The sad truth is that many citizens want a closely surveilled world. Flock delivers the product they want.
Imagine a shooting took place in the downtown area of a major city next week that lacked cameras. Do you think people would praise that city's respect for their citizens' privacy? Or would people blame the city leaders for not keeping the citizens safe?
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
I find people’s on the spot reasoning abilities considerable worse than even cheap LLMs. This “fast” mentality is what causes stupid decisions because we need to “keep moving” (To where? Wrong meeting!) Answers, answers, decisions, decisions, quick, quick! next quarter In hindsight we need to do things differently. Answers, answer, quick quick! Time is of the essence! If you don’t start producing sound within 5 seconds we will all spontaneously combust!
People can also ask questions that it is unreasonable to expect people to know on the spot too and after a while the role of the questioner in the meeting can be questioned. :)
I prefer to share a video, ask people to watch it, and have them send me questions. That way I can spend time preparing answers to those questions, and then then meeting can be about discussion, not information delivery or recall.
Asking people to be conclusive on the spot is a recipe for acting on bad data. There are too many biases related to stature, they interfere with accuracy.
I can see that. Personally, I use that for people who like to go down tedious rabbit holes and want to free up the rest of the attendees to go back to work.
True, but only for things that that your colleagues don't expect you to know already. Remember the "I'll circle back" meme about Jen Psaki? This response can only be used sparingly before it's seen as a sign of underpreparedness/inability to do back-of-the-envelope thinking.
The answer is "accepted", in the sense that it won't get you fired. But the meeting plows on, and decisions are made in absence of the answer to the question! — and never revisited once the answer is known.
And like 90% of the time it comes up, it's because the data contradicts the decision.
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
Doing the right thing never becomes less rational. It may suck compared to the temptation towards the alternative, but part of growing up and being responsible is realizing there is a reason the shortcut isn't supposed to be normalized.
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
And yet if nobody likes you your career is going to stall. If you’re annoying, if you smell bad, if you dress poorly, if you’re fat and ugly, just like in school you’re going to have worse career outcomes.
And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye.
Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
Your employers want those assignments done. That’s why they pay you. School assignments belong in the trash can and you pay for someone to look at them before throwing them away.
I like the sentiment from Hitchens that we choose our regrets. Being an absent father was not something I was willing to regret. I know it has cost me some degree of earning potential and career progression. I wouldn't change anything.
I searched for "ophthalmologist," got a list of results, and made an appointment. Only later did I discover that my search engine had shown me results for "optometrist" instead of the term I searched for. It was not helpful. The optometrist could not provide the care I needed and it was a waste of time and money. That experience added to my distrust of search results.
But...I added an image to see what options it gave me. There was no way to add alt text, which leads me to believe that accessibility was not a priority. Unless passing accessibility checks is a feature, this isn't something I could use.
Thanks for bringing this up, it's a valid point and also something I haven't really focused on specifically. I'll add at least the beginnings of these accessibility features to the next release.
Rootless was the reason I switched to Podman years ago. It's just so smooth and I don't have to worry about obscure permissions and services errors anymore.
People predict that in 50 years, no human will be driving a car, and people will be shocked that we let humans drive cars manually. Coding may be the same. So many vulnerabilities in code written by very competent programmers. Manually building large, complex systems without major bugs or security vulnerabilities seems to be a nearly impossible challenge.
And to consider AI agents are still mostly entirely limited to generating code in token-heavy programming languages designed to be written, tested and debugged by humans.
Not just the languages but frontend/user interfaces as well. You can see the potential for the future when using Claude Design->Claude Code->Agents live testing in BrowserOS. It's all modeled on existing humans patterns of using Figma passing to devs then testing after the fact before starting the loop again, while a lot gets lost in translation in between the designs and the code.
We'll like have some standard AI-focused UI libraries that are harnessed into a design gen system where an AI can pull all the real levers, while also developing a large training data set around it.
I reckon that in 50 years the very idea of code existing will be esoteric knowledge, a bit like binary. We simply won't care to think at that level of abstraction anymore.
Some numbers, however shaky, that AI-written code is secure.
It could become that way, but thus far no evidence has been presented for it. The best we have right now is that you can spend $20 in tokens to write a patch and then $20K to find a vulnerability in it. First, that's not measuring the same thing. Second, it's not very impressive.
50 years is a long, long time, so I wouldn't bet against it. But I agree that we don't have evidence for it yet.
> What are the numbers on how secure is human written code? We should have something to compare AI numbers to.
That's kind of what the article is about? Mythos is finding lots of security bugs in lots of human-written code. They can now compute some sort of baseline estimate of security bugs per N lines of human-written code or whatever. (Restricted to security bugs that the AI is currently capable of finding, but whatever.) Even before Mythos et al, we can look at historical security bug rates. We do have numbers for estimating the security of human written code.
> It seems more likely to me that you could spend $20 to find a vulnerability in a piece of software that costed you $20k in human labor.
Ok, but that's not what is being discussed in this subthread? The topic is whether or not we have data suggesting that AI-written code is or can be secure, and thus whether insecure human code is fated to replaced with secure AI code. I claim we do not have that data. Therefore, we don't have evidence to think that for the sake of security we should replace all human code with AI code, vs whether AI code is worse for security and so we should replace AI code with human code (that presumably has been vetted with AI, since we do have evidence for its effectiveness.)
If I were to guess, I would probably think that today's AIs are trained solely on mountains of insecure human code and so will probably produce more of the same. Tomorrow's AIs will have the benefit of being trained on human and AI code that has had a large swathe of vulnerabilities purged from it, and so they'll have a much better chance at writing secure code, at least.
It depends a lot on whether the failure modes of AI code generation lend themselves to exploitation as security vulnerabilities. (And whether they will continue to do so.)
> > It seems more likely to me that you could spend $20 to find a vulnerability in a piece of software that costed you $20k in human labor.
> The topic is whether or not we have data suggesting that AI-written code is or can be secure
I think my point is related because if the AI is great at finding vulnerabilities then it should be possible just tell AI to write the code and another AI to look for vulnerabilities and secure them. All for $20 + $20 instead of 20k.
Unless AI is somehow uncharacteristically weak in finding vulnerabilities in AI produced code. Which can probably be tested.
Unlike fusion, driverless cars are already a reality, there are just have a few kinks to work out. LLMs are also pretty close to AGI already. 50 years are more than enough to figure it out.
Oh there's plenty of evidence. Because a lot of these people have been committing to repos in public for over a decade. Wouldn't take much to show the world just how fallible human coders really are.
Musk has been predicting self driving cars next year for fifteen years. Fifty years ago, everyone was going to be flying supersonic all the time. Flying cars were just around the corner. Interplanetary travel. Everyone forgets the technology that fails.
I hope this will never be the case. As long as we have personal vehicles they should be personally controlled. Self driving cars is such a waste of everyone's money.
Cities should all have better public transport and out in the middle of nowhere you don't need self driving anyway. (And yes, personal cars should be entirely banned from cities)
Don't we all inherently know that government surveillance will constantly increase over time if we give in? In theory, we could achieve a "happy medium," but the same access used by a thoughtful law enforcement agency are the same tools that a fascist government would use to suppress dissent or other "wrong" thinking.
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