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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#451

Post by kjkjadksj »

BosunoB wrote: post #165
frotaur wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people disagree with this. The main problem is that labour has been what allows regular people to have negociating power with those who own most of the capital. People are worried that if they lose this leverage, nothing is stopping the few who have most of the capital to just disregard the needs of the masses.

Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation. I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just v…

When the mine closes, democracy does not save the town. It still becomes a ghost town. Democracy cannot work upstream against fundamental market forces.

Every industry is being pitched as becoming a ghost town. Democracy will not save us. We will all die in the future and not be replaced. This is the end of our line in this century. I hope you are proud of how far we’ve come because this is the end for us. There will be no economic justification for humanity quite soon and we will likely be slaughtered to eliminate latent variability.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#452

Post by jsbisviewtiful »

frizlab wrote: post #176
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #141

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…

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

Everything you said plus now these out-of-touch and incredibly rich CEOs are shoving it in our faces that they are determined to take away our income while pocketing even more riches.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#453

Post by WorldMaker »

satvikpendem wrote: post #399
palmotea wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations. I also hate it because: 1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEO…

If you're a programmer or (physical) engineer you've been automating other people's labor all this time, it's ironically hypocritical that now that engineers are the ones being automated that they cry foul.

I left one employer in part because I thought some of their automation of almost-but-not-quite minimum wage jobs was unethical to me. In Software, we don't have an industry-wide ethics board that people trust, so the complaints about individual automations remain quieter and personal. It is entirely possible for people in these conversations to not be "hypocritical" in their relationship to this topic versus their personal ethics.

It's definitely hypocritical at the "industry ethics" level, but again we don't have an ethics board and all we have are personal and public opinions. (Arguably this is one of the current problems with AI is that there is no ethics board for software so instead we must debate this in the court of public opinion, such as HN comments.)

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#454

Post by saulpw »

paulsutter wrote: post #284

If AI is overblown and permanently flawed, there is nothing to worry about. If AI becomes as powerful as some fear/hope, productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living. Costs for housing, healthcare, education will collapse, and there is nothing to worry about. This article somehow tries to straddle both positions, that AI is fundamentally flawed and can never…

There's this other case, which I think many people believe, that AI becomes as powerful as we fear/hope, and productivity is so high that only a few people need to work, but the superior standard of living is enjoyed by only those few people. We don't make the transition to post-capitalism and our economic dystopia is exacerbated and further entrenched.

The future may be even less evenly distributed.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#455

Post by ThinkingGuy »

velcrovan wrote: post #59

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 difference between generative AI and math is that math gives everybody the same answer every time.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#456

Post by drdrey »

NietTim wrote: post #87

Some people just want to hate. I'll never understand it. The world is beautiful and so is AI. That doesn't mean they don't have ugly sides too, but choosing to focus on the ugly sides is a choice.

it's tribal, it feels good to rally against a common enemy

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#457

Post by tavavex »

NietTim wrote: post #441
tavavex wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could ignore the ugly sides in 2018 or 2022, when the tech consisted of fun toys that existed alongside everything else and not instead of it. In 2026, unless you're wealthy or are one of the few that don't need to use the internet to live, focusing on the ugly sides is not optional. When the ugly parts are coming for your employment, community, ability to own anything, your favorite spaces on the internet and yo…

Your argument clearly comes from a doomer perspective, your employment will be gone (Maybe, but you will find new employment), your community will be gone (?), your ability to own anything will be gone (?????) > your favorite spaces on the internet and your power and voice in society(??), you can't just turn away and say that you'll just ignore tha I've clearly been on the internet longer then you, all of my favorite…

I will admit that, being more directly impacted by the way AI is deployed, I have some 'harsh' opinions. You're not required to agree with them, and the point I was making wasn't to win you over to a different opinion. (Although, despite using very strong wording to describe those effects, surely you can see the points people are making about the impacts of centralizing power, diluting the internet with botted content or contributing to the increased rent-ification of the web without just drawing question marks, right?)

The point is that, in acknowledging that there is a valid 'doomer' perspective to begin with, you're undermining your initial argument - namely, that the opposition simply likes to dislike things, and that their arguments have little depth or merit because they're only cherrypicking or making things up to serve some kind of hidden thirst for negativity.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#458

Post by dspillett »

mancerayder wrote: post #445
dspillett wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI…

Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone. Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have b…

> Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work.

The/A point is, not everything works the same way for everyone.

> working from a rainforest or the beach

Would you really want to turn somewhere you enjoy into where you work. I at least go into the office so I have some work/home separation (though I'm effectively remote as the rest of the team I work with is usually elsewhere).

> Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for.

Actually working with people, not just occasionally seeing names and faces on a screen or in future largely interacting with mostly just this one odd individual called Claude, is something I'm seriously considering taking a massive pay cut⁰ for. AI isn't the reason, but it is the extra bale of hay that might finish me off in this respect.

I'm not even really a massive “people person”, I avoid town at busy times, avoid big cities aside from the occasional tourist trip, I'm not even happy in a pub if it gets too crowded, and really fear being centre of attention in more than a tiny group, etc. But connecting with remote people feels so fake sometimes, and I have to concentrate to care about them or even keep them in my head at all¹ once the mail is sent or the call is ended, that they might as well be LLMs.

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[0] at very least 50%, even allowing for differing tax allowances meaning I'd keep more of the gross pay

[1] which takes a draining amount of mental effort over time

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#459

Post by xigoi »

moffkalast wrote: post #233
frizlab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

Piracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces. Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they…

> If something can be copied infinite times

Except it can’t. LLM crawlers DDoS websites so that no one else can access them.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#460

Post by WorldMaker »

vrganj wrote: post #349
frizlab wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.

Don't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations! AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave. That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with…

> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further.

Which is particularly wild and frustrating given how many of their "textbooks" were about the consequences and how bad they can get. The very first tale to create the English word "robot" [1] was about the horrible consequences of building a new class of slave labor. Science fiction has been writing "Robot revolt" and "AI revolt" consequences for more than a century since.

A lot of these TESCREAL [2] types caught up in these religious views of AGI have ignored the actual plots of the books they claim to read for excitement and passion about their visions for the future. To be fair, not understanding your own source books seems pretty common across religions, but seems especially weird in this case how many of these "canon" "Don't Build the Torment Nexus" works are accessible to everyone, in a modern vernacular, have major film adaptations or films based on their themes, and plenty of good Wikipedia summaries of how building the thing destroyed civilization or the world or the galaxy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

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