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Shunning AI is the human choice

thehandbasket.co

311–320 of 572 posts

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dismiss people's legitimate concerns Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.

> It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me Does this hypothetical issue concern you AND the rest of society as a whole as well, or just you? Because there is a big difference between the two cases.

How many people do you require for it to be a legitmate concern? I can show you millions but you will disregard them anyway, because they all have wrong opinions.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#312

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.

Do most people hate because they view it as less efficient means of transportation then by horse? Or that cars replaced their job as a horse keeper?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#314

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#315

The hate around AI is entirely earned by the CEOs of the companies pushing the frontier models and integrating them into social media. Spending time and compute on generative audio and video was incredibly short-sighted. I think it was born of some arrogance that they were speeding towards the inevitability of AGI and now they're stuck with models that are as good as they're going to be due to poisoning, and very exp…

>They probably shouldn't have ignored the public sentiment.

Company goes under and they just start something else.

There's no real consequences. This is a club, not a market.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

> But aren't we glad it happened?

No. Or rather, I wish it happened very differently, and much slower. The rush to make every new city and development "car-friendly" had negative consequences that will last centuries. That's why my city isn't walkable and has awful public transportation, and biking is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the insidious environmental and health effects!

Of course cars have their place in efficient modern transportation, but we would live in a much better world if their development and integration had been slower, more carefully considered, and more criticized.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#317

Every waves of automation are naturally creating resistance, as they tend to make the lives of a large number of people miserable during the transition. Nothing new here. What I find surprising with the anti-AI sentiment is that it seems to be a lot more prevalent among the younger generation. I am not sure why or if this is a new pattern.

[deleted]

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#318
post #195

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back. Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

The people who hate "AI" are correctly understanding it as a political project, not simply a technology. Ali Alkhatib's definition here is clarifying in this regard: https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?

I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#319
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).

There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big…

I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption.

Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#320

Can I ask what the deal is with people saying anti-intellectual things and then finishing it with ", actually"? Where did this originate from from? Is it a shibboleth?

“anti-intellectual” judgment aside, I believe it’s just a meme (in the original definition of the word).
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