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Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

nytimes.com

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Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#151

Post by keeda »

pixelready wrote: post #139
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrial loom cloth is far inferior to artisan made cloth. And yet you'd be dooming all future generations to poverty if you stuck with artisanal cloth production.

Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.

And there should be a daily reminder that as long as we live in a Capitalist society, what befell the Luddites will also befall those that try to resist an economic force of this magnitude.

Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?

How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.

Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#152

Post by Atheros »

bartwr wrote: post #31

I love using AI tools and they are changing my work and life in amazing ways. I cannot imagine going back. And yet, I am more concerned about the social damage due to their widespread use and the amounts of slop they generate. Just this week: - There was an article about a news company faking polls by asking LLMs for answers. - My wife told me that she stopped watching any funny pet videos because 99% now is AI slop…

I think it remains to be seen whether the various AI tools we have today are a net-negative or net-positive for society.

Most inventions are a net positive: The steam engine, vaccines, chimneys.

A few are net-negative: grenades, leaded gasoline, asbestos insulation.

If we can no longer trust that a potential job candidate in a video call actually exists, they will have to be flown in. That's a cost. If we can no longer trust that an employee who wrote a document actually thought about it at all and must be questioned to make sure, that's a cost. Those costs will add up.

A written document or a video essay used to be proof-of-thought and now it's not. If we can't find new proofs of thought, and if AI doesn't get vastly better to the point where we can trust it blindly, then I think this will all be a net-negative.

One of the motivations to build data centers as fast as possible and improve tools as fast as possible may be to get to net-positive before it all gets banned. This article exists. The clock is ticking.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#153

Post by keeda »

justonepost2 wrote: post #4

We are, in the best case scenario, minting a lost generation in real time. This will become increasingly clear over the next 2 years. Meanwhile, simonw and his retiree friends are having the "time of their lives", so that's good I guess :)

My take is "simonw and his retiree friends" spend a lot of their time exploring this disruptive new technology and sharing their learnings (for free!) so that everybody can leverage it too... and yet so many people see that as something bad rather than an opportunity to learn.

Radical changes bring radical opportunities too, so "having the time of their lives" is not necessarily incompatible with "adapting to profound disruption."

Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#154

Post by goalieca »

causal wrote: post #127
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But what's the solution? Ban AI development?

No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future. In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.

Post-labor? There’s a huge gap between slop and Star Trek that we have to bridge first.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#155

Post by Teever »

causal wrote: post #127
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But what's the solution? Ban AI development?

No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future. In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.

I honestly think that we'll start to see a movement where people diagnosed with terminal illnesses like a brain tumour that leave them functional for a few weeks or months before dying within a year will start kamikazing against the ultra wealthy.

People with nothing to lose will feel empowered by taking everything from the people who they feel are responsible for taking everything from them.

There's a chance this kind of thing becomes a social contagion that spreads, much like suicide or school shootings.

I'm not sure what the solution is to it once it starts. I guess people like Thiel won't be able to do antichrist talks at the Vatican anymore.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#156

Post by causal »

goalieca wrote: post #154
causal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future. In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.

Post-labor? There’s a huge gap between slop and Star Trek that we have to bridge first.

> first

Priorities in the wrong order.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#157

Post by causal »

Teever wrote: post #155
causal wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future. In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.

I honestly think that we'll start to see a movement where people diagnosed with terminal illnesses like a brain tumour that leave them functional for a few weeks or months before dying within a year will start kamikazing against the ultra wealthy. People with nothing to lose will feel empowered by taking everything from the people who they feel are responsible for taking everything from them. There's a chance this ki…

That's a pretty extreme take on the current situation IMO, I don't think we're anywhere near things being that bad. But I certainly want to avoid that.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#158

Post by eudamoniac »

enragedcacti wrote: post #62
angelgonzales wrote: post #26

[flagged]

It's quite interesting that your (presumably very representative) survey of young people has unanimously reported 'arbitrary amalgamation of bog-standard right-wing grievances' as the primary issue of our time

Among my sample of friends, who are mostly right wing and successful, crime is literally the primary issue of their time. That's practically the sole problem in their lives. Not sure why their political leanings are relevant. This is what a vast swathe of people actually care about.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#159

Post by jesse_dot_id »

bogzz wrote: post #25
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #18

Yeah, no kidding, the tech bros have utterly botched the rollout of this technology. It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research. Instead, they opted for regulatory capture in lieu of addressing people's concerns, using robber-baron techniques to force data center construction in at-risk communitie…

> It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research. How so? Colloquially, AI currently means LLMs. Why would we revere LLMs as our greatest achievement?

Because you can already fill a datacenter with hyper-productive PhD level autodidactic polymaths and we're still on the ground floor of the technology? These frontier models are like alpha builds and they're already ridiculous. AGI is marketing slop and machine learning doesn't need that promise to be the most impressive achievement in human history in my opinion.

Re: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

#160

Post by Teever »

causal wrote: post #157
Teever wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think that we'll start to see a movement where people diagnosed with terminal illnesses like a brain tumour that leave them functional for a few weeks or months before dying within a year will start kamikazing against the ultra wealthy. People with nothing to lose will feel empowered by taking everything from the people who they feel are responsible for taking everything from them. There's a chance this ki…

That's a pretty extreme take on the current situation IMO, I don't think we're anywhere near things being that bad. But I certainly want to avoid that.

As an outsider looking in I'm pretty sure that these were the kinds of conversations that took place in social media companies after that Health CEO got Luigi'd.

I think that's why you saw the extreme moderation on even the word 'Luigi' or pictures of the character on Reddit -- They were trying to prevent a social contagion scenario.

With that said I'm curious what you think would have to happen in Westernsociety for this kind of thing to take off? The person above paints a pretty bleak picture of AMerica where healthcare is tied to employment and people are facing the prospect of mass unemployment.

Are people just going to sit there and die? Or sit there and watch their family members die while they see the ultra wealthy flaunt their wealth on social media?

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