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After AI takes everything

ursb.me

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Re: After AI takes everything

#31

Post by GolfPopper »

functionmouse wrote: post #12

> My answer: soon. By the end of this year or next, the year after at the very latest. lol Two More Weeks(TM)

I've noticed that "18 months" is a very popular prediction target, across a wide variety of prognosticators. Close enough to seem urgent, and if what they predict comes to pass anytime in the next few years, they can claim "See, I was right, just a little off on the timing because ". If it doesn't happen, most everyone will have forgotten their prediction. And in the unlikely event they get called out, they have over a year of random events to find a plausible fall guy for their failure.

Re: After AI takes everything

#32

Post by grey-area »

jolt42 wrote: post #7
no_multitudes wrote: post #5

Writing tip: you do not need to have LLMs expand your ideas into a longer form for you. Spreading out your ideas across a longer post does not make them better.

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

Unfortunately with word generators this has become -

I would have written a letter, but I couldn’t be bothered.

Re: After AI takes everything

#33

Post by ks2048 »

paraphrase> what's left for us? ... taste.

If human "taste" changes our cursor for no reason, maybe we should just go with the AI's "taste"?

Sorry for the snark - nothing wrong with the essay - I just prefer a plain, unobtrusive style.

Re: After AI takes everything

#34

Post by sandoze »

citrin_ru wrote: post #11
pydry wrote: post #4

I've started to realize after poring over pull requests which are, frankly, slop that the devs who are the most bullish on AI are the ones who raise those PRs and don't recognize the slop. AI for sure is giving all of them existential crises but I'm not sure most of them ever really belonged in the industry in the first place. I give it 9-12 months before they start to realize that acknowledgement of this existential…

Many managers are more bullish on AI and less able to recognize slop, they are unlikely to recognize quality crisis. And they are the people who decide who belong to the industry and who is not. As a result we will get an escalation of enshittification and people will start to forget that slop is not the only option.

Where you see quality crisis I see job security! Honest question, when it comes to enshittification of software quality.. have you ever had to use a Meta framework? How many times have they rewritten their mobile apps to use some architect's bespoke code pipe dream? The quality crisis has always been here, now there's just more of it.

Re: After AI takes everything

#36

Post by kmoser »

> Go where it’s new. Build things no one has built yet — things that other people’s workflows can come to depend on. One important rule here: don’t build what can be obtained by burning tokens. Any engineering product that someone has already built and that you can simply have AI clone — one more review bot, one more workflow tool — is not worth your energy, because its acquisition cost has already approached zero. What’s worth building is paradigm-level work: things that, once they exist, change how other people work.

But once you build something new, that people depend on, they will shortly want to move away from that dependency, lest you raise prices or disappear. Even paradigm-level work ends up as tools that can be replicated by other humans, at the cost of a few tokens. That's a difficult dragon to catch and ride successfully.

I think the author had it right when they talked about going deeper into the stack, where we are still loath to deploy AI. The only way to stay ahead of the beast is to do things the beast can't do reliably.

Re: After AI takes everything

#37

Post by visarga »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #24
biotechbio wrote: post #23

This post is a little long winded. At times I agreed, and others I felt the author was doing a little too much hand-wringing on what-is-mine vs. what-is-the-AI's. The opportunity is and always has been the possibility of accelerating work. Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. We value these things because they h…

> Honestly, if something works (I mean genuinely, actually works) I don't care at all about what craftsmanship or insight went into its creation. That's where I'm at too. Saves you weeks of effort to boot.

But once you put something out, an app, repo, content, music or photo - it can be easily cloned with AI, changed to be different just enough to avoid accusations and customized as needed. The price of replication is dropping fast, and that means any perceived arbitration point will be competed away. I predict AI will be immensely valuable like Linux, but "nobody" (excluding shovel makers, for a while) will get rich off AI, because whatever it can clone is not a moat anymore.

Re: After AI takes everything

#38

Post by embedding-shape »

agentultra wrote: post #27

Again, they didn’t smash the machines because they hated the technology or wanted everyone to be making lace by hand. They were arguing for basic human rights in the workplace. Things like child labour were still super common and were among the practices the Luddites wanted to abolish. Along with the workhouses they wanted to replace with protection for workers (they didn’t have the word for it but they wanted a soci…

I think the vibe is generally same with AI too. If people believe AI will genuinely be used for good (like many in China seem to think, I get the feeling) then the public at large seems fine with industry focusing on it. But when people have the feeling or even expectation that it'll be used for things like increasing the wealth/wage/inequality gap, control of the masses, automated widespread surveillance and more, you get the violent attacks on data centers and such.

Maybe if these people who are basically wealthier than some countries would share their loot or just care a tiny bit about 99% of the rest of the world, people would feel differently about things. Use AI and your data centers to figure out how to quench, feed and power the entire world, and probably a bunch of people who hate AI would even get onboard.

Re: After AI takes everything

#39

Post by swader999 »

visarga wrote: post #25

I have my own take on what is ours and can never be taken away by AI. When a task is initiated, it starts from a need, from a specific context. To work it out the AI needs to continuously interact with the context, and get feedback from it. At the end gains, losses, risks and costs sink back in the context. The context is you, the person who prompts, your team or company. It is indexical and relational. It is maximal…

I agree with all that but the problem is what others will pay for. There might be niche artisans that survive but most of it might go the way of wallmart.
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