AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#151

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

edg5000 wrote: post #28

slopinthebag wrote: post #7

The AI mania has been really fascinating to witness because on the surface it’s surprising that so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen into it. But I suppose intelligence as a concept is multifaceted and doesn’t include wisdom. I also wonder if it has to do with personality, where the people whose personality best suits leadership roles are more susceptible to this psychosis. I think there is also an archet…

It's a very interesting technology, so it leaves some shockwaves while it's impacting the world. Over time this will be absorbed and the insanity will die out, but it's quite transformative, just like cars and the internet were (to name a few).

And the quantum NFT blockchain metaverse .com (don't register that domain, I call dibs)

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#152

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

eth0up wrote: post #102

AI may have made a few mistakes, e.g. suggesting the US abduct a sitting president (Claude), and maybe went too far with the whole diarrhea-vomit machine thing, but you can't say it doesn't write a clean python script. Maybe if we can just get AI to view humanity as a software problem... and give Palantir the chance it's been waiting for. One thing is certain; it's here to stay. Now we just need to centralize it into…

That's a great insight. I appreciate you sharing this perspective directly. But honestly, it's not diarrhea, it's not vomit, it's a lean mean machine—AI has become load-bearing and you're right to question that.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#153

Post by treis » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

pproe wrote: post #124

treis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't accurate. The first mobile phone came out in 1983. It took at least a decade before they started to become common.

Mobile phones at that time were 800g and cost $4000. Using your logic you could say we are almost 20 years into the age of LLMs because Cleverbot was released in 2008.

The first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications.

We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#154

Post by neonstatic » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society.

I don't want to sound like a jerk, so please let me know if I do - I don't understand why you claim that "most of us" felt that way. I ignored "AI" until mid 2024. Then I tried it and was very unimpressed. I tried again in 2026. Seemed useful, then very quickly I realized that it's something that looks great until you look closer.

I was never impressed by a text generator. A talking computer might be the most boring thing I could imagine. I never understood why people got so obsessed by it and I certainly don't understand why it would "change society". Society is composed of people. What would change society is something that would allow people to think less, feel more clearly, express themselves more freely, and suffer less. Of course, things that accomplish these results exist, but they require a lot of effort. I cannot fathom how a technology that doesn't lead to these results could revolutionize anything. In fact, every technology, that I witnessed arising since late 90s has made things worse precisely because it has not done anything to address the human condition, instead praying on it.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#155

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:24 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #26

This is excellent. > Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. Then later: > In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisatio…

For some reason this comment was shadowbanned.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#156

Post by AussieWog93 » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out?

Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers.

You can literally just open Claude Code, say:

- "Add these domains with these mailboxes to an SMTP server running on my homelab, forward all incoming and outgoing via mxroute"

- "Port this unmaintained app from 2017 to modern Android, and then test it on an emulator and sign it with my real key for distribution via Google Play"

- "get my GitHub Actions runner on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android, ensuring that it supports all available architectures from the last decade and a half, then check your outputs in a loop until it works"

and it just spits it out while you do the dishes.

Someone the other day talked about "AI psychosis psychosis" and it absolutely stuck with me. The people who deny this is a big deal are in la-la land.

We could literally hit a brick wall in terms of model intelligence now and it would still be a game changer.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#157

Post by inigyou » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:25 PM UTC

nimonian wrote: post #66

ajkjk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect from a person other than the generalizations they see from the experiences they have had...? What 'evidence' could possibly be given other than extensive anecdotes?

The article presents hypothesis as fact with insufficient science. I have no problem discussing speculation, but if the author wants to promote their claims to any more than that I would want to see more journalism.

What journalism would you like to see in a blog post about the authors opinion?

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#158

Post by ifwinterco » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

ungovernableCat wrote: post #135

ifwinterco wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the bell curve meme every time - very, very often stupid people end up being "wiser" than moderately intelligent people. Meanwhile the really intelligent people end up with beliefs surprisingly close directionally to the stupid people who've barely thought about an issue, just fleshed out with 100x the detail. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

I've seen both variants of this where the midwit is enthusiastic about the impending singularity and where the midwit is saying it's all a bubble. Everyone's just portraying a strawman of the other side with new formats.

Yes true, I can see that actually.

I feel though that if you picked a random sample of members of the public and asked them about the probability of the singularity you would get blank looks from most people on the left tail even if you explained it.

Whereas if you had the statement "ChatGPT can be useful for some things, but it isn't going to fundamentally change the world" you would get a lot of people on both tails agreeing and the people who disagreed would be clustered in the middle.

Maybe that's just my bias speaking though and actually I'm the midwit

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#159

Post by toasty228 » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

[flagged]

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#160

Post by oblio » Sun, Jul 19, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #156

dtj1123 wrote: post #94

Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. The singularity made sense to me, at least. It hasn't worked out like that, but rather than accept the crushing reality of our mistake and take a second to re-evaluate, we've decided to LARP out the future we promised ourselves by crowbar-and-vaselineing AI into every crack and crevice we can find and loudly proclaiming progre…

I just don't understand how someone could think we're going back to a pre-LLM world. Have you not used one since Opus 4.5 came out? Especially as somebody that's no longer in the software profession and so doesn't have 40 hours a week to just sit there and crank out code, agentic AI is a technological leap on the level of search engines, bulletin boards or compilers. You can literally just open Claude Code, say: - "A…

1. Everything you said is more about revolutionizing IT though. IT is more easily testable than other things in real life.

2. The gap between the singularity and really strong automation is huge. It's basically that between 1 million and infinity, or even better, that joke about the difference between 1 million and 1 billion being roughly 1 billion.