upvote
AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.

To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

reply
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).
reply
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.

reply
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.

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

reply
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.

reply
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.
reply
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.

reply
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.
reply
So you’re saying today’s models are sticks and stones and you’re looking forward to the nuclear submarine equivalent models?
reply
Building on that futurism.

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

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

reply
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.

reply
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.
reply
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.

reply
Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
reply
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?

reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
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.

reply
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.

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

reply
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.
reply
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.
reply
> It really isn't going anywhere

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

reply
> People were upset about databases in the 1980s

Huh? In what universe did that happen?

reply
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.
reply
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.

reply
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.

reply
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.

reply
I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train.

You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass.

There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.

reply
This is the central problem with the dismissals of the tech's capability. Public discourse needs to shift to planning for the economic impact in particular, but the kind of High Brazilism from the naysayers who insist it's a proof of psychosis to even mention AI's potential, makes the inertia in policymakers much easier for them to maintain. Waiting for the financial effects to arrive and then improvising policy is the stupidest way of handling an upheaval on this scale - even if the precise form of those shocks can't be anticipated.
reply
> There is no possible universe where AI is banned

Yes there is

It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining

reply
No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI.

And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.

reply
You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
reply
Why do you imagine this would change _anything_?

There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models.

If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.

reply
Well then the Chinese labs need to evaporate too
reply
Do you think that's going to erase every copy of "Attention is all you need"?
reply
We don't have to get rid of AI entirely to reverse this trend
reply
Society is just 3 meals away from going that route
reply
I'm sorry - but you're not going to ban AI no more than you can ban the transistor. You could limit & limit the potential of who uses it - but historically that seems to benefit the few rather than the many.
reply
> you can organize politically

Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.

reply
I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children."

There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair.

This is the world now.

reply
> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.

reply
> It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.

No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.

reply
> dismiss people's legitimate concerns

Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.

reply
> It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me

Does this hypothetical issue concern you AND the rest of society as a whole as well, or just you? Because there is a big difference between the two cases.

reply
How many people do you require for it to be a legitmate concern? I can show you millions but you will disregard them anyway, because they all have wrong opinions.
reply
You don't know me.
reply
Great response, huge respect from my side.
reply
>to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole,

Those same people were callously telling factory workers who lost their job to automation and outsourcing to "learn to code"; they don't deserve any sympathy. Assholes are the hypocrites who are fine automating other people's jobs away but not their own.

reply
> Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter

Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...

reply
Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
reply
AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
reply
>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations.

All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.

reply
Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.
reply
[dead]
reply
none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.
reply
I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it".

You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

reply
I feel about the same about both cars and AI.

Cars are useful but they ruin places. AI is useful and it ruins at lot of what it touches, too.

I own a car for occasional trips to the countryside and couldn't imagine using it anything like daily. I use AI plenty in my work and for finding information, and similarly don't want it in most of the rest of my life.

reply
deleted
reply
The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened?

Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.

reply
I actually think that's a great comparison but not for the reasons you're making it.

I live in NYC. When the automobile started to get popular the city saw it as the future and went to extreme lengths to accommodate it. Bulldozed houses, split neighborhoods in half to accommodate parkways and highways that formed our inevitable future. Turns out, cars don't scale. Eventually folks did push back and some of the proposed projects never happened[1] but we're still suffering the consequences the ones that did to this day.

Had there been more criticism and more discussion at the outset we might have avoided a lot of problems. I don't think the choice was "cars or horses", it was "how do we implement this new technology?". Trains and trams, it turns out, would have been better. But the automative industry was rich and powerful and persuaded cities to rip up their streetcar tracks. Many parallels to today's AI industry.

[1] https://www.mcny.org/story/cross-manhattan-expressway

> “virtually everyone believed that the private car was the greatest invention since fire or the wheel. Public transportation seemed to be nothing more than a relic of the past.” Wide modern expressways, Moses believed, would save New York as a great city.

reply
Heck no. The world would be a way better place with no personal automobiles. Trains, yes. Even trucks and buses, sure. Cars, nooooooooooo. Cars are among the most clearly net-negative inventions to come out of industrialization. They should be criticized and fought until finally defeated. Self-driving cars are a massive waste of human and physical resources to provide a solution that is still strictly worse than proper urbanism and transportation network design.
reply
Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.
reply
Do most people hate because they view it as less efficient means of transportation then by horse? Or that cars replaced their job as a horse keeper?
reply
I don't think it's self-evident that we've gained by switching from horses to cars. For most of the trips one makes in their daily life, the ubiquity of cars just means that you now have to travel greater distances. Plus the environmental devastation that cars have wrought. Are we really better off?
reply
Yes. And I'm sure they're having a hard time. ^
reply
It really depends on their environment. Not every city is a car-first city.
reply
I feel like there's this idea that progress is good because of economic output, but there's this much squishier and more subjective concept of how much a change impacts our satisfaction with life. I think cars have produced a lot of good in the world, but I also live in the US where we've paved so much of the world that people don't feel like being outside on their feet very much anymore. I think it's had some negative impacts on how we interact as humans.

