Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

honest-broker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 90 posts

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#51

Post by AndrewOMartin »

jlangenauer wrote: post #22
keiferski wrote: post #5

I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened, but in the last decade or so, the message coming from the tech industry has been less "technology will improve your life and help you be a better human being" and more "technology will replace you as a human being and make you obsolete." I think this is a big, big mistake and a large reason why AI specifically and the tech industry in general is being perceived negatively. S…

Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."

This matches my feelings. It seems that I used to believe there would be cool and powerful tools for more and more things, but now I'm expecting recurring subscriptions on ever simpler stuff until I'm paying by the character (plus a monthly sub) to type into notepad.

Most likely this was always the case, just a bit bigger and obvious now. I comfort myself with the belief that the number of cool and powerful tools released under properly free licenses can only grow, even if they proportion shrinks.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#52

Post by guappa »

red_admiral wrote: post #46
guappa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that. So you don't sound too correct.

With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution. There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really r…

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchinaggio

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#53

Post by PeterStuer »

doktrin wrote: post #29
PeterStuer wrote: post #23

One has to wonder wether those same people also boo when pundits praise advanced automation in factories. Feels like they suddenly discover luddism when the automation is coming into their own backyard.

> Feels like they suddenly discover luddism when the automation is coming into their own backyard. Sounds to me like you're describing a broadly universal human trait. I for one certainly can't claim with a straight face to always place the concerns of others on a fully level footing with my own. Can you?

Nope. Guilty as charged guv. Admittedly one of the drivers that got my naive 15 yo interested in AI in the early 80's was the hope of eliminating the need for 'work' and tbh, especially my own future work (not AI, as that would be my hobby). :)

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#54

Post by vanviegen »

doktrin wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering at the CTO level, sure. Coding? It’s looking like the chess versus go of jobs. My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop. > My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely. The broad point you're conveying is…

I don't think ski instructors are safe from AI over the next ten years. It already seems quite feasable on indoor skiing treadmills (which are getting pretty popular for lessons), and would be enabled on actual slopes with some heads-up display and body sensors/cameras.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#55

Post by maxerickson »

doktrin wrote: post #43
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineering at the CTO level, sure. Coding? It’s looking like the chess versus go of jobs. My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely.

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop. > My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely. The broad point you're conveying is…

So the idea is that a massive increase in productivity will reduce economic production?

Or is the idea that we will continue to organize our society around the ever more pointless concentration of wealth?

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#56

Post by doktrin »

red_admiral wrote: post #46
guappa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serfs might decide to kill the local lord. And most local lords didn't have a huge standing army to prevent that. So you don't sound too correct.

With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution. There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really r…

> peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows

The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse killer).

All this to say, it's IMO a mischaracterization to imply the peasants in the aforementioned peasants revolt held the military edge relative to the crown and its allies. After the initial shock of the uprising, they were a clear underdog matched against a well resourced and ruthless opponent.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#57

Post by red_admiral »

doktrin wrote: post #56
red_admiral wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of Switzerland, this didn't tend to go too well in the middle ages - the early modern age was the first time this became viable "at scale", hence the French Revolution. There were plenty of earlier cases of one family of minor nobility killing another family of minor nobility and taking over their farmland and serfs, but successful peasant revolts that led to a change in the hierarchy were really r…

> peasants armed and trained with knight-killing longbows The longbow's reputation as a hard-counter to heavy cavalry is, I think, a little context dependent. The famous set pieces like Poitiers, Agincourt, Crecy all featured favorable terrain - and in the case of Agincourt, favorable weather - ideal for massed fire into predictable funnels (where, strictly speaking, the longbow served first and foremost as a horse k…

I agree entirely. Even with the longbow (or crossbow), a peasant uprising could maybe kill a few local lords and knights, but most of the time they would then find themselves very much the underdog against the forces that would be mobilized in response. We have to wait until gunpowder (for example Jan Zizka's Hussites - and even that was more an exception that proves the rule) for peasants, on average, to have a decent chance.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#58

Post by doktrin »

maxerickson wrote: post #55
doktrin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My bartender and ski instructors’ careers are secure. Both of these jobs - particularly the latter but where I live also the former - rely on a heavy surplus of disposable income sloshing around the economy. Once the money stops flowing the home stills start and the ski trips stop. > My friend whose ten year old stayed indoors for a few years to play around on REPL, less surely. The broad point you're conveying is…

So the idea is that a massive increase in productivity will reduce economic production? Or is the idea that we will continue to organize our society around the ever more pointless concentration of wealth?

Are you asking me what I personally believe, or what the GP meant? I don't want to put words in their mouth, but stating that bartending is future-proof while white collar work isn't paints the picture of a future with more inequality and concentration of wealth rather than less.

Maybe I'm being overly broad in my interpretation, because they did specifically single out "coding" - but having personally worked both in and out of tech I don't really see non-dev "desk jobs" as having any particular moat against automation (and potentially even less than devs, which admittedly means I disagree with the likes of Jensen Huang).

So, when programmers go - they won't go alone. At that point it's reasonable to ask what kind of human labor will be marketable enough to command upward-mobility salary tiers, or if the 99.9% are perpetually relegated to pouring Bezos & co drinks while teaching them how to telemark [1]

[1] dystopia aside it would be entertaining to watch

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#59

Post by Gud »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #51
jlangenauer wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."

This matches my feelings. It seems that I used to believe there would be cool and powerful tools for more and more things, but now I'm expecting recurring subscriptions on ever simpler stuff until I'm paying by the character (plus a monthly sub) to type into notepad. Most likely this was always the case, just a bit bigger and obvious now. I comfort myself with the belief that the number of cool and powerful tools rel…

No, this was not always the case. Over the last 5-15 years there has been a substantial shift in who the software on YOUR devices belong to.

No longer do we buy software, it’s for rent.

Which is why I use FreeBSD.

Re: They Praised AI at SXSW–and the Audience Started Booing

#60

Post by xanderlewis »

doktrin wrote: post #50
xanderlewis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AirPods were also roundly mocked and described as so weird looking no one would want to be seen dead wearing them when first announced. A few years later, it seems like we all have them (or a very similar-looking competitor) in our ears.

If you're arguing that initial criticism doesn't meaningfully predict future potential, then I fully agree. We've seen this in everything from EVs to streaming services to a megacorp like Amazon : plenty of rocky if not outright lampooned beginnings. However if you're attributing widespread product adoption to the erosion of cultural conservatism towards [new thing], then I think that underplays the role of product i…

I wasn’t arguing that (though I agree); I was just adding a further data point to support the claim that mockery of Apple products is nothing new.

Sure — products evolve and potentially assume a less controversial (mockable) form, but I think most of the change is in perception. Almost all of the products we use daily would probably look completely weird if we could somehow see them for the first time out of context. I’m currently typing on a tiny little touchscreen QWERTY keyboard on a device that is ostensibly a mobile telephone; none of this makes sense when first presented but we’ve all come to accept it as being as normal as breathing air.

Post reply on HN