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The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

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Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#101

Post by heavyset_go »

otterley wrote: post #85
senectus1 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, completely agree. Made worse by the fact that the boomer and gen X generations are really well known for the whole "fuck you I've got mine, i deserve to stay rich and comfortable" attitude.... I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.

Please don’t lump GenX in with boomers. We are the first generation not to have lifetime employment and pensions, the first generation to pay through the nose for higher education, and many of our peers are just barely scraping by at 50 alongside our Millenial and GenZ friends.

Stop the Boomerification of Gen X's voting record and the comparison will go away.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#102

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tptacek wrote: post #7
hydroplane wrote: post #6

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A gr…

I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.

> the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers

SWE layoffs are politically irrelevant. The kids booing commencement speakers, however, are not aspiring SWEs. AI CEOs’ rhetoric, in particular, Altman’s, has been aimed and successfully landed more broadly.

And I don’t think the underlying cause of the anxiety is unemployment, which remains relatively low. Finding a block of hard-working workers who used to be able to make ends meet, but now can’t, is a political goldmine for good reason.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#103

Post by euroderf »

hydroplane wrote: post #6

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A gr…

[dead]

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#105

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #8

I'll just keep repeating this: There are three options: 1. AI owned by everyone 2. No AI 3. AI owned by billionaires If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI. Any of us arguing for (1) get sh…

4. AI owned by someone else. Unless you’re in America, China, the UK, France or Israel, it’s this or No. 2.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#106

Post by euroderf »

wvenable wrote: post #36
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #8

I'll just keep repeating this: There are three options: 1. AI owned by everyone 2. No AI 3. AI owned by billionaires If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI. Any of us arguing for (1) get sh…

What does #1 actually mean in practical terms? Collective ownership of a giant data center and all the CPUs, GPUs, and DRAM needed to do AI?

This is where the researchers and the essayists should be working. What does it look like when there's a significant tax at every value-add (hey let's call it a value-added tax!) that goes into a big beautiful kitty that funds UBI and general nutrition & housing ?

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#107

Post by JumpCrisscross »

gensym wrote: post #55
WillPostForFood wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.

Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.

> Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then

We won a contest against a global superpower, due to administrations stretching across generations executing on a consistently-escalating strategy, and then balanced the budget on the peace dividend. Of course it was great. The point is there wasn’t the option of just doing the 90s in the 60s, 70s or even 80s—it had to be diligently worked towards and sacrificed for. (To be clear, our leaders of those eras, flawed as they were, could ask for those sacrifices.)

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#108

Post by hyperadvanced »

librasteve wrote: post #81
rob74 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real reason is "make number go up". A few years ago, you showed the stock market (or your investors if you weren't listed yet) how amazing a company you were by hiring people like crazy, even if you didn't need them, and giving them all sorts of perks, including (but not limited to) home office. Now, the stock market wants to see blood, so you have to sacrifice people - not because you're actually losing money, b…

this “square wave” effect is driven by interest rates … when the bank rate is very low investors will tolerate high level of gambling on growth (ponzi-like). as soon as money will grow anyway in the bank, then investors demand actual RoI

It’s hard to square this with the post 2024 AI-investment economy. Interest rates have stayed higher longer than expected, while many, many companies (Vercel, Cursor, Wave-whatever that got bought out last year, whatever Alexandr Wang’s thing) got billion dollar valuations with no path to profitability and no revenue.

It seems that ROI has become more important in the last 5 years, but then again you have these Space or Rare Earth shitcos trading at -200x PE while all of their industrial promise is directly undermined by rising costs from AI.

The likely forecast for this year is either rate hikes combined with further labor market deterioration and consumption somehow going negative, or inflation eating up all of the (still non existent) profits from AI mega caps themselves.

It’s hard to see how this ends well without a lowered cost of capital or more interest in taking on capex risk, which seems frankly unlikely. The worst case scenario seems to be a lot of bad debt with nobody except for perhaps Berkshire or China who would be interested or capable when it comes to salvaging it. Armchair economist here, grain of salts a plenty.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#109

Post by xboxnolifes »

ivantop wrote: post #18
hydroplane wrote: post #6

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A gr…

The pandemic over hiring that ended 4 years ago?

I wonder if people will continue blaming things on pandemic over-hiring in 2030.

Re: The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

#110

Post by SubiculumCode »

nozzlegear wrote: post #48
SubiculumCode wrote: post #46

We truly need to put a stop to leaving our citizens defenseless against nation-state propaganda campaigns coming out of China and Russia.

Are you implying this story is Chinese or Russian propaganda?

No. I'm implying that Chinese micro targeted propaganda is stoking fear of AI in the U.S. with the aim of slowing/diminishing our advantage in data center compute in the AI race.
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