241–250 of 399 posts
ChatGPT has a billion users so surely not all of the public hates it
And their company's leadership is famous for compulsively lying. Pardon me if I suspect they might be arriving at that number using creative math.
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…
UBI drives inflation. All other effects follow from that.
Inflation is driven by scarcity. More demand for a fixed/limited resource drives up the price. Historically, every good and service humans bought followed this pattern, so we didn’t even have to consider an alternative.
Already in our current economy, however, we have seen a good portion of our economy shift to things that do not have this characteristic. For example, take something like a video streaming service. The marginal cost for additional demand is small enough to be almost negligible; if everyone in the world decided they wanted a Netflix subscription, there wouldn’t suddenly be a shortage of streams or a run on episodes of The Great British Bake Off. They would have to build more datacenters, but the cost per additional user is tiny compared to almost every other traditional good that came before.
If AI and Robots start doing all work, then this would spread to more of the economy. The increase in productive capacity would severely reduce the limitations that have historically driven inflation. We obviously have to invest in building robots and AI, but once we have enough robots they would be making more of themselves and we would be limited by natural resources, but we could use robots to get more of those, too… and we could focus on clean energy, since we would have plenty of robots to do that work, too.
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The title of the original article feels like click-baiut to me. It's covering an act of violence under the pretext that people hate AI. In fact it's a very sad story about a 20 year old throwing their life away instead of fighting for what he believes is right through non-violent activism and/or regulations. Last year I wrote an article asking the very question "Who will be the next Luddites?", National Geographics f…
Non-violent means don't work and get you killed by cops. This is what the people are left with.
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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.
Many (most?) adults do not have time to write an appreciable amount of software outside their jobs. Further, this doesn't address the enormous impact that losing the option of doing something you find engaging and don't hate for a job has on mental wellbeing, life satisfaction, just being happy at all, etc.
* artisanal, handmade products
* affordable products, not just for the rich
* well-paid workers
This was true of clothing, agriculture, and will also be true of SaaS. I choose affordable products and well-paid workers, but that requires embracing automation.
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 first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?
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…
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Which company is that? Do let us know so I can make sure to never be your customer.
I think the truth is in fact asymmetric on this front. People, esp. many SWEs, like generating with AI, or more telling, wouldn't want to give it up in their work. On the other hand, people generally hate consuming the product of gen AI. Consumer experience = mostly negative Producer experience = mostly positive
I disagree. The producer experience is mostly positively impacted in a very visible way: Output. Saying their personal experience has been mostly positive, on average across all of them, is probably wrong.
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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.
> 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 That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument. And I'm…
While I find a Gemini Ultra subscription worthwhile for myself, most of the value is in the fun and entertainment of interacting with a strong API in AntiGravity (usually use Claude models), Gemini App, NotebookLM, etc. It is intellectually interesting and fun.
Can I justify the cost to society for data centers, possibility of US government bailing out the AI tech giants, etc.?
No I can't. I think the Chinese are skunking us. Building cheaper AI is the winning strategy. GLM-5.1 and Deepseek v4 are amazingly effective for much lower inference costs.
Are they? I heard a presentation from some pro-AI people on Friday to the large company I work at. They said they surveyed people at an AI conference and 93% of people were excited about it. This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”. No self awareness at all.
In consulting firms and corporations you kind of have to pretend to be into it, it's just the culture.