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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#481

Post by throw4847285 »

d_burfoot wrote: post #178

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually…

Ok, but try the same argument with sedentary societies. Those seem "superior" despite all the negative side effects, right? But here comes one of a number of steppe nomad tribes to show up and decimate their "superior" neighbors.

The vast diversity of human societies refuses any kind of rigid hierarchy of development. There are many branching paths, and no paradigm wins for long.

History is a not a game of Civilization.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#482

Post by karmakaze »

satvikpendem wrote: post #395
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.

I (and I assume many others on especially HN) don't consider intellectual "property" as real so there is no "theft" in our minds, so this argument doesn't bear much weight.

The idea of artificial scarcity and property in a capitalistic society runs deep.

It's the reason why copying => theft for them.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#483

Post by BosunoB »

hack1312 wrote: post #282
BosunoB wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.

This is plainly delusional. There already is abundance, global crop lands produce enough calories to feed twice the world’s population[0]. Greed is the reason for inequality and “AI” is not solving that. It is pure wishful utopian thinking to believe that there will be some massive AI-initiated abundance. [0] https://www.oneearth.org/half-the-worlds-food-never-feeds-pe...

Speaking specifically about food insecurity and homelessness in the US, it's not simply greed, it's "just deserts" ideology. It's a belief in the lack of merit of the poor to receive help.

Speaking globally, there are many more barriers to feeding everybody than just abundance, like the other guy said.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#484

Post by _DeadFred_ »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #414
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons we…

> Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's. The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now, so a lot of the issues that came with their ownership and special privileges no longer exist. There is no way that is how this is going to go down with Google et al

AI should fall under libraries. It's benefit/value is derived from the knowledge of humankind.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#485

Post by card_zero »

NoGravitas wrote: post #381
card_zero wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might disagree with it, unexpectedly, even though I'm very lazy and anti-work and would have agreed with it ten years ago. This isn't some they took our jobs stance, either. Thing is, you have this mythical beast, the "dark factory". This exists mainly as way to humiliate the west by suggesting that China is way more developed. One reason that it's unlikely to be substantially real is because of the failure of robo…

You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e.,…

The Musk-esque theory is that robots can do all the drudgery for free, while the economy centers on humans being creative, which in this trope looks like an Elysium with singing and dancing and poetry and painting, and maybe togas.

The core argument is that people don't want to be machines, and shouldn't do mechanical work, and that it's a shame if anybody feels compelled to work like a machine to survive. But then we have the job loss part, in which, because of automation, that person doesn't even have the option of working like a machine, and complains about it.

However, I'm coming round to thinking that the vision of a continual symposium-party is wrong anyway. I think automation can't do all that much, and creativity is needed in even the most mundane and dreary contexts. This means automation is less disruptive that it's purported to be - but is still somewhat disruptive - and the change in the nature of jobs is less of a shift to creativity - but is still a small shift to creativity. The jobs aren't delightful, people are still needed in factories, and there are no togas involved. This is my dreary insight.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#486

Post by BosunoB »

OptionOfT wrote: post #468
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 us…

Yeah but the tech doesn't end here. Sure, it doesn't make anybody particularly happy that the tech started here. It's kind of a bummer to automate creative labor that gets social esteem so early on.

But that's not the point. Where the tech ends is human-level intelligence that can do any task as well as a human and more cheaply.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#487

Post by jayGlow »

bsza wrote: post #306
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...

It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.

chips limiting what kind of software can be run sounds absolutely awful and would be a huge overstep in government power. once I buy a piece of hardware I should be able to run whatever I want on it.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#488

Post by jayGlow »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #352
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons we…

> is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM No it won't. Natural language manipulation is never a bottleneck in STEM.

I'm fairly certain LLMs have been used to solve some novel problems already.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/04/17/ai-solv...

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#489

Post by pelasaco »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #276
pelasaco wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?

Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually. If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that w…

I was more thinking, Taxi drivers that hate cars, or people who hate their work but still do it, the whole life.. but yeah your answer is good too lol :)

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#490

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #162
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Nobody knows where it works A large percentage of code being written today is AI generated. If none of it worked it wouldn’t be so. > This is where it definitely does not work. The person said it’s clearly working for their friends’ purposes. That means it works.

> A large percentage of code being written today is $TOOL generated.

This has been true for the last 60 years.

Generating more technical debt is never a difficult problem in software development.

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