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Shunning AI is the human choice

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Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#561

Post by mancerayder »

dspillett wrote: post #458
mancerayder wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 incr…

I understand - and I think our respective feelings on the matter are deeply tied to where we are geographically. High-cost of living vs low-cost? Jobs nearby versus not so much?

For me - remote jobs seem few and far between, and highly competitive. Stuck locally, I suffer from being forced into commutes, forced into high cost of living situations, and being that I despise high density living/noise and I'm sensitive to crowds, for me remote work is a paradise-like fantasy. I can picture myself working throughout the world exploring new lives rather than being stuck in dystopian city life.

Most of us where I live are "four days a week in the office." No choice. I think what's missing here is the dimension of choice. Some people thrive in noise, others not so much. Sometimes 2 days a week is good, for others 0, for others 5. For some, it might be that they love coming into the office, but want to spend a month in the rainforest. Etc.

Remote versus office requirements are 100% about control.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#562

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #511
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aside from everything everyone else has mentioned, AI != LLMs

There is no "AI" that isn't an LLM in 2026.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#563

Post by TrnsltLife »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #505
d0liver wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The old gods lost their power because they had been conquered by the Spirit of Christ.

It's a danger to beware of, that people might start to listen to LLMs like they have the gospel truth on morality and spiritual matters. But they're just an image of a man given breath and speech, without true wisdom. Man took sand and copper and formed the simulation of a mind. If we then bow down to it and obey it, we're fools.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#564

Post by TrnsltLife »

keybored wrote: post #153
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).

Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago…

Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#565

Post by subjectsigma »

inglor_cz wrote: post #551
subjectsigma wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Whoa, don't move the goalposts so fast. A few mean comments is nothing; persistent hatred, which I witness on forums, is something else. Precisely because I have been online for 30 years, I know how productive this is: zero. More precisely, this way of emoting/thinking gets lousy populists elected, like Trump. "Holy shit, I didn’t even read your sibling comment, where you make vague hand gestures towards the anti-sem…

[flagged]

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#566

Post by andrekandre »

anonzzzies wrote: post #155
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).

People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not a…

  > But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience
people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#567

Post by andrekandre »

brandon272 wrote: post #319
lacewing wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big…

I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption. Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.

  > Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms.

right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#568

Post by esseph »

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

> The thing is they don’t control them anymore, governments do by and large now

All of the class 1 freight railroads in North America are privately owned.

BNSF

Canadian National

CPKC

CSX

Norfolk Southern

Union Pacific

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#569

Post by lccerina »

headcanon wrote: post #199
lccerina wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to have a "good knowledge" of a misused technology to hate it when it's used by malevolent people. In the same way I don't need to be a virologist to know that is better to avoid the flu, I don't need to be a ML/AI expert to see its direct detrimental effects on people, communities, and the internet as a whole.

To use your analogy, I would say the "blanket ban" attitude would be more like wishing all viruses would just go away, or have never existed in the first place, which: 1) is an impossible and unproductive attitude, and 2) fails to recognize the important contribution to evolution, genetic diversity, and our immune systems that viruses introduced, not to mention the possible beneficial applications that could exist by…

Exactly, my vaccine against GenAI chatbots is to not use them, which is the equivalent of masking when covid vaccines were not available.

I am just waiting for the GenAI vaccines (ideally regulations, practically people rioting in municipal councils against gigantic data centers opening at their door).

Re: Shunning AI is the human choice

#570

Post by frizlab »

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #433
seidleroni wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough. https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity

I've been telling my friends this since LLMs launched. If your interest is in lowering the use of fossil fuels, then a global race for compute is great because the increased demand is probably going to usher in a nuclear/solar revolution in the energy sector. It feels like a very large segment, on both sides of this argument, is completely incapable of forming nuanced opinions on this stuff.

As it was already supposed to be the case (and has never been) with crypto mining, yeah…
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