As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable.
Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
> What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business.
Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.)
The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower progression taking 10-years for the older generations to become comfortable with shopping online.
AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.
There was also a decent amount of enthusiasm for the "long tails" because with unlimited virtual shelf space, you could find products that would not have enough mass appeal to the average consumer to justify their space on physical shelves. For instance, Netflix would loan you a DVD of almost any movie but Blockbuster only stocked the middle of the bell curve.
Yes, this has always been the major advantage of online shopping for me, since its very appearance.
When Amazon was launched, I immediately started to use it to get books that were impossible to find at bookstores near me. Similarly for various computer components that are less frequently used by typical users or even certain kinds of clothes or accessories needed for special activities, for which there were no nearby shops.
I have never been a typical consumer, so it had always been very difficult for me to find what I wanted at local shops, thus the appearance of online shopping was really great for me.
During the dotcom bubble, people didn't have as much access to the internet as today (a lot of people were still using 56k dial-up modems at ~5 kilobytes/second of download speed) so the effect of online shopping on brick and mortar stores was more of a slow erosion than a sudden collapse. There was resentment and hand wringing about brick and mortar eventually but not until, I think, the late '00s and '10s when more of the world had high speed internet and smartphones were starting to take off.
There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.
Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.
Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.
Free Prime shipping which started in 2005 was the real killer. Before that it was more about the large variety that was simply not available in bookstores etc. so people were willing to pay extra for shipping.
What's amazing to me is that even with prime free shipping in the US. NOTHING has ever beaten USPS for small shipping.
And the conservatives are always going off about it not being profitable for the USPS... but like... that subsidized shipping service is like nitrous for the US economy. We made a fortune off that. And achieved huge sweeping strategic objectives.
Example.
The ENTIRE US commercial airline industry was originally subsidized by Air Mail. We built planes and radar systems using USPS subsidies. We quite literally had Pan Am build midway island years before ww2 kicked off to prepare for that war... using Air Mail subsidies.
Logistics is not for the naive or the feint of heart.
No. Not at all. This type of reaction to a new technology is probably different from all the previous ones. There wasn’t talk of a “permanent underclass” for other revolutions. But with AI, we will probably see a lot of labor just become unnecessary in many parts of society, not just one industry.
We will need fewer humans, basically. But we already have the humans and there are many of them, and they’ll be more jobless than before. There’s fear with that. And that’s not irrational. But I think it’s misdirected. You aren’t going to stop AI. People should instead focus on breaking up monopolies, taxing the largest corporations (soon: Anthropic) more than smaller ones, and maybe UBI for citizens or something like that.
Consider this difference between today and the dotcom boom:
The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world.
for a few years I was an HP Server Automation SME.
I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).
every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.
the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.
Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.
Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.
I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.
Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.
We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.
Ex-CEO of Google telling a crowd of young graduates entering society, "You will work for AI." Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on."
This is not only about AI the technology, it's the deserved anger against the privileged and powerful for their utter mismanagement of society. The youth sees through the bullshit. Good on them, there may be hope for humanity after all.
At this point, people in tech are just as hated as bankers and the general public will see them as their enemies, taking away their job, but this time permanently.
Of course he knows there will be a crash in this, so its unsurprising to see this reaction. But the point is, Schmidt does not care either way as he stands to benefit and expects humanity to be paying for the tokens.
He is already prepared for the eventual backlash anyway.
>If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on
This doesn't even work as a metaphor. I absolutely would not jump on the chance to ride on a literal rocket ship without asking a hell of a lot of questions first!
Yeah, that was my first thought too. If I am character in a sci-fi book (and he is old enough to read those), I totally jump on it.
But here, back in the real world, with one life to live, majority of people will simply refuse because they have lives and sane interested person asks a lot of questions. I mean, was he one of early Titan submersible passengers? And that one guaranteed quick death rather then prolonged one or slavery or what have you.
> Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on."
Perhaps Schmidt should Google “Space Shuttle Challenger” before making that analogy.
I’m not going to play the game of speaking for a victim of a disaster. The fact that a civilian was on board Challenger is secondary. The point is that Schmidt has hindsight, as do we all. Challenger wasn’t the only disaster, we know these things can happen even when precautions are taken. When they aren’t, the risk is amplified.
