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This is not the future

blog.mathieui.net

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Re: This is not the future

#151

Post by tinco »

lekevicius wrote: post #28

I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple: > Tiktok is not inevitable. TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in…

The author doesn't mean that the technologies weren't inevitable in the absolute sense. They mean that it was not inevitable that anyone should use those technologies. It's not inevitable that they will use Tiktok, and it is not inevitable for anyone, I've never used Tiktok, so the author is right in that regard.

If you disavow short form video as a medium altogether, something I'm strongly considering, then you can. It does mean you have to make sacrifices, for example Youtube doesn't let you disable their short form video feature so it is inevitable for people who choose they don't want to drop Youtube. That is still a choice though, so it is not truly inevitable.

The larger point is that there are always people pushing some sort of future, sketching it as inevitable. But the reality is that there always remains a choice, even if that choice means you have to make sacrifices.

The author is annoyed at people throwing the towel in the ring and declaring AI is inevitable, when the author apparently still sees a path to not tolerating AI. Unfortunately the author doesn't really constructively show that path, so the whole article is basically a luddite complaint.

Re: This is not the future

#152

Post by mirekrusin »

acedTrex wrote: post #137
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

> Does it matter? Like how does it matter? It matters because the amount of influence something has on you is directly attributable to the amount of human effort put into it. When that effort is removed so to is the influence. Influence does not exist independently of effort. All the people yapping about LLM keep fundamentally not grasping that concept. They think that output exists in a pure functional vacuum.

Maybe they're just trying to say that robo taxis look like the future, not bike taxis?

Re: This is not the future

#153

Post by terminalshort »

everdrive wrote: post #143
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #119

I understand artists etc. Talking about AI in a negative sense, because they don’t really get it completely, or just it’s against their self interest which means they find bad arguments to support their own interest subconsciously. However tech people who thinks AI is bad, or not inevitable is really hard to understand. It’s almost like Bill Gates saying “we are not interested in internet”. This is pretty much being…

I think we're all just sick of having everything upended and forced on us by tech companies. This is true even if it is inevitable. It occurred to me lately that modern tech and the modern internet has sort of turned into something which is evil in the way that advertising is evil. (this is aside from the fact of course that the internet is riddled with ads) Modern tech is 100% about trying to coerce you: you need to…

> you need to buy X, you need to be outraged by X

Well you don't, and no tech company can force you to.

> you must change X in your life or else fall behind

This is not forced on you by tech companies, but by the rest of society adopting that tech because they want to. Things change as technology advances. Your feeling of entitlement that you should not have to make any change that you don't want to is ridiculous.

Re: This is not the future

#154

Post by alnwlsn »

cons0le wrote: post #27

>Your computer changing where things are on every update is not inevitable. This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the internet now. I don't care about your "U""X" front end garbage. I highly prefer text based sites like this

As my family's computer guy, my dad complains to me about this. And there's no satisfactory answer I can give him. My mom told me last year she is "done learning new technology" which seems like a fair goal but maybe not a choice one can make.

You ever see those "dementia simulator" videos where the camera spins around and suddenly all the grocery store aisles are different? That's what it must be like to be less tech literate.

Re: This is not the future

#155

Post by davidw »

I feel like it's time for a new direction in tech. Open source was a lot of fun (because I was young), but then it sort of became the default for a lot of infrastructure. I liked PG's take on startups and some cool ones came out of that era. But now the whole thing is collapsing on itself and "Silicon Valley" is broadly becoming disliked if not reviled by a lot of people, with cartoonish figures like Musk, or Joe Lonsdale calling for public hangings. The sense of wonder and innovation feels gone to me. It's still out there somewhere, though, I think, and it'd be nice to recover some of that. LLM's owned by megacorps aren't really where it's at for me - I want to see small teams in garages making something new and fun.

Re: This is not the future

#156

Post by asveikau »

nostrademons wrote: post #58
croes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. I doubt that. There is a reason the videos get longer again. So people could have ignored the short form from the beginning. And wasn’t the matching algorithm the teal killer feature that amazed people, not the length of the videos?

I've got a hypothesis that the reason short-form video like TikTok became dominant is because of the decline in reading instruction (eg. usage of whole-word instruction over phonics) that started in 1998-2000. The timing largely lines up: the rise of video content started around 2013, just as these kids were entering their teenage years. Media has significant economies of scale and network effects (i.e. it is much mo…

I recognize this is very anecdotal (your observation and mine), but my gen alpha daughter approaching the teenage phase always has her head in a book. She also has a very short attention span.

Re: This is not the future

#157

Post by vegadw »

titzer wrote: post #112
vegadw wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Did you just complain about modern technology taking power away from users only to post an AI generated song about it? You know, the thing taking away power from musicians and filling up all modern digital music libraries with garbage? There's some cognitive dissonance on display there that I'm actually finding it hard to wrap my head around.

