[Music]
Thank you. Sound effect. Uh, speaking
of, did everyone notice that there was a
uh tram? Uh, yes, the tram dog. I'm
talking about the um tram races that
happened last night on the interweb.
There's information about it on on the
Discord. It's terrifying. Um, anyway,
I'm going to uh leave you all in the
capable hands of Beno, another well
credentialized goth and uh
ranter from way back who's here to give
us a rant of some sort, possibly
several. Um, make yourselves
comfortable.
How many do you want?
So, uh, one of the bits of feedback I
got for my, uh, proposal, uh, when we
were doing review was that, um, some
people didn't get what I was getting at
with the title, so I've provided a bit
of a definition up here. Um, it's it's
it's gamer speak, so you know, it's it's
onliney kind of stuff. Um, anyway, so
once upon a time, there was this guy who
stood up at a conference. It was in New
Zealand, I believe, and and said words
to the effect of, you know, nerds
especially have a really complicated
relationship with change. You know, we
love it to pieces. You know, change is
awesome when we're the ones doing it.
And as soon as change is something
that's coming from outside of us,
becomes untrustworthy and threatens what
we think of as the familiar. Um, so
yeah, that was me.
Um, then that was in a talk that got a
little bit of attention. Um, and it was
a little while ago. Um, but some people
got the point of that talk and others
didn't. And so just to save you having
to watch the whole thing, um, it was
about rejecting the new thing just
because it's not the old thing and why
that's bad. Wasn't actually about
systemd per se, but it was, but it
wasn't. Um, and I I bring this up
because I'm about to talk about one of
the, you know, bigger changes that's
happening in our industry, or at least
my industry, um, that I can remember.
And, you know, spoiler alert, I'm not a
fan. Um, that said, uh, there are some
similarities in the origin of this talk
and the systemd talk in that both of
them came about from me asking, well,
the first one came about came about from
me asking why everyone seemed to hate
systemd. And this talk came about from
me asking why do I find all this AI
stuff so off-putting?
Um to put it mildly, there's elements of
really sort of just
um and I'm just going to do a quick
linguistic thing here. I don't like the
term AI for this. Um I don't think it's
artificially intelligent. And I mean the
philosophy zone can come for me. um and
the nature of intelligence and all that
kind of stuff. Um whatever. Come find me
outside or or don't. Um but I'm going to
be using large language models because I
feel that's more accurate and it's my
talk and I can do what I want.
Um so to get to back to my point, um why
do I find all this LLM stuff so
off-putting? Um, so
one of the more amusing outcomes of the
systemd talk was that everyone decided
that I knew what systemd was and exactly
how it worked and I was the world's
biggest expert. Um, I know of it. I use
it. Uh, I I don't I I don't think I've
ever looked at any of the source code.
Um, educated user maybe, but I mean so
what what do I do? What what are what is
relevant to this? And what I have is,
you know, to paraphrase a 17-year-old
movie, um it comes down to I have a very
particular set of skills. I've acquired
them over a very long career. Um skill,
they're skills that make me quite
valuable to certain people. Um when they
have problems, I'll look for solutions.
I'll find them and I'll implement them.
Um so it comes down to skills like I I
have to I have skills to offer. Skills
that in my case are bound based
primarily around knowing things. um but
also knowing how to use the things that
I know effectively in situations and
adapt them and so on so forth. But why
do I find all this LLM stuff so
off-putting? Um the first, you know,
part of it purely personal. I just find
them irritating. There's a whole bunch
of ways in which I don't like what they
do. But I mean, part of it is just
change.
I mean, uh, I did a whole talk about why
we shouldn't just reject change just
because it's change. And here I am
rejecting change. Um, but it comes down
to I think
the distinction here, and this is where
I'm going to get a whole bunch more
comments about systemd stuff is that I
feel like unlike the systemd thing, this
is forced change.
Um, the systemd people will tell me that
systemd was forced upon them and I will
look at them and smile and nod and walk
away. But um the reality is that um yeah
I just resent the notion that I am going
to be told how I need to do my job.
