[pfisch]

Are you ever concerned about the consequences of what you are making? No one really knows how this will play out and the odds of this leading to disaster are significant.

I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

[lbrito]

>I just don't understand people working on improving ai. It just isn't worth the risk.

A cynical/accelerationist perspective would be: it enables you to rake in huge amounts of money, so no matter what comes next, you will be set up to endure it better than most.

[coffeebeqn]

Unless the AGI starts a new monetary instrument or something

[ianbutler]

Of course, I think about this at least once a week maybe more often. I think that the technology overall will be a great net benefit to humanity or I wouldn't touch it.

[justonepost1]

Genuine question: how?

I’m younger than most on this site. I see the next decades of my life being defined by a multi-generational dark age via a collapse in literacy (“you use a calculator right?”), median prosperity (the only truly functional distribution system we have figured out is labor), and loss of agency (kinda obvious). This outcome is now, as of 2026, essentially priced into the public markets and accepted as fact by most media outlets.

“It’s inevitable” is at least a hard point to argue with. “Well I’M so productive, I’m having the time of my life”, the dominant position in many online tech spaces, seems short-sighted at best.

I miss being a techno optimist, it’s much more fun. But it’s increasingly hard.

[ianbutler]

I really think the doom consensus is largely an online phenomena. We're in a tense period like the early 80s, and that would be true without AI in the mix, but I think its a matter of perspective. We're certainly still way ahead of the 1910s and the 1940s for instance (it's on us btw to make sure we don't fall to that in time).

Every generation has its strains and the internet just amplifies it because outrage is currency. Those strains are things you only start to notice as you start to get older so they seem novel when in reality in the scheme of humanity is basically standard.

Fwiw if the market actually priced it in it would be in freefall since the market would be shortly irrelevant. We are due for a correction soon though.

Internet discourse is a facsimile of real life and often not how real life operates in my experience.

So I see all the discourse around extremes on either end and based on lived experience and working in the field think theres a much neater middle ground we'll ultimately arrive at thanks to people working very hard to land the plane so to speak.

[NateEag]

None of that answers the question:

How will this technology be good for humanity as a whole?

[ianbutler]

I answered the more important question of a seemingly lost youngin and how to deal with the stress of inheriting a world in a bit of turmoil.

That said, trivially we already see it advancing math and science research as an assistive tool, development and more. Extrapolate it out a few more generations and it helps us unlock a whole bunch of things on the skill tree of life so to speak.

[fogzen]

Yes, doomerism is a symptom of severe doomscrolling addiction. All the people who talk like this spend all day on X. They sound like delusional drug addicts TBH.