It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.
The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did.
I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.
Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position.
Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago!
What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.
Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug
A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic physics (replicators, warp drives, transporters, etc.)
I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.
Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.
* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.
Of course. I was just responding to the parent who was sad that AI isn't turning out to be "the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago." But that was always fantasy sci/fi anyway.
From the perspective of pre-history, anyone living in a western country is in a post-scarcity society.
Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.
The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.
Can't exactly have a post-scarcity economy with the current dominant economic system in place. As long as a few are allowed to "own" the means of production and gate access to it, there will always be scarcity.
Like if any of those ideas had bring anything other than poverty, hunger, suffering, and millions of deaths.
We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
> Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have.
I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
I don’t think it’s any more facile to use the term “intelligence” to describe the synthesis engines that we call “AI” when we use the same word to describe the gradient-seeking behaviors of slime molds.
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
It depends on how you define intelligence. There's a straightforward functional definition: if a system can solve a range of problems that require complex reasoning and it meets objective standards of success across multiple disciplines, then that system is intelligent.
Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.
What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it.
Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
> We can have actual conversations with our computers,
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side.
Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).
Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
> AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails.
Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?
Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.
>We can have actual conversations with our computers
conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.
The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.
What's nuts to me is how sycophantic the models are even when I'm just generating code. "What a fantastic project!" "Such an elegant solution!" When all I've done is described the problem and pasted a debug trace or whatever.
It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops
Dude we were having "actual conversations with our computers" ten years ago and weren't pretending it was AI because it fucking wasn't then, it was markov chains, oh and it's ADVANCED markov chains now.
That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!"
Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.
The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.
20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.
Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.
> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.
There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob.
Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?
In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.
If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria
I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
However your experience isn't necessarily where the other poster is coming from.
As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it.
From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.
This is a terminally online thing. It makes people more extreme. It also prevents them from realizing just how intense their POV is when everyone in their internet bubble is one upping each other.
In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.
> I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions.
I'm living now in the city, where you don't need to listen to your neighbor because you can find a more fitting social circle. People are not able to listen and compromise, they'll just turn around and ignore you once they understand you are not on their side.
I was explaining this to a woman who was going to move in a village, and she said "how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?".
It's a strange situation where the far right rural nut job are more open minded than city dwellers.
> There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
A question I find myself selfishly asking a lot is: why do I have to be the one who is accepting or tolerant of others when they may not be accepting of me or my friends and family? I should speak respectfully of rural areas and their inhabitants but cities are free game to be portrayed as dens of crime, drugs, filth, and illegal immigrants? I should respect evangelical Christian communities but my transgender friends can't enjoy the same rights, benefits, and protections of society as cisgender/heterosexual people anywhere they go in the US? To make it explicitly political, Democrats are being asked to moderate and not be so intolerant but no such demands seem to be being made of Republicans or their voters.
I am pretty certain that the book of at least 1 of the Abrahamic religions explicitly states that you either believe all of it, or you are not a believer.
What you’re describing is religion applied to every opinion.
"Our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal"
It might be a recency bias, because the 19th and 20th were extremely polarized, politically… from entire nations split up on one issue, up to political assassination, civil wars…
slavery, women’s vote, antisemitism, prohibition, civil rights, asylum, universal marriage, and much more.
> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.
As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.
"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?
They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.
Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:
- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)
- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)
- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)
- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)
- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)
- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)
- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)
I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.
People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!
But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.
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I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this.
I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order effects kicked in.
Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.
Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment.
The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
> Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that.
This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.
No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.
> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living
AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.
> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.
But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.
I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.
It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.
Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.
Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.
I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.
My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been very selective about my employers based on their general operating philosophies.
The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver or someone who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.
Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.
I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?
Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.
I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.
> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away.
I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.
I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.
I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.
This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.
Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.
I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.
> There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?
Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”
I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.
I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”
You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.
And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.
That is a big differentiator. I think there is a pretty valid argument that the models and data centers are net positive for society, and therefore ethical (better than the counterfactual of their absence).
I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.
Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.
I don't think the AI criticism has anything to do with "thinking we are beyond nature or whatever". It's the realization that this force will only drive societies apart even more
Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities?
Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc.
Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.
Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.
It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).
Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)
Most do, in my experience? I worked at Argonne for a while, and they absolutely treated their profession with deadly seriousness. I didn't meet anyone who took the stance of "Move fast and break things". Most spent too many late nights rechecking their work to make sure it was correct. Even when being wrong would be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.
Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates
The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.
People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.
Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
More specifically, someone actively building on top of Amazon decrying the exploitation of workers and the environment is demonstrably hypocritical.
And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.
"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.
All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
Sure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit.
I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.
I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.]
Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses < thing > is < problematic >" feels extreme.
I could even agree with “is problematic” although I don’t see it as black and white, but “is problematic and therefore doesn’t get to comment / needs to own this / did this” is definitely not a legitimate critique of the critical discourse.
> Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
I'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take.
The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
I very much agree with this position. And it didn’t even have to be AI.
It’s possible that sufficiently advanced “dumb” compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - that’s happened in other professions. We always joked about how we’re automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity.
When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.
> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Not the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business.
If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead
> moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money
I was part of the online division of a newspaper. Online classifieds did lose them money, but for my company at least, moving them online was an effort to stop losing all of the money from them.
> you are the automation that came in their stead
Sure. We hired fewer people to answer phones for managing their classified ads, but we hired more people to moderate the site and make sure people weren't posting obscene stuff. And it also employed a handful of software developers.
I'm not convinced it was a total loss. I can't speak to the quality journalism part though
Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years.
Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.
You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.
> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
I vehemently disagree that meta or airbnb have done more to benefit society than not, but I'll take the overall argument; that technology, on the whole, benefits society overall.
Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers.
Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that.
Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few.
To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.
We agree for the first few sentences! I’m a huge proponent for AI displacement taxes because of the rapid pace of acceleration and a lack of confidence that our economies reabsorption mechanisms are adequate.
If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.
On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.
It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.
I think we're roughly on the same side here? I'm explicitly against moralizing about AI by people who benefit from other forms of tech exploitation, e.g. using Amazon for hosting; I'm not against the idea of AI as a whole; I think it's an inevitability.