Um
and
you know there are some and this is one
of the things where one of the things
I've noticed is there are two kind of
you know more than two but there are
broad camps where I have seen a whole
bunch of people who are quite willing to
use these tools and that's fine. Um, I'm
not going to tell them how they should
work because that would make me an even
bigger hypocrite. Um, but I feel like
there are some people for whom the
having the code is the outcome and they
don't mind how they get there. But
that's not me. My purely personal beef
with this is that I need to have my head
stuck right into the code. I need to
know what it's doing. I need to know
where it is. I need to know what it
thinks it's doing and why hasn't it come
home. Um,
and I just, you know, these tools just
get in the way of that for me. It just
doesn't work. Um,
but sort of digging into this further
is like what is the societal change that
this thing represents for me?
Um so digging into it further
this is a term that's used by a certain
you know political bent but um
skating straight past that for just the
moment. The whole point of learning
things is to gain knowledge right we
need to learn how to do things.
Um we need to learn the structures of a
language. We need to learn the API
service of a library. We need to know
what the semantics of a given method
are. You know, these are all concrete
bits of knowledge. And this is where,
you know, those of us with, you know,
beards my color or at least, you know,
the age that would get you a beard of
this color can remember a time before
things like Stack Overflow or even
GitHub existed. That there that time did
exist. Um, and the challenges of finding
out anything about, you know, how
something worked and, you know, you had
to go to a lot much greater length than
that. And this is something where LLMs
can help. um they act as a form of
search engine in this regard. Um using
them as a code generator can be
effective but my contention is that you
know knowledge isn't the end state of
learning in and of itself. Um and so if
we try to distinguish skills from
knowledge
um you you gain a skill for the purpose
of applying it um you can apply
knowledge but that you know this is
where you I'm constructing a distinction
here. Leave me alone. Um, you know,
knowledge can be gained from a whole
bunch of other purposes. Like I you
don't learn about the entire tram
network of Victoria because you're
looking to run it necessarily. You just
want to talk about it with your friends.
Um, but if you see skills as kind of
being, you know, knowledge plus
understanding,
um, it's it's a pathy way to put it. It
might not be accurate, but there's
enough truth to be able to make a couple
of points from it. The main one being
that LLMs embody knowledge. They know
for a given sequence of tokens what
tokens are likely to come next. They
know for a question what the shape of an
answer might be. Uh they don't
understand that though. They don't
understand why you get from here to
there. Um they can give you some of the
reasons why other people have given as
to why that might be the case. But um
that's you that's still sort of in the
vicinity of of just regurgitating the
textbook rather than actually
understanding what's going on and
conveying that. To develop skills, you
have to be able to develop
understanding. And LLMs can point us
that way. But you know, you have to
develop the understanding on your own.
If you're using the output from an LLM,
that kind of approach can work. I mean,
a similar approach worked for me. I am
not the best at just receiving knowledge
from someone standing on a stage.
Um I I learn things by having projects
to work on. I learn things by pulling
things apart. I am terrible at dealing
with other people's code because I will
basically learn it by reformatting it.
Um but other people work differently.
But the way that you come to
understanding is you know coming to the
understanding is the important point.
And what can really help with that is
things like effective mentoring.
Um, but to be an effective mentor
requires not only understanding the
problem space you're working in, but
understanding the student.
Um, and
you know, understanding why they're
making certain mistakes, why they're not
getting to where they need to be, and
helping them realize that and move on.
Sometimes it can even just be
understanding that their problem isn't
any lack of knowledge, but just lack of
confidence. And we've seen what happens
when people try to use LLMs to build up
their confidence
like any kind of you don't go to LLM for
therapy people just don't. Um
so coming back to this line
we used to make things is a line that's
trotted out by people of a certain
political economic bent and like all
good short pathy statements it has a
grain of truth in it. A lot of western
economies used to have a lot of
manufacturing in them. Then starting in
the 70s and increasingly in the 80s, a
lot of that moved offshore.