> Did you just complain...only to post an AI generated song about it? Yeah, I absolutely did. Only I wrote the lyrics and AI augmented my skills by giving it a voice. I actually put significant effort into that one; I spent a couple hours tweaking it and increasing its cohesion and punchiness, iterating with ideas and feedback from various tools. I used the computer like a bicycle for my mind, the way it was intended…

It didn't augment your skills, it replaced skills you lack. If I generate art using DallE or Stable Diffusion, then edit in Krita/Photoshop/etc. it doesn't suddenly cover up the fact that I was unable to draw/paint/photograph the initial concept. It didn't augment my skills, it replaced them. If you generate "music" like that, it's not augmenting your poetry that you wish to use as lyrics - which may or may not be of good quality in it's own right - it replaced your ability to make music with it.

Computers are meant to be tools to expand our capabilities. You didn't do that. You replaced them. You didn't ride a bike, you called an Uber because you never learned to drive, or you were too lazy to do it for this use.

AI can augment skills by allowing for creative expressions - be it with AI stem separation, neural-network based distortion effects, etc. But the difference is those are tools to be used together with other tools to craft a thing. A tool can be fully automated - but then, if it is, you are no longer a artist. No more than someone that knows how to operate a CNC machine but not design the parts.

This is hard for some people to understand, especially those with an engineering or programming background, but there is a point to philosophy. Innate, valuable knowledge in how a thing was produced. If I find a stone arrow head buried under the dirt on land I know was once used for hunting by native Americans, that arrow head has intrinsic value to me because of its origin. Because I know it wasn't made as a replica and because I found it. There is a sliding scale, shades of gray here. An arrow head I had verified was actually old but which I did not find is still more valuable than one I know is a replica. Similarly, you can, I agree, slowly un-taint an AI work with enough input, but not fully. Similarly, if an digital artist painted something by hand then had StableDiffusion inpaint a small region as part of their process, that still bothers many, adds a taint of that tool to it because they did not take the time to do what the tool has done and mentally weigh each pixel and each line.

By using Suno, you're firmly in the "This was generated for me" side of that line for most people, certainly most musicians. That isn't riding a bike. That's not stretching your muscles or feeling the burn of the creative process. It's throwing a hundred dice, leaving the 6's up, and throwing again until they're all 6's. Sure, you have input, but I hardly see it as impressive. You're just a reverse centaur: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11...

Re: This is not the future

#158

Post by CGMthrowaway »

rmah wrote: post #120
nostrademons wrote: post #38

I think a more accurate and more useful framing is: Game theory is inevitable . Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives. The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that y…

The statement "Game theory is inevitable. Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives." implies that the "actors" are humans. But that's not what game theory assumes. Game theory just provides a mathematical framework to analyze outcomes of decisions when parts of the system have different goals. Game theory does not claim to predict human behavior (humans make mistakes,…

A practical formula:

1) Identify coordination failures that lock us into bad equilibria, e.g. it's impossible to defect from the online ads model without losing access to a valuable social graph

2) Look for leverage that rewrites the payoffs for a coalition rather than for one individual: right-to-repair laws, open protocols, interoperable standards, fiduciary duty, reputation systems, etc.

3) Accept that heroic non-participation is not enough. You must engineer a new Schelling point[1] that makes a better alternative the obvious move for a self-interested majority

TLDR, think in terms of the algebra of incentives, not in terms of squeaky wheelism and moral exhortation

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

Re: This is not the future

#159

Post by munificent »

terminalshort wrote: post #150
munificent wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like how does it matter? If I look at a piece of art that was made by a human who earned money for making that art, then it means an actual real human out there was able to put food on their table. If I look at a piece of "art" produced by a generative AI that was trained on billions of works from people in the previous paragraph, then I have wasted some electricity even further enriching a billionaire and encourag…

When you consider the inputs, human art uses much more electricity than the bit of inference that AI art takes.

Yes, but that electricity consumption benefits an actual person.

I'm so surprised that I often find myself having to explain this to AI boosters but people have more value than computers.

If you throw a computer in a trash compactor, that's a trivial amount of e-waste. If you throw a living person in a trash compactor, that's a moral tragedy.

Re: This is not the future

#160

Post by dvlsg »

delichon wrote: post #61
jasonshen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be saving money but wood smoke is very much harmful to your lungs and heart according to the American Lung and American Heart Associations + the EPA. There's a good reason why we've adopted modern heating technologies. They may have other problems but particulate pollution is not one of them. > For people with underlying heart disease, a 2017 study in the journal Environmental Research linked increased partic…

I acknowledge that risk. But I think it is outweighed by the savings, exercise and reduced fire danger. And I shouldn't discount the value to me of living in light clothing in winter when I burn wood, but heavily dressed to save money when burning propane. To stop me you'd have to compel me. This is not a small thing for me. By burning wood instead of gas I gain a full week of groceries per month all year! I acknowle…

Wood smoke can go beyond your own home and land on your neighbors, depending on where you live.
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