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As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
One of the notable figures in that, Carly Fiorina, made a point to “forget the engineers”.
Ex-CEO of Google telling a crowd of young graduates entering society, "You will work for AI." Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on." This is not only about AI the technology, it's the deserved anger against the privileged and powerful for their utter mismanagement of society. The youth sees through the bulls…
>If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on This doesn't even work as a metaphor. I absolutely would not jump on the chance to ride on a literal rocket ship without asking a hell of a lot of questions first!
The whole speech was probably written by AI anyway
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
Speaking just for myself: I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix. I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the promp…
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
For one thing, we were promised AI and we got... a chatbot. So it pretty much starts with the lies and scams. You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For one thing, we were promised AI and we got... a chatbot. So it pretty much starts with the lies and scams. You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
What kind of AI were you expecting that wouldn't be "a chatbot"?
Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses.
But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness.
Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people.
If it systematically degrades our humanity.
I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it.
Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life.
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That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper.
So the entire effort was for... what?
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
Personally, yes.
I'm against anything that seems poised to devalue human life
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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No need to be so dismissively pathological. If you disagree, that's one thing, but this reads as 'look at this sad, crazy fool' when this is a pretty understandable reaction to feeling alienated by the way in which LLMs are being forcefully pushed in both personal and professional domains and the oft ensuing breakdown in human to human communication. 'Who does this technology serve?' is a valid question and 'not us'…
Instead, I'm pointing out that it's an extreme overreaction and histrionic viewpoint that is shared by a lot growing number of people, who have been living in this same world for the last 10 years. Now we've got generative AI all the sudden it's "I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate, I'm against all of it"
In every fucking thread.
It seems like the only thing we can talk about is how cool this technology is and how much a growing number of vocal people really don't like it.
"Not liking ai" is becoming a demographic of people that are just as annoying as the people that want to shove llms down your throat.
Imagine trying to have a rational conversation where someone up top has declared their absolutist position with 7 declarations of hate
How uninteresting: welcome to hackernews. You can't talk about the class struggle, and you lose the ability to vouch for things for trying to keep reporting of fascist downslide in the west unflagged.
But you can post screeds against a technology on a technology forum and people just fucking looovvee it.
As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
We will need fewer humans, basically. But we already have the humans and there are many of them, and they’ll be more jobless than before. There’s fear with that. And that’s not irrational. But I think it’s misdirected. You aren’t going to stop AI. People should instead focus on breaking up monopolies, taxing the largest corporations (soon: Anthropic) more than smaller ones, and maybe UBI for citizens or something like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower prog…
There was also a decent amount of enthusiasm for the "long tails" because with unlimited virtual shelf space, you could find products that would not have enough mass appeal to the average consumer to justify their space on physical shelves. For instance, Netflix would loan you a DVD of almost any movie but Blockbuster only stocked the middle of the bell curve.
When Amazon was launched, I immediately started to use it to get books that were impossible to find at bookstores near me. Similarly for various computer components that are less frequently used by typical users or even certain kinds of clothes or accessories needed for special activities, for which there were no nearby shops.
I have never been a typical consumer, so it had always been very difficult for me to find what I wanted at local shops, thus the appearance of online shopping was really great for me.