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I need you to understand that if you actually believe this, normal people think you are an evil lunatic.
You asked for an optimistic case and he gave you one. One thing I really like about LLMs is that they don't engage in this type of petty deceit where they ask a question and then insult you for answering.
> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
Shouting people down isn’t “open debate”.
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Political conservatives are generally all in on AI. There is some resistance from the “crunchy momma” wings of the conservative movement, but overall political liberals are putting up far more resistance to AI.
Political conservatives (at least in the US) have very little left in common with actual conservatism. They are more like neoliberals, primarily catering to the rich for accumulating wealth. So of course they are in on yet another scheme for cutting costs by screwing over normal workers.
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to…
Setting aside whether a permanent underclass will be an outcome or not - is it not a bit incompatible to simultaneously believe that all jobs will be gone and that a subsistence UBI is necessarily very bad?
The way I see it, if strong AGI really replaces all jobs, then even a subsistence level UBI (by the new post-AGI standards) will be a world with ubiquitous resources and post-scarcity wealth where people pretty much spend their time how they want. Yes, perhaps it might be an "underclass" in the sense that Musk and Altman meanwhile settled Mars with some privatized space colonization, but I might still be orders of magnitudes richer than I am today - so why should I care, except for status games?
It's basically like someone in the pre-industrial age complaining that the industrial revolution will lead to the permanent underclass of people who currently live on welfare in developed countries. But this is surely a wonderful outcome from the pre-industrial peasant's perspective - even poor people in the western world live better than middle age kings!
Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.
Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas. They may not actively use LLMs or even know what they are, but they’re satisfied with Google’s AI overview and they love using voice assistants. These aren’t people from any particular sphere I sought out or which self-se…
My grandma can't tell the difference between reality and AI. My parents and older family members either treat AI as a dog ("wow, look at this fun trick") or, worryingly, as Google.
People younger than about 35 I know dislike AI, ranging from mild annoyance up to passionate hatred, except for the people who are all-in on it. Calling something "slop" causes a fun diverse reaction, with some people offended on behalf of an LLM, and with others poking fun at the slop referenced.
The vast majority simply doesn't seem to care outside of annoyance at AI being shoehorned into everything (but that might as well have been the web 3.0/blockchain/web 2.0/whatever term manages to milk investors).
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It's a rhetorical attempt to tie "those who dislike AI" to "those who dislike immigrants, and we all know they're super-duper evil". It's a relatively cheap trick, badly executed.
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AI is first and foremost a political artefact: https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? The optimistic case is technological deflation. Where goods and services become so cheap, you don't need a lot of money to afford them. If you can have a robot sort packages like, https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/human-intern-beats-figure... Why have a human do that? I don't think there's a person alive whose life g…
OK, and in a world where this technology is broadly available and not controlled by 4-5 companies with an unassailable capital moat, I can see how this could be a good outcome. But that’s not the situation we’re in. For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital t…
This has been the situation for CPUs for decades. We now carry a 1980 cray super computer in our pockets.
>For me to understand this as an “optimistic” case, I need to understand why people believe that absent a need for human workers, there will be any incentive for the people who control all of the capital to keep people alive.
They won't need to engineer a Terminator style genocide of mankind. Man will kill each other in another war, like we always do. Biological imperatives mean we all kill each other until resources are abundant for those left standing. Then the winners of that war have a baby boom, their children are boomers for the next 80 years, and we start all over again.
The optimistic case says the robots are so freakin' good, they create the abundance for us without the need for the killing.
> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
It's not clear to me why they booed him. you think for only asserting predictions that benefit him? Not because they agree on those predictions and don't want that future, blame him for this role in it?
My guess is because of what he's done, or at least perceived to have done, in the area of AI. Because what he said (at least to me) didn't seem boo-worthy, but in the context of who is saying it, I can see it.
Put another way, if someone that the audience liked said the same things, its not clear the person would get booed.
Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to…
Will and agency are primal biological instincts, which a pure intelligence doesn't have. It doesn't want or need anything. Therefore it won't act.
A superintelligence with human primal instincts would be scary indeed, but obviously we don't want to build that.