Don't worry, it's a shiny tool at the moment. The electric screwdriver had its wow moment too.

I still haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie. If it wasn't made by a person, there is no 'personal'-ity to it. It's just bland.

Eventually things will slow and slide back to thoughtful first, crapload second.

[dead]

Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.

To what end?

Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.

And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.

Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.

> less intelligent people have been left behind

May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence.

I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs.

In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own.

People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.

Token cost or token demand?

Out of curiosity. How can you explain to a Gen z fresh graduate with 50k in student loans, 5 dollar gasoline (and rising), no healthcare, housing prices at an all time high, and competing with their entire age group for the honor of holding multiple minimum wage jobs that are below the survivability wage that they should feel a collective sense of achievement? UBI isn't coming and we have multiple individuals who own measurable percentages of all of the worlds wealth. Those same people are investing heavily in automating all work these young people could hope to provide while waxing poetic about changing laws and owning media companies with cold hard cash.

It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.

This is actually a solid comment because ideally it would be the case. I think it's the opposite though. The problem with LLMs is they are marketed not as a collective achievement. They are at their heart a tool which should belong to collective humanity. We should all be getting dividends from them and they should be collectively owned. But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.

Of course no one sees it as a collective achievement when the announcements are aimed at either scaring people about how even the team behind them is worried about releasing it or for CEOs to replace workers.

Artemis II, at least in the states, was an example of people genuinely feeling collective achievement. There is absolutely no reason this AI moment couldn't be that. Instead though the companies involved have explicitly chosen fear and capital as their marketing tools. We should be seeing this as an incredible time but those involved do not want us to and plan to keep the spoils for themselves so we shouldn't.

Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics.

It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI.

You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.

The AI is for the "billionaires". The billionaires do not give AI to their own kids, just like how they don't give them phones, social media or a games console until they are old enough.

AI psychosis is real and the billionaires who own the AI chatbots know this.

Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.

Care to explain?

Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.

That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.

It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.

I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.

Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.

"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.

But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.

There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.

> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"

Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.

[dead]