I just believe all of us should be willing to accept our own responsibility for the state of it. I also believe it could eventually work out to be a net benefit to the species; but in the short term, it's going to hurt us badly, as most technological revolutions have. I'm saying everyone involved, directly or indirectly, should be willing to accept their fraction of responsibility for the people who are suffering in the interim, and that moralizing about it is disingenuous.
I'm pretty sure we're not disagreeing at all. Over time, most technological revolutions have benefited society. That doesn't mean they didn't exploit people, though. Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been. People are still being exploited by technology. It's just more diffuse, and (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down.
Yes, I think we have the same beliefs largely - my point is that the lens of economies of scale == exploitation is a very silly one that would naturally lead to conclusions such as "Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been."
That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.
Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.
From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".
I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs.
1. Life expectancy
2. Infant / Child Mortality
3. Extreme Poverty
4. Literacy Rates
5. Average years of schooling
6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths
I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth
It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.
Meta’s primary issue is an alignment problem. They’ve built the most valuable human connection network ever and then added a misaligned algorithm on it.
You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.
To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.
All of their open source work, facebook marketplace, messenger connecting people, low cost distribution for small business, crises and humanitarian tooling, abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc.
The open source stuff is nice and all, but I wouldn't say React, GraphQL, Cassandra, or any of the other stuff is "beneficial to humanity" lol wtf
> facebook marketplace
Craigslist exists, plus other startups were aiming to do that and one would have found its footing if not for Facebook marketplace. Either way, this doesn't make up for any of the negatives people ascribe to Facebook.
> messenger connecting people
This is a fucking joke, as there were and are numerous other instant messaging apps.
> low cost distribution for small business
Yeah, small businesses can have Facebook pages, but this isn't that beneficial. We are talking "extremely beneficial" here, not "some features are useful to some people".
> crises and humanitarian tooling
Yeah I can see it being useful for governments to communicate, but unfortunately outweighed by the misinformation
> abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc
Cool that they try to solve problems their platform is susceptible to? They are doing this for themselves and it's proprietary software, isn't it?
IDK what kind of bubble you exist in where people genuinely believe any of the above would constitute "extremely beneficial". Large quantities of people, including those holding down jobs, in the richest country in the world are barely able to put food on the table, people are getting kidnapped by masked Federal agents who are entering homes without warrants, and there are multiple ongoing wars in the world, but, yeah, Facebook, "extremely beneficial", solving the hard problems xd
I am at least objective in my criticism. I'm not going to reply to 5 different emotionally charged strawman arguments, especially because I don't care to defend Meta.
If you're going to engage in discussion, at least try to interpret the other parties argument charitably. You're wasting both our time replying to the dumbest interpretation of what I said.
You gave one sentence statement to try to explain why you think the company does anything that would count as "extremely beneficial" (your words), and it's just a list of stuff you didn't bother to elaborate on (including, laughably, Facebook Messenger, as if anyone could possibly count that as "extremely beneficial"). You didn't even make a cogent argument.
Depends what part of AI they say they don't agree with. Anyone with a reasonable, sound argument can give it a shot.
Is a 100% local, open-weight model that you only use for learning purposes / generating questions meant just for you the same thing as criticizing the use of "AI" in large corporations replacing workers?
How about DLSS 4 frame gen in a game? That's AI too, and pretty universally seen as neutral or positive by anyone who's aware of it.
How about AI assisting doctors scanning for cancers in medical checkups?
How about running google translate on a street sign when you're in a new country?
Folks gotta be more specific than just saying they're anti-AI, because what does that statement even mean in practice?
Indeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999:
> People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever).
And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
Agreed.
I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.
A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.
The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
That's why almost no one notable in tech (both software and hardware) is taking this stance, or still has this stance with the current state of LLMs. Even the extremely talented devs who personally don't use LLMs don't have this extremist take that LLMs and AI tools are morally evil (??).
It's obvious that tons of people have become better at their jobs because of it, it's obvious that it has already saved companies millions of hours. I understand that many don't like the copyright avoiding antics of these big AI companies, but to say that AI is a net negative on humanity is so completely idiotic that it makes me question their character in anything they do moving forward.
You make a good point; but the scale of destruction is by no means the same now.
Most of the US jobs were lost not to automation, but to outsourcing in pursuit of profits. A similar problem of corporate exploitation, but not so much a technological one.
To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
> it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?
It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.
For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.
In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.
That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.
The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:
> I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:
> Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?
On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
That the frontier models and subs are all big tech is probably what bothers me most about “AI” right now, but I’m bullish on advancements in the capabilities of local models. I suspect and hope that, in time, the field will level and we will have very capable local, offline models and the landscape will be much as it is now with subscription compute in the cloud for enterprise and self host / local first for indies / hackers etc.
Well, but the data centers needed for AI are on a much different scale than what "big tech profitmaxxing" used to need. I also agree with the author and you. Morally, I also cannot support the toll it takes on the environment, workers, and society in general. However, what's the option? Either be part of it or get laid off. Build an AI startup or be employeed in one and get that money or well I really cannot imagine a third path that's both financially viable and keeps you relevant in the next decade.
I guess the third path could be to use it as less as possible, hopefully finding a job that doesn't enforces its use.
Still learn how to use it in case that becomes your only viable option in a few years time.
And don't forget how to program by hand, for che case where in a few years time AI didn't improve as much(or just costs too much) and we discover there is a lot of messy AI codeto fix. In that case you might be able to keep your moral stance and still get paid reasonably
I agree. It's a finance capitalism issue. The people who build data centers get free reign on the use energy, land, water and the atmosphere while everyone will bear the cost. Its another upward transfer of wealth. Another wealth pump as Peter Turchin describes it. This could end whatever democratic process is left. The West will be just like China but worse. Slower trains and more violent. At least in China, Political power is in control of capital.
Most people I've spoken to in private hate AI in tech too, they just keep quiet out of fear for their job (voice any objection to AI? next on the chopping block), so you only hear the pro AI voices.
Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).
If you and 5 others go to McDonald's for 3 meals a day, it will always appear busy to you even if it had no traffic outside those moments you were there with the 5 others. Similarly the news can report on outliers using AI while most people you know IRL may not use it. In other words, it is accurate, the groups are not the same, and statistics often don't feel like they reflect reality.
Humans are complex. I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are a lot of people who both rely on and don't like the idea of AI. People can need a car to get around and also be worried about the effects of car emissions. People can dislike cigarettes and be smokers.
