91–100 of 521 posts
How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)
I don't think it's AI. I think it's the apathetic voterbase finally waking up to just how much tax dodging is going on.
It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so) The loneli…
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so) The loneli…
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems. Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much…
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.
The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.
My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.
The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.
I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.
That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically. I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flo…
But yes, there is so so much slop as well
It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so) The loneli…
Everyone knows it's just another stake in the coffin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This wildly assumes that "I voted for $candidate" means "I like $candidate." Every presidential election cycle we get served up two turds, one with a (D) and the other with an (R) by their name, and we have to pick which turd we'd like to ruin our country for us the least.
while I’d say that was true in most elections, this one the choices for the future couldn’t be more stark. The dude just had a UFC on the white house lawn, for instance, and fell into the Iran/Israel trap every previous president had avoided. But yeah, Kamala and Trump are the same level of turdness /s.
When one person says we are going to slowly drive a train off a cliff and the other says they will drive quickly but may or may not drive off a cliff, I understand why many people at the front of the train would take the risk of voting for an unpredictable speed demon.