Why? Well, we got better at moving
things around u for on one hand, but we
got bit better at moving physical
objects around and we got better at
moving money around and it was a lot it
became a lot easier for you to do the
the making of an object in one place and
then get it to the market you wanted to
sell it in. And why would you even
bother doing that? Because it was
cheaper.
Um, you
Sorry, I'm losing where I am in my
notes.
Yeah. So, we got better at moving things
around so that you could move the you
could get the components that you needed
in one location, put the thing together,
put it on a boat, send it over, sell it
somewhere else. And not only that, you
could get the money to where it needed
to be in order to make that happen. And
you combine that with the fact that
countries like you know China, India,
others were getting to the point where
they had the ability to have these
factories
uh constructed there but that their
workforces were not necessarily as uh
their standards of living had not
increased to the point where they were
as expensive as people in the countries
that they were moving out from. um you
could just move everything over there
and it became cheaper and naturally this
was a great you know this is a great
deal for the people who were looking
after the money but a terrible deal for
the people who had been doing the work
and it also turns out that a lot of
those hang no Jesus sorry I've mucked
this one up completely so
yeah
right yeah it works great provided you
don't get big boat stuck
And so, you know, exactly why would you
want to? Your money is portable. You can
move it there. Um, the a lot of the the
deregulation during the 70s and 80s was
about allowing capital to move from one
place to another. Um, and so
you you can get your money to where it
needs to be to make that happen, but the
labor can't move and seek better
conditions elsewhere.
And the grim comedy that comes along
with this is that the same people who
were telling us that this was all a
really good idea because we get cheap
televisions.
Um
they they are working against the people
who just lost all their jobs and those
people turns out they vote and so those
people these days are looking for a
reason why this happened.
Um
but the biggest issue really and and the
one that I want to focus on here is that
all those skills that were involved in
manufacturing went away in a lot of the
economies that doing this. The US being
an obvious example, but it's not by not
alone. Manufacturing is a huge industry
that has many layers to it. Uh the
obvious one is the workers in the
factory themselves assembling the
products. Um, that's one set of skills
because as much as various people are
going to claim that this is unskilled
labor, I would challenge any of the
people saying that to actually do that
kind of work at the rate that they'd be
expected to do it.
But the components that go into that
manufacturing process uh also have to
come from somewhere. And those could be
individual components, screws, parts,
whatever. But they could also be the
things that make the parts. And so there
are sort of skills further back in the
chain. uh tool and die manufacturing
which is where you actually make the
things that make the parts that go into
the things
those don't exist in the US anymore
either because when the factories moved
the skill sets required moved with the
factories
and so you can't necessarily get that
done in the US anymore. You can see you
can find a bunch of stories online uh
where someone goes and tries to make a a
brand new completely made in the US
product and
they can't because they they first go
right I just need someone to put my
product together and they and they have
trouble finding a factory that's going
to do that. But then once they've found
that they then need to get the the tools
and dyes and whatever to make the the
parts that they need. And if they can
find a factory that does that, most of
the time the actual design and and
construction of the tool of the dyes and
molds and everything that's used is done
elsewhere, generally China.
Um the people that had those skills lost
their jobs and they weren't able to pass
those skills on. They weren't able to
mentor the next generation of people who
would be doing those jobs and so those
jobs aren't there anymore.
Um, and so this is one of my big worries
when it comes to large language models
and their use in coding is that if we
allow skills around coding to atrify in
the same way in in our societies, then
we end up in a similar situation where
the skills that we need to do that kind
of work are not here anymore and we are
required to go elsewhere for that.
Um, meanwhile, the solution generally
proposed for a lot of these situations
is if you don't want this to happen,
then you need to accept lower
conditions.
Um, I'm not a huge fan of this argument.
Uh, cuz it's often coming from people
who seem to be perfectly happy accepting
better conditions for my sacrifice.