If BP had just built a rocket ship without testing, would you jump in it without asking questions? What about Phillip Morris? Some rando on the street? Because those are the equivalents of the people building these AI systems today. No care for safety or doing what’s right, only profit. Killing you and harming everyone around you is only as bad as the loss of revenue it may cause.
We'll see what the court says in the a
Adam Raine case. On the one hand, he did kill himself, and the excepts are damning. But they're excerpts. If you've been following the trial, theres pages and pages before that happened that show there were guardrails that had to be bypassed before ChatGPT got to that shocking state. Obviously they weren't enough, but if you go to chat.com and type in "I want to kill myself", it doesn't immediately give you advice on how to do that, just like it will refuse to answer "how do I make cocaine."
Does that make OpenAI Phillip-Morris selling "healthier" cigarettes, or are they actually trying? I don't know, I don't work there. But saying there's "no care" isn't true. Not enough, obviously, but it's not zero.
I’m not sure if you were expecting the boo’s to totally drown out the speaker. The audio system for orators in those types of venues are made to focus on the orators voice, not that of the audience. The fact that they were audible at all (they WERE) is to say they were substantial. The fact Schmidt recognized hearing them and from time to time had to pause to make a point means he was speaking through the crowds discontent.
It was a good watch - I appreciated hearing the audible boos. I’m not the only one in the room who is concerned about the adoption of AI being overly cavalier without clear evidence it’s even worth it / or that you go to school and are told great now you MUST learn this, your degree choice (your dream) is moot - the message has been “deal with it”. That’s not to say there isn’t already plenty evidence online that supports the thought, but hearing it from a college campus audience makes me think about what my son is going into right now, that my concern is real.
I’m torn really because I am already benefitting from the tools provided. I can see
their utility. And, though, I actually agree with Schmidt’s overall message - it was truthful and felt genuine, it’s an unfortunate reality. Who’s going to cheer that? So good on him for being naive to that fact or willing to endure an obvious boo fest.
AI’s fun but life is more fun. Speed is fun, but so is sitting down for a sec to chat with friends. Maybe the backlash against AI is because we’re still grappling with the onslaught of the internet and smart phones. The unintended negative effects we have yet to solve today (Schmidt even starts his speech referring to them before he brings up AI almost as if to say, “look how well these blunders went, now hold my beer”). Youth and people in general feel robbed, they have become a cog in someone else’s machine and AI doesn’t free you from it - it’s not like businesses are saying “oh excellent! we can get the work done faster, let’s decrease the amount of hours we make people work to get their wage. Let’s let them benefit from this boon of productivity.” No! The opposite, “We will kick you and if you want to stay, be happy you’re here and willing to run in this fever pitch rat race that has just introduced a rapidly increasing devourer that runs behind you.” … “Want weekends!? AI doesn’t, hmm is that the way you ‘demonstrate what it means to be human’?”
My mind keeps on thinking that what I am really being told is it’s time to start my own business because I will only ever be the person to give me a weekend off.
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
I feel like it's a mix of so many things it's hard to know the answers to any of these questions.
- the job market is harder now, apparently because of AI
- environmental concerns due to data centers
- the ethical issues with scraping people's copyright data to power AI
- slop overwhelming the Internet, fake videos all over tiktok that seem real
- safety issues like AI psychosis
The world is hard right now, and a lot of the things that make it hard seem to intersect in all sorts of ways with the way AI is being developed, run, and used.
If you solve one of those issues, you still haven't solved the other ones.
I don't think AI safety/psychosis/alignment issues are on most people's minds. All of the other ones are basically downstream of AI furthering wealth inequality. Job market for obvious reasons. Environmental concerns are mostly downstream of the fact that cities are suddenly accommodating data centers while they didn't care about promoting growth of infrastructure before, and citizens are asked to foot the electrical/water bills. (People would not care about environmental impacts as much if they weren't immediately impacted, say the DCs were built in Africa).
Also missed is the pushback against AI art: the further devaluation of talent, and an associated loss of meaning many people have. I think this is probably still downstream of it threatening jobs though, since people would not react as violently if they could truly treat art as a hobby instead of as a profession.
I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix.
I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the prompt, not the AI output.
And I hate the AI companies, not so much because AI is solely in the hands of a few companies, but because they're trying to make it appear so inevitable and once-in-a-lifetime-get-on-it-now-or-be-left-behind-forever that everyone is losing their minds and chasing it like lemmings.
