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After AI takes everything

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Re: After AI takes everything

#71

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #67
paul7986 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content). I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thou…

> If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content). I think you're on to something. Imagine OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly started funding millions of artists worldwide, basically "we pay monthly rent and f…

[deleted]

Re: After AI takes everything

#72

Post by brap »

brap wrote: post #69

>So: after AI takes everything, what remains is not some second-best refuge — it is the place where the sense of value was always meant to live. AI is a receding tide. It washes away all the external anchors we carelessly threw out over the years — title, output, the feeling of being needed — and forces us to swim back to the one center that the tide cannot reach. Yeah for sure and that’s great and all but I think wh…

OP after completing this essay https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/240/075/90f...

Re: After AI takes everything

#73

Post by willchis »

rayiner wrote: post #52

AI can’t take away babies, picnics with your spouse, or dipping your toes into the ocean. If it replaces work, then great, that’s the stuff we didn’t need to do anyway.

But what about putting food on the table for your babies and spouse?

Re: After AI takes everything

#74

Post by Windchaser »

paulorlando wrote: post #48

I really liked this quote: “If in the future we write less code and only review, these abilities are hard to train — what do we do?” That's a different question than the included Luddite example, which I take as "what do we do to prevent change?". Related, I've been maintaining a list of anti-tech Luddite movements here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_UjOPxpbKMYes5CcWRW...

I think the better Luddite position is "what can we do to protect humans?"

Which can be channeled into making the change healthy.

I heard a statistic that the average QOL and life expectancy didn't increase for most of the Industrial Revolution, once you account for the increase in pollution and disease (disease partly coming from greater urbanization). Yes, our lives are much richer now than they would've been 200 years ago, but it was pretty rough there for a while.

I'd like to think we can do better this time. Though, realistically, I'm not sure. Gilded Age 2.0, coming up

Re: After AI takes everything

#75

Post by willchis »

munchler wrote: post #43

> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us? This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is: Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth? If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting. If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is pro…

> If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting.

Have you looked around at the current state of wealth inequality?! The internet (without AI) already did that.

Re: After AI takes everything

#76

Post by dijksterhuis »

graypegg wrote: post #13
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…

I’ve tried to explain this to folks as “having taste”, but I’m always worried it comes off as subjective and snobby. It might be a fair assessment honestly, it’s hard for me to describe so I wouldn’t hold anyone to it as a standard. Give me an honest vibe check on that. Theres a lot of codebases out there that are at odds with my own opinions about syntax/structure/purpose, but there’s evidence of “taste” that I abso…

giving a shit == having taste.

giving a shit != perfect.

i recently had a PR which had a comment explaining a change of an import: "// Changed imports to add Foo as it's needed for updated bar()".

apparently the person behind "it" has been a developer for 10 years. couldn't be bothered to remove completely useless "how" comments from a 25 line change (without all the useless comments).

also, i posted on another AI slop thread about taste: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515463

Re: After AI takes everything

#77

Post by pixl97 »

edukite wrote: post #21
rybosworld wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's likely that what you call slop is more often than not "good enough". One thing a lot of developers aim for in their code, beyond "it does what it is meant to", is something along the lines of elegance (that's my word for it, there may be a better one). With AI generated code there is no time for elegance. It will happily recreate the same function in several different places for no reason. And that reall…

But it's not good enough. We can see this all over industry where even M$ is producing software so bad even calculator is electron app. Slow, poor quality and for any engineer below acceptable

Producing things that aren't good enough has never stopped companies from becoming multibillion dollar entities. I've been waiting for 40 years for good software to take over the market... and I'm still waiting.

Re: After AI takes everything

#78

Post by Windchaser »

munchler wrote: post #43

> Once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us? This is a good question, but is perhaps too abstract to address well. I think a better question for right now is: Once AI generates all the wealth it can generate, who benefits from that wealth? If the answer is a small number of humans, that is probably a dystopia worth resisting. If the answer is some number of AI agents, but no humans at all, that is pro…

There was a really neat article here a while back comparing AI to previous tech/industry revolutions.

The article compared market conditions to argue that the current revolution is similar to the shipping container revolution of the '60s-'80s -- with a lot of market interest and no real moat or market leader, high competition drove prices down, kept margins low, and most of the benefits went to the consumer.

This seems like the best case scenario here. AI ends up expensive to train but cheap to copy and run, so we end up with lots of competitors or even just running it in-house. It's cheap to use, so there'll be lots of businesses trying similar AI-driven ideas and pushing prices of their products down for the consumer.

Re: After AI takes everything

#79

Post by idle_zealot »

embedding-shape wrote: post #67
paul7986 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content). I saw Trump saying AI companies are discussing offering Americans stock in AI companies so that's one way where the narrative changes and a few days I thou…

> If AI was paying for us all the content we create daily just by living, humans would love it. It would be a cyclical relationship where AI thrives off all the daily content all humans create daily and AI pays us for the privilege to thrive off of us (our content). I think you're on to something. Imagine OpenAI and Anthropic suddenly started funding millions of artists worldwide, basically "we pay monthly rent and f…

I don't think a private company could possibly swing that, but that general arrangement would be welcome as part of a copyright reform package. Like the mandatory licensing we did for song covers back when we cared more about pretending that copyright was meant to balance art and profits. You want to train on something? Fine, no need to negotiate 1,000,000,000 licenses, that would be impossible. Just check the registry for ownership and wire some cash.

Re: After AI takes everything

#80

Post by cdfalcon »

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.

You think this was written by AI? I'm curious, why? Anytime I'm about to read a long post I generally paste it into a few detectors for sanity, but none of them flagged anything for this one. I read the entirety and thought it was pretty compelling - long maybe, but thoughtful. I appreciated the historical quotes interjected, and didn't find the prose suspect.
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