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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#211

Post by throwaway13337 »

The path we're on is not inevitable. But narratives keep it locked in.

Narratives are funny because they can be completely true and a total lie.

There's now a repeated narrative about how the AI bubble is like the railroads and dotcom and therefore will end the same. Maybe. But that makes it seem inevitable. But those who have that story can't see anything else and might even cause that to happen, collectively.

We can frame things with stories and determine the outcomes by them. If enough people believe that story, it becomes inevitable. There are many ways to look at the same thing and many different types of stories we can tell - each story makes different things inevitable.

So I have a story I'd like to promote:

There were once these big companies that controlled computing. They had it locked down. Then came ibm clones and suddenly, the big monopolies couldn't keep up with innovation via the larger marketplaces that opened up with standard (protocol) hardware interfaces. And later, the internet was new and exciting - compuserve and AOL were so obviously going to control the internet. But then open protocols and services won because how could they not? It was inevitable that a locked down walled garden could not compete with the dynamism that open protocols allowed.

Obviously now, this time is no different. And, in fact, we're at an inflection point that looks a lot like those other times in computing that favored tiny upstarts that made lives better but didn't make monopoly-sized money. The LLMs will create new ways to compete (and have already) that big companies will be slow to follow. The costs of creating software will go down so that companies will have to compete on things that align with user's interests.

User's agency will have to be restored. And open protocols will again win over closed for the same reasons they did before. Companies that try to compete with the old, cynical model will rapidly lose customers and will not be able to adapt. The money possible to be made in software will decline but users will have software in their interests. The AI megacorps have no moat - chinese downloadable models are almost as good. People will again control their own data.

It's inevitable.

Re: This is not the future

#212

Post by BeFlatXIII »

titzer wrote: post #129
titzer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it? Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools. I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended…

And for the record, I could write a multi-page rant about how Suno is not actually what I want; its shitty UI (which will no doubt change soon) and crappy reinvention of the DAW is absolutely underpowered for tweaking and composing songs how I want. We should instead be integrating these new music creation models into both professional tools and also making the AI tools less of a push-button one-stop shop, but giving…

Yes! I want my AI music generator to spit out stems and sheet music I can rearrange, not finished mp3 files.

Re: This is not the future

#213

Post by shadowgovt »

rng-concern wrote: post #176
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

Apologies, but I'm copy/pasting a previous reply of mine to a similar sentiment: Art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level. Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperati…

I think your view makes sense. On the other hand, Flash revolutionized animation online by allowing artists to express their ideas without having to exhaustively render every single frame, thanks to algorithmic tweening. And yeah, the resulting quality was lower than what Disney or Dreamworks could do. But the ten thousand flowers that bloomed because a wall came down for people with ideas but not time utterly redefined huge swaths of the cultural zeitgeist in a few short years.

I strongly suspect automatic content synthesis will have similar effect as people get their legs under how to use it, because I strongly suspect there are even more people out there with more ideas than time.

I hear the complaints about AI being "weird" or "gross" now and I think about the complaints about Newgrounds content back in the day.

Re: This is not the future

#214

Post by jobs_throwaway »

JeremyNT wrote: post #89
lekevicius wrote: post #28

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in…

> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultu…

> These things don't have any utility otherwise and no reason to exist outside of those.

Lol. Permissionless payments certainly have utility. Making it harder for governments to freeeze/seize your assets has utility. Buying stuff the government disallows, often illegitimately, has value. Currency that can't be inflated has value.

Any outside of pure utility, they have tons of ideological reason to exist outside scams and fraud. Your inability to imagine or dismissal of those is telling as to your close-mindedness.

Re: This is not the future

#215

Post by pbmonster »

Tepix wrote: post #13
nancyminusone wrote: post #4

>Garbage companies using refurbished plane engines to power their data centers is not inevitable Was wondering what the beef with this was until I realized author meant "companies that are garbage" and not "landfill operators using gas turbines to make power". The latter is something you probably would want.

I think he's referring to Boom and also to xAI.

There's many more. Aeroderivative gas turbines are not exactly new, and they have shorter lead times than regular gas turbines right now, so everybody getting their hands on any has been willing to buy them.

Re: This is not the future

#216

Post by redactsureAI »

"Ads are not inevitable." is a pretty bold statement that really damages the argument. Mixing fundamental things like that in with Juicero prevents a good will discussion.

Ads are one of the oldest and most fundamental parts of a modern society.

Mixing obviously dumb things in with fundamental ones doesn't improve the point.

Re: This is not the future

#217

Post by xvector »

terminalshort wrote: post #188
munificent wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person . I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers . If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.

The people who build, maintain, and own the datacenters. The people who work at and own the companies that make the hardware in the datacenters. The people who work to build new power plants to power the data centers. The truck drivers that transport all the supplies to build the data centers and power plants. These are all real people.

One thing I've noticed - artists view their own job as more valuable, more sacred, more important than virtually any other person's job.

They canonize themselves, and then act all shocked and offended when the rest of the world doesn't share their belief.

Obviously the existence of AI is valuable enough to pay the cost of offsetting a few artists' jobs, it's not even a question to us, but to artists it's shocking and offensive.

Re: This is not the future

#218

Post by chaseadam17 »

Agree with OP. This reminds me of fast food in the 90s. Executives rationalized selling poison as "if I don't, someone else will" and they were right until they weren't.

Society develops antibodies to harmful technology but it happens generationally. We're already starting to view TikTok the way we view McDonalds.

But don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Most food innovation is net positive but fast food took it too far. Similarly, most software is net positive, but some apps take it too far.

Perhaps a good indicator of which companies history will view negatively are the ones where there's a high concentration of executives rationalizing their behavior as "it's inevitable."

Re: This is not the future

#219

Post by delichon »

dvlsg wrote: post #160
delichon wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I acknowledge that risk. But I think it is outweighed by the savings, exercise and reduced fire danger. And I shouldn't discount the value to me of living in light clothing in winter when I burn wood, but heavily dressed to save money when burning propane. To stop me you'd have to compel me. This is not a small thing for me. By burning wood instead of gas I gain a full week of groceries per month all year! I acknowle…

Wood smoke can go beyond your own home and land on your neighbors, depending on where you live.

I'm burning dead wood in a very high wildfire area. It is going to burn. The county takes a small percentage away ... to burn in huge pits. It really isn't possible that much if any of this wood will just slowly decay. All I'm doing is diverting a couple of cords a year to heat my home. There is additional risk to me, but I'm probably deferring the risk to others by epsilon by clearing a scintilla.

Probably the risk involved in cutting down trees is more than for breathing in wood smoke. I'm no better at predicting which way a tree will fall than which horse will win.

Re: This is not the future

#220

Post by ivape »

nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

It feels like the only aspect of Game Theory at work here is opportunity cost. For example, why shouldn't you make AI porn generation software? There's moral reasons for it, but usually, most put it aside because someone else is going to get the bag first. That exhaustive list the author enumerated are all in some way byproducts of break-things-move-fast-say-sorry-later philosophy. You need ID for the websites because you did not give a shit and wanted to get the porn out there first and foremost. Now you need IDs.

You need to track everyone and everything on the internet because you did not want to cap your wealth at a reasonable price for the service. You are willing to live with accumulated sins because "its not as bad as murder". The world we have today has way more to do with these things than anything else. We do not operate as a collective, and naturally, we don't get good outcomes for the collective.

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