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Maybe not the best example? The luddites were skilled weavers that had their livelihoods destroyed by automation. The govt deployed 12,000 troops against the luddites, executed dozens after show trials, and made machine breaking a capital offense.
Is that what you have planned for me?
I remember when Covid got out of control in China a lot of people around me [in NY] had this energy of "so what it'll never come to us." I'm not saying that they believed that, or had some rational opinion, but they had an emotional energy of "It's not big deal." The emotional response can be much slower than the intellectual response, even if that fuse is already lit and the eventuality is indisputable.
Some people are good at not having that disconnect. They see the internet in 1980 and they know that someday 60 years from now it'll be the majority of shopping, even though 95% of people they talk to don't know what it is and laugh about it.
AI is a little-bit in that stage... It's true that most people know what it is, but our emotional response has not caught up to the reality of all of the implications of thinking machines that are gaining 5+ iq points per year.
We should be starting to write the laws now.
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…
Can confirm. We don’t know if AI really is about to make programmers who write code by hand obsolete, but we sure as hell fear our competitors will ship features 10x faster than us. What is the logical next step?? Invest lots of money on AI or keep hoping it’s a fad and risk being left in the dust, even if you think that risk is fairly small?
There's no way any LLM code generator can replace a moderately complex system at this point and looking at the rate of progress this hasn't improved recently at all. Getting one to reason about a simple part of a business domain is still quite difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
Many users don't want to acknowledge this about the company making their fav ai
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…
The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening
None of our much-promoted AI initiatives have resulted in any ROI. In fact they have cost a pile of cash so far and delivered nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also what OpenAI’s “safety” angle was all about. “Ohhhh this is so scary! It’s so powerful we have to be very careful with it!” (Buy our stuff or be left behind, Mr. CEO, and invest in us now or lose out)
Anthropic has been the most histrionic about this, with their big blog post about how they need to make sure their models don't feel like they are being emotionally abused by the users being the most fatuous example.
They're trying to get government to hand them a moat. Spoilers... There's no moat.
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…
The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening
> To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless.
It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless."
My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.
> Microsoft’s AI CEO is saying AI is going to take everybody’s job. And Sam Altman is saying that AI will wipe out entire categories of jobs. ANd Matt Shumer is saying that AI is currently like Covid in January 2020—as in, “kind of under the radar, but about to kill millions of people”. > I legitimately feel like I am going insane when I hear AI technologists talk about the technology. They’re supposed to market it.…
The marketing is clearly effecting individual developers, too. There's a mass psychosis happening
This is where the misrepresentation... no, the lie comes in. It always does in these "sensible middle" posts! the genre requires flattening both sides into dumber versions of themselves to keep the author positioned between two caricatures. Supremely done, OP.
If you read Matt's original article[0] you see he was saying something very different. Not "AI is going to kill lots of people" but that we're at the point on an exponential curve where correct modeling looks indistinguishable from paranoia to anyone reasoning from base rates of normal experience. The analogy is about the epistemic position of observers, not about body counts.