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Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Hence why I can't stand such techno-optmism, apparently most folks live in an ideal world free of economics.
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Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires. The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the sa…
Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into transportation or health care/life expectency…
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Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now . All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market. And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistan…
Advocate or not, it’s here to stay. And if you’re not adjusting to it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Last week I did the amount of work that would’ve taken me give or take a month. A significant part of it was writing an API client for a system I needed to use. Pretty run of the mill stuff. Doing this ‘by hand’ just takes time. Go look at the docs, type out your data structures, wire things up for the new call,…
This is the future to prepare, not AI generating a couple of files.
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Nobody sane and smart I know is advocating for AI now . All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. Our megacorp very effectively blocked all of this and we don't have anything internal yet, but we are in specific market. And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... well no, show me some hard facts and we can start building trust. Sure assistan…
> All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. The parallels with crypto are amazing. > And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with Claude, etc. It is very tiresome indeed.
Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
I’m honestly very excited about this type of work. The benefits to society - better healthcare for less money, humans with their beautiful, creative brains not spending 40 hours a week looking at documents unnecessarily - are incredibly obvious. The flipside of this progress is, of course, that we have to overthrow the extractive capitalist system we have in place. We’re able to do this work in spite of that wasteful, inefficient system, not because of it.
I think the only thing that will actually push people to overthrow it is exactly the type of work I’m doing. Much like the first industrial revolution begat our first efforts at creating a more socialist, just, and democratic society (eg, like Fiorello La Guardia for instance). The benefits to this the first time were extremely tangible.
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I personally think it's polarized, and either the Pentti Linkola/Ted K way of thinking that the industrial revolution (or maybe even the agricultural revolution) were a detriment to humanity is correct and there is no turning it around within that framework, or all tech progress will reach an ultimately good equilibrium, though will be unstable and have mistakes along the way. I definitely lean towards the latter. Wh…
Regulation is violence? sorry for putting my socialist hat on, but free market is efficient, so efficient that without regulation it’ll optimise away human happiness and find a way to turn tears into profits. Regulation is basically saying that you can make money in ways that benefits the humanity also, at least in theory. Lobbying and corrupt regulators muddy the waters
Does anyone else find techno-optimism really depressing? I guess one for the more common reason that it’s displacing humanity with technology, but the second reason is just you can’t get excited about a hype that is unlikely to manifest. It feels very ungrounded from tangible benefits to society.
Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires. The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the sa…
Disconnect between progress being done (ie. alphafold) and trying to infer answer from some historic stats on r&d investment, ratios, their past estimated impact etc. is... just weird.
It's also funny that the whole ai itself together with constant breakthroughs is r&d.
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> All keep saying 'one day', 'soon' etc. The parallels with crypto are amazing. > And basically all I saw so far was a snake oil from people trying to push it or benefit from it, even here. Trust me bro... Cue some dude chiming in on how they are 1000% more productive now and wrote 100 apps in a weekend with Claude, etc. It is very tiresome indeed.
Except this time is quite real for some jobs, maybe programming will take a few more years, but for artistic fields, it is already here. Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
Oh it was very real during crypto hype cycle too. The crypto people were very annoying with it.
> Indie devs now using AI generated assets instead of hiring artists is quite common.
I would imagine it is fine for some concept art, based on my experimentation with multiple models for Stable Diffusion.
For generating actual assets that are consistent? I am highly skeptical. Unless we are talking about bottom of the barrel indie games.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replacing human labor with technology is usually a wonderful thing if the gains are generally realized. It means less time spent in 'toil' and more time to pursue one's true interests and desires. The reason it feels depressing is that if recent history is any guide, 0.0001% of the human race will receive almost all the benefit. A tiny number of richer-than-rich will get even richer and everyone else will stay the sa…
Agreed,only the super rich will get cars err electricity err I mean refrigerators err I mean personal computers err I mean mobile devices To be fair I think there's a lot of truth in your statement in the short term (and arguably in the long). But in the 'long' term , it sure does look like revolutionary technology makes everyday peoples life better (I didn't even go into transportation or health care/life expectency…
The nice things from (A) don't necessarily require what co-occurred with (B). There is nothing in the physics or materials of a refrigerator which requires the assembler to have been paid less than the CEO.