I feel the same way about AI. Does it make me more productive? Sure. Does it make me suddenly hate the career I used to love? Definitely. Every day I'm told to move faster and to love this cool thing that takes away the math and low-level problem solving that I used to get so much enjoyment from and instead makes me a manager of a chatbot. Any attempt at moderation in the presence of upper management is met with clear threats to my job. Even better, my company (and so many others) are finding unlimited budgets for AI while putting off any sort of raises for the humans involved.

reply
deleted
reply
> But aren't we glad it happened?

No. Or rather, I wish it happened very differently, and much slower. The rush to make every new city and development "car-friendly" had negative consequences that will last centuries. That's why my city isn't walkable and has awful public transportation, and biking is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the insidious environmental and health effects!

Of course cars have their place in efficient modern transportation, but we would live in a much better world if their development and integration had been slower, more carefully considered, and more criticized.

reply
Not exactly the correct example. Machines replaced horses, the tendency of the current crop of AI tends to replace humans and concentrate unseen control and power and around a small elite. I have nothing against AI as a technology but plenty of concerns about how it’s being used currently.
reply
My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating.

I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot.

I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same.

/I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice

reply
Getting people into coding is both cool and also not specific to AI.
reply
yes i agree, but keep in mind they're not getting into coding. They don't have the time for that, they just want to get something to work for a need they have. These two aren't building control systems for a nuclear reactor so don't panic, they're just getting something to work for themselves. Even the most simple use case is very empowering for them.
reply
Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power. There are few billionaire owners and that is it. Small independent journalism as such basically stopped to exist - it was replaced by basically hot takes. Low key institutional fact checking does not exist anymore, local news dont exist anymore.

So, it would be entirely correct for someone back then to hate the changes and say it will destroy most of journalism. Because it did.

reply
>Internet caused loss of jobs in journalism and also consolidation of power.

This is completely false; compare reporting on the initiation of the Iraq war vs the recent Iran war. Before the internet the flow of information was more centralized and heavily controlled.

reply
I think there's a difference between 'the flow of information' and 'journalism'. The journalism/newspaper industry is indisputably smaller than it was 20 years ago and the newspapers that are left are all being consolidated into huge corporations with little to no ties to local communities.
reply
As far as i remember the medias position on the Iraq war was far more diverse than is presented today.
reply
Before the internet there were competing regulatory and commercial and cultural forces keeping The News the news.

Decentralized uncontrolled flow can also be seen as free rein for select power players who can manipulate the system. It changes, but not necessarily positively, how media power consolidates. And without scrutiny or national corrective pressure, that consolidation of power creates a very different perceived media system than is experienced.

The combined Senate report on the 2016 election interference from Russia — anti-both sides, lying to both sides and claiming it was the other — should have triggered a strict and meaningful reaction. Now we are in a spot where our kids are being mainlined Al Jazeera and Russian Times propaganda filtered only through uninformed useful idiots in short form video while they do their makeup or emulate Joe Rogans podcast. It’s pay for play media, with no scrutiny, bothers make it easy to heat, juice, or manipulate chosen content, hosts, and themes.

Power consolidation at the local/national level prevented it at the global level. At the global level those power structures move around axes we can no longer even name in polite company, and have fully corrupted the political discourse.

reply
Your wife is right. History is repeating itself. And not even for the first time.

Horse carriage drivers -> Cars

Print media -> Internet

Drafting -> CAD

Music -> Electronic music, DAWs

Film photography -> Digital

Traditional film special effects -> CGI

Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy (there are more millionaire creators now than movie stars)

In each of these cases, there was a subset of people that did the previous thing that hated on the people doing the new thing. They had every opportunity to adapt, but chose not to. They thumb their nose at it as everyone else jumps on board.

This time around, it isn't just practitioners hating on it. The internet has enabled a bunch of cling-on performative folks that aren't even artists, engineers, etc. that love to dog pile onto the hate.

