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points by Scubabear68 1 day ago | 0 comments

"Contrast that with a knowledge worker that's more of an artisan in this analogy. For them they aren't running a factory but instead watching a robot do the work they used to do while they sit idle and watch it".

I think your general thesis about how AI is used of agents vs. the general chat interface is true, but not the rest.

Your knowledge worker example is where people fail when using AI, and it is usually very obvious.

Knowledge workers who know what they're doing recognized very quickly that AI often goes down very bad rabbit holes, often cites incorrect sources, makes up sources, or will use a random Facebook source or Reddit post as an authority on some topic. In legal circles you have to fight it to understand what venue(s) apply and to get it to stick to the right ones, in medical research it will sometimes pull in crackpot papers from left field and intermix them with well defined research.

People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it. Let it run on its own and it will give you a legal theory based on some weird case in Kentucky that has no bearing to your issue with a court in Vermont.

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.

Using AI is like using adaptive cruise control: you're still in charge of where the vehicle will ultimately end up and if you decide to go take a nap you will wake up in the hospital or end up in the morgue.

It's true though that the 'time between interventions' is lengthening steadily.

[–] slg 1 day ago

>This is not that much different in programming, it just takes longer to find out.

The primary difference is that it's much easier for the AI to figure out itself if it's wrong on the programming side. Knowledge workers don't have automated testing for example.

The end result is the knowledge worker needs to be more heavily involved in the process and be more mindful of mistakes which makes it a worse experience for the user and generally less productive than it is for programmers.

[–] jacquesm 1 day ago

That's true. And: as long as you don't hit production mistakes are cheap and quick to fix. Not so in many other fields.

[–] WillPostForFood 1 day ago

It is more that knowledge workers are less sophisticated at using AI. It is not that hard to check whether sources are real, using AI or other tools, for example. Something like functional testing will come to non programming tasks.

[–] Retric 1 day ago

Consistently catching errors is vastly harder when you’re not the one doing the legwork. Send the wrong file, do a bad copy and paste, or skip one verification step, etc is all it takes for most people to majorly mess up.

For most professionals it’s just safer to avoid having output in your workflow. Keep using AI, but stop copying and pasting AI output.

[–] deeponey 1 day ago

It's not hard, but having to check work so carefully, at some point you're better off just doing it yourself.

[–] eluru 1 day ago

i wonder why dont we have a better pipeline for research. for example ask opus to do some research, then have some hook configured with Haiku, JEV, anything that makes more sense really, only job is ti check the sources are real. you can keep adding into this, of course it can get too big, of course it will still fail, but it will still be much better than the current state of things. It seems to be a low hanging fruit with a huge value that no one has taken.

[–] EA-3167 1 day ago

The major difference is that people routinely ship shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the same thing with a court filing and you’re out on your ass.

[–] infamouscow 1 day ago

This was true before AI too.

In practice, lawyers generally don't ever disbarred except if they lie to clients or steal from them.

[–] EA-3167 1 day ago

Yes exactly. It isn’t a surprise that the industry with no professional standards worth discussing is also the one having the biggest field day with ML. My point is that in many other professional arenas acting like a software “engineer” is called malpractice.

[–] echelon 1 day ago

We're still early in AI.

All of this will sort itself out and eventually bio, legal, software will all just work.

Don't hold onto any single assumption about the world. Things are going to be weird.

[–] dTal 1 day ago

Well hang on, "just work" implies an objective standard of correct vs incorrect. No such standard exists. I'm sure that there will be legal AIs that reliably do... something... but the whole point of the legal system is to allow space for humans to argue their case. If an AI "does legal" deterministically, without human intervention, how can it be said to be "working" if its very use defeats the purpose of the system it has learned to navigate so expertly?

[–] EA-3167 1 day ago

That’s utopian thinking unburdened by reality or the need to explain how this will work. I have no interest in that.

We aren’t talking about the new version of SV spiritualism here, we’re talking about systems people actually care about.

[–] readthenotes1 1 day ago

"People in the knowledge realm caught on very quickly that you have to use AI iteratively and constantly back check what you get and correct it."

If lawyers and article writers are in the knowledge realm. Then your thesis has plenty of counter-examples of people who just use AI to create stuff and don't correct it.