Um,
and
and just, you know, as people sometimes
say, history doesn't always repeat
itself, but it does rhyme.
So,
this is a picture of Ned Lud.
We can't for sure say that this is
anything close to what he actually looks
like because he didn't exist.
um doesn't mean though that he wasn't
the face of a major movement in what
we'd now call industrial relations. And
so if anyone hasn't seen the bottom of
that there, uh he was the lud in lites.
Um and one of the things I'm fascinated
by and one of the things that my talk at
um um the 2023 Pike on AU in Adelaide
was about is just how how ideas and
understanding of things evolve and
especially how things like politics play
into that and specific to this case is
how the term lite in common usage is
generally uh someone who's reflexively
anti-technology in general um when
that's not actually what the lites were
um so the original lites came from the
English textile industry and so it's
probably worth just starting with a
brief thing on how cloth is made or at
least at the time. Um so ignoring the
primary industry bit so you know um
sheep wool or cotton or flax or hemp or
whatever you're using once you've got
that ba fiber you need to spin that into
yarn or thread and then that needs to be
woven into cloth and then you know there
are other finishing processes going
after that dying you know various other
things cropping was an important one
where you had to sort of trim off the
the fluffy bits to get nice smooth cloth
um that comes up Um so before automation
this was all done largely by hand. There
were simple machines involved but they
were oneperson things. Um and it
involved a significant number of people
at each stage of the process. Um you
often had um uh family like literal
cottage industries where a family would
be uh taking in raw fiber turning it
into thread like as you know one part of
the family group would be doing that
then the the thread would be woven into
cloth and and then that sold. So by
around 1740 this had evolved to a system
where the families involved would
receive raw materials from a trader. Um
they would then turn that into cloth and
then the trader would come and collect
it and go on to get it dyed or whatever
and they'd pay the family for the the
work done. Um and this was known this is
this is a this was known as the putting
out system. Don't laugh.
Um
so this the the important point of all
this was that a family could support
itself on this. um the the economics of
it were well understood and so you knew
for how much cloth you raw material you
were getting how much cloth you'd make
and how much money you'd get and a
family could live not a like a amazing
life on this but a very comfortable one.
Um then you start getting a whole bunch
of changes. Um the flying shuttle was
the first one um that allowed the cloth
to be made faster. It also meant that a
given weaver used to be that the width
of cloth was limited by the arms span of
the weaver. Um the flying shuttle
allowed that to be made uh wider than
that without requiring an extra person
working the loom. Um
and then after that you start getting a
bunch of things. You start getting the
spinning jenny which allows multiple um
threads to be spun at once while also
being an amazing band name. Um, and then
you get the water frame which allows
water power to drive a loom and and
weave cloth. Then some mad Scottish
person invents a steam engine. Um, this
has made many people angry and has been
widely regarded as a bad move.
And from that you're then getting the
spinning mule, which is a slightly less
good band name, but a
again sort of, you know, thread
manufacturing device. and then the power
loom or the steam loom.
All of these advances met with some
level of resistance, even the flying
shuttle, because all of them represented
less people getting paid for the same
amount of work.
And all of them get used in various ways
to ratchet down the amount of money that
a given uh cloth producing unit family
in this case is getting
um while making meaning more profit for
other people further in the chain. Um
but the steam engine and the the tools
derived from that are where it really
sort of kicked off.
Um once the machines reached a level of
capability and especially once they were
getting steam power initially you know
uh the need for skilled workers dropped
steam looms didn't need a skilled weaver
to operate them and there were other
parallel advances in that automated the
cropping process and the croppers were
very much a uh a very skilled trade. you
needed a very good cropper in order to
get really good quality fabric and they
were basically out of a job at that
point. Instead of the SC instead of the
cottagebased systems, you started
getting factories.