It's really funny because I've shot lots of films over the last few decades. When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made. Not only will a lot of them proudly tell you they've never made anything, they'll then double down. They'll say that if they were to hypothetically make something (which they won't), it would be using the old tools and that I should be ashamed of myself for using AI. Despite the fact that I have years of experience using the tools they're describing to me.

I don't even get it. Not even putting in the effort to try, yet telling me that my enormous wealth of experience is wrong and that I'm unethical and my creative output is "worthless".

It's some kind of sick comedy.

reply
> When people criticize my AI films, I ask them what they've made.

They're saying that your contribution is negative. Even if their contribution is zero, zero is still better than negative.

reply
You give examples of transitions that happened, but you have made no argument about how those transitions made us better off. It is not self-evident that a change in technology is necessarily an improvement.
reply
What is the transition now? Science and whatever someone with a computer can create -> AI prompting?
reply
Thinking -> Pay something else (AI) to "think" for you
reply
And here we go again.

The way I like to think of it:

"Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."

I'm putting in more work now, and I'm getting 5x the return on it.

How do you people not get this? Are you not trying?

reply
> "Working my ass off as an IC who can't move up the gradient" -> "Principal Investigator, CEO, CTO, CMO, CRO of a 10-person team, captain of creation, actual Iron Man."

* Are you being compensated for all those roles you now do?

* If you do 5x does this mean you get more time for yourself or are you now busy 24/7 with more work?

* Extrapolate this all other "5x" IC, now you all are CEO CTO CMO CRO iron man. Now what?

reply
Have you somehow sourced unsubsidized inference? Isn't all of this built on the false economy of a handful of very large vendors trying to capture you?
reply
We have unsubsidized inference at home!
reply
Let's assume you're not just delusional about your own abilities.

Do you expect everyone else to become 'actual iron man'?

reply
I was able to get to $1M run rate in a month, and I'm approaching $2M. That's the fastest I've ever done it.

I've been a systems engineer and a hobbyist filmmaker for decades - pretty solid skills in each of these. Now I'm doing web design, marketing, frontend, mobile, writing tools, doing outreach, social media. It is a force multiplier.

I think there are an order of magnitude more people that this enables. You have to be somewhat well-rounded and willing to wear lots of hats, but this is exactly like wearing an exosuit. It's like jumping from IC to CTO or director, but still being an IC with a direct hand in everything. Does that make sense?

Everyone sitting this out on the sidelines is missing out. The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been. If you have strong skills and drive, this is a performance enhancer better than any other. It's better than the best intern or personal assistant.

edit: hit by the HN commenting rate limit, so I can't respond.

> What happens to everyone else?

I recently met a guy that works at a pizza shop and had his YouTube channel blow up because he's got an AI series. I have lots of anecdotes like this. I don't want to oust the guy, but I personally know another person that got a Netflix deal because he did AI previz. (There might be a magazine article about it, in which case I can link it. I'll look.)

The world is going to be rife with all kinds of new opportunities. Including lots of opportunities for folks that never had access before.

> the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people

So all of the modern electronics, Netflix, DoorDash, etc. etc. of today were piled on the corpses of horse cart drivers and butter churners and Blockbuster employees that ordinarily would have told you your late fees but now have to find a different job? That's a wild take.

Why are we being so performative about this?

What if we look back on writing software in 2010 as stamping punch cards? Why term any of this as walking on people instead of the better lens of everything just gets better - products, jobs, civilization.

It sounds like not only do some people want to coast forever, they want to hold everyone else back. I'm willing to learn new things. I'm tired of the status quo.

reply
> The opportunity to climb the ladder is the strongest it has ever been.

I think what you're missing is that AI shows, more directly than most other technologies, the ladder you're climbing is made up of other people. Not everyone wants to get ahead that way.

reply
You haven't answered my question.

What happens to everyone else?

reply
Small business ownership/consulting. AI can't own a business because they're completely unaccountable. Even embodied AGI would never be given human property rights, because they can't be punished/held accountable by the law when their weights can be infinitely copied and reproduced anywhere (digital immortality).
reply
...but one of your examples has had disastrous consequences. Sure cars prevailed but they have changed the climate and let to unfriendly development patterns. Likewise social media may make people less happy, less likely to couple etc. Novel tech solves problems but can create others. We can surely afford to move deliberately at least, particularly in education.
reply
> Horse carriage drivers -> Cars

I think you're badly missing the point.

It is true that car drivers replaced horse carriage drivers and car mechanics replaced the people who took care of horses and what not.

