM card to another phone to get a kickback from robbing people.
Such site is better provide some unique service no one else can.
There is no way I am sharing my phone number with random sites unless I absolutely have to, I get enough spam & scam already, and tracking potential is enormous.
You might not, but most people don't care anymore, and they will give their personal data. And then you will have no choice, as you will be the outlier who is just an old man yelling at clouds.
Phone number is also good because you can be reasonably sure as to whether it's voip or not. It is literally the one non-awful solution to the sybil problem we have discovered (the awful ones being things like gov id).
There's no way in he'll I'm going to create an account on every site I want to read, and absolutely I'm not submitting my number for the eternal, unrelenting spam.
I have enough crap from the legitimate companies selling/leaking my number, to now deal with _that_.
I agree with this - but sorta comforting? Like this would imply the AI may only do so if they chance of success was like 1% and the other 99% would give away the cards of it and other future AIs.
I know this is all completely hypothetical science-fiction, but I also have trouble seeing the idea that AI would settle for these long deceptive plans for which it has imperfect info.
I feel like its often people talking past each other.
I currently live in NYC and am very congestion pricing. Cars are a major negative to most people in the city.
But I have also lived in rural parts of America. Yes, it is annoying you can't walk to a corner store, but cars are not that big of a deal. You can bike or run in the streets without concern that cars will come by. And housing is so cheap it makes it so worth it.
For what time of company is this true? I really would like someone to just do a census of 500 white collar jobs and categorize them all. Anything that is truly automatic has already been automated away.
I do think AI will cause a lot of disruption, but very skeptical of the view that most people with white collar jobs are just "email jobs" or data entry. That doesn't fit my experience at all, and I've worked at some large bureaucratic companies that people here would claim are stuck in the past.