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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#501

Post by joquarky »

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…

> productivity will be so high that we will need to do very little work for a superior standard of living

Who is "we" in this statement?

How will these gains go to those who need housing, healthcare, and education?

The current trajectory indicates the gains will go to the wealthy and the rest of us will get to fight for scraps.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#502

Post by [deleted] »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #492
esseph wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good lord! >I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements. --- This has been in use for awhile. https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/26/3/bbaf263/8158336 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12970898/ How it gets used: https://mlconference.ai/blog/ai-in-vaccine-development/

No, you cannot use LLMs to develop vaccines. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying to you. Also, you're confusing "AI" and LLMs.

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#503

Post by esseph »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #492
esseph wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good lord! >I hope somebody is documenting all these bombastic LLM-related public statements. --- This has been in use for awhile. https://academic.oup.com/bib/article/26/3/bbaf263/8158336 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12970898/ How it gets used: https://mlconference.ai/blog/ai-in-vaccine-development/

No, you cannot use LLMs to develop vaccines. Anybody who claims otherwise is lying to you. Also, you're confusing "AI" and LLMs.

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#504

Post by velcrovan »

tavavex wrote: post #431
velcrovan wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.

> If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project? No. Obviously, what you do on your PC is inconsequential to the rest of society. But despite this, AI and its consequences in big tech have become so thoroughly linked because the entities that develop and profit off of AI use are so big and influential over the rest of us. The hobbyist space isn't what people even think about.

There are business uses of on-prem agentic AI happening right now all over the place, it's not just a hobbyist space.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#505

Post by TimTheTinker »

d0liver wrote: post #181
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).

What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.

All a functional religion needs is on-demand answers to arbitrary life questions... which is what chatbots do, unfortunately.

Ancient Greek/Roman polytheism lost its social power around the time the oracles stopped speaking.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#506

Post by velcrovan »

Tubelord wrote: post #312
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...

Everything is fundamentally energy. If you hate something you're just hating energy.

This is funny and a pretty clever move, but not actually the argument I'm making. I'm specifically saying you can't make people un-learn math once it turns out to have interesting uses.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#507

Post by jesse_dot_id »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #495
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a Google search away from fact checking me if you want to do that. I'm a DevOps engineer, not a C suite guy, but I tend to agree with you in general. I think there is a lot of smoke being blown into the hive around this technology but having used it extensively, and having witnessed its progression first hand in engineering, these tools are insanely useful and have made giant leaps forward in just ~4 years. Do…

No offense, but your post reads like LLM psychosis. Mostly because you failed to understand my post at all and rushed in to defend AI's honor. (Why? I don't think AI wants or needs your oaths of loyalty.)

Ah yes, the mark of a cogent argument: the phantom diagnosis.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#508

Post by karmakaze »

> And can anything truly novel be created by a technology that feeds on what already exists?

When I was very young, I used to make up jokes that didn't really make sense, but they seemed novel and I cracked myself up. Late in life I wondered what truly original idea(s) I've had that wasn't an extension or mashup of existing ones or I'd learned from somewhere even subconsciously. It was very hard to come up with any. So this fault like many others that can be ascribed to machines can equally apply to ourselves.

I did finally think of a few, the clearest being the idea of 2*Pi being more fundamental than Pi back when I was in grade 7 math (I can visualize the room and lesson when the thought occurred to me) back in '77 long before I learned of Tau.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#509

Post by subjectsigma »

inglor_cz wrote: post #329
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.

I agree with you - I am already alarmed at how many people are now so openly hateful. As if they were waiting for a social licence to show their hearts and minds openly. It is in vogue to hate AI now, so they loudly proclaim their hate towards it, because it is widely acceptable. I will always be a little wary around those people who now profess their hate towards AI aloud. Who knows what and whom they hate with the…

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#510

Post by xantronix »

mindcrime wrote: post #388
xantronix wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it should be fairly obvious by now which form of AI people refer to when they talk specifically about theft. It gets a bit old and repetitive to expand the shorthand in every conversation possible. If people are genuinely curious about other forms of AI, that information is readily available. When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not…

It only takes three extra characters to say "GenAI" instead of "AI". It's just lazy use of language to not disambiguate what one means.

A lot of this discourse is intended for a wider audience than just us technical folk, and so the vocabulary used mirrors that of news headlines. If I were to guess, I would say it distracts from the discourse of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic impacts of generative AI providers and their products.

It is understood which forms of AI are at play here when the discussion revolves around the massive companies, capital investments, datacenters PR campaigns, and mandates required to create and sustain them and their usage.

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