Um, and those factories um weren't
staffed by people who had had to spend
years training and learning how to do
their craft. Uh, they were staffed by,
you know, whoever, often children. And
this is in, shall we say, very non-union
conditions. Um, so yeah, ONS had not
been invented yet at all. Um, the other
thing that led into the Lite uprising
was this guy Napoleon. Um, there was a
bunch of wars going on that Napoleon
kept starting. Um, sort of the Bruce
Lairman of wars. Um
um
but that caused a whole bunch of
economic clarity um and which led to the
the economic situation for the weavers
getting absolutely dire. So what do they
do? Well, you could start by asking
nicely. You talk to the people who are
who are in charge of the the the sort of
the the
receiving side of all this and say look
could we not build the factories? Could
we build them in such a way so that
you're employing people who you know
need the money? Could we not employ
children maybe? Um and of course um you
know the response for that was um how
about no. I mean the thing is that some
people did respond and change practices
but all it takes as we've seen time and
time again is one or two people who are
willing to put profit above everything
else and suddenly it becomes untenable
to stay in the business unless you are
also putting profit above everything
else.
Um so the next stage is appealing to
authority and so they they went to the
government and said hey can you help out
exactly yeah didn't work. Um so then we
move on to I guess what would these days
we call direct action.
Um they started breaking the machines.
Um this is where you actually get the
lites showing up as lites. Um Ned Lud
was named for a a invented character who
had a very large hammer and he would
come in and he would break your um break
your machines. They were very surgical
about it though. They didn't attack
everyone. They attacked they they would
go after mill owners and factory owners
who were the the most obvious at
actually trying to screw the workers
out. And they would break their machines
in specific ways to make them uh either
hard or very expensive to repair.
And they were incredibly organized with
it. They would they would run drills. Uh
they'd be out on the moors at night
practicing their operations so they
could just get it all smooth. Um and it
was combined with you know all of the
other things you would expect from this
kind of direct action movement. There
was more appeals to government, more
appeals to you know other government
officials, legislature, you know the
public in general. It's it was a uh an
industrial strike before such things
were really thought of as such. And so
it all worked right.
It was initially very effective and
and it wasn't all by the end of it just
the cool targeted machine breaking
though. Uh the lites did send death
threats and the likes. Um and it did
lead up to one mill owner getting us
getting killed. Um but part of the
reason it escalated that far was it was
so effective that the government got
involved on the side of the factory
owners. Um there was legislation passed
making the breaking of machines illegal.
initially in 1788
with the punishment being
transportation.
Um so any Australians in the room should
understand where that was going. Um but
then in 1812 machine breaking was made a
capital felony as in death penalty. Um,
all of that worked and the Leites were
put down and the slow march of history
got to work reducing them from a group
of people with a legitimate set of
grievances but no legitimate way to deal
with them uh to a bunch of out of touch
weirdos who didn't like change.
Um, so the lites, you know, they're a
lot more complex and complicated as with
a lot of things in history than they
seem on the surface. Um, and as with a
lot of historical things that have, you
know, in that are political and
socioeconomic in nature, there are a lot
there's a lot more dimensions to it than
we're encouraged to think of. Um, they
are absolutely forerunners of of what
becomes the labor and union movement
later. Um, and especially um, the lite
reaction to the industrial revolution,
everything came on was something that
got written into a book by Friedrich
Engles. Uh, the English title is the
condition of the working class in
England.
which um in turn was heavily in
influential on uh one Karl Marx
um because you know when we're talking
about Marx like the means of production
is a term that you see used a lot
through Marxist writing and what that
generally means is the things that the
worker uses or needs in order to produce
something
tools workspace you know all of that
kind of stuff owning that gives you the
ability to control the way production
happens even if you're not actually
producing anything yourself.
In the case of the lites, part of the
change they're dealing with is that the
means of production had changed and it
had changed in a way that meant they had
less control over it. Not just because
the machines existed, although that was
part of it, but because of the way in
which the machines were owned and
operated. They didn't own the machines,
the mill owners did. So the mill owners
could tell them how work was going to
happen. And that change was forced on
them under terms that they didn't like
and weren't allowed to negotiate. They
had to adapt or get out of the way.
