Ask HN: How to deal with the AI-pocalypse as a regular guy?

I feel like there is a huge elephant in the room, and I'm sure I can't be the only one thinking about this currently. However, in the web dev community, which I likely follow a bit too closely for my own good, there is a lot of business as usual. People argue about all kinds of things like AI had never happened. Sure, everyone is regularly confronted with the rapid advances made by Copilot and the likes, but influencers on YouTube and X, as well as the very companies developing all these novel solutions, keep telling us: "there will always be a need for good (whatever that means) developers," "the rising tide lifts all the boats," or "the ones who adapt will be the ones who survive." And it seems obvious why each of those are making these claims. I'm just increasingly having a hard time believing any of that.

I think pretty much everyone who has seen the advances of AI in the past years can imagine a not-too-distant future (likely less than 10 years) where literally everything we are doing currently will be obsolete. Even the best developers will not be able to compete with the literal infinite compute the large companies throw at training ever more capable models. Artificial agents likely will be better at any given knowledge-worker task by the end of the decade and why would they need instructions, that go beyond a simple list of necessities? Sure, currently it's still incredibly advantageous to have a deeper understanding of how complex software systems work to leverage to full potential of the current generation of AI assistants, but I'm not at all convinced that this will last another decade. Powerful agents will be ubiquitous. Infinite compute outperforms anyone.

There might be societal backlash at some point, as more and more people become obsolete in their jobs, but democracies are already under a lot of pressure all around the world and have a tendency to (by design) not be sufficiently quickly in adapting to technological change. It seems foreshadowing to me that even the more consolidated democracies from a decade ago failed spectacularly in regulating Big Tech. The result of which we live with today in the form of accumulations of power that outmatch almost all of the democratically elected governments worldwide and dictate large parts of our daily lives—a concentration of power the likely will seem laughable compared to what we're headed at.

And even in the case, that a sufficiently powerful societal movement could emerge in one or many democracies of the world, I'm almost convinced there will be a sufficiently large counter-movement claiming —and maybe rightly so— that "we" need to be faster than China, because otherwise "they" will be the ones calling the shots for the centuries to come. So "going into politics" seems like a waste of time from my perspective at this point.

I'm currently a freelance web developer, who studied Design and trained and worked a couple of years in a kitchen as a chef. This is to say, that I adapted quite a bit over the years. However I haven't started a bunch of startups or worked in a FAANG-company or anything of the like. Heck, I don't even have a large following on X or any other social platform. I have two kids and no large amounts of savings, that could assure me, that I would at least be able to sustain myself for a couple of years during the AI-pocalypse. This means I cannot "invest" myself through the next years by buying stock or real estate or anything of the like.

I find myself in a unique position here, as my diverse background and experiences have given me a perspective that allows me to see the potential impact of AI more clearly than large parts of the society I'm living in. At the same time, I feel like there is absolutely nothing to be done for someone in my position.

How are you dealing with this?

> How are you dealing with this?

I help to make a podcast, called cybershow.uk

I hope it entertains, informs and emboldens people feeling existential anxiety as you describe.

I am worried too. But not as much for the AI itself, but the hoards of brainless humans (including quite a number in positions of at least some power) who are being seduced by the idea of AI without a hint of critical thought.

As a regular person, I would suggest that one method is to not over-intellectualize it, as much as promoter types may throw extreme possible future outcomes at the screens one look at.

Having thought a little about it, some thoughts below. If something helps, great. If not, I tried. What do you think of the following concepts?:

1. Big fat trends. There is repeatedly a "hype wave" of this or that, in technology. Companies jump on board. Old work gets done using the latest fad. There are some improvements and some detriments as a result. But overall "progress" marches on. So, you have crops of companies doing the same basic busy-work, which still requires integrations. It's a cash cow. Companies at the top may be vertically integrated, making shovels. Lots of people buying and using the shovels to help dig for the gold. The more things change, the more things stay the same, though. In some way, this might just go on this way. In some ways, big AI appears to be just a jobs program to keep people busy, so don't worry too much about it.

2. Limitations. Without being overly specific, the ML systems today can do a lot and almost surely will do more tomorrow. But there are still huge, obvious (to some) problems with these systems, that, currently, and a far as this observer can see into the future, will still require a human in the loop (to actually be as effective as purported). I guess this gets closer to the "politics" that you, the OP, state a valid reason (the pointlessness of it) to stay away from (perhaps for good reason). But there's something to be said for addressing the limitations of machines trained on a bunch of imperfect data. At some point it does seem to come down to ideas, and ideas can be inherently political. I think we have technological progression, and society gets complacent and needs to catch up, in order for people to really be able to make use of the tech advances. Some people have talked about this at length I think. As a chef turned web guy, I think you could pivot into this adjacent/more-human-centric area if eventually needed.

To elaborate on (2) broadly, consider what ML branded as AI is supposedly able to unlock. Then look at the websites of 5 or 6 top AI or AI-tangential companies, including maybe their blogs or hiring pages. And see JUST HOW LACKING in true intelligence those companies really are. (If you can't see it, that's okay.) The point is that the people that develop the AI really are not utilizing very fully AT ALL the larger field or true capabilities/applications of what they sell. If we're going to be all lofty about it, we are obligated to explorer here, too, IMO. I don't think it's that such companies and their employees are too close to the problem. I think it is that the problem space is that large and difficult. This is not meant to be a detractor so much as it shows how much opportunity is out there, and how much careful, sustained effort meaningful FORWARD progress will take.

3. Just stay focused on what is actually real and in front of you. What do the customers want to pay for? Offer that. In tech this seems to often require picking up certain skills along the way I guess, although often old things remain applicable, too. I think that will keep going for a long time.

4. There could theoretically be a burgeoning arts and architecture scene if we don't have to manufacture widgets ourselves so much. I guess we haven't really seen this play out a whole lot, maybe some (not talking NFTs). What is thought to throw this off track would be an asymmetry in art-funders (and art-interested) and art-makers. I don't have the answer here, maybe UBI is part of it. But I think this is an area that have businesses invent creative solutions. Because we shouldn't defund music class to push AI and enviro-tech; there has to be a better way, what is it?

It’s a classic bubble. People are overpaying for chips (tulips) because other people are overpaying for chips. The big tech giants see the entertainment value in LLM and don’t want to be caught pants down. These investments are mostly being made on blind faith, not on the basis that any real value will come from it. There isn’t going to be an AI-pocalypse, but we are going to eliminate a lot of copy and paste cookie cutter shit even faster than before. Marketing and advertising feels like an area where that might happen. But the true creative marketing people, who aren’t just the same person at every car dealership or supermarket but truely creative innovators will not be affected. Apply the same logic throughout the marketplace. It’s all worthless shit work anyway. Big tech is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this and be the provider of choice, but it’ll be a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. It’ll end up being a waste of money and the shareholders will punish the ones who go too far. Apple had their chance today and all we see is UX and workflow stuff, not some new “intelligence”. Shit, half their play is just making buttons to send shit to ChatGPT. This shit is desperation and grasping at straws to make good on our egos, to try to make something out of nothing because we fell for something so many humans have falled for: if someone (or thing) is well spoken, they are trustworthy and valuable. Great religious orators have long used this to control the masses. Not to invoke Godwin’s Law, but look at Hitler. This mathematical parlor trick IS the level up. Computers can generate probablisticly realistic words, images and audio. That’s it. It’s already happened. The data wall is looming and we’re all going to go back to laboriously training ML like we have for 20+ years to get little incremental improvements. It’s a bubble. You’re fine.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania