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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#461

Post by saltcured »

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #345
52-6F-62 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you would be banning trains if they were built to just run smack into the centre of town squares loaded with bombs, rendering the cities to dust, as a part of their design and boasted about by the owners. At least until the maniacally evil train ownership debacle was better organized to prevent such harm in their core application.

I think that perhaps your perception of the impacts of data centers is a bit over the top.

I parsed that wrong (better?) as running smack (heroin) into the center of town

And so I thought it was a reference to the overall AI psychosis, FOMO, and dopamine marketing. That is the big impact that bothers me, regardless of whether this deployment uses massive new datacenters. It is a toxic social impact even if it somehow reduced atmospheric CO2 with every token.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#462

Post by archagon »

hnthrow0287345 wrote: post #315
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…

>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.

If the powerful try to push this through to its logical conclusion, they might see an actual revolution.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#463

Post by mpalmer »

kalleboo wrote: post #212
splittydev wrote: post #2

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.

AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight. We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, a…

    We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)
FWIW the people saying this tend to be remarkably ignorant.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#464

Post by senderista »

jononor wrote: post #404
senderista wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What new technology does not reduce the power of labor in some way?

Communication tech/tools enable more people to collaborate. It increases ability for labor that is far away from high value markets to contribute. Same goes for shipping tech wrt physical goods. On the global scale that is empowering the labor class. Any productivity tool that individual laborers can purchase also (and that still needs the worker) is probably good for labor, overall.

Seems to me that global collaboration tech devalues local labor?

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#465

Post by giancarlostoro »

tavavex wrote: post #383
giancarlostoro wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI cod…

The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make prod…

> It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before.

Correct it is not, but there was also some better tooling and frameworks before. We used to have RAD native tooling, now we have... Electron.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#466

Post by WorldMaker »

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 problem is that isn't just math, the problem is more specifically one of the weakest maths for our entire species: Probability and Statistics. Humans as a general rule are terrible at Probability and Statistics.

Being angry at LLMs isn't hating math, it is hating slot machines and the human inclination to lose everything to them because the Gambler's Fallacy affects us all, unfortunately deeply.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#467

Post by iAMkenough »

joquarky wrote: post #401
afavour wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. Not without a concrete answer for how we all continue to survive and thrive when our jobs are replaced. And that's the part the AI boosters are silent on, beyond vague notions of UBI.

UBI is not a solution either, as it will inevitably fall into the same traps and favoritism as tax laws.

Agreed. Sam Altman’s vision for UBI is basically “bring back company towns.”

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#468

Post by OptionOfT »

BosunoB wrote: post #93

Counterpoint: Work sucks. Of the billions of workers on the planet, the number of them who love their job and would truly be doing it even if they didn't need to in order to survive is probably in the low single digits. Hating work is good, wanting it to all be automated is good. It is a pro-human flourishing stance, whereas keeping the majority of humanity laboring in jobs they dislike just to survive is against hum…

While that may be true, all the automation that's happening is not making people work less.

Except by firing them, which is absolutely devastating, especially in places with 0 social protection like the USA.

And for other people the workload has actually increased because we're being pushed left and right to use AI to go FASTER, yet over and over we see proof that we need to validate EVERYTHING.

Automation is only useful if we use part of our brain to do something ELSE. Yet as a Software Engineer I cannot do that (full disclosure: I don't mind, I like to engineer and code).

But from a managerial point of view there is this aura of 'AI will solve all our problems', whereas what we're seeing is a deluge of slop where the people producing the slop THINK they're helping, yet they are parasitizing on the time of the people who validate the PRs.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#469

Post by WorldMaker »

satvikpendem wrote: post #402
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't goi…

Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.

Juicero had customers that thought it was useful. Both "smoothie juicers" and "smoothie subscriptions" were big product categories equally before and after Juicero tried to unite them with a technological middleman. Kuerig, the Juicero of coffee, remains quite active and profitable (and wasteful).

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#470

Post by Paradigma11 »

asklq wrote: post #90
splittydev wrote: post #2

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.

It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency. Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who…

Of course these graduates have agency. So do the companies not employing them. Telling them to deal with it is well meant advice, not an attempt to coerce them into compliance. To be honest most likely nobody cares deeply if they take that advice or not.
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