I keep seeing this argument in various places on HN that usage implies a positive opinion, when it very much does not. AI has put most people in prisoner's dilemma, and in prisoner's dilemma you can simultaneously play the game and hate the game. To go through a few of your examples:
> Students using AI to do homework
Either you don't use AI, where you have to spend a lot of time studying or graduate bottom of your class, or you do and get on with your life. You can acknowledge that the studying is the valuable part (most students do in my experience) yet skip it for whatever reason (procrastination / life issues / etc).
> Teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students
We've added an extra step to their already overloaded schedules. If they don't do this they're basically encouraging students to cheat this way.
> Translations
You can now easily get a translation with much better accuracy than before (presumably, I'm a monolingual English speaker), but now you aren't talking to any other human beings for this information. This goes for a lot of other knowledge-value work / hobbies too where asking questions is valuable.
I don't work in tech (school teacher), so the main way I interact with tech people is online.
IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.
Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.
This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals.
I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.
If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
Bit confused - you and me voluntarily reading a blog post linked on HN, doesn't make the author someone who is pushing their morals on us?
I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?
It’s less about the article pushing a POV (although it does), and more about the attitude of the author, which is basically “I’m angry that taking an absolutist stance will cause discomfort!”
Having a libertarian stance on morality is great unless its actually important to take a stand. It's the difference between "I would never own slaves" and being an abolitionist. I think it's pretty reasonable to expect others to agree and align with my personal morals around slavery.
To me, slavery is an ethical issue and transcends morals, but setting that aside:
You have to follow your own moral compass and do what's workable. If you're compelled to take a stand, take a stand. Just know that you can't force other people to change their morals. People who follow this line of thought to its extreme end up killing people who disagree with them. This is how you get everything from anarchist bombings to civil wars.
Personally I think car culture is more damaging than data centers and the threat of super intelligence, but I'm not willing to kill anyone over any of it.
I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.
This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters.
As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
> As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others.
If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right.
Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
There is no such thing as good person or evil person anywhere else other than in human society.
It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.
Sometimes I get an impression that it isn’t even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.
"Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors."
If everyone defects, the system breaks down. Morality is good and it is actually logical - it solves the prisoners dilemma and pushes cooperation instead of defection. It also reduces harm and has lots of other good properties. I feel that how we affect others matters, but even if you're just a sociopath doing the math, defecting is a strategy that burns things down at scale, not a smart one. Tit for tat with forgiveness is not only morally aligned, but also more prosperous in scenarios that aren't just one-off interactions with strangers.
> If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult.
Yes, and that’s my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them.
Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.
I think there is a selection bias here. If it succeedes the minority becomes a majority.
I think a good example are religious movements (obviously i dont want to equate religion with morality, but often they come with certain moral views attached). They start as a minority, and either they die or they take over. Christianity was a minority at one point.
a tiny minority can't but somewhere between 10% or a quarter is enough to pressure the rest to support them. for example to force the majority of restaurants to make sure their food is halal, because otherwise muslims would not eat there. or to port your software to run on macs, etc...
it depends of course on the cost of compliance. halal food is fine, because everyone can eat it. a minority of vegans could not force restaurants to stop serving meat because that would in turn exclude the majority of meat eaters.
While i agree with your general point, i'm not sure i agree with your example. i don't think a minority of muslims (or jews) are going to convince all resturants to stop serving pork, because bacon is too popular.
in some places i have traveled to that were predominately christian but had a minority muslim population, pork was very rare, and most shops and restaurants indicated that they were halal. now pork could have been rare for other reasons, but places advertising halal food clearly can only come from the muslim minority. although, maybe it was just muslims running all the restaurants. no idea. i don't know what it takes to be allowed to advertise halal food. i know kosher food requires an inspection by someone authorized. and it also takes considerable effort.
this example just came to mind from my observations. i didn't check any statistics other than the religions in the region. also i just realize, i don't remember seeing this in singapore, which also has a 15% muslim population. so yeah, it looks like you are right, and it is a bad example after all.
The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:
> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.
> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.
Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?
> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.
> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.
> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.
It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
I disagree with multiple of your responses, but I'd like to push back on this point in particular:
> Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
You could have made the same point without the baseless accusation of bigotry. But even if it's true, it would still be the "You think we should improve society, yet you live in it" meme in action. Exploitation is not a binary state (some workers are exploited worse than others), and if the author believes that AI will broadly lead to much more/worse exploitation, watering down their actual point would only make their stance less likely to be heard.
And if they mentioned DoorDash workers, would you actually be satisfied? Or would you be looking for the next group of exploited workers that aren't included?
Nuance would make the points stronger, not weaker. If you complain about something while assuming everyone should agree with you without question, you are not contributing to the conversation, but merely whining.
Sure, but including more groups of exploited workers wouldn't have made the author's point more nuanced. And ironically, throwing around baseless accusations (like "you just ordered DoorDash" and "if you actually cared about the environment") will only serve to make the conversation less nuanced.
This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.
I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to prevent/offset the "omnipresent big brother" is to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to models with decent capability and know how to properly evaluate and use them.
I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself.
Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
I don't think there's a way to "starve the beast", unless completely isolating from society is an option (which it isn't for any but a sparse few). But the data it lives on can be diluted and made more piecemeal by keeping things local first, and spreading usage across multiple jurisdictions when more than local is needed.
This, but we need to prevent as much of this data from being collected in the first place. All our traffic cameras for instance are being coopted into a massive surveillance network with no oversight, but this network doesn't exist if you don't have traffic cameras in the first place.
I propose the J Edgar Hoover heuristic. Would X be something you'd want Hoover to have access to? If not, then don't build it.
The main reason is that almost everyone's experience of AI is that it has replaced something or someone that did the job better before AI. That means the experience that vast majority of people have with AI is that it has made things worse.
It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.
Its always detached at some level. Morality always comes down to a choice of what you think is wrong vs right. You can't reason from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, without picking some values.
Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.
Congratulations, you just discovered moral relativism why even bother if __bad thing__ exists? Why shouldn’t I sell opiates when doctors can prescribe oxycontin and fentanyl? Throwawaytwice won’t care about hurting me and mine with their choices, why not preemptively strike throwawaytwice? Where’s the bottom?