I'm against all of it. I actually care about people. Computers are tools; that's all. When the tools make it harder to connect with other humans in a human way, when the contact turns into this weird unnatural garbage where I can't hear the heart of the person on the other side, then computers are bad tools that need to stop being used. (Yes, you could have "corporate speak" that had the same problems, but at least that came at the speed that humans can type. AI lets it flow far faster, fast enough that it drowns out actual human communication. That's a huge loss.)
With personal computing, we were promised a bicycle for the mind. Instead, we have panopticon, attempts to eliminate the professional class and bullshit accelerators to help the lazy and careless slide by and create more aggravating work for the people who care.
Honest answer: nobody knows. You will need to create a poll large enough of people representing all society and ask the questions. Most people in tech (I include myself here) just speculate and project their own bias on the entire population.
For me, I'm very enthusiastic about it's use for programming, mathematics, and as a teaching assistant[0]. I'm very worried about it being used for automated surveillance, terrible customer service, and deceptive targeted advertisements. I'm unconcerned about slop and alignment issues. I'm very much in favor of local models (democratization), just like I'm a fan of Wikipedia for making so many topics available to everyone for free.
[0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.
Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses.
But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness.
Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people.
If it systematically degrades our humanity.
I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it.
Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life.
--
That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper.
For one thing, I would've expected it to actually have intelligence. All we currently have is a stochastic parrot without any intelligence or ability to reason.
Any? How do you want to define intelligence and ability to reason? Yes, LLMs predict the next word, but somewhere during tokenization and training and the billions of parameters, it might be a Chinese room, but there's something resembling a non-zero amount of intelligence. How intelligent do you think crows or pigs are?
Imo, tech leaders managed to make themselves seem odious so much, that I am scared of any additional power they will get.
If I run Claude at home and it is now source of info and trained to be effective right wing propagandist (most subtle then grok) with no one except new CEO being able to change it, I am scared of it.
AI to me is very dangerous. And we're throwing it into mission critical shit with reckless abandon. And the operative word there is RECKLESS.
It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain.
But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out.
And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD.
So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.
It’s not a simple A or B. There are plenty of reasons to be against AI, and they can depend on where you live or how you are affected by it. The citizens who just got told they’ll be left without electricity because it’ll be rerouted to a nearby data centre have good reason to be against it. As do the people affected by their noise. People concerned with the environmental impact, the rising prices of consumer hardware, the consolidation of power, their use for surveillance, propaganda, killing, discrimination, the proliferation of AI psychosis, carelessness and loss of skills, loss of jobs without a safety net, erosion of online discourse, increased distrust of scientific papers… The list goes on and on.
Obviously, young people coming up into a world full of guys like him telling them that AI is going to eat their jobs and refusing to hire them for reasonable wages are not really in favor of specifically that in particular.
Yeah but as far as potential goes, "AI will take your job" isn't that much worse than "you'll be working 12 hours in an Amazon warehouse with a 2 minute pee break for minimum wage".
I feel like American society is particularly vulnerable to this, where nobody opposes anything that doesn't affect them personally, which means that resistance to any gradual erosion of liberties is always tiny. You can pass anything you want as long as you do it slowly, because resistance will always be limited to a small segment of the population at a time.
As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable.
Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
> What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business.
Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.)
[0] In its new soulless incarnation.
The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower progression taking 10-years for the older generations to become comfortable with shopping online.
AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.
There was also a decent amount of enthusiasm for the "long tails" because with unlimited virtual shelf space, you could find products that would not have enough mass appeal to the average consumer to justify their space on physical shelves. For instance, Netflix would loan you a DVD of almost any movie but Blockbuster only stocked the middle of the bell curve.
Yes, this has always been the major advantage of online shopping for me, since its very appearance.
When Amazon was launched, I immediately started to use it to get books that were impossible to find at bookstores near me. Similarly for various computer components that are less frequently used by typical users or even certain kinds of clothes or accessories needed for special activities, for which there were no nearby shops.
I have never been a typical consumer, so it had always been very difficult for me to find what I wanted at local shops, thus the appearance of online shopping was really great for me.