So
coming back to this question, the lites
weren't successful. The change happened.
The genie of automation was out of its
bottle and wasn't going back in. And
those of us who are in the IT industry
now need to know that LLMs are here and
it's now easier to automate some of the
work we do. We used to be the ones
automating other people out of jobs and
now that might be coming back to us.
It's entire and so it's entirely
possible that our industry could go the
same way as the textile industry that
started the industrial revolution, but
we don't necessarily have to accept that
in advance.
So
change is inevitable. Um, but who gets a
say in how it happens?
Um, the Hollywood strikes that, uh, if
you were in Chris's talk earlier, he
mentioned the the actors and the writer
strikes in Hollywood. Um, they show that
direct action is possible. You can
dictate how these tools are going to be
used in your industry.
But um
when it comes down to just me personally
um I'd love to see these tools as
useful, but I find it really hard to
separate them from the people that own
them. I certainly don't want to just
quietly accept a future that's
envisioned by Elon Musk or Peter Teal or
Sam Alman. If I But if I had to sort of
look at it uh deeply, one of the things
that I really want out of these tools is
sustainability.
uh which isn't just one thing like
you've got environmental sustainability.
The the current models are just a
disaster environmentally. Um we were
almost at a point where we I thought we
were starting to do action on climate
change and now that's completely out the
window because we need to build this
first and then this is going to tell us
how to fix it.
I don't quite like that. And then also
like there a bunch of data centers that
are being apparently constructed around
Melbourne have just been given the
license to use huge amounts of water uh
in Australia. This is ridiculous.
Like
for these tools to be a viable fixture
in our lives, they can't come at the
cost of the planet we live on. And
speaking of costs,
all of these companies, all of the major
companies in the LLM space at the moment
are financially currently impossible to
sustain. All the ones that claim
profitability are generally doing it by
excluding things like the cost of
training their models. And all of them
are relying on billion a lot of them
relying on billions with a B of dollars
of investment per year to keep
operating. Um,
and this tells me two things. Firstly,
this is growth phase behavior, which
means that extraction phase comes next.
And if you are now dependent on using
their model and they start raising
prices or reducing functionality, you're
going to be in trouble. And if they are
not for financially sustainable, then
the ability to retrain the models, which
has to happen regularly in order to keep
them up to date, that stops happening.
which all leads to how do we make them
society sustainable.
Um, LLMs can't come up with new ideas.
They have that or to be more accurate,
they've got no understanding of what
they're generating. The reasoning models
only work by feeding the output from one
model to another and refining the result
that way using more resources in the
process. They can generate the code, but
they can't ensure the code is right or
good or safe.
They also can't learn. They can't learn
new things. And my this is where my
biggest worry joins everything together.
If we society speaking let our skills in
this area atrophy. We're letting the
LLMs do the work. We put ourselves in a
position where we are both beholden to
whoever is asserting ownership of the
LLMs or the tools around them and also
beholden to wherever we get the skills
from to actually make the code useful.
assuming we're not just begging the LLM
to please take the bugs out this time
and paying even more for the privilege
because that would be us accepting that
these people now own the means of
production in our industry and that our
work, our skills and to some extent
ourselves are no longer valuable. So
where do we go from here? Well,
firstly um at some level we need to
accept that we are workingass. We are
selling our skills and that means that
we are you know we need to find common
cause with all the people who are also
selling their skills to make a living.
Join your union.
Um
the ACTU is the peak body for Australian
unions. You can go there. They'll I'll
help you find out what your union is. If
your union would be the shop
distributive and allied employees
association or the SDA, it is not your
union. join the retail and fast food
workers union instead. Come and ask me
outside as to why. Make your union
better. The union movement needs to get
better at actually advocating for this
stuff. Um,
make society better. We need movements
that will actually improve stuff outside
of the union movement and working
alongside it to work together to make
society better because I individually
can't change everything and we have to
at least try. We all need to try because
if we can't make society better, well,
that sounds like a skill issue.
[Applause]
[Music]