201–210 of 221 posts
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My partner cried the other day because her long-planned PC upgrade is now an order of magnitude more expensive than she budgeted for pre-AI-boom.
Order of magnitude? It's 10x more expensive now?
Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…
What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-0…
Of course this is going to be deployed in the most exploitative way possible. When have these people ever done differently? Elon just spent most of last year gleefully destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I'm sure he'll get right on developing a model to solve world hunger next...
Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education. We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer import…
The amount of assumptions about what it might mean to "think" coupled with a seeming obliviousness to those assumptions is quire masterful.
The dumbest people making the most confident statements about thinking...
I love it.
I am going to print it out so that when my great-great-grand kids are hunting angus beef on the plains of what used to be the US they will have some understanding of how the late 21st C version of a Butlerian Jihad came to be.
This is beautiful and I hope that all you folks actually do stop thinking even harder than you already have, because it might liberate the rest of the humans from the Torment Nexus v3.0 you folks seem so dead set on rolling out post haste.
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> Then you need to quit confusing simplistic pattern matching for logic. Details matter, as do degree and scale. But that's the core problem of AI fanatics, isn't it. They cannot comprehend how people who saw and used the same thing they did, and came away with "this smells like fancy autocomplete" instead of "this is genuine intelligence!"
But nobody who uses Fable and Sol all day is saying that it's fancy autocomplete. Also, nobody is saying it's genuine intelligence. As always, the Internet fails to find the middle ground. Frontier models are really useful software engineering tools, not AGI, and not tab completion. To me it feels a lot like using a new programming language, like going from assembly to a Lisp machine or something like that.
There are lots of people saying both. You are correct there is also a middle ground, but both these opinions are held by many people.
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I don't think your premise is true. Remember John Henry, worried that the steam engine would put him out of a job drilling holes in rocks? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore) Ludditism has a long history, and they made the exact same arguments about job loss in the 1800s as today.
You should look up the history of what actually happened with the Luddites. They weren't opposed to the machines (many were even machine operators!), they were opposed to the manufacturers circumventing labour rights . Turns out people don't like routinely seeing 12-year-old children getting scalped by a weaving machine! They targeted the machines because it was the most convenient way to sabotage a factory, not beca…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I find interesting is the contrast between the West and China here. Most people in the West expect that AI will make their lives worse in some way. Meanwhile, 84% of Chinese are excited about this tech, and expect that it will be used to make their lives better. it's a really vivid contrast between the way new technology becomes integrated into each type of society. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-0…
I think it's more about institutional trust than the technology itself. AI could be a great common good in the west, but look at the companies and politicians controlling its development. The notion that trump/elon/altman/zuck/etc would choose to deploy this in a way that helps the general good at the expensive of massively enriching themselves as much as possible is laughable to most people. Of course this is going…
Of course everyone hates AI. For most people, it's actively making their lives worse, not better. AI is a really effective technology when used with restraint, in appropriate places. But it's rarely being used with restraint, and it's being inserted just about everywhere. If you're trying to work in AI on a product related to education, you've got a really high bar to clear to prove that you're actually helping stude…
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education. We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer import…
The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said for using (or not using) our brains.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also have to answer why, if the AI project pans out, we would care about education. We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. We're building mechanical brains, and the human thought that was needed before the intelligence revolution is no longer import…
> We have mechanical muscles, and the human strength that was needed before the industrial revolution is no longer important; weight lifters still strength train, but it's a hobby, and nobody needs to do it. The amount of strength required for the median job may have decreased, but that doesn't mean that nobody needs to do it. The health ramifications of not strength training are constant, and the same can be said fo…
If AI fills its promise, some people will be telling others they should think more, but people will get lazy.