Probably should feel as bad about it as you do for owning and using your phone. The world is unfair and will stay that way, but now with AI it'll probably just get worse. And if you only look out for yourself - fine, that might work, but all of it has consequences. If you use AI for coding you will most certainly have noticed already that your actual skills might have declined - at least that's the observation I made personally and from talking to fellow engineers.
Or it gets better; every industrial revolution has made life for everyone better, not only the rich ones.
Coding skills will decline indeed, like math skills of bookkeepers declined when they started using computers. But other skills come in their place too.
I think it's possible to come up with cogent and principled anti-AI arguments. This post is not example of something like that lol
Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI.
Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.
What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend.
Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.
Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
These are more like HPC supercomputers than garden variety datacenters. That's why there's so much concern re: water use for the electricity being supplied. (That's easy to address in principle, of course: wind and solar power use up negligible amounts of water compared to other sources.)
Most of the water concern is evaporative cooling of the datacenter itself. But IMO not too much of a concern. The energy use and the resource use to make the chips, etc, is bigger.
Well, stuff tends not to get completely wasted, but:
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.
It's worth doing when the -true cost of resources- is represented in their price.
If it's not, then more of the thing ends up being done than is socially optimal.
E.g. artificially cheap agricultural water -> lots of water-heavy crops being produced like alfalfa and exported for less than the cost of the water.
I think we might disagree about the degree to this is true, but I think most of us can agree that the true cost of energy is not completely included in its price.
Yeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Something that I've started looking into and I think could become an interesting metric is resource usage comparison of # of average-request prompts against minutes of audio/video streaming. Then we can start to say things like "you know, watching a 10-minute YouTube video uses roughly the same amount of resources as 60 prompts" and hopefully have a more down-to-earth conversation surrounding our ecological impact and how we assign value.
Care to elaborate? Just taking the impact of data centers on locals is enough to validate his point. (Noise pollution, heat pollution and emissions from on-site gas turbines)
There was a chart on Twitter comparing the water usage of AI datacenters to that of the California almond farms and the golf courses all over the country. AI’s water usage is tiny compared to those.
> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.
I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths
The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?
As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?
I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things.
Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry out your plan, you will just end up being an incredibly hurtful person towards a lot of folks who probably have no idea why you are abandoning them and now feel isolated, hurt, and confused.
Also, ask yourself how sure you are, that you're going to be right for all time, about AI, which is a brand-new technology. Maybe you know yourself. Your views seem incredibly rigid and perhaps you really will never change your mind no matter what AI becomes. But if you ever have changed your mind about anything ever, again, please consider whether the harmful course of action you are describing is worth the extraordinary harm you seem eager to effectuate on everyone who disagrees.
Honestly I don't know why I bothered typing out of any of this. I doubt the author cares. I just wish people like this author would consider that their words and actions do actual harm to real people. And, by the way, zero harm to the progress of AI. Just hurtful and dumb.
Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly."
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive.
The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.
That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.
So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.
My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.
What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.
Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.
I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.
If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.
Yeah so therefore I think a positive attitude is all the more needed, where you see the potentials, see solutions instead of problems. But I feel most anti-AI people are just negative people seeing only problems and don't have any solutions to offer.
I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.
> I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.
Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.
Hmm, okay, then...
Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.
Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...
--
Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]
- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?
- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?
--
[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!
Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
Holy cow this is whiny
And essentially saying no one else has morals… yikes.
Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad.
In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.
Your eyes were irritated and you took an antibacterial eyedrop which is basically the only product on the market for such a condition… I’m really not sure Google would’ve failed you 10 years ago or even just asking your pharmacist 20 years ago
This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.
It's part of this nihilistic undercurrent, especially among Millennials and younger generations. "I'm not having kids, have you seen the world?" "I'm not saving for retirement, Social Security won't exist and the oceans will swallow the continent by the time I reach retirement age." "I refuse to use AI tools that could help me create new things and reach my goals, because the influencers told me AI is going to poison the water". Quite sad actually.
As a society its good for resilience to embrace small pockets of complete ai withdrawl. We should be happy some groups go through pain to keep best practices and processes alive that do not rely on any ai whatsoever. But most of these are unbearable for pragmatic normies to be around. This is made worse by the fact that seemingly a high percentage is not fully motivated by morals but by a deep insecurity that makes them militant, overly judgmental, bipolar thinkers and prone to weird authoritarian dynamics and exclusionism that i only know from the “vegan power” hatred for vegetarians and militant antifa s hatred for the “realist left”.
I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.
Then your issue isn't with AI, it's with your bureaucracy. Just because your company is holding it wrong doesn't mean the entire technology is morally fraught.
If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?
Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.
Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).
It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.
But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
I mean if you had the same reaction when personal computers were made, you would also be an outcast. They also put whole industries out of business and caused huge pollution and etc. There is no real difference. But you have a right to withdraw from the world and be a luddite.
I've always liked new technological discoveries, and LLMs is no exception. It's an amazing breakthrough.
But the actual benefits for society are honestly underwhelming. Yes, we can code faster now -- but was there a serious problem with humanity being unable to produce enough code fast enough? We can write emails faster, and summarize documents much faster -- ok, yes, that does make some people more productive, myself included. But yeah, email also made us more productive than typewriters, which made us more productive than hand-written letters. LLMs might uncover medical discoveries that humans just couldn't on our own? Uh, maybe? I mean we've had ML/DL models for a while and they're getting better.
And then you consider the way that AI is being implemented, developed, invested in, and pushed, by large corporations, whatever benefits there could be from LLMs, are highly outweighed by the negative effects on society as a whole. It is a highly destructive force in almost every area. It could be a force for good, but at the rate we're going, it will not be, because that's not the profitable path.
Nuclear fission was an amazing scientific discovery as well! And yet if it weren't for strict regulations, international treaties, UN-verification agencies, major protests against nuclear weapons etc., there's a pretty good chance that millions would have died by now by some nuclear weapon. (In addition to the hundreds of thousands who did die by nuclear fission in Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- which makes you wonder if the discovery of nuclear fission was worth it at all.) (Ah, but nuclear-backed MAD prevents conventional wars that might have killed millions anyway! Yes, that argument has some merit but I'm certainly not convinced. I'm old enough to remember feeling like we were literally a button-press away from destroying much of humanity. The weird thing is that we still are, we just don't think about it much because it hasn't happened yet.)
Hating AI is the majority position. Almost everyone's experience of AI is that it has replaced something or someone that did the job better before AI. That means the experience that vast majority of people have with AI is that it has made things worse.
