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The AI backlash is only getting started

economist.com

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Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#191

Post by baron816 »

customguy wrote: post #141
baron816 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just how productivity works. If people spend less time building a unit of output, then you have more output. People aren’t going to stop wanting stuff. Right now, the world can’t come close to making all the stuff people want. As long as there’s a desire for further consumption, there will be work for people to do.

But that's just the thing, productivity is so much higher than, say, 50 years ago, while the average worker has less of a perspective (to own a home, start a family, etc. anything stable to work towards essentially). The profits mostly don't go towards the now more productive workers and ensuring their rights and well-being and a habitable world to live in, do they.

My view is that AI's productive power will allow more individuals to be independent from powerful corporations, and that will significantly weaken those corporations.

It's been really challenging to start companies because you need to go hire and manage a lot of people to handle lots of very different tasks. But it's becoming easier and easier everyday because AI is able to do a lot of that work.

As more people start companies, more competition will drive down prices for everything, making the things people want more accessible.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#192

Post by alamortsubite »

dofm wrote: post #119
gruez wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the average dirt farmer in the 1800 is going to be assuaged by the prospect of almost all farm work being mechanized, because he can be a "medical and health services manager" or "data scientist" instead? https://www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm

What's a dirt farmer?

As opposed to a moisture farmer, presumably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aran_Islands#History

If you're never seen Man of Aran, you're in for a treat! Far more thought provoking than the fluff Lucas made, but by which I always assumed his fictional homestead on Tatooine was inspired.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#193

Post by dofm »

dgellow wrote: post #88
dofm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have been made to believe by very influential people (dario, sam, elon etc) that AI will replace them. As a result people are getting angry. Who did not see this coming? Cal Newport calls this "Doom-Trolling" — there was an NYT article, he has talked about it on his youtube channel and there was an actually really great, long discussion with Ed Zitron about it where Ed covered a lot more topic ground than he…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...

Thank you!

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#194

Post by xydone »

adrians1 wrote: post #180
xydone wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's also fine. However I am personally willing to side with the group which's arguments for the cause are environmental and societal impact over the one which's rebuttal to that is the fact we were wrong once 40 years ago. That's just me though.

We weren't wrong just once, 40 years ago. That's just one example, but the Luddites and doomers were wrong every time something new was invented. Check this out: https://x.com/PessimistsArc

Luddites, the group of people which famously were concerned about societal impact of a piece of technology? Right.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#195

Post by BeetleB »

HEmanZ wrote: post #178
BeetleB wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The scale just seems fundamentally different. Not at all. I doubt LLMs will result in a 90x drop in the overall labor workforce. The agricultural shift was likely greater than the shift due to LLMs will be.

This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal). That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intellige…

> We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital.

Oh, as a SW engineer, I assure you I am scared. My profession will be one of the most impacted ones.

My point is that a lot more than 10% of the labor that is done out there involves things that require physical work, and that is a tougher problem to solve than pure reasoning. I'm not saying the changes won't be drastic - just not a 90x drop.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#196

Post by HEmanZ »

BeetleB wrote: post #195
HEmanZ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires an assumption that humans have some capacity that LLMs/machines can not fundamentally match (or match cheaply, or we’ll make matching it illegal). That’s fine, but one of those assumptions has to be the case for your statement to be true. If they meet or exceed all productive human capacities at lower cost, are not stopped by regulations or some kind of near insurmountable “exponential cost of intellige…

> We should at least be scared enough to seriously consider the possibility that in the future there is no productive use for human labor, only capital. Oh, as a SW engineer, I assure you I am scared. My profession will be one of the most impacted ones. My point is that a lot more than 10% of the labor that is done out there involves things that require physical work, and that is a tougher problem to solve than pure…

Robots?

I agree in some sense, I think the runway on human physical labor is measured in decades. But it’s likely not infinite, and likely not 100 years. I expect my children will at least see “the end” in their lifetimes.

Human physical labor also has a ticking clock, albeit longer than software engineering.

Of course again, this is if we don’t put up or find unknown-unknown walls on machine intelligence. I think there is a pretty high chance we just make sufficient machine intelligence illegal for a very long time, at least until labs can fine-tune models enough to be smart enough to replace humans but dumb/lobotomized enough to not make a bio-weapon.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#197

Post by ben_w »

josefritzishere wrote: post #10

Frankly, most AI is pretty meh, really only impressing AI enthusiasts, with their near religious fervor. There's a big delta there between power users and everyone else. It writes bad emails, messy code, incorrect metrics, dubious slide decks, ugly graphics... the consumer rejection of AI is only growing. At the same time, the product itself is sold wildly below cost. So it needs to be increase in price at the same t…

Weird thing I've encountered. I've seen all the stuff you say, but not all at the same time.

The stuff I'm getting from ChatGPT this week has been absolutely garbage. Back in the very early days you might prompt 5 times and see if it was consistent with itself in the conclusion, even if not how it got there; this week it's not even been that. But back in those days the UI was also fast, today it lags massively on relatively short chat sessions.

Ugly, dubious, incorrect, it definitely feels like a regression. And its love of emoji hasn't gone away.

Claude no longer works for me on Safari, only Chrome. No lag at least, but the free message allowance has shrunk a lot.

I'm not too fussed about messy code, given the humans I've worked with, but that's about it.

Even the ChatGPT image model is… for all the improvements in the model itself, the UX isn't good enough to make up for what the model still can't do. In many cases I actively prefer running Stable Diffusion locally because that's easier to fix the last 5% than having to deal with a completely different 5% wrong each time.

But yeah, correction very possible. Was thinking so just on the basis of the % of US electrical power being called for: that can't possibly be sustainable for the broader economy.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#198

Post by vitorfblima »

yunwal wrote: post #121
greenavocado wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not theoretical. I am literally in corporate meetings where leadership is automating away labor by directly comparing total cost of operations against the current human operator's salary to calculate ROI. The direct purpose is to eliminate jobs (and do things more reliably, ideally, since bots don't sleep or get sick). The question is whether those people will be able to find meaningful new work.

This was absolutely happening with tractors too. Not in a board room or whatever, but people were definitely getting laid off because of tractors.

Not in the speed and scale you would imagine, luckily.

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#199

Post by fireflash38 »

BeetleB wrote: post #118
fireflash38 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it? The industrial revolution came along with massive production of goods that people need and desire. Even then, there was still a huge amount of pushback (it still echoes in a lot of communities today!). Do you see any differences compared to the AI revolution we're being sold?

> Do you think that happened bloodlessly with everyone very happy about it? Do you not think the ultimate outcome was worth it?

Where is the glut of food and consumer products from AI?

Re: The AI backlash is only getting started

#200

Post by lnenad »

josefritzishere wrote: post #81
lnenad wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood people like you. Factually that's just not true. Five years ago current llms would have seen like magic to even data scientists working on them and realistically their impact has been felt by many. Just taking jobs into account, imagine an average worker in an average industry; how do you think something like Fable compares? Worse? By how much? Like even many years ago we had alphafold that had a n…

Sorry but it's painfully true. I now spending time daily like the "reverse-centaur" fixing things that AI has hallucinated, conflated, or just done wrong. It's miserable work. The copy/pasta part is easy.

My point is you'd be doing the same if you wrote the code or an average person did it. If you spend time for the prep work AI is solid in execution.
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