[xnx]

Blanket claims like "Everbody" are trivially falsifiable. I'm not "weirded out" by AI, and I'm not foisting it on anyone.

There's a strange vein of aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous) even if it hasn't yet cured cancer, led to 100% unemployment, solved nuclear fusion, etc.

[hackeraccount]

This.

I still think AI is at root at UI improvement for working with computers. It's an equivalent to the general move of command line interaction to WIMP.

Freaking out over this seems like nothing to me so much as that Tracy/Hepburn movie ... Desk Set.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"Blanket claims like "Everybody" are trivially falsifiable."

As are claims like "No one" or "99.9%"

How many times per week are such claims made on HN and in similar forums with respect to software and hardware

   curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=no+one&tags=comment |grep -Eo '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+'

Perhaps the term "everybody" is just a figure of speech used in an online title. Can we, should we, forgive HN commenters for making 47,000+ trivially falsifiable claims

How often do HN commenters use the trivially falsifiable term "everybody"

    curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=everybody&tags=comment|egrep -o '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+'

What about the term "99.9%"

I read the article but found no hint of "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)"

Instead I found a statement that the author finds AI "incredibly" useful:

"An AI summary would have been incredibly useful"

Where, specifically, is the "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" in this article

The author's point as I understood it is about "AI" _hype_ not "AI" usefulness. The issue she has is with the _people_ who are hyping "AI" and the actual or potential effects of that hype

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

(Use quotes around the URLs or escape the ampersands)

[keane]

You’re right, that’s a flourish. But more importantly, the author isn’t claiming no one uses it / finds it useful. Her point is about potential problems that could occur as its real (though flawed) utility drives its broader adoption in particular arenas.

[tim333]

Also that AI is "making society dumber overall" seems dubious.

[joenot443]

I think a bit of the aggressive denialism comes from sour grapes that American society’s best hope for UBI came from capitalists in tech instead of progressives in policy.

UBI used to be a bit of a funny reddit pipe dream. Now it’s a serious long term hypothetical being trialed in the short term and that’s solely as a result of AI progress.

When that result undermines the tenet that capitalism is the root of human suffering, it’s simplest to just reject the result wholesale.