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Feeling Sad about AI

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Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#271

Post by willchis »

mike_hearn wrote: post #269
willchis wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They were nearly the same average for exactly one day in February" says the guy lecturing me on reading noise.

I think there's some sort of communication gap here. My point is that neither fact tells you anything much, especially not about "how screwed" we are. It's not a battle of data points.

Definitely a comms gap. I'm not going to sit and list all the evidence for the climate crisis we're currently experiencing in an offhand HN comment. I'm going to say something like "this winter we saw crazy high anomalies" to express how screwed we are.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#272

Post by dang »

flyingshelf wrote: post #24

This is basically me in 2026. Life has no meaning and I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it. Hopefully I can find a job that doesn't bore me but I'm not positive.

(HN moderator here)

> I'm waiting for my money to run out before I end it

Please don't do that.

Someone emailed us a link to your comment and was concerned that you were in this level of distress. I didn't have another way of getting in touch with you, so I thought I'd post here and say that there are strangers on HN who care. Perhaps they (or we, rather - I'll include myself too) can't do much beyond that, but I hope it makes at least a small difference.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#273

Post by simonw »

palmotea wrote: post #268
simonw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now. I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be. Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans. Computers a…

> Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery. > I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to ever…

> A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers."

If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.

I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve, and that AI tools will widen the spectrum of what's possible to solve in a way that provides a whole lot of economic opportunity. I hope I'm not wrong!

> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.

This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.

Then Gemini Pro 1.5 happened, and Claude 3, and then Mistral and DeepSeek and Qwen and MiniMax and GLM and more, and now I don't think we need to worry about that at all.

And then Qwen 3.8 27B demonstrated that you can have a useful, agent-driving, competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM.

Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#274

Post by sonicrocketman »

simonw wrote: post #66

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…

I feel the same and have gone through a similar journey.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#275

Post by RivieraKid »

slowin wrote: post #88
simonw wrote: post #66

I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well , is to be very disheartened by it. Once you come to terms with the idea that translating an exact spe…

> The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of work that would have taken you a week in an hour and does it well, is to be very disheartened by it. I think it depends on the person. I've been waiting for AI since I first saw Wargames as a child. As soon as I saw that agents could code at or beyond my level, it felt like the entire world was unlocked. Now I can explore so many ideas that I was bottle-n…

What's your job or source of income? This is the main factor behind how you feel about AI.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#276

Post by cindyllm »

palmotea wrote: post #268
simonw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying, I genuinely didn't understand your point and I do now. I agree that ChatGPT was launched without having an idea as to what it was for. OpenAI themselves debated internally as to whether it was worth releasing and were shocked at how popular it turned out to be. Given what I know about what ChatGPT and similar tools can do, I firmly disagree that they don't solve problems for humans. Computers a…

> Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery. > I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to ever…

[dead]

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#277

Post by palmotea »

simonw wrote: post #273
palmotea wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Computers are hard to use. People need to be able to solve problems using computers. Solving problems is fun! And perversely, LLMs actually seem better at doing a good-enough job at the fun stuff and being worse at certain kinds of drudgery. So the people get more drudgery. > I think LLMs are the biggest leap we have ever had in making the power or computers - previously reserved for programmers - available to ever…

> A lot of people survive and find the security they need by solving problems for others. Take that away and they have little need for or access to "the power [of] computers." If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar. I remain optimistic that peopl…

> If LLMs and related technology result in a gutting of the workforce and mass unemployment the world will be a dark and terrible place. I do not trust the governments of the world to solve that with UBI or similar.

IMHO, UBI is a sop to mitigate the thread of violence and revolution during creation of a poor, disempowered underclass. That's why I'm in favor of literal communal ownership (or some other kind of severe ownership or operation restriction that limits the concentration of power).

> I remain optimistic that people will always find new problems to solve...

Oh "people" will, the question is which people and how many.

I could totally imagine AI leads to a post-scarcity future of abundance for all humanity...which consists of the descendants of the nepo babies of today's billionaires, after everyone else is eased out of existence in some kind of economic holocaust. You can adjust the dial as you see fit to make the survivor group a bit bigger, but the point is the utopia comes only for the few.

>> If you really want to advocate for AI, and address most of the concerns about it, advocate for literal communal ownership of the frontier models and data center infrastructure.

> This is why I've been following open weight and local models so closely. A couple of years ago, back when GPT-4 had been unbeaten for 10 solid months, I was deeply concerned that we might end up in a dystopia where all of the useful AI was controlled by a single organization.

> ...

> Right now communal ownership of data centers looks less likely to me than widespread availability of useful models that run on consumer hardware. That's pretty surprising - a year ago I never dreamed I would have a Claude 3 equivalent model that ran on a Mac.

I should probably just have said "AI" instead of "frontier models and data center infrastructure." Because fat lot of good a "competent model in ~24GB of GPU-accessible RAM" does me if there's no jobs or the jobs available pay shit or suck, because the wealthy just get the work done with their own local models.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#278

Post by dd8601fn »

xpct wrote: post #209
dd8601fn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there’s a narrow window to make hay right now, but that has to be closing fast for the same reasons. I wouldn’t be giving kids any career advice around software development of any kind, myself. Now seems like the worst time in my life to be making long term projections on the subject.

I hold the opinion that learning about tech is important, especially as more and more of our world revolves around software. Biased of course, but I'd keep betting on software over other fields when it comes to career options.

Well I’ve certainly been wrong before, and hope I am about this, but it all looks very fuzzy to me right now.

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#279

Post by micromacrofoot »

asdfman123 wrote: post #107
micromacrofoot wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are many many jobs that largely consist of sending emails and answering phones all day

Or generating spreadsheets, or sitting in meetings, or operating any other kind of software. That can all be replaced with AI. Carpenters, flight attendants, etc. won't yet, because robotics just isn't there yet. You need humans to move things in irregular ways. But everyone else can be replaced.

yeah entire skyscrapers filled with people doing this sort of work... it's not even close to as bad as it could get yet

Re: Feeling Sad about AI

#280

Post by luisgvv »

Ya'll overestimate how the average programmer uses LLMs and tools and underestimate how a good programmer uses them.

Nothing is set in stone other than the fact the way software engineerind is done.

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