Claude Opus 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Claude Opus 5

#831

Post by gonzalohm » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 12:56 PM UTC

lucas_the_human wrote: post #820

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life? There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

It's pretty naive to think that tools like this are not going to be exploited by American corporations to extract money from people and as an excuse for layoffs

Re: Claude Opus 5

#832

Post by theshackleford » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

lucas_the_human wrote: post #820

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life? There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

It will do great and useful things for holders of significant capital. The majority will be in bread lines.

Re: Claude Opus 5

#833

Post by muldvarp » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:01 PM UTC

lucas_the_human wrote: post #820

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life? There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

> How will it destroy your life?

By taking away my ability to earn a living.

> There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

What great things and why would I get access to those things?

Re: Claude Opus 5

#834

Post by voidmain » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

I already live off my wealth, and I expect AI development to destroy my life.

Once humans can be robustly replaced by machines, the military-industrial "meta build" will be a state with no humans, no cities, and 100% of all production dedicated to war. Whichever states descend to this new equilibrium fastest will crush the others and then fight over the corpse of the world forever. (Unless, of course, something like the Yudkowsky scenario happens along the way, which is totally possible)

I can't understand why anyone expects things like civil rights, property, the rule of law, nuclear deterrence, democracy, etc to survive when human beings no longer need each other. Why do investors in AI companies expect a payoff once they are no longer needed? Why (and, more importantly, how) does anyone expect a UBI from a government to which they are nothing but a drain on resources and which is in existential competition with other governments with exponentially growing robot armies?

Either the world will come to its senses and shut it all down, or there will be no winners at all.

Re: Claude Opus 5

#835

Post by cardboard9926 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

makaking wrote: post #711

Dilettante_ wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are always cherry-picked, though. They tell you about the 1/10 that went really impressively, ignoring the other 9 shots at the task where the clanker started to try selling tungsten cubes (in person, wearing a blue shirt).

Fair. But that 1/10 continues to get more and more impressive. Say, Claude 7 creates a new, brilliant scientific idea every 1 out of 1000 times. Anthropic reports "Claude figured out how to tie general relativity with quantum mechanics." Would you hand-wave it away saying that it's cherry-picked?

> Say, Claude 7 creates a new, brilliant scientific idea every 1 out of 1000 times

Sadly, general public (us) is never seeing that model

Re: Claude Opus 5

#836

Post by bbor » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:04 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #799

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

Even for people living of wealth, it is not clear what the outcomes are. If renters of your apartments can not afford to rent them, housing crashes because your city was a looser (Detroit style withdrawals). Even for stocks we don't know who the winners are. The market as a whole usually does not respond that well on serious turmoil. So yeah. We are likely seeing some very rough years.

Sadly, we have gone above and beyond the level of innovation where stock market disruption is a primary concern.

Luckily, we're all in this together. As long as enough people realize the weight of what's happening soon enough, I'm confident the indominable human spirit and the relative momentum of post-enlightenment social & institutional progress will carry us the rest of the way on a wave of clearly-justified solidarity.

To think otherwise --to truly face the spectre before us without hope-- is pathology, I think. Not necessarily incorrect of course, but definitely an unhealthy source of cognitive distress.

Re: Claude Opus 5

#837

Post by flossly » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:05 PM UTC

tossandthrow wrote: post #822

lucas_the_human wrote: post #820

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life? There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

It will only do so if the benefits of the technology is made available to all and we will see alternatives to make an income. Based on the past 40 years track record it seems unlikely that we will see any form of redistribution before it is existential. That is definitely grounds for being pessimistic.

It's the economic model we live under, not technology by itself, that's the problem IMHO.

Every tech gets exploited to make some richer folks more rich. Nothing new. Since the rich-ladder *is* the power-ladder under cap'ism.

In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.

Re: Claude Opus 5

#838

Post by arthurofbabylon » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

[dead]

Re: Claude Opus 5

#839

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

lucas_the_human wrote: post #820

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

This is just so negative. How will it destroy your life? There are so many great and useful things it can and will do to improve humanity.

Much of the history of industrial automation has had a dichotomy between the benefit to the general economy (good) vs. the people working in specific industries that were automated (bad); only a subset of goods see total demand rise as a result of efficiency improvements.

AI is automating a lot of things at the same time. Not evenly, there are faster- and slower-automated things. But this does suggest that instead of e.g. society as a whole doing better from all the fabric coming out of the power looms, by a large enough margin to stomp on the weavers who lost their profession, that we may face something more like the entire initial economic displacement from the first industrial revolution (including the period where weavers were replaced), everything from farms finding they no longer needed so many hands through the luddites getting the death penalty to (roughly) the invention of Communism concurrently with the Irish Potato famine, and as part of this those now-bulging cities having to invent new sanitation solutions because their "slop" problem was more literal and gave the population cholera and typhoid.

My expectation a decade ago was that software development would be the last thing to be automated, because we'd need software developers to write AI. Today, while I don't know how far most fields are from automation*, we definitely have AI capable enough at coding to write more AI.

* a decade ago I also thought self-driving cars were basically already sorted; what a pity that the software in the Paint It Black video was not as good as depicted

Re: Claude Opus 5

#840

Post by noslenwerdna » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

muldvarp wrote: post #796

Why should I be amazed at something that promises to destroy my life? I genuinely don't understand why people who have to work for their living are amazed at this. It will have a vast negative impact on your life unless you already live off of your wealth.

Automation is only good if you're putting blue collar people out of work! White-collar is out of bounds! People should do the work where they add unique value