Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts:

* It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not.

* It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive.

I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society:

* solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible

* integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors

* the personal computer revolution

* mobile telephony

* the internet

* smart phones

* AI

Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.)

We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.

I disagree, though I highly dislike the affect of Anthropic models.

> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework?

Typically speaking, the ones that run companies.

> On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.

“Everybody…except [those advocating for it]” –– rhetoric that borders on tautology but, regardless, the author cites the Gallup poll showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers and alludes to other widely-held sentiment. But it’s not about your feelings (or their feelings).

This piece, by a defense analyst formerly at RAND, expands its concerns out from public sentiment and is mainly drawing attention to major yet-unsolved and generally uncontested issues such as AI output being unoriginal (fundamentally, due to next-word prediction), the output polluting future training (garbage in garbage out), and errors only being caught by experts (cf. the Gell-Mann amnesia effect). The essay, in a political magazine, intends to warn elected leadership about strategic issues that are likely to arise if our government and experts intertwine AI into their decision making without these concerns being solved first.

yeah, I think we have plenty of evidence that a certain sector of the population absolutely "vibe codes" life.