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Shunning AI is the human choice

thehandbasket.co

231–240 of 572 posts

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#231

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#232
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#233

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very exp…

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

Piracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces.

Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.

Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.

Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay.

Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along.

It is question of when.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital. People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.

I often hear people talk online about burning data centers to avoid some capitalist dystopia. It just seems incredibly pessimistic to me. Who wants civil unrest? The rich elite does not want this either. We will pay people. Capitalism is not set in stone when human labor is no longer essential for productivity and AI can handle planning that markets currently coordinate through capitalism.

Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#236

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very exp…

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

[deleted]

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#237
post #93

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against hum…

Its fine to hate work, whatever. But you wouldn't quit your job today, so why would you want to be replaced by an AI today?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#238
post #164

The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have. I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions. This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should…

It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else. No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.

You don't think the concerns have any validity? Sounds kind of hand wavey to me.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#239
post #93

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against hum…

I would humor this stance if we were also actively building a new economic arrangement that was not capitalism.

Automating away the drudgery or dangerous parts of life seems inherently good. But I would argue that AI has not been awesome at that, really. There are certainly cases where it has lessened tiresome work, but there are just as many cases where AI is worsening the pleasant parts of life. And I don't know anyone who has experienced shorter work weeks because AI is doing stuff for them.

Under capitalism, AI is converting labor power of ordinary people to "property" owned by the owning class. It is making the rich richer. It doesn't really improve my state of being.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.

Short of societal collapse, there's no way the technology is going to go away or fade out of existence (unless it's replaced by something even better), that's just not how technological progress works. It's useful , probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet.

Building those datacenters and keeping them operational involves massive amounts of highly skilled blue-collar labor.
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