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LLM Inevitabilism
951–960 of 1001 posts
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#952If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is w…
If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…
> Cherrypicking the stuff that worked in retrospect is stupid, plenty of people swore in the inevitability of some tech with billions in investment, and industry bubbles that look mistimed in hindsight.
But that isn't the argument. The article isn't arguing about something failing or succeeding based on merit, they seem to have already accepted strong AI has "merit" (in the utility sense). The argument is that despite the strong utility incentive, there is a case to be made that it will be overall harmful so we should be actively fighting against it, and it isn't inevitable that it should come to full fruition.
That is very different than VR. No-one was trying to raise awareness of the dangers of VR and fight against it. It just hasn't taken off because we don't really like it as much as people thought we would.
But for the strong AI case, my argument is that it is virtually inevitable. Not in any predestination sense, but purely because the incentives for first past the post are way too strong. There is no way the world is regulating this away when competitive nations exist. If the US tries, China won't, or vice versa. It's an arms race, and in that sense is inevitable.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#953If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is w…
If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…
What are you on? The only potential is AR? What?!!! The problem is AR is not enough innovation and high cost. That's not the case with AI. All it needs is computing, not some ground breaking new technology.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#954Earlier quoted context omitted.
It actually seems more to me like dialectical materialism, which started centuries ago and was already secular. It bears more in character to the differences that other commenters have already voiced, in that human actors not only believed in its inevitability, but attempted to bring it about themselves. Multiple global superpowers implemented forced industrialization, cultural reformation, and command economies to b…
I kinda feel this way too. Reading some of the blog posts by AI "luminaries" I'm struck by how Stalinist they sound. They hold out some utopia that exists in their minds, and they are ready to feed people into the meat grinder to try and make it a reality. Stalin said that this generation would suffer so that the next lived in utopia, and that's kind of the same pitch they are making. I think if we actually cared abo…
In other words, "if we cared about the world, we would only do things that line up with my personal political beliefs and my political beliefs are obviously correct"
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#955Earlier quoted context omitted.
Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet. Using an LLM UI like open ai is like we just figured fire and you use it to warm you hands (still impressive when you think about it, but not worth the burns), while LLM development is about building car engines (here is you return on investment).
3 years into automating all white collar labor in 6 months.
lol you must not be looking for a white collar job right now then outside of IT.
The only thing that is over hyped is there is no white collar bloodbath but a white collar slow bleed out.
Not mass firing events but transition by attrition over time. A bleed out in jobs that don't get back filled and absolutely nothing in terms of hiring reserve capacity for the future.
My current company is a sinking ship, I suspect it will go under in the next two years so I have been trying to get off but there is absolutely no place to go.
In 2-3 years I expect to be unemployed and unemployable, needing to retrain to do something I have never done before.
What is on display in this thread is that human's are largely denial machines. We have to be otherwise we would be paralyzed by our own inevitable demise.
It is more comforting to believe everything is fine and the language models are just some kind of doge coin tech hype bullshit.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#956Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they're performing at at least graduate student level across most tasks I strongly disagree with this characterization. I have yet to find an application that can reliably execute this prompt: "Find 90 minutes on my calendar in the next four weeks and book a table at my favorite Thai restaurant for two, outside if available." Forget "graduate-level work," that's stuff I actually want to engage with. What many peopl…
This is absolutely doable right now. Just hook claude code up with your calendar MCP server and any one of these restaurant/web browser MCP servers and it'll do this for you. https://apify.com/canadesk/opentable/api/mcp https://github.com/BrowserMCP/mcp https://github.com/samwang0723/mcp-booking
How reliable are the results? I can expect a human with graduate-level execution to get this right almost 100% of the time and adapt to unforeseen extenuating circumstances.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#957Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner) I think this is a great analogy, not just to the current state of AI, but maybe even computers and the internet in general. Supersonic transports must've seemed amazing, inevitable, and maybe even obvious to anyone alive at the time of their debut. But hiding under that…
The problem with supersonic commercial jets was mainly one of marketing/politics. The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. The conspiracy theorist tells me the American aerospace manufacturers at the time (Boening, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.), did everything they could to kill the Concorde. With limited flyable routes (NYC and DC to Paris and Londo…
> The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you.
The pilots don't shit where they eat. Ask some farmer a bit further away how many sheep die a year from panic instead.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#958What he calls inevitabilism, Chomsky referred to as "manufacturing consent":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Sure, Chomsky was specifically talking about how the underlying systems of US mass media manufacture consent among the governed but inevitabilism lies at its core: a thought-terminating cliché that eliminates all alternatives from even being legitimate subjects of the debate.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#959Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner) I think this is a great analogy, not just to the current state of AI, but maybe even computers and the internet in general. Supersonic transports must've seemed amazing, inevitable, and maybe even obvious to anyone alive at the time of their debut. But hiding under that…
The problem with supersonic commercial jets was mainly one of marketing/politics. The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. The conspiracy theorist tells me the American aerospace manufacturers at the time (Boening, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.), did everything they could to kill the Concorde. With limited flyable routes (NYC and DC to Paris and Londo…
>as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you.
In the US, the Air Force is simply not allowed to fly supersonic anywhere near a city or a suburb with only a few exceptions.
One exception is Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert: there are houses nearby, but the base (and supersonic warplanes) preceded the construction of the homes, so the reasoning is that the home builders and home buyers knew what they were buying into.
Another exception (quoting Google Gemini):
>From 1964 to 1966, the FAA and U.S. Air Force conducted supersonic flights over St. Louis and other cities like Oklahoma City to gauge public reaction to daily sonic booms. The goal was to understand public tolerance for commercial supersonic transport (SST) operations. Reactions in St. Louis, as elsewhere, were largely negative, contributing to the eventual ban on commercial supersonic flight over land in the U.S.
Have you have experienced sonic booms? I have (when my family visited West Germany in 1970) and I certainly would not want to be subjected to them regularly.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#960With respect to the post’s discussion of “surveillance capitalism”, Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital (published 1974, https://archive.org/details/labormonopolycap00brav) makes it clear that Capitalism (particularly with respect to the use of machines for worker exploitation) is never not surveillance.