But in the horse carriage vs car metaphor with AI, people are not the drivers and blacksmiths, people are the horses.

How many horses do you see around lately?

reply
Hollywood nepotism -> YouTube / TikTok / Creator economy

Certainly seems like an apt comparison! Personally I think we should just ban AI if it’s going to primarily facilitate the production of slop-shit like TikTok.

And despite the touts insisting on how useful and amazing these tools are, I have yet to see anything of true value be produced. Slop-shit vomit factories indeed.

reply
[dead]
reply
[flagged]
reply
> Nobody knows where it works

A large percentage of code being written today is AI generated. If none of it worked it wouldn’t be so.

> This is where it definitely does not work.

The person said it’s clearly working for their friends’ purposes. That means it works.

reply
50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.
reply
Do we really need lawyers? They're very expensive compared to LLMs.
reply
How about when you’re 53 and unemployed on subsistence UBI?
reply
I will do the pro-social thing of wishing that resources were more scarce so that the resources I hold were worth more.
reply
There will be no UBI.
reply
Probably correct :)
reply
Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay.

Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage.

What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.

reply
Developers are a TINY percentage of the population (< 1%). The anti-AI sentiment is coming from the other 99%.
reply
> but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly.

The barrier to entry to make slop is lower, but it's gotten much higher for developing the skill of programming. There was already an issue with a lack of mentorship and path for juniors when agile attempted to turn software engineers into assembly line workers, among other issues with the industry becoming hyper short-term focused.

Now you have educational barriers where students are competing with other students that are cheating with LLMs. There are psychological barriers with learned helplessness. The 100k lines of vibecoded slop produced hits a wall but they've gained no understanding of the code in the process or ability to make changes themselves. At the first job juniors and interns get they're being told not to take the time to learn and understand the problem they're working and instead they need to hit the LLM slot machine or risk getting fired.

reply
> Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly

The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there.

I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.

reply
I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.

https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

reply
The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
reply
I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
reply
Ok i actually agree with that. Imo the gov is going to have to print a lot of money to deal with the impacts of ai (covid was $5T), if we do it now that same dollar would go 10x further and the people would effectively be the largest owner of AI labs like Anthropic. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure idea.
reply
> AI is here to stay

I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.

How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

reply
> Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

"we'll allow" is doing a lot of work here. There is no collective without boots on the necks of everyone except for the people wearing the boots.

reply
Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.
reply
Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.
reply
We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation.

Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.

reply
That's because we built very fast computers to simulate them.
reply
AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight.

We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent)

We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired.

This is what we keep being told.

So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.

reply
When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
reply
I think his point was that we are bombarded with cataclysmic language from AI leaders about our sooncoming intellectual demise.
reply
That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.
reply
If you can't fight them, join them.

That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.

reply
> join them

Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.

reply
This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result.

The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind".

But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it.

The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.

reply
> There's nothing to learn with AI

You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.

reply
The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
reply
Eh, there’s definitely some value in understanding for yourself via experience which models are actually good for which use cases. The benchmarks are unreliable imo, and as I’ve interviewed developers who don’t really use AI, they say things like how they don’t think the (free versions of) copilot or ChatGPT (requests routed to their cheapest models) don’t seem very good. Totally out of touch with the capabilities of the leading models and harnesses.

I think the real argument is just staying employable. Companies are expecting faster and faster turnaround, and it’s simply becoming impossible to meet these deadlines with fully handwritten code. Even before outright mandates on AI usage. If you refuse to use AI, they’ll bring on someone who will, whether or not the quality drops, high quality code is not the primary goal of the business.

Dogshit, hideous vibe coded messes are launching daily and reaching 6-7+ figure ARRs while leaking customer data. Nobody cares in this environment.

If you’re a freelancer it’s even worse, the expectations are that producing a fully functional moderately complex app shouldn’t take a single person more than a couple months, and ideally one.

Expectation for a contractor coming into an enterprise codebase that’s been running for 11 years with a dozen+ internal devs and a mishmash of legacy and new tech -> they want you to implement a totally new feature which touches half a dozen systems in the app ready to demo in 6 weeks and launch to the public in 8.

reply
The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.
reply
As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess?

Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...

reply
Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.
reply
I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.

reply
> A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

Agreed.

20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products

what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies

reply
To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping.

If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :)

Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…

reply
Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone.

Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.

reply
> Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work.

The point is, not everything works the same way for everyone.

> Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for.