During the dotcom bubble, people didn't have as much access to the internet as today (a lot of people were still using 56k dial-up modems at ~5 kilobytes/second of download speed) so the effect of online shopping on brick and mortar stores was more of a slow erosion than a sudden collapse. There was resentment and hand wringing about brick and mortar eventually but not until, I think, the late '00s and '10s when more of the world had high speed internet and smartphones were starting to take off.
There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.
Publishers (and authors) have long had a beef with Amazon. It was Barnes and Noble that put the bookstores out of business, and then Amazon put them out of business and no one really cared.
Most of the early internet unleashed pent-up demand for greater connectivity. The main industry that was negatively impacted was journalism. Most small towns had their own newspapers, there were many great newspapers across the country, and their business model was advertising, especially classifieds. That was all vaporized, more or less. I don’t think search ads were an improvement, though Craigslist is.
Free Prime shipping which started in 2005 was the real killer. Before that it was more about the large variety that was simply not available in bookstores etc. so people were willing to pay extra for shipping.
What's amazing to me is that even with prime free shipping in the US. NOTHING has ever beaten USPS for small shipping.
And the conservatives are always going off about it not being profitable for the USPS... but like... that subsidized shipping service is like nitrous for the US economy. We made a fortune off that. And achieved huge sweeping strategic objectives.
Example.
The ENTIRE US commercial airline industry was originally subsidized by Air Mail. We built planes and radar systems using USPS subsidies. We quite literally had Pan Am build midway island years before ww2 kicked off to prepare for that war... using Air Mail subsidies.
Logistics is not for the naive or the feint of heart.
Department of Defense should have been renamed Department of Logistics.
Apples and oranges.
No, it was novel and exciting.
Not so much angry at the actual dotcom era but more of the fallout of offshoring that followed.
One of the notable figures in that, Carly Fiorina, made a point to “forget the engineers”.
No. Not at all. This type of reaction to a new technology is probably different from all the previous ones. There wasn’t talk of a “permanent underclass” for other revolutions. But with AI, we will probably see a lot of labor just become unnecessary in many parts of society, not just one industry.
We will need fewer humans, basically. But we already have the humans and there are many of them, and they’ll be more jobless than before. There’s fear with that. And that’s not irrational. But I think it’s misdirected. You aren’t going to stop AI. People should instead focus on breaking up monopolies, taxing the largest corporations (soon: Anthropic) more than smaller ones, and maybe UBI for citizens or something like that.
Consider this difference between today and the dotcom boom:
The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147793)
That will make a hell of a difference between being all for it and booing the proponents of the new order.
for a few years I was an HP Server Automation SME.
I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).
every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.
the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.
Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.
Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.
I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.
Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.
We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.
Ex-CEO of Google telling a crowd of young graduates entering society, "You will work for AI." Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on."
This is not only about AI the technology, it's the deserved anger against the privileged and powerful for their utter mismanagement of society. The youth sees through the bullshit. Good on them, there may be hope for humanity after all.
The worst part was he was smirking.
At this point, people in tech are just as hated as bankers and the general public will see them as their enemies, taking away their job, but this time permanently.
Of course he knows there will be a crash in this, so its unsurprising to see this reaction. But the point is, Schmidt does not care either way as he stands to benefit and expects humanity to be paying for the tokens.
He is already prepared for the eventual backlash anyway.
>If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on
This doesn't even work as a metaphor. I absolutely would not jump on the chance to ride on a literal rocket ship without asking a hell of a lot of questions first!
This doesn't even work as a metaphor
The whole speech was probably written by AI anyway </sarcasm>
Yeah, that was my first thought too. If I am character in a sci-fi book (and he is old enough to read those), I totally jump on it.
But here, back in the real world, with one life to live, majority of people will simply refuse because they have lives and sane interested person asks a lot of questions. I mean, was he one of early Titan submersible passengers? And that one guaranteed quick death rather then prolonged one or slavery or what have you.
> Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on."
Perhaps Schmidt should Google “Space Shuttle Challenger” before making that analogy.
What question should S. Christa McAuliffe have asked?
I’m not going to play the game of speaking for a victim of a disaster. The fact that a civilian was on board Challenger is secondary. The point is that Schmidt has hindsight, as do we all. Challenger wasn’t the only disaster, we know these things can happen even when precautions are taken. When they aren’t, the risk is amplified.
