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Shunning AI is the human choice

thehandbasket.co

381–390 of 572 posts

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#381

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 might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either. Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robo…

You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. I also hate it because: 1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEO…

What new technology does not reduce the power of labor in some way?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#383

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 swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI cod…

The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the klept can maintain their "just desserts" mentality longer than you and I can maintain our metabolic integrity.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#385
It's shocking to see such an article title on HN, especially with so many upvotes. It would've been unthinkable in 2025. I always saw this website as very AI-boostery and pro-VC, pretty much as pro-AI as you could find without getting into the singularity cult. Has the audience changed, or is it the opinion of the average user that changed?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#386
post #289

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually…

Historians. Well, one. Well, he's not a historian. He's a biochemist and physiologist who has studied some anthropology. It's Jared Diamond. That's who says agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity.

He's actually pulling that from about 70 years of anthropology and anthropological archaeology; it wasn't in any way original to him.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#387

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…

This, and the fact that AI is taking people's jobs away without (as far as we can tell) significantly creating new jobs for those people to move to.

The job impact is really pissing people off, rightfully so.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft Two thoughts: A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow. B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infrin…

I think it should be fairly obvious by now which form of AI people refer to when they talk specifically about theft. It gets a bit old and repetitive to expand the shorthand in every conversation possible. If people are genuinely curious about other forms of AI, that information is readily available. When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not…

It only takes three extra characters to say "GenAI" instead of "AI". It's just lazy use of language to not disambiguate what one means.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#389
post #87

Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.

I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly. It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable. I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the…

I'll tell. It's you. You personally, and no one else. Not a category of people that includes you. Just you.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#390
post #122

Lots of people on this site seem to be of the opinion that "AI is tech, you can't hate tech, only its use". That may be true, but I bet there'd be a whole lot less AI hate in society if: (1) The proponents would just CHILL THE F OUT. If the technology is so fantastic, and the things you're building with it so amazing, then surely that will speak for itself in due time? Why do you need to sound like a cult leader on c…

I'm somewhere on the pro-AI spectrum (great tool, let's use it *where we've evaluated it and it's the best tool for the job*), but... 100% agree. AI is a tool and outcomes should speak for themselves. I'm not impressed by what tools you used building your thing, and "AI" is not a feature or a benefit on its own.
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