It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
> All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
But the difference is I actually like artificial intelligence and the capabilities it provides. No one can predict the future. I don't know if it's going to make my life better or worse. But if you think you're gonna start an uprising and change the world while this thing is in motion, you're deluding yourself. Might as well adapt and make the best of it. Much better than getting steamrolled and not getting anything out of it.
I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
the argument reminds me of the uncanny sense of being managed. i think there was a belief that having the skills that AI synthesizes was some kind of intellectual equity, when this was more of a convention and a promise than any kind of social contract that preserves the value and meaning of ones past contributions.
imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base?
mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
I'm torn because i genuinely think LLMs absolutely completely suck ass at 99.99% of tasks, i think AI "art" is disgusting, it sucks balls at writing, it sucks at documentation, it sucks at summarizing, it sucks at research, i would never in a million years trust current AI to tell me what medication is safe or how long food is safe to eat or any of that.
However. For _programming_, they actually are shockingly useful. Like I'm actually shocked that models in 2026 do useful programming for me where 2024 models definitely could not. They still need babysitting, definitely. I see with my own eyes people with less programming knowledge accepting awful output without consideration. But in the hands of an expert, there are actually now programming tasks i prefer to do with an LLM, which i genuinely never thought would happen.
Basically if it were me, the societal impacts of the "art" and the chatbots are clearly awful, cheapening creative cultural work, replacing it with hideous slop, and preying on the mentally unwell driving many of them to self harm, and i think these products should be taken off the market. But coding agents, specifically? It's getting harder to imagine life without them. Idk if it's possible to have one without the other, not that it matters, it's not up to me, it's up to sama, and he loves preying on the unwell and destroying culture
We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows
>Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
If you think that people working in tech shouldn't be capable of criticizing their own domain, and taking a step back to understand what they're helping build, I can't do much for you
Where did you get that idea? Capability isn't in question. Intelligent, well-informed on the subject, positioned to see issues, problems, and drawbacks first. They spend most of their waking hours chewing over every tiny detail.
They just don't want to. It'd be like asking a paleontologist why they hate dinosaurs. And if you can't see that, then I don't know how to explain it to you in a way that will ever make sense. On 4chan, they'd say something along the lines of "not your army", and that goes the same here. We're not your army to mobilize against AI. Nothing will ever change that. Somehow though, you think our positions are reversed, but they're not. I'm comfortable here, I'm comfortable with the zeitgeist and everyone's attitude on the subject, it's you that seems to be in distress. I don't want anything from you and I don't need your help.
Not my experience. Maybe it's your presentation that earns downvotes, not your message.
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
A principal dogma on orange reddit is the neutrality of technology. Most people here are opposed to the nigh inevitable incipient use of AI in mass surveillance but don't think that that has any relationship to their use of AI (for example) as "Google that actually works." Whether they are right, I am not sure.
They lack the understanding that technology is not separate from society. Both go together, and CANNOT be analyzed without each other.
People who did engineering studies often think that "tech is pure", it's a simple "knowledge field" where something is "true or not". That's completely wrong. Tech is indissociable from society
But engineers don't understand that. Only researchers (and militants) do
It is fun watching the thieves squirm in this thread and being upset at others calling them criminals. "But think of the loom," they say. The loom wasn't stolen by a replicator.
It's funny, I have the opposite experience of everyone around me hating AI. I'm not aggressively pro-AI around them at all but you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm used to it though, I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago. The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month. The article seems a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly concerns around the nature of work and the economy, though. There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.
When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities.
I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades.
The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?
The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did.
I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions
What's "the West"?
UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
[0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978.
[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence
[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.
Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.
Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position.
Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
>old definition of AI
There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.
AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
You are very wrong here.
The term "AI" never meant bots in general.
It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago!
What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.
Nonsense. The median human is wildly better off than ever before.
A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.
Maybe we need some kind of worldwide negative event first. In Star Trek lore, World War 3 starts this year (2026). Like with World War 2, perhaps it’s needed to calibrate the zeitgeist to a spot where a prosperous era can follow /shrug
A Star-Trek style "post-scarcity" economy can't exist in the real world. It depends on an impossible paradigmatic shift in basic human nature across the entire species (people just "evolve" beyond their base vices and desires such that they're willing to work purely for the sake of voluntarism and the betterment of humanity, there is no racism, no sexism, no struggles for power. *) and technology that violates basic physics (replicators, warp drives, transporters, etc.)
I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.
Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.
* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.
Of course. I was just responding to the parent who was sad that AI isn't turning out to be "the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago." But that was always fantasy sci/fi anyway.
From the perspective of pre-history, anyone living in a western country is in a post-scarcity society.
Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.
The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.
Especially now that we have magic boxes to answer any question and speak any language
there's no hope for you in your future with that fine attitude.
Can't exactly have a post-scarcity economy with the current dominant economic system in place. As long as a few are allowed to "own" the means of production and gate access to it, there will always be scarcity.
Like if any of those ideas had bring anything other than poverty, hunger, suffering, and millions of deaths.
We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
It's not really "intelligence"
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
> Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have.
I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
I think if you showed me LLM AI twenty years ago, I'd be like "what's the trick, what's the catch, how does it work" and then the statistical nature of it would be explained to me and I'd have the exact same reaction as i had when i learned how it worked in ~2021: oh, that's very clever, and maybe even very useful, but idk if it's "intelligent"
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
I don’t think it’s any more facile to use the term “intelligence” to describe the synthesis engines that we call “AI” when we use the same word to describe the gradient-seeking behaviors of slime molds.
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
It depends on how you define intelligence. There's a straightforward functional definition: if a system can solve a range of problems that require complex reasoning and it meets objective standards of success across multiple disciplines, then that system is intelligent.
Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.
What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
> We can have actual conversations with our computers,
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side.
Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).
Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
Wow. Palantirians (or whatever tf they call themselves) have no reply other than downvotes? Couldn't even get ChatGPT to astroturf an advocacy?
> AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails.
Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?
Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.
>We can have actual conversations with our computers
conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.
The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.
What's nuts to me is how sycophantic the models are even when I'm just generating code. "What a fantastic project!" "Such an elegant solution!" When all I've done is described the problem and pasted a debug trace or whatever.
