alt Hacker NewsThe problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.
One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])
I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.
"I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee"
"we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"
Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.
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This analogy really only works assuming that maintaining [insert company]'s institutional expertise requires N engineers to maintain individual lines of code manually.
This is already showing not to be true with AI. Institutional knowledge is not the same as knowing how to implement low-level software details. Even today, every company does not need engineers to remember git cli syntax by memory, how to write parsers for JSON, or write the large amount of boilerplate from scratch that is at every software company. Most company's already hire engineers who have zero experience in the existing code base, yet they are productive despite this lack of institutional knowledge. For a company to maintain institutional knowledge they may only need N/K engineers.
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> decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China.
To build a $100M software company, you need 6 engineers and 6 laptops.
To build a $100M hardware company, you need 60 engineers and $100M.
Everyone decided on the most logical choice. It gets even worse if you jump into profit margins, as software is the unambiguous winner there too.
> The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.
I believe this is what Socrates said (verbatim) about the invention of writing.
>The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff
Right. And the spin I would put on your point: while the U.S. could never compete with outsourced labor, institutional manufacturing expertise could (you would think) still be valuable to startups finding some kind of niche in the manufacturing space.
With all this new 3D printing infrastructure, and constantly improving robotics, maybe some manufacturing efficiencies in some spaces could emerge that compete on cost and outcompete the cost of shipping stuff across an ocean. The availability of institutional expertise could be one of the necessary ingredients for mixing and matching the way to a new efficiency.
Yeah it's bleak in terms of automating away labor, but I'd like to think robotics is the next automated frontier after LLMs and we want to get there first.
Most of us can't hunt either. Somethings go away in time because they're no longer needed (by the masses). That is essentially what society does -- it allows us to multiply a few for the benefit of many so the many can focus on other things.
The resilience is more in ensuring archival process to ensure it's never lost forever, and a continuity plan to ensure enough (but few) people still know.
> The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.
That's the whole point of Global managerial class even without AI. The idea is just by creating metrics one can measure how teams, groups, organization and whole industries are performing.
Before the current AI complex the previous one Agile Industry Complex One can see we starting producing 10x more code, 50x more JIRAs resolved, 100x more network bandwidth used. All these metrics tremendous gain in productivity.
Also it may not have been seen in US but in many places a change in political regime does want to burn down previously collected institutional knowledge because new dispensation have their own idea about what is knowledge, who will preserve it and how it will be preserved.
I think this is a good point but we should see AI at the person level. For your example, not all companies/people manufacture, but everyone has access to AI. Soon a lot of people will lose skills to AI and at some point we would need them back and there won't be many skilled workers with it
Well I have seen many mediocre folks who confidently operate in India as they have licenses and things just work their way (CAs, lawyers, even a lot of diagnostic Doctors serving the very bottom and whose modus operandi is simply giving an antibiotic for everything). I am hoping that good AI will lift a lot of the mediocre ones at least 1 SD above.
Peace through global interdependence wasn't a bad side effect at all. The analogy only holds so much, but I'd wholly agree that any profound deterioration of skills across the board would create dependencies on AI infra that are on a whole new level.
At the very latest, when "AGI robots" will be commonplace and taking on the most crucial labour on our behalf.
How come we cannot keep/define "specs" of how to manufacture such "mundane" objects such as a grill brush, everything from what raw materials are required, how should the assembly line(s) look like, which industrial robots or their human professional alternatives are required, etc. etc.
It just seems to me that fundamentally this is a knowledge organization problem.
It is not unsurprising to find dev lacking knowledge in domain stuff that would be actually required if they were doing the development themselves, rather than outsource it to an LLM.
So the client who writes the ticket understand the domain, the LLM that implement it understand it too.
The dev is the only one that is clueless.
The outsourcing of manufacturing was largely influenced by the externality of environmental pollution. People wanted to live in clean habitats. We had rivers on fire for weeks, extinction of species, and horrible pollution causing cancer and birth defects. Giving "the commies" the dirty, dangerous jobs, and moving everyone up into middle management and white collar knowledge work was seen as an evolution of the economy.
The political move to put all of that death and destruction onto China, where environmental regulation is willfully ignored in the interest of economics, was a smart move on their end.
We lost so much intellectual knowledge and other "tribal" technology in these processes to this outsourcing, which is unfortunate. We're almost having to rebuild our manufacturing from first principles, which may not be a bad thing.
In Europe we lead the regulation :)
> West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff
Americans produce the highest technology equipment in the world. Our machining base is structurally sound, but its all making weapons, so you don't hear about it.
It's true that China benefitted immensely from outsourcing, but they took the jobs Americans didn't want. It's the same with immigration today - folks cross the Rio Grande to do chores that Americans won't, or others fly in and work for nothing in academia while they wait for their PhD.
> The problem imo is the slow deterioration of institutional knowledge that offloading the mental task of wisdom gathering to AI is causing.
Have you considered the institutional knowledge could actually be actively preserved and distributed with AI? The kind of tacit knowledge that is situated and not readily preserved in a book might be absorbed by thinking machines and proliferated to the next person who needs it. The caveats would be trade secrets, skill differentiators, that people might not be willing to discuss, and manufacturing secrets of national importance. Maybe you can think of others.
> West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China.
Bogus nonsense.
1. Manufacturing output in West/America is higher than it ever was in history.
2. What has reduced over time is the number of people employed in manufacturing, not manufacturing output. And that's an effect of automation, same as it happened over centuries in agriculture.
3. West/America did not decide anything, the realities of capitalism did.
You're either a capitalist and embrace efficiency of producing where it makes sense (for many different reasons) or you're fine with inefficient third-tier industries.
The tax payer may help a handful of sectors that would otherwise die survive if they are truly critical for national security, but just a handful, not all of them.
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> I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.
Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!
There were all these theories like Comparative Advantage that people would trot out to point out that, if you don't like outsourcing, not only are you ignorant and backwards you're also probably racist.