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What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

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Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#101

Post by wibbily »

orangecoffee wrote: post #93
luckymate wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you link some of those projects? I'm genuinely curious.

pi, openclaw, vinext, browser, ccc compiler, the scope is only growing. Look for the claude icon in the trending GitHub repos https://github.com/trending . It's like on all of them. It's hard. :( .. Those who are not accepting this are in cognitive dissonance.

I'm taking the bait whatever. All those projects are just more fucking AI tools. It's all Claude seems to be good for - writing agents, skills, harnesses. Just a big fat ouroboros.

(Going down the /trending page - 13 of the 14 are some flavor of context manager or agent or smth)

Let me know when someone uses Gas Town or openclaw to write something that isn't "the next Gas Town or openclaw" and then we can talk

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#102

Post by simonw »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #94
simonw wrote: post #26

I suggest leaning into the joy a little. I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now. I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them. All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasi…

You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else. You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing? I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an…

I emphasized the career status of the people I'm describing here precisely because it's important to acknowledge how different perspectives are affected by privilege in this kind of conversation.

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#104

Post by tim333 »

To quote Python

""" Always look on the bright side of life...

Life's a piece of shit

When you look at it

Life's a laugh and death's the joke, it's true

You'll see it's all a show

Keep 'em laughin' as you go

Just remember that the last laugh is on you """

I'm optimistic that AI will fix some of the shittiness, and something like uploading may fix the last laugh on you bit.

Anyway no harm looking on the bright side...

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#105

Post by ajross »

jameskilton wrote: post #16

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you w…

Absent any existential debate about religion and faith, this bit of the Sermon on the Mount relies on some pretty profound misunderstandings of biology and ecology.

Life really sucks in the wild. By nature, all species expand into their niche. Literally everything exists, in perpetuity, right at the razor's edge of starvation. If there is abundance, by random chance, then the prolific grandchildren of the lucky critters will find themselves in horrifying competition for the now-limited resources.

Those birds of the air may not sow or reap or store[1], but they're just one bad hunting day away from death. And their prey life on the opposite side of the knife. The flowers of the field seem to be growing without labor because you aren't noticing the 99%+ of them that are going to be eaten or destroyed before procreating, or the 99.999%+ of grass tufts that got eaten before even making a flower.

[1] Actually they totally do. But fine fine, Jesus and Matthew didn't know that.

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#106

Post by tim333 »

tinfoilhatter wrote: post #100
_alternator_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of science depends on materialism. Modern neuroscience strongly suggests that all experience has a material basis. Thus, the hypothesis that whatever “experience” or “qualia” arises from is in fact material seems to be well supported, though not yet conclusive.

No actually, all science does not depend on materialism. Prior to material science being a thing, there were the occult sciences which are still practiced around the world today and most definitely fall under the category of science. One can form a hypothesis, make observations, experiment and base their reasoning upon evidence. Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciou…

I agree science doesn't depend on materialism but experimental observation suggests consciousness is a materialistic effect as it's affected by material substances like LSD and ideas of a conscious spirit separate from the body like ghosts don't find much evidence.

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#107

Post by coffeebeqn »

simonw wrote: post #26

I suggest leaning into the joy a little. I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now. I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them. All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasi…

I have been using the tools for the last 3 years and I don’t find them joyful. I’m a craftsman at heart and managing agents sounds like an even worse proposal than managing people

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#108

Post by GeoAtreides »

simonw wrote: post #26

I suggest leaning into the joy a little. I know a lot of people - serious, thoughtful people with impressive careers behind them - who are having the time of their lives right now. I've spoken to multiple people who have come out of retirement because the challenges and opportunities of this new space are irresistible to them. All those side project ideas from the past few decades have suddenly become much more feasi…

I tried leaning into the joy, took about 10 seconds before I remembered I don't have any discretionary spending, that the job market is crashing, that I don't own a house, and the AI is destroying the very industry I trained on since I was eleven, taking my means of surviving away. And no personal project will save us, because everything will drown in a deluge of vibeslop that devalues any kind of work and knowledge.

Tell me Simon, what happens with the economy when no one affords more than barely survival? To whom are we going to sell those side projects? To the 1% with their soon to crash stocks? To the disappearing white collars? To the proles that only spend on food, alcohol and gambling?

Is that where the joy is? In seeing the hope fading away? In our stolen future? Tell me, so I too can be joyful like you.

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#109

Post by judahmeek »

mathgladiator wrote: post #63
joshmarinacci wrote: post #34

This too shall pass. Seriously. I've been through too many hype cycles to count. In a few years we will look back on this and see three things: * Both the downsides and upsides were exaggerated * A lot of VCs lost money and many of the trillion dollar buildouts didn't happen * after the hype died down we figured out what AI was actually good for, and what it wasn't.

AI is getting really good at too many things, so this feels very different. I have a claude "skill/program/mega-prompt" for health: https://github.com/nexivibe/md/blob/main/DOCTOR.md I gave it absolutely everything, and praise be to the machine I get the best debate and recommendations I've ever seen. I check what I know to be true, and it's there. I check the logic, and it is sound. I check the medication recommenda…

> AI is getting really good at too many things, so this feels very different.

How are you going to follow that up with a single anecdotal example?

Respectfully, shame on you.

That said, summary (information compression) along with low-level inference does seem to be the tasks that A.I. is best at right now. Little surprise there. Information compression is the sole purpose of the attention transformer in the first place.

Re: What are the best coping mechanisms for AI Fatalism?

#110

Post by tinfoilhatter »

tim333 wrote: post #106
tinfoilhatter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No actually, all science does not depend on materialism. Prior to material science being a thing, there were the occult sciences which are still practiced around the world today and most definitely fall under the category of science. One can form a hypothesis, make observations, experiment and base their reasoning upon evidence. Like you said, it's a hypothesis and you still can't explain the hard problem of consciou…

I agree science doesn't depend on materialism but experimental observation suggests consciousness is a materialistic effect as it's affected by material substances like LSD and ideas of a conscious spirit separate from the body like ghosts don't find much evidence.

We have no idea what brings matter into existence, because material science only takes into consideration what we can measure. We base our understanding of the material world solely on that. We can only measure an infinitesimal amount of the stuff that's out there, and anything we can't measure we come up with blanket terms to describe - like dark energy or dark matter.

What if all matter and our shared reality, is a manifestation of the mind? What if we are all a single mind going through dissociative identity disorder and each of us is like an altar of a person that has multiple personalities? There are all sorts of possible explanations for phenomenal consciousness that material science shrugs off because it limits what is possible to only the matter that we are able to observe and measured, which again is a tiny fraction of all the known matter in the universe.

Edit: All of these downvotes to my original and subsequent reply are quite amusing. HN is honestly a terrible website - people just downvoting anything they don't want to hear. Why even read the website? Just speak your own thoughts into a tape recorder and play them back. Same effect.

The popular narrative must be preserved at all costs. No room for dissenting opinions on this website!

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