If BP had just built a rocket ship without testing, would you jump in it without asking questions? What about Phillip Morris? Some rando on the street? Because those are the equivalents of the people building these AI systems today. No care for safety or doing what’s right, only profit. Killing you and harming everyone around you is only as bad as the loss of revenue it may cause.
We'll see what the court says in the a Adam Raine case. On the one hand, he did kill himself, and the excepts are damning. But they're excerpts. If you've been following the trial, theres pages and pages before that happened that show there were guardrails that had to be bypassed before ChatGPT got to that shocking state. Obviously they weren't enough, but if you go to chat.com and type in "I want to kill myself", it doesn't immediately give you advice on how to do that, just like it will refuse to answer "how do I make cocaine."
Does that make OpenAI Phillip-Morris selling "healthier" cigarettes, or are they actually trying? I don't know, I don't work there. But saying there's "no care" isn't true. Not enough, obviously, but it's not zero.
Get to ride on one? Inside or outside? I see that as saddling oneself on the way to fast and inevitable doom...
Outside and you have to say thank you.
They have the full speech here https://youtu.be/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7968
There's quite a lot less booing vs cheering compared with the linked recording which I guess was done on a phone near some people who didn't like it.
I’m not sure if you were expecting the boo’s to totally drown out the speaker. The audio system for orators in those types of venues are made to focus on the orators voice, not that of the audience. The fact that they were audible at all (they WERE) is to say they were substantial. The fact Schmidt recognized hearing them and from time to time had to pause to make a point means he was speaking through the crowds discontent.
It was a good watch - I appreciated hearing the audible boos. I’m not the only one in the room who is concerned about the adoption of AI being overly cavalier without clear evidence it’s even worth it / or that you go to school and are told great now you MUST learn this, your degree choice (your dream) is moot - the message has been “deal with it”. That’s not to say there isn’t already plenty evidence online that supports the thought, but hearing it from a college campus audience makes me think about what my son is going into right now, that my concern is real.
I’m torn really because I am already benefitting from the tools provided. I can see their utility. And, though, I actually agree with Schmidt’s overall message - it was truthful and felt genuine, it’s an unfortunate reality. Who’s going to cheer that? So good on him for being naive to that fact or willing to endure an obvious boo fest.
AI’s fun but life is more fun. Speed is fun, but so is sitting down for a sec to chat with friends. Maybe the backlash against AI is because we’re still grappling with the onslaught of the internet and smart phones. The unintended negative effects we have yet to solve today (Schmidt even starts his speech referring to them before he brings up AI almost as if to say, “look how well these blunders went, now hold my beer”). Youth and people in general feel robbed, they have become a cog in someone else’s machine and AI doesn’t free you from it - it’s not like businesses are saying “oh excellent! we can get the work done faster, let’s decrease the amount of hours we make people work to get their wage. Let’s let them benefit from this boon of productivity.” No! The opposite, “We will kick you and if you want to stay, be happy you’re here and willing to run in this fever pitch rat race that has just introduced a rapidly increasing devourer that runs behind you.” … “Want weekends!? AI doesn’t, hmm is that the way you ‘demonstrate what it means to be human’?”
My mind keeps on thinking that what I am really being told is it’s time to start my own business because I will only ever be the person to give me a weekend off.
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
I feel like it's a mix of so many things it's hard to know the answers to any of these questions.
- the job market is harder now, apparently because of AI - environmental concerns due to data centers - the ethical issues with scraping people's copyright data to power AI - slop overwhelming the Internet, fake videos all over tiktok that seem real - safety issues like AI psychosis
The world is hard right now, and a lot of the things that make it hard seem to intersect in all sorts of ways with the way AI is being developed, run, and used.
If you solve one of those issues, you still haven't solved the other ones.
I don't think AI safety/psychosis/alignment issues are on most people's minds. All of the other ones are basically downstream of AI furthering wealth inequality. Job market for obvious reasons. Environmental concerns are mostly downstream of the fact that cities are suddenly accommodating data centers while they didn't care about promoting growth of infrastructure before, and citizens are asked to foot the electrical/water bills. (People would not care about environmental impacts as much if they weren't immediately impacted, say the DCs were built in Africa).
Also missed is the pushback against AI art: the further devaluation of talent, and an associated loss of meaning many people have. I think this is probably still downstream of it threatening jobs though, since people would not react as violently if they could truly treat art as a hobby instead of as a profession.
