The Education of a Doomer

At the top of what? After all the massacres the remaining billionaires and their families would be all that's left of humanity. Who would want to rule over a human-empty, machine-led Earth for the rest of their lives? Not to mention the attitude and morality of their families and those close to them.

Since neither of us are doing this, we’re apparently both betting our lives on the current trajectory of LLMs hitting a wall soon and fast.

I think the only main critique that comes to mind is the primitivists, who argue that automation has massively destroyed our freedom and psychologically destabilized us (among other things); you really can't meaningfully opt out of whatever technology exists and it forces someone to use it somewhere. It also ultimately takes away certain freedoms that previously existed and creates lots of new problems that didn't exist before (like increased mental health problems in industrialized nations). And so this problem has already happened with the Industrial Revolution - AI is basically just a continuation of these problems, not perhaps different in kind but degree.

> Alignment

is an issue to me, but any currently existing technology can also be misused to some extent

> Control

again we're not in control of current technology, new things are developed that other people have no control over but just "adapt" to

> by letting the AI write, you are giving up most of what makes up thinking

I guess I haven't been viewing things this way but have been filtering ways I anticipate AI should be used and not used as. In other words, I think it's a great use of AI to share a prompt and AI output as a way of dialogue "writing". For example, I might want to give you 10 ideas on something to bake, and AI outputs 10 ideas that are actually valuable, so sharing the list does add value. But in how I would "write" with AI, it would be clear where I am prompting and where the AI takes over. I also think that a person should read the AI output and essentially indicate points of agreement or disagreement especially if there is some serious defect in the AI output.

> The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber

Good and bad; it's enabled people with less SE experience (or intelligence even) to talk more about SE and become a meaningful participant in the process of software creation. But it takes less specialized skill for some of these things than some of the previously developed skills, and that can have a different feel to it.

> Deferring to AI

Again I guess I am filtering a bad use of this. AI frequently gives "good" answers that I would have manually hunted for previously on a search engine, and I still can sift through what it outputs. So I think it's great as a brainstorm tool that I somewhat freely choose from. I can understand how other people may not be using it in the same way as I use it though, more like an aide rather than a smarter entity I am taking orders from.

> Stagnation

I guess it's ironic because although I also focus on "stagnation", I guess there is indeed a lot of actual "progress" going on. It's more of a political issue perhaps than a technological issue.

And it's no coincidence that Saito is Japanese because that's what Japan has been living in. They've not grown in decades. Without overlords, it's an adaption to a world where the average citizen is 50, ecology cannot sustain consumption and significantly more time will be dedicated to mending the environment, taking care of old people, and putting technology to work to make that possible.