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The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

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141–150 of 399 posts

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#141
post #56

AI has automated my favorite part of the job: coding. Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec. It’s disgusting. And t…

Just because tractors are here doesn't mean you can't garden as a hobby. I'm also tired of the slop, but this is a culture and management problem. Every software job I've had there was tension between speed and maintainability.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#143

Welcome to the end of another AI hype cycle Anyone who was in AI before 2022 can tell you about the last cycle that went from 2012-2018 or so when the metaverse failed, but we got tensorflow, pytorch, gpgpus The cool thing is that every hype cycle generates a lot of really good new AI tech and integrations that persist. This time we got GPTs and diffusion sand splatting I think this previous cycle will be seen as the…

This is the first time the general public has cared about any AI industry cycle.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#144

This was evident everywhere except within the AI industry itself. The rhetoric from many of the industry’s top leaders has been “this technology will eliminate millions of jobs, fundamentally reshape countless other jobs, and automate the use of lethal force, but we’re going to develop it anyways”. Many of the current economic woes, including mass layoffs, have been blamed on AI by the very executives conducting said…

Not to mention, it doesn't actually create the productivity promised at the lower rates promised. The most enthusiastic proponents are middle-management, not actual doers.

It's an expensive route to mediocrity, which doesnt offer an edge in a market where everyone is using the same snakeoil.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#146

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income.

The very same CEOs are extremely against social support, any taxes for themselves and any govermental agencies that help or protect people.

How is can this be possibly easiest in the world of Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Palantier and overtone window moving toward economically conservative for years.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#147
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one (that an AI may be created that drastically exceeds human intelligence, and that it may accidentally be incentivized to take actions that destroy most or all of human civilization).

> concern I hear the most (which I don't think is common among the general public) is the existential risk one Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignm…

The "alignment problem" as traditionally understood assumed a different path to AI development, where the best AIs wouldn't primarily operate on a substrate of human language. If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem, and it seems no less likely today than it did in 2023.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#149

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

I think you may be going too far, as in your critiques assume the tech is further along than it actually is. There are three fundamental problems for mass AI adoption/AGI:

1. Lack of memory/continuity

2. Lack of agency

3. Lack of self-awareness

Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem:

4. Lack of compute

To get anywhere near AGI we need massive context windows. The whole thing is a mess.

Re: The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it

#150

I feel like their are (at least) three main critiques of AI, and I wish we could debate them separately, because I think they each have different resolutions. The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on…

If you lost your $60,000 a year job due to this, do you really believe a basic income funded by it will make up that loss? It won't. Basic income in the US is usually proposed at $12k per year, which would add another $3 trillion to the budget. Do you think you can even get that just taxing these companies? I don't. People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it…

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