[derac]

It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.

I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.

According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.

[thewebguyd]

> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.

I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.

Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.

There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.

[Glawen]

> I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.

I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions.

I'm living now in the city, where you don't need to listen to your neighbor because you can find a more fitting social circle. People are not able to listen and compromise, they'll just turn around and ignore you once they understand you are not on their side.

I was explaining this to a woman who was going to move in a village, and she said "how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?".

It's a strange situation where the far right rural nut job are more open minded than city dwellers.

[em-bee]

"how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?"

how can you be open minded and avoid being stuck in a bubble if you can't be friends with someone like that?

[pixl97]

>are more open minded than city dwellers.

I mean it's a bit difficult to be open minded to someone that would gladly have you killed.

[michaelt]

> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob.

Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?

In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.

If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.

[bluefirebrand]

> Are you having these conversations in person?

I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria

I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences

[intended]

However your experience isn't necessarily where the other poster is coming from.

As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it.

From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.

[juliendorra]

"Our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal" It might be a recency bias, because the 19th and 20th were extremely polarized, politically… from entire nations split up on one issue, up to political assassination, civil wars… slavery, women’s vote, antisemitism, prohibition, civil rights, asylum, universal marriage, and much more.

[the13]

Thanks to people being glued to social media & other rage bait machines on their phones.

[isabelc]

The overly tribal, lack of nuance, is overwhelmingingly from the millennial generation. I don't see older people being like that.

[coffeefirst]

This is a terminally online thing. It makes people more extreme. It also prevents them from realizing just how intense their POV is when everyone in their internet bubble is one upping each other.

In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.

[ozozozd]

I am pretty certain that the book of at least 1 of the Abrahamic religions explicitly states that you either believe all of it, or you are not a believer.

What you’re describing is religion applied to every opinion.

[doom2]

> There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.

A question I find myself selfishly asking a lot is: why do I have to be the one who is accepting or tolerant of others when they may not be accepting of me or my friends and family? I should speak respectfully of rural areas and their inhabitants but cities are free game to be portrayed as dens of crime, drugs, filth, and illegal immigrants? I should respect evangelical Christian communities but my transgender friends can't enjoy the same rights, benefits, and protections of society as cisgender/heterosexual people anywhere they go in the US? To make it explicitly political, Democrats are being asked to moderate and not be so intolerant but no such demands seem to be being made of Republicans or their voters.

[Awoooooo]

You know what you are

[adampunk]

>Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example.

This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.

[hyperhello]

Would you assume he was a far-right nut job?

[adampunk]

Would I need to assume?

[cm2012]

You are incredibly proving OPs point

[w29UiIm2Xz]

No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order effects kicked in.

[tptacek]

Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.

[mplanchard]

It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.

[tptacek]

A lot of things in the technology field's internal debate about AI feel extremely karmic to me.

[arvid-lind]

Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.

Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.

[thunky]

I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.

[arvid-lind]

My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been very selective about my employers based on their general operating philosophies.

The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver or someone who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.

[w29UiIm2Xz]

Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment.

The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

[SoftTalker]

Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.

[phil21]

> Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that.

This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.

No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.

> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living

AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.

> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.

Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.

But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.

I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.

[tptacek]

The exact same thing has happened with IPR.

[queenkjuul]

Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.

I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?

[tptacek]

Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.

I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.

[phil21]

> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away.

I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.

I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.

I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.

This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.

Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.

I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.

[queenkjuul]

It's perfectly possible for software to enable people to do things they couldn't do before without putting anyone out of work. I'm sorry you're struggling to imagine such a thing.

[phil21]

As opposed to hiring someone to do it? Or rather, that software not competing with the wider market as a whole? Those areas are exceedingly small in the web-dev space. Or even technology as a whole.

I recently used AI to make me a custom song for a silly thing. It put no one out of work and I'd not hire someone to make such a thing. But the fact the tech exists to enable such a thing means its absolutely putting musicians out of work. My trivial usage of the technology is part of what enables it to exist at all and put others out of work. Those devs probably point to things I use it for to pretend it doesn't impact anyone negatively. But what I did with it makes using it for stuff like a 30s advertising jingle even more trivial.

My very first web-dev work in the late 90's to enable a pet store to sell their wares on-line absolutely put folks out of work, even though I could have easily seen it as it enabling a small company to do something they could not have done before.

Same goes for my first "real job" where I was debugging Java Applets for an expense management company. This was in direct competition with the existing industry that did it via paper receipts and phone calls. It put massive numbers of folks out of work if you zoom out to the larger industry, while also enabling many other folks to do things they never could haven even thought to do before.

There are extremely small use-cases along the margins where you won't be using technology that directly competes with an existing industry, I can certainly imagine them but you'd have to go extremely out of your way to ensure you are only in these spaces. I will certainly admit it is unlikely but possible to find a way to make a living in these edge cases while still working within the IT space.