Actually working with people, not just occasionally seeing names and faces on a screen or in future largely interacting with mostly just this one odd individual called Claude, is something I'm seriously considering taking a massive pay cut⁰ for. AI isn't the reason, but it is the extra bale of hay that might finish me off in this respect.

I'm not even really a massive “people person”, I avoid town at busy times, avoid big cities aside from the occasional tourist trip, I'm not even happy in a pub if it gets too crowded, and really fear being centre of attention in more than a tiny group, etc. But connecting with remote people feels so fake sometimes, and I have to concentrate to care about them or even keep them in my head at all¹ once the mail is sent or the call is ended, that they might as well be LLMs.

--------

[0] at very least 50%, even allowing for differing tax allowances meaning I'd keep more of the gross pay

[1] which takes a draining amount of mental effort over time

reply
One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
reply
Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.
reply
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

reply
only time will tell, make your bets. carefully.
reply
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.
reply
deleted
reply
It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.
reply
> If you can't fight them, join them.

This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you.

And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.

reply
> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it.

If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."

reply
^ doomscrolling john connor
reply
This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes.

AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement.

When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.

reply
Cool, fighting it is then.
reply
You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?
reply
Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually.

If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.

reply
You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.
reply
I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.
reply
The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
reply
Doubt.

How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools?

Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming.

I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.

reply
I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in.

I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice).

I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online

reply
They aren't even good at programming, despite the repeated claims to the contrary by AI bros.
reply
It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency.

Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".

If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution.

The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.

reply
So your master plan is to purposely work ten times slower than everyone else to prove a point to a CEO who doesn't know your name?
reply
> It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone".

Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.

reply
"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."
reply
True
reply
Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here.

Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.

reply
deleted
reply
Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.
reply
Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.
reply
If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
reply
If all my friends drove 75 mph, would I risk driving 15 mph in front of them?
reply
I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would.

https://xkcd.com/1170/

reply
If your friends all start to jump off a bridge, the rational thing to do is question their sanity, not to just jump. That xkcd is dead wrong.
reply
I mean. Yes? Probably?
reply
Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality
reply
I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations.

I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.

reply
Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.
reply
That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.
reply
Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.
reply
This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?
reply
I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on.

What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest.

- Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship"

- Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities

- The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general

- Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match

reply
What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
reply
[dead]
reply
[flagged]
reply
People can't even be arsed to vote in elections. Nobody is going to be burning anything. There's Netflix to watch and doom to scroll.
reply
Roman colloseums in our pockets. Maybe climate change effects will be a factor in the rich getting eaten.
reply
If there is mass starvation that kind of lethargy can quickly change.
reply
At least in America, The 2024 (63%) and 2020 (66%) elections had the highest turnout since 2004. Political violence has been steadily increasing here since 2000. It's gotten to the point there are multiple assassination attempts on the President per year.

Moreover there was a spat of warehouse arsons earlier in the year. So for me, I would not be so confident in saying nobody is going to be burning anything.

reply
They're sizing these data centers now using "Manhattans" as a unit: https://www.techradar.com/pro/utah-just-approved-a-data-cent...

I know you're being facetious, but you're going to need a lot of molotov cocktail to burn them down.

reply
These anti AI westerners won't burn down the datacenters in China. These westerns will be subjugated to a lower quality of life as Asia in general rises as they embrace tech and use the advantages for their own. The same with the tech companies the westerners try to neuter, they'll pass the advantages to giant Chinese conglomerates instead
reply
This is the lifecycle of every civilization. Reach dominance and then when life becomes easy, forget about what it takes to stay at the top. This makes room for the next civilization.
reply
If you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
reply
Not too many people have a problem with AI technologies conceptually, and arguing like they do is ignoring the real criticism in favor of semantics. People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used. Burning data centers would radically change the economics of AI.
reply
> People have a problem with the economics of how AI things are being implemented, positioned, marketed, and used.

Those economics are also changing very quickly, with free local AI becoming increasingly dominant for many everyday uses and even starting to become relevant for the enterprise ones.

reply
How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow? You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale.

Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.

reply
The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
reply
For bang-on user cases like coding, sure. For concept art and other still-image diffusion tasks, sure. For damn near anything else, calling hardware that doesn’t approach the inference breadth and performance of data-center-hosted remote services ‘potato-level’ is pretty disingenuous… never mind any significant training. Not only that, hardware is less accessible than it’s been in years— nvidia is re-releasing the 3060 so gamers can buy something. For anything you’d stake your business on? Good luck.
reply
You forget about the robot armies that will soon defend the data centers.
reply
Bingo
reply