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

nytimes.com

171–180 of 199 posts

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

#171
post #162
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 profoun…

But everyone can't leverage it too. The technique of feeding money into the slot-machine that generates tokens so that it can maybe generate what you want and you get the results at scale if you have enough money paradigm just isn't accessible to many people. In this context Simonw and Karpathy are starting to look more and more like degenerate gamblers who admonish everyone else for not joining in, while telling us…

My personal take, which seems to be consistent with what these folks are saying, is "OMG there's this huge radioactive asteroid that's going to flatten our world, but its gamma rays also give us weird superpowers, here are some ways to harness those..."

I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs.

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

#172

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 :)

Doubt it. Companies have already begun moving away from AI and back to hiring humans. LLM capabilities were vastly oversold (moreso than the DeepBlue or machine learning memes of prior economic cycles).

After several hundred billions dollars spent on LLMs, they can almost reproduce the capabilities of a partially deaf visually impaired secretary with severe brain damage.

Humans are cheaper, and they can actually learn things. Even the brain-damaged secretary can learn better than an LLM can, and it doesn't cost of hundreds of millions to train one.

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

#174
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bac…

[dead]

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

#175
post #171
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But everyone can't leverage it too. The technique of feeding money into the slot-machine that generates tokens so that it can maybe generate what you want and you get the results at scale if you have enough money paradigm just isn't accessible to many people. In this context Simonw and Karpathy are starting to look more and more like degenerate gamblers who admonish everyone else for not joining in, while telling us…

My personal take, which seems to be consistent with what these folks are saying, is "OMG there's this huge radioactive asteroid that's going to flatten our world, but its gamma rays also give us weird superpowers, here are some ways to harness those..." I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capa…

> I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs

Point me to something real that happens rights now that would support such optimistic vision.

I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.

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

#176
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bac…

> 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?

Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.

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

#177
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it. Would we? Starting a business is easy. Building a profitable business isn't even that hard. Wanting pleasure in our work is what stops us. Running a business generally isn't much fun. We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.

This is completely wrong - Good for you if you think its so easy. I would do almost anything to get out of salary but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit. Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.

> Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.

Then I dare say you've found your market fit. Tomorrow, your task is to start looking for a contractor position doing the exact same thing you are doing now. There's your business.

> but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit.

Not even a single penny? What did these attempts look like? Were you out there knocking on doors offering to weed every flowerbed in the city? Or were you sticking to fun tasks, like programming, that made it feel like you were busy building a business but in actuality were hiding from it?

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

#178
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bac…

> 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? Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.

Where the commenter is right is that luddites didn't have (or had they?) a global competitor more than happy to push their entire system aside. Not that they personally thought about this argument, just that the context and possible consequences were different.

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

#179
post #68
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 we've built something that's (functionally) intelligent, comparable to humans in terms of its ability to exhibit (functional) understanding of complex topics, and produce novel correct output. There's nothing even remotely close to this in human history. This was all science fiction 10 years ago.

Maybe the comparison is imperfect, but: we also built a wonderful, novel and excellent bomb, the atom one, not remotely close to whatever humans did before, yet I'm not totally thrilled by it.

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

#180
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal take, which seems to be consistent with what these folks are saying, is "OMG there's this huge radioactive asteroid that's going to flatten our world, but its gamma rays also give us weird superpowers, here are some ways to harness those..." I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capa…

> I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs Point me to something real that ha…

> I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.

Not really "much power" but more like a viable alternative: in a world where everybody needs LLMs to do their white-collar work, you can't force me to use your paid LLM subscription as my local-running model is close enough.

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