[tptacek]

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).

[d0liver]

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.

[packetlost]

Short of societal collapse, there's no way the technology is going to go away or fade out of existence (unless it's replaced by something even better), that's just not how technological progress works. It's useful, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet.

[zozbot234]

Building those datacenters and keeping them operational involves massive amounts of highly skilled blue-collar labor.

[sateesh]

I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.

[squidbeak]

You seem to suppose the building of those datacenters - even the power plants behind them - won't soon be automated. Almost as if robotics isn't happening.

[dmantis]

Why would it?

It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it.

Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.

[sifar]

Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay.

Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along.

It is question of when.

[KptMarchewa]

They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.

[sifar]

Yes, there is the general class of technologies (warfare, computing ...) and there are particular instances of those for a given time and space and evolve as the landscape changes.

The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.

[chaps]

Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.

[charcircuit]

No one is claiming that ChatGPT 5.5 is here to stay and be popular forever. More advance AI models will replace what exists today.

[u_fucking_dork]

So you’re saying today’s models are sticks and stones and you’re looking forward to the nuclear submarine equivalent models?

[lucketone]

Building on that futurism.

We might design organic brain extensions, so people just become smarter, making LLMs obsolete. (Brain-Bluetooth interface for additional cost)

[squidbeak]

What tech can you imagine that would make the conversion of electricity into thought 'no longer useful'?

[sifar]

This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.

What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.

Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.

Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.

I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.

[ang_cire]

I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.

Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.

[sifar]

The point is not that these cease to exist. The point is that their significance decreases greatly.

[ang_cire]

But are these actually completely different technologies, and if so, where is the dividing line? Firearms certainly have not decreased in significance, and they're the modern version of a bow, which is simply 2 iterations later in propulsion methods: tensioned string -> high-tension cable -> high-pressure gas.

Are LLMs really going to fall off in significance, or will it just be the nth newest incarnation of LLMs?

The function of what an LLM does (generative language) is what people seem to take issue with, but the function is here to stay, even if the next iteration has a different name or method.

[the_gastropod]

In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it?

The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

[KptMarchewa]

Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.

[AnimalMuppet]

No. You're not thinking it through well enough.

The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.

Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)

The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?

You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?

[satvikpendem]

Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.

[jononor]

There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.

[ang_cire]

In the same way that any technology could just magically disappear, sure.

But I hear everyday, non-IT-sector people talking constantly about how they're using it, and that means there's a demand for it, and someone is going to supply it. I think a lot of anti-AI people think it's still equivalent to the PDA, and don't realize it's a smartphone already.

The other side is that "AI" is of course very very broad and isn't new, and e.g. medical vision models are making advancements that are having huge impacts on patient care already, especially around early cancer detection. Those aren't going away (and shouldn't), so there's still going to be a demand for the underlying technology and infrastructure to support it, even if LLMs stop being spammed everywhere.

The other thing which people seem not to understand is that you don't need a whole datacenter to RUN individual LLMs, you need it to train them, or to run them at scale for thousands of customers. A lot of the upper-mid-tier models that exist now can be run on a single (beefy) 4U server in your closet if you've got the GPUs to put in it. And people are running e.g. Deepseek V4 Pro FP4 locally. If you've got an actual server room, like at a university, you can run the full, un-quantized versions with ~2-4 servers.

Technology that is living in peoples' homes and businesses already is not going to just disappear. It's a lot less centralized than the market prevalence of OpenAI and Anthropic would lead you to believe.

[gensym]

I think this disconnect is based on the ambiguity in the term "AI".

"AI" as tech - the models, how to train them, etc. Isn't going to go anywhere short of a Library-of-Alexandria-type catastrophe. We know how to do it and it's useful, so why would we forget?

However, "AI" as the thing that is enveloping our culture - the slop everywhere, the mandates to use it at work regardless of its usefulness, the constant talk about it being the future, the machine-dominated future that's been promised/threatened by the heads of the labs - we do still have a chance to put that onto the scrapheap.

[TimTheTinker]

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.

[TrnsltLife]

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.

[goosejuice]

I'm sorry but this makes very little sense. Society isn't going to unlearn the methods.

[squidbeak]

It makes tremendous sense - when understand as reflexive straw-clutching and wish-thinking aimed at reducing the frequency of the poster's nightmares and reducing their diaper expense.

[dredmorbius]

Upset with what aspect(s) of databases?

The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create?

That latter seems to have aged quite well.

[kalleboo]

Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information).

Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.

[barnabee]

TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it.

AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.

[knuckleheads]

The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.

[anonzzzies]

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 as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. 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. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.

[andrekandre]

  > 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

[customguy]

The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.

[bdangubic]

> It really isn't going anywhere

It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)

[the_gastropod]

Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.

[hansmayer]

> People were upset about databases in the 1980s

Huh? In what universe did that happen?

[lacewing]

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 part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.

[brandon272]

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.

[andrekandre]

  > 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...

[keybored]

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, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be.

So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily.

Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.

[TrnsltLife]

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.