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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

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Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#191

Post by amalcon »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #189
recursive wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out some of Trump's positions on renewable energy.

Perhaps I should have specified Anti-AI. Its just the thing that upsets me the most about your everyday liberal professional, how much they hate AI just because Trump is pro AI

I think "your everyday liberal professional" is more likely to be anti-AI because it is being advertised as a direct threat to their livelihoods, rather than for any more abstract reason. The latter includes both political allegiance stuff and the reasons those professionals would likely cite, like its energy requirements or the economic damage if the bubble bursts.

Whether or not you think it likely that this threat will materialize is beside the point. Workers never like it when someone is advertising that they will put you out of work.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#192

Post by blizarre »

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…

Yeah and no... I have been a developer for 20 years and most of my time isn't spent writing code. Most of my time is spent monitoring production, being in meetings, doing design work, doing code/spec reviews, creating tickets for infra/IT to deploy stuff...

So yeah I love AI and it really helps my personal projects. But my actual work? A little, I can work on some nice-to-have PR in the background during my meetings. I might be 20% more effective coding? Mostly because I do more of these low-hanging fruit PR like bug fixes and refactoring. The hard stuff still require thinking. But that's not even half of my time. It's fun, but not world-changing.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#193

Post by dofm »

I want to frame my comment here carefully to talk about the narratives, specifically, and accept that we need to stipulate on face value that this is true (it certainly rings true from people I know in real life):

This specific narrative reads like every narrative explanation of the Republican party in the period from the second half of the first Trump administration until now.

Again, I am talking only about the narratives here. But the pervasive narrative around Trump is that privately everyone hates his guts, comes away with a worse impression when they work with him closely, dreads him opening his mouth, thinks his decisions are insane, and they are telling journalists that, at every opportunity, and have done since the 2018 midterms. And yet in public we have committee hearings where any number of irrational topics become a sort of terror zone here rational people have to assert irrational beliefs or pretzel logic to be able to continue; where ordinary absurdities have become cult-like witness-bearing that everyone polices everyone else on. It's like the Hunger Games of litmus tests.

For example the desire for career advancement is a common thread in both of these narratives, even though this is being promoted further up into the kafkaesque absurdity. Both of these things remind me of other things, like somehow everyone in US politics seemingly believes in God and somehow nobody in an international football (soccer) team is gay. Even though these are not plausible.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#194

Post by bluefirebrand »

dgellow wrote: post #129
parpfish wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And manias are so foundational to the relatively young field of AI that they made the term “AI winter”. We should brace for the third (I think) AI winter soon

When the current mania ends that will be more like a tech/software winter than just AI. I expect the public to have a complete distrust for tech companies and politics to push for strict regulations

I would like to see that happen. We've really let tech companies get out of control

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#195

Post by dofm »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106
drob518 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…

Manias go back a long way. The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.

The paradox of the cutbacks after the railway industry corrected is that more or less every track they got rid of would now be useful. The Beeching cut damage done to East Sussex, for example, is devastating and unfixable.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#196

Post by dofm »

drob518 wrote: post #103
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. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…

This hype cycle is much more like the NFT hype cycle — it's just that it has a more easily understood product. Impossible to see Beeple's Everydays as anything other than a harbinger, IMO.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#197

Post by phil21 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #106
drob518 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of us on some level felt confident that AI would completely revolutionise our society. Seriously? Maybe I’m just getting old, but having lived through the dot-com hype in the 1990s, the XML hype in the 2000s, and the cloud hype in the 2010s, this has been an utterly predictable hype cycle around AI. This does not mean that AI is completely useless. It will impact the world but not in the ways the snake oil sal…

Manias go back a long way. The history of the UK's railway mania in the 1840s is worth researching, because it's uncannily similar, with a stock bubble, fraudsters and chancers, huge hype, cutthroat competition, boardroom intrigue and drama, miles and miles of unnecessary infrastructure in the wrong places, and eventually a technology that became useful, but could have been developed more intelligently.

Manias are required for humans to develop a new technology. It’s just part of the human condition.

Tilting at windmills over the stupidity of it is just something I’m trying to get over and not care about at a personal level. Nothing I can do about it either way!

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#198

Post by uwamamama »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #120
dinfinity wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It hasn't worked out like that It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive. The recursive self-improvement aspect that is necessary for the actual singularity is something we're only really starting to get into this year. If the singularity is 5 years from now, that is still much sooner than most people (including me) previously expec…

As a vocal advocate for the use of machine intelligence in certain contexts and a skeptic of claims they are useless or always hallucinate or whatever... It hasn't been even close to even the recent claims! It's been like three straight years where it was supposed to utterly transform society any minute now . I think we more or less have a fragile consensus that in like, computer programming and really very little el…

Uncritical use of today's AI beats all of the optimized use of yesterday's AI by far. I think people like the idea that their success is a result of their efforts, but this is just not the truth.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#199

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

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…

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

I laughed reading this. Have you actually tried it? I recently tried to get Claude (Opus) to give me a setup for a simple SMTP relay with Postfix. I had to constantly fight it not to include completely unnecessary components and configurations like Dovecot or just override my requirements. Even Claude is nothing but a semi-competent tutorial clicker.

To someone who never did anything like this themselves the result might seem fantastic. They might not battle Claude on details like I did because "hey, it works, doesn't it".

Don't get me wrong, I agree in general that LLMs are a significant milestone. But I would like to add, especially because of your tone, that perception of how much of a leap it is, is very likely a matter of individual competence. So your enthusiasm might say more about yourself than about the tool.

Re: AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

#200

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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