It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops
Dude we were having "actual conversations with our computers" ten years ago and weren't pretending it was AI because it fucking wasn't then, it was markov chains, oh and it's ADVANCED markov chains now.
Delusion.
That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!"
Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.
The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.
20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.
Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.
>I've been excited by the concept of AI since reading about Turing and such as a child 20 years ago...
I have been too, but LLMs aint it, just like mobile phones is not subspace communicator...
Nuance was banned from the internet circa 1996, sorry
> you aren't allowed to have any positive or nuanced opinion of the tech.
I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob. Trying to stand up for your right to a safe public space brands you as evil.
There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
> Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example. If you state any opinion other than silent acceptance of the issue, you get called a far-right nutjob.
Are you having these conversations about politics in person? Or are these conversations happening on Twitter/Reddit/HN/whatever?
In my experience, online forums don't really work for political discussion for a bunch of reasons.
If you change to getting your fix of politics from long-form articles and radio-style scripted podcasts by professional journalists, you'll probably find there's a lot more room for nuance.
> Are you having these conversations in person?
I can't speak for the other poster but I've had the experience they described in-person, when I was living in Victoria
I rented an apartment downtown Victoria and had pretty frequent run-ins with addicts on the streets. My friends who lived and worked further out away from the downtown core had very strong opinions about it any time I had anything negative to say about the experiences
However your experience isn't necessarily where the other poster is coming from.
As a counter point, I have more nuanced conversations in person and am able to do it online; however I have also moderated a community for several years and learned how to do it.
From what I can remember of research, is that there is a difference in how people express themselves online vs offline.
Thanks to people being glued to social media & other rage bait machines on their phones.
>Look at the issue of public drug use by the unhoused in PNW cities, as an example.
This is such a wild thing to bring up unprompted.
Would you assume he was a far-right nut job?
Would I need to assume?
You are incredibly proving OPs point
This is a terminally online thing. It makes people more extreme. It also prevents them from realizing just how intense their POV is when everyone in their internet bubble is one upping each other.
In the real world I still encounter more moderation than not except from people who spend a lot of time on TikTok.
> I'm finding this isn't unique to AI, it's as if our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal. There's little room for shades of gray now.
I grew up in a small village, 300 people. There you learn to accept your neighbor political rant, otherwise you're socialy dead and that's a pretty bad place to be. I learned to dissociate the person from its opinions.
I'm living now in the city, where you don't need to listen to your neighbor because you can find a more fitting social circle. People are not able to listen and compromise, they'll just turn around and ignore you once they understand you are not on their side.
I was explaining this to a woman who was going to move in a village, and she said "how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?".
It's a strange situation where the far right rural nut job are more open minded than city dwellers.
>are more open minded than city dwellers.
I mean it's a bit difficult to be open minded to someone that would gladly have you killed.
"how can you be friend with a person from the other end politicaly?"
how can you be open minded and avoid being stuck in a bubble if you can't be friends with someone like that?
> There's no room for a middle ground or nuance anymore. You are either entirely in one tribe, or entirely out.
A question I find myself selfishly asking a lot is: why do I have to be the one who is accepting or tolerant of others when they may not be accepting of me or my friends and family? I should speak respectfully of rural areas and their inhabitants but cities are free game to be portrayed as dens of crime, drugs, filth, and illegal immigrants? I should respect evangelical Christian communities but my transgender friends can't enjoy the same rights, benefits, and protections of society as cisgender/heterosexual people anywhere they go in the US? To make it explicitly political, Democrats are being asked to moderate and not be so intolerant but no such demands seem to be being made of Republicans or their voters.
The overly tribal, lack of nuance, is overwhelmingingly from the millennial generation. I don't see older people being like that.
I am pretty certain that the book of at least 1 of the Abrahamic religions explicitly states that you either believe all of it, or you are not a believer.
What you’re describing is religion applied to every opinion.
You know what you are
"Our entire society has become black and white, overly tribal" It might be a recency bias, because the 19th and 20th were extremely polarized, politically… from entire nations split up on one issue, up to political assassination, civil wars… slavery, women’s vote, antisemitism, prohibition, civil rights, asylum, universal marriage, and much more.
> The idea has always been met with negativity, IMO because people want to feel that they have a part of themselves that is beyond nature and has a "special" place in the universe.
This is actually a big part of why being pro-AI is met with negativity today.
As someone who's using and building with AI and also experiences the "anti" movement, you've chosen a pretty condescending minority of the reasons why they dislike AI and painted it as the default.
"They never liked AI because they don't like the idea maybe they're not such special snowflakes in the universe"... really?
They didn't "always hate AI". Most people didn't even think of AI outside of niche things like self-driving. Instead their hatred is from LLMs and generative AI which (as far as they're concerned) didn't exist until November 30, 2022.
Actual reasons they readily share for not liking it are things like:
- it was built by abusing copyright (true with nuance)
- it's used to generate massive amounts of low value content that's overwhelming their spaces (very true)
- it's having an environmental impact (true with more nuance)
- it's making the things they want to buy more expensive (true, even things unrelated to AI)
- the loudest voices in the room have spent years telling them this could destroy humanity and/or take all their jobs (completely true)
- it's behind major layoffs (true with nuance around stated reasons vs actual)
- people who are pro-AI have a strong tendency to minimize their reasons for hating it (... obviously true)
I mean even if you like AI, it's clear we're at a place with so many reasons for people to be anti-AI that it's honestly an own goal at this point.
People didn't have opinions about generative AI as it exists today 20 years ago. The idea of a computer being able to turn any topic into a haiku would have been contentious for if it was possible, not if it was good: that sounds great!
But now we got it and it came with way more baggage than any of them ever imagined. They didn't think it'd learn to write haikus by ripping through every written word. And they didn't think it'd be used to write lots of spam instead of haikus once it could. And they didn't think the same capability would generalize to typing in an artist's name and spitting out infinitely remixed copies of their work.
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I think moving forward in a less negative direction starts with being real about why people hate AI, and it's a lot less "it makes me feel less special" than it is "it's actively reducing my quality of life" for people outside of the bubble.
I wasn't trying to be condescending. I was stating my experience talking to people 10-20 years ago, before AI was thought about at all by people outside of tech. It always boiled down to a dualist vs monist ontology argument. I agree there are valid reasons to dislike current generative AI tech though. I agree with a lot of this.
