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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

theguardian.com

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Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#11

Post by sodapopcan »

kuerbel wrote: post #6
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making. The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work. In fact, it more or less assumes the opposite. The critique is about the economic and organizational story being told around AI, not about whether an individual developer can ship faster today. Saying “these tool…

> I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making.

The headline.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#12

Post by DetectDefect »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work.

Is this really something you want to have proudly said? Because it makes it sound like your "work" is not very important.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#13

Post by whimsicalism »

Sharlin wrote: post #8
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

I think you’ll find the essay much more nuanced than that. It only incidentally discusses what you’re thinking about. > Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI. Using AI for simple tasks can genuinely make them more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about th…

I disagree. The article leads with the sentiment that I mention and has it woven throughout. The theme is AI is obviously not capable of doing your job, the problem is that the stupid managerial class will get convinced it is and make things shitty.

> This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

> Now, AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past. That means that it will “hallucinate” a library called lib.pdf.text.parsing,

I think it is a convenient, palatable, and obviously comforting lie that lots of people right now are telling themselves.

To me, all the ‘nuance’ in this article is just because the coyote in Doctorow has begun looking down but still cannot quite believe it. He is still leaning on the same tropes of statistical autocomplete that have been a mainstay of the fingers-in-ears gang for the last 3 years.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#14

Post by whimsicalism »

DetectDefect wrote: post #12
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

> It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Is this really something you want to have proudly said? Because it makes it sound like your "work" is not very important.

My work involves reading papers, doing high level math, coding it, reasoning about the business environment, etc. etc. My work is important and I find the classic HN impulse to stigmatize people for saying this to be silly.

It is you who is the fool if you haven’t managed to use these things to massively accelerate what you can do and if you cannot see the clear trend. Again, it has been three years since chatgpt came out.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#15

Post by DetectDefect »

jongjong wrote: post #2

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…

It is pretty plain to see technology enables socio-economic disharmony, to say the least. While it may not be the "cause" it is certainly a potent accelerant.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#16

Post by kuerbel »

jongjong wrote: post #2

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…

I don’t think the article is blaming AI as a technology. It’s criticizing how the current socio-economic system uses AI.

The argument isn’t “tech is the problem,” but that autonomy narratives are used to shift risk, degrade labor, and justify valuations without real system-level productivity gains. That’s a critique of incentives and power structures, not of technological progress itself.

In that sense, “don’t blame tech, blame the system” is very close to the article’s point, not opposed to it.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#17

Post by whimsicalism »

meroes wrote: post #9
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

What masterful framing AI leaders developed that people say, “AI is doing my work”. Did other technologies get phrased this way? The accounting software is doing my work? The locomotive is doing my work?

yeah it’s all branding. there is totally nothing different about this technology that might cause someone to say that…

e:tone

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#18

Post by hackable_sand »

Avicebron wrote: post #5
jongjong wrote: post #2

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…

> But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed. Agreed. I think people would be open to suggestions if you have actionable ways to improve the current socio-economic system.

If it involves work then no, people are not open to suggestions.

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#19

Post by [deleted] »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.

[deleted]

Re: AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

#20

Post by netsharc »

jongjong wrote: post #2

It's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if pe…

How to fix the human/society instead? Technology has enabled a lot of evil: the society that had guns came and colonized the society without, and made them slaves (here's the opening to argue that Genghis Khan managed to enslave many societies without guns). The rise of the Internet and online shopping ruined "main street shops". "Uber for ___" enabled the exploitative gig-economy with retirement meaning dropping dead...

Yeah, we're back to feudal lords having the power to control society, they can even easily buy governments... Seems like the problem is with neo-liberalist capitalism, without any controls coming from the society (i.e. democractically elected governments) it will maximize exploitation.

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