The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create?
That latter seems to have aged quite well.
Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
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.
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.
The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.
We might design organic brain extensions, so people just become smarter, making LLMs obsolete. (Brain-Bluetooth interface for additional cost)
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.
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.
The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
Huh? In what universe did that happen?
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.
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.
Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
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.
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.
Yes there is
It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
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.
Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.