I should say I do think that deeper ontological thing is why people tend to think the tech will always be a novelty or will stagnate soon, etc.
I appreciate this nuanced take. You've been added to my filter of people who have an opinion that bubbles to the top.
I wish the Dems could have this conversation about their policies and messaging!
The nuanced takes of tech haven't been welcome for other tech as well.
Last year Wikipedia reported an 8% drop in humans traffic[1]. That's huge.
[1] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
No technology will have me "excited" if the prospect is lower/no compensation and poorer working conditions. I concur on the nuance -- I use it as a tool at work. I see value in it. I see business value in it displacing me, even if that's not the maximally correct position because some higher up did some numeric calculations. The first prompt I got a decent reply to was a thrill. Then the thinking of the second-order effects kicked in.
Just as long as you understand that this is how everybody else not in technology, from accountants to East Coast dockworkers and all points in between, have felt about everything we do in this field for the past 50 years. It's awfully tough to adopt a morally rigorous position about "lower compensation" when you're literally in the business of automating jobs away.
Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that. But now, it is not obvious what 'trading up' in this situation is. There was optionality: upskill and increase your compensation. Now, there may be no opportunity to upskill. And that is a meaningfully different environment.
The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living (and many of us still do so) -- we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
Ironically, the trades are now desperate for smart people who show up as scheduled and sober. Upskilling might be learning to be a plumber or electrician or carpenter.
> Those people could've traded up. And plenty of people in the trades have done that.
This is precisely the karma that is coming to us as a group. Because of this sort of stuff.
No, a 50 year old trade worker cannot "trade up" in any realistic sense. That's idiotic on it's face. And that also ignores that many folks don't want to trade up because they get satisfaction in what they do - just like some tech workers do. Man of those folks also had moral and ethical reasons to not want to join an industry assisting in putting their friends and family out of work.
> The other aspect to this is many of us spent our pre-LLM days writing basic CRUD apps for a living
AKA automating other jobs away in many (perhaps most?) cases. Either directly or indirectly. These line-of-business applications tend to be automation of some sort which reduces manual labor. Be it on the factory floor, enabling that factory to be outsourced to China, or just making "paperwork" more efficient putting an office full of secretaries out of a job. Or working in some ad-tech enabled field which put entire industries out of work altogether.
> we didn't meaningfully contribute to the rise of LLM technology. Very little of anything I did was in the public domain for training.
Factory workers, skilled machinists, tool and die manufacturers, secretaries, accountants, journalists - effectively an infinite list - did not contribute to the IT over the past 30 years that replaced them either. That's the point being made in this sub-thread.
But hey, you could always pivot your career to be a plumber, roofer, or electrician! While I'm certainly going to be part of the targeted group, I can't really say I'll be surprised at the working class laughing at us and enjoying IT folks getting their comeuppance.
I haven't found a way to articulate my thoughts very well on this subject, others do it better even on HN. But coming from a working class family with most of my old school friends from growing up still working blue collar jobs - I can say it's been incredibly uncomfortable listening to the narratives from tech workers on these subjects for 25 years. It's been utterly amazing to me how people switched on a dime within a couple years on the subject now that their livelihoods are on the line. The calls for free markets, pro-automation, "just learn to code", anti-regulation, etc. all instantly changed the moment such folks had even a trivial amount of similar pressure put on them.
It does feel a bit karmic, doesn’t it? I’ve never worked in a part of tech that was explicitly doing this, but I still feel as though all the current anxiety and uncertainty I myself am currently going through is in some way “earned” by my participation in this industry.
A lot of things in the technology field's internal debate about AI feel extremely karmic to me.
Really? Not sure if you like to work on your own cars, but would you also feel like you're accumulating negative karma for associating with the automotive and fossil fuel industries? We're not responsible for the world that is here right now, but we have to figure out how to operate within it. The idea that "we earned this" like we're all at fault for the state of things seems pretty far off.
Not trying to say you're wrong but long way of saying don't be so hard on yourself, its not like you're Elon, Altman, any of the other awful figures steering our tech world right now.
I don't think your analogy fits. Tech is directly responsible for automation, which impacts jobs. Tech workers didn't cry moral outrage then. But mow that tech may automate their job, suddenly it's evil.
My point was that the world we have is here, for better or worse, and "reaping what we sowed" seems like a wildly reductive and self-defeating interpretation. There's no way this guy who says he never worked directly on automation-related tech should feel like he's banking bad karma by earning a living doing the best he can. I'm assuming that not working in automation was a conscious decision, like I've also been very selective about my employers based on their general operating philosophies.
The analogy wasn't the best, but the whole of tech isn't on the hook for this. Just like a typical daily driver or someone who works on their own car can't be directly responsible for the climate crisis. There are major players making the decisions that are causing the state we're in.
Ah yeah, lowly web dev me, self-taught with no capital, is responsible for the choices of faceless corporations and sinister magnates I've never worked for nor interacted with nor influenced in even an infinitesimal way.
I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away. But because I'm a programmer at all, it's partially my fault?
Like everyone else in the industry, you're almost certainly the beneficiary of an industry predicated on automating people's jobs away. Your labor is fungible. Your comp is based on supply and demand. Whatever work you do, you are subsidized in large part by the demands of projects that improve productivity elsewhere in the workforce.
I'm not saying you personally set out to take anyone's job away. But our field is unusually well compensated because of its function in the broader marketplace. The point is that moralisms like "fault" don't operate here.
> I've never worked on software that automated someone's job away.
I think this would be very difficult to do as a web-dev. The web itself is a form of global scale automation in-itself.
I am also a self-taught tech nerd. I have not "directly" worked on any specific automation project in terms of "come put this group out of work" - but I can't think of a single project I worked on that wasn't making current processes more efficient and automated - by largely removing remaining manual steps involved. This is why we exist to begin with, otherwise no one would be paying us to do the work.
I wrote software that took server provisioning from a process that involved a tech typing on a keyboard every time, to clicking a button on a webUI to install an OS. A task many here at HN have done just for their home lab environment so as to make their own lives more efficient.
This put zero people out of work. But it probably prevented hiring of at last a handful of low-level technicians over the course of that software's lifecycle. Which is the same thing to an industry at large.
Even stuff as simple as writing code to put up a new post on a company website is contributing towards automating someone's job away.