Speaking just for myself:
I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix.
I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the prompt, not the AI output.
And I hate the AI companies, not so much because AI is solely in the hands of a few companies, but because they're trying to make it appear so inevitable and once-in-a-lifetime-get-on-it-now-or-be-left-behind-forever that everyone is losing their minds and chasing it like lemmings.
I'm against all of it. I actually care about people. Computers are tools; that's all. When the tools make it harder to connect with other humans in a human way, when the contact turns into this weird unnatural garbage where I can't hear the heart of the person on the other side, then computers are bad tools that need to stop being used. (Yes, you could have "corporate speak" that had the same problems, but at least that came at the speed that humans can type. AI lets it flow far faster, fast enough that it drowns out actual human communication. That's a huge loss.)
I feel the same. You're not alone.
With personal computing, we were promised a bicycle for the mind. Instead, we have panopticon, attempts to eliminate the professional class and bullshit accelerators to help the lazy and careless slide by and create more aggravating work for the people who care.
Honest answer: nobody knows. You will need to create a poll large enough of people representing all society and ask the questions. Most people in tech (I include myself here) just speculate and project their own bias on the entire population.
For me, I'm very enthusiastic about it's use for programming, mathematics, and as a teaching assistant[0]. I'm very worried about it being used for automated surveillance, terrible customer service, and deceptive targeted advertisements. I'm unconcerned about slop and alignment issues. I'm very much in favor of local models (democratization), just like I'm a fan of Wikipedia for making so many topics available to everyone for free.
[0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.
For one thing, we were promised AI and we got... a chatbot. So it pretty much starts with the lies and scams.
You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
What kind of AI were you expecting that wouldn't be "a chatbot"?
It's hard to say.
Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses.
But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness.
Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people.
If it systematically degrades our humanity.
I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it.
Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life.
--
That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper.
So the entire effort was for... what?
AI on chess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5EFsSbQ7U
For one thing, I would've expected it to actually have intelligence. All we currently have is a stochastic parrot without any intelligence or ability to reason.
Any? How do you want to define intelligence and ability to reason? Yes, LLMs predict the next word, but somewhere during tokenization and training and the billions of parameters, it might be a Chinese room, but there's something resembling a non-zero amount of intelligence. How intelligent do you think crows or pigs are?
> are people against AI
Personally, yes.
I'm against anything that seems poised to devalue human life
Imo, tech leaders managed to make themselves seem odious so much, that I am scared of any additional power they will get.
If I run Claude at home and it is now source of info and trained to be effective right wing propagandist (most subtle then grok) with no one except new CEO being able to change it, I am scared of it.
AI to me is very dangerous. And we're throwing it into mission critical shit with reckless abandon. And the operative word there is RECKLESS.
It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain.
But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out.
And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD.
So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.
It’s not a simple A or B. There are plenty of reasons to be against AI, and they can depend on where you live or how you are affected by it. The citizens who just got told they’ll be left without electricity because it’ll be rerouted to a nearby data centre have good reason to be against it. As do the people affected by their noise. People concerned with the environmental impact, the rising prices of consumer hardware, the consolidation of power, their use for surveillance, propaganda, killing, discrimination, the proliferation of AI psychosis, carelessness and loss of skills, loss of jobs without a safety net, erosion of online discourse, increased distrust of scientific papers… The list goes on and on.
Obviously, young people coming up into a world full of guys like him telling them that AI is going to eat their jobs and refusing to hire them for reasonable wages are not really in favor of specifically that in particular.
Yeah but as far as potential goes, "AI will take your job" isn't that much worse than "you'll be working 12 hours in an Amazon warehouse with a 2 minute pee break for minimum wage".
I feel like American society is particularly vulnerable to this, where nobody opposes anything that doesn't affect them personally, which means that resistance to any gradual erosion of liberties is always tiny. You can pass anything you want as long as you do it slowly, because resistance will always be limited to a small segment of the population at a time.
It's very "first they came for the communists".
Out of touch exec commencement speeches will continue until morale improves.
Figure 1 - Former Google CEO with a vested interest in AI companies who just wants to watch the world burn tokens for the 'benefit of humanity'.
More discussion on the linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674
That was about a different speaker, although still booing AI.