alt Hacker News"Most purely cognitive labor is automatable"
I cannot express how annoyed I am a researcher could use such a shitty definition.
It only makes sense to say "most" if you have a clear idea of what constitutes the majority. "Most people are male" yeah, fine..50% + epsilon of humans are males. That's more or less decidable (maybe a little vague because of intersex folks). I believe it's false because there are slightly more females but it's obviously measurable.
Now, most cognitive labor...what does that mean? Is it most of the time? Most of the tasks? Most of the value? Most of the job descriptions?
If I am a developer, and the majority of my code is written by AI, but I'm still in the driver's seat, is that most of my cognitive labor? Probably not. Ok, what if my company fires 60% of its developers, does that mean most development cognitive labor is automated? Well, it's most of the expense, and most of the butt in chair time, and it's most of the individual jobs, but it's not most of the job descriptions.
Of course, there's no way that all these researchers making pronouncements are giving consistent answers to what they mean by "most". They're probably not using his phrasing either.
Edit: The four options I threw out above: time, tasks, value, job descriptions are each interesting in their own way. My point is not that they're bad questions to be asking, it's that they're all separate questions that matter in different ways.
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Some big names in AI made predictions by pulling random dates based on vibes, the author collected this and called this data.
What's a definition of AGI you would use, for either time, tasks, value, or job descriptions?
You can make them separate questions rhetorically but it doesn't mean they need to followed up on as such. It's pretty simple...
Most of the time? Well it includes the word most, so yes.
Most of the tasks? Well it includes the word most, so yes.
Such is a common way of writing. Think of it as a kind of compression. Researchers consider the rhetoric more than you want to give them credit for with your knee jerk "I don't personally understand so these researchers are idiots" ad hominem.
Models do contain a mathematical happy path to answer most questions that have been asked and answered when the model was trained. The issue is not whether those answers exist but finding them. That's what the bulk of the bleeding edge of model work is focused on atm.