As a hobby? Sure. Easy. Making a living as a web-dev at it over a longtime career? I do find it very difficult to imagine - since that's where the money comes from to pay overhead such as IT folks and programmers.

As an industry ? IT (and especially web tech over the past 30 years) exists to make things more efficient and put entire categories of folks out of work.

[ambicapter]

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

[YoukaiCountry]

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

[mooreds]

> We can have actual conversations with our computers,

Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.

It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.

[Awoooooo]

Dude we were having "actual conversations with our computers" ten years ago and weren't pretending it was AI because it fucking wasn't then, it was markov chains, oh and it's ADVANCED markov chains now.

Delusion.

[yallpendantools]

I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.

The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.

And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!

[xg15]

Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side.

Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).

Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.

[phil21]

> AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails.

Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?

Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.

[JsonDemWitOster]

Wow. Palantirians (or whatever tf they call themselves) have no reply other than downvotes? Couldn't even get ChatGPT to astroturf an advocacy?

[Barrin92]

>We can have actual conversations with our computers

conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.

The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.

[queenkjuul]

What's nuts to me is how sycophantic the models are even when I'm just generating code. "What a fantastic project!" "Such an elegant solution!" When all I've done is described the problem and pasted a debug trace or whatever.

It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops

[elxr]

That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!"

Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.

The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.

20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.

Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.

[nerdsniper]

When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities.

I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.

[pixl97]

>old definition of AI

There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.

AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.

[bmacho]

You are very wrong here.

The term "AI" never meant bots in general.

It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.

[gobdovan]

IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted.

Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.

[gobdovan]

[0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978.

[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence

[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence

[skeledrew]

So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.

[gobdovan]

Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.

[joquarky]

Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position.

Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.

[lazide]

Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical.

AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.

FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?

[marcosdumay]

I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.

The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.

[joquarky]

As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?

[marcosdumay]

The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did.

I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.

[queenkjuul]

Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions

[beering]

Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)

[newaccountman2]

It's not really "intelligence"

It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.

[skeledrew]

Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".

[queenkjuul]

I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"

Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)

[newaccountman2]

> Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have.

I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.

[dcrazy]

I don’t think it’s any more facile to use the term “intelligence” to describe the synthesis engines that we call “AI” when we use the same word to describe the gradient-seeking behaviors of slime molds.

It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.

[the13]

Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808

[fasterik]

It depends on how you define intelligence. There's a straightforward functional definition: if a system can solve a range of problems that require complex reasoning and it meets objective standards of success across multiple disciplines, then that system is intelligent.

Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.

[bananaflag]

What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.

[SoftTalker]

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

[skeledrew]

Can't exactly have a post-scarcity economy with the current dominant economic system in place. As long as a few are allowed to "own" the means of production and gate access to it, there will always be scarcity.

[nomdep]

Like if any of those ideas had bring anything other than poverty, hunger, suffering, and millions of deaths.

We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.

[Tubelord]

Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug

[krapp]

A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic physics (replicators, warp drives, transporters, etc.)

I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.

Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.

* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.

[xyzzy123]

From the perspective of pre-history, anyone living in a western country is in a post-scarcity society.

Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.

The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.

[cm2012]

Especially now that we have magic boxes to answer any question and speak any language

[SoftTalker]

Of course. I was just responding to the parent who was sad that AI isn't turning out to be "the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago." But that was always fantasy sci/fi anyway.

[the13]

there's no hope for you in your future with that fine attitude.

[ryandrake]

An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.

[senordevnyc]

History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago!

What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?

[ryandrake]

There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.

[senordevnyc]

Nonsense. The median human is wildly better off than ever before.

[skeledrew]

A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.

[Deebster]

Last year Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in humans traffic[1]. That's huge.

[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...

[bensyverson]

Nuance was banned from the internet circa 1996, sorry

[intended]

> According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month.

> But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year,

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...

[duxup]

I find people in person are pretty welcoming of nuanced opinions.

Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.

[indemnity]

Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc.

Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.

[oulipo2]

I don't think the AI criticism has anything to do with "thinking we are beyond nature or whatever". It's the realization that this force will only drive societies apart even more

Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities?

Don't you think there's a reason for this?

[j45]

The nuanced takes of tech haven't been welcome for other tech as well.

[BoorishBears]

> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.

This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.

As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.

"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?

They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.

Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:

- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)

- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)

- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)

- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)

- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)

- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)

- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)

I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.

People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!

But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.

-

I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.

[snvzz]

There's no use being so negative; The genie will not get back into the bottle.

Luddites, the whole of them.

[peteforde]

I appreciate this nuanced take. You've been added to my filter of people who have an opinion that bubbles to the top.

I wish the Dems could have this conversation about their policies and messaging!

[derac]

I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this.

I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.

[qsera]

>I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago...

I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...

[agentultra]

> There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.

Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?

Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”

I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.

I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”

You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.

And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.

[s1artibartfast]

That is a big differentiator. I think there is a pretty valid argument that the models and data centers are net positive for society, and therefore ethical (better than the counterfactual of their absence).

I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.

Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.