I have often stated computers are the ultimate robot. They fit in nearly every industry to automate things and make processes more efficient. These are code words for "less human labor needed" - aka less jobs.
> According to Google Wikipedia still gets 4 billion pageviews a month.
> But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human page views falling 8% year-over-year,
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/18/wikipedia-says-traffic-is-...
> There are of course ongoing concerns about global warming. I'm not denying that, but I don't think it's particular to AI tech.
Ok so you’re not denying the impact on climate change. Any of the other negative impacts it has on society?
Don’t sweep them under the rug and say, “works for me though so that’s worth it, not a big deal.”
I think the maths is interesting and the research is fascinating. I like computers, programming, and theoretical computer science more perhaps than the average person. That doesn’t mean I’m happy with data centres relying on illegal methane power plants to generate their base load power requirements. I think it’s unethical… and illegal. It seems like regulators are either unable to keep up or are getting paid to not look. That’s unethical. The financial systems used to deploy these data centres are imploding in debt and should also be regulated. They’re going to poison a bunch of retirement funds and could be a major factor in the crash of US bonds. Unethical. If they can’t run a profitable business even when they are bending and cheating and causing all of this harm I don’t think there’s any reason they shouldn’t be left to crash and burn like anyone else.
I don’t have much sympathy for the position of, “yeah that stuff is bad but I like it anyway and don’t want to talk about it.”
You might find more common ground with people if you can recognize the harms it does do, acknowledge that they are bad and advocate for change.
And you might have to give up the idea that any of this technology is going to lead to the creation of science-fiction super intelligent beings. We know what the combination of attention, transformers, and RNN can do. Pretty nifty stuff… but is it worth bleeding an economy of all its resources so that you can simulate f within psi worth it? I don’t think so. Sometimes the answer is, yeah neat but who cares? I’d rather have energy for keeping my cooling on in the middle of this heat wave.
That is a big differentiator. I think there is a pretty valid argument that the models and data centers are net positive for society, and therefore ethical (better than the counterfactual of their absence).
I agree that there are some harms, but they are mostly self imposed. If a retirement fund gambles people's money on the wrong company, that is on them.
Most of the power conflicts are downstream of corrupt politicians and ignorant voters strangling their grid and stymieing efforts to improve production and transmission.
I find people in person are pretty welcoming of nuanced opinions.
Online if people even smell something they don’t like… it goes bad fast.
I don't think the AI criticism has anything to do with "thinking we are beyond nature or whatever". It's the realization that this force will only drive societies apart even more
Noticed how the proponents of AI are the Musk, Thiel, Palantir, and other, who have wet dreams about authoritarianism, control, and subjuging minorities?
Don't you think there's a reason for this?
Try mentioning AI in a remotely positive light on Mastodon, e.g. just as a side comment about how it let you finally finish a side project or something cool, and you’ll get a wave of neckbeards swarm in to tell you they are blocking you, you are a bad person, killing the earth, fascist supporter, etc.
Very strange, but I’ve seen the same folks dog pile in for other causes, so I guess it’s just a part of the identity now.
Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
You dont get to benefit from the expansion of companies like Uber, airbnb or meta, then pretend like you were always focused on the success of the average person. You didn't care when you could get ahead, don't pretend like you care now. It's childishly performative. This is an evolution of the same automation and communication tech that has been growing for as long as most people have been alive. Just now it might actually affect the technologically literate class. You did this. Own it.
Some of us have loathed Uber, Airbnb & Meta. Are we allowed to be negative about AI?
It's not a matter of being "allowed" per se. What the parent is saying that people need to do a better job being internally consistent in their beliefs and moral stances. If you are one such person, great! But my impression is that most people aren't.
Sure. I think that I’d you were expressing concerns about all the leopards running around and having discussions about whether we need to do something about the leopard population, it’s perfectly reasonable to be upset when a leopard eats your face.
It’s just that the median tech worker was more often to talk about moving fast and breaking things and making glib statements about buggy whips. If you were the sort of person to just shrug and say that a few leopards were the price of advancement then you’re probably not going to get a lot of sympathy. That is, unless you connect your current faceless state to your previous stance on leopards and admit that maybe you were shortsighted (generic “you” here, not you specifically).
Partially correct. But the massive investments of capital, environmental resources, etc. are in some cases specific to modern AI, and some of the objections are specific to those. Ditto the overlapping issue of global intellectual property appropriation. (Much of what LLMs do is refactor what people posted on the web for free.)
It is the exact same capital that paid all of our salaries for the last 20 years
Most people don't work for Uber, Meta or AirBnB and these companies have been criticized forever in tech forums.
This time the "innovation" is also based on actual theft.
It's weird for physicists to complain about nuclear weapons. They did it. Own it.
Most do, in my experience? I worked at Argonne for a while, and they absolutely treated their profession with deadly seriousness. I didn't meet anyone who took the stance of "Move fast and break things". Most spent too many late nights rechecking their work to make sure it was correct. Even when being wrong would be entirely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
I get what you're saying, that not everyone who is in tech contributed, which is fair to an extent, see my other comments.
Who's "they", the vast majority devs work for non tech companies doing very boring shit. We're not all hellbent on making the most $$$ while burning the world down like the silicon valley degenerates
The boring shit is still about eliminating labor that would have had to be done without computers. Automation is a core value of computing, back to automated switchboards and census tabulation.
Make Neo-Luddism Great Again! /s
People are never ever ever allowed to realize maybe sometimes bad things are bad once the chickens come home to roost. An antisocial belief they held fifteen years ago needs to define them forever, because people are just machines for receiving guilt and wrath, they can’t learn anything from suffering personally, or if they can here’s why it’s bad anyway.
Also engineers building stuff to spec are exactly the same thing as venture capitalists
I don’t think they’re trying to imply that at all. But arguing that it’s bad without a mea culpa comes across as inauthentic.
More specifically, someone actively building on top of Amazon decrying the exploitation of workers and the environment is demonstrably hypocritical.
And "engineers building things to spec" are not the same as those giving the orders, but they should take a measure of responsibility for the things they build. I think most people generally agree about the culpability of those following orders when people are harmed. I'm not even saying they should necessarily be held accountable; just that moralizing about it is hypocritical.
"Anyone who uses < public cloud computing > is hypocritical" is a pretty insane take, even for HN.
All technologies have benefits and costs — choosing and using a technology does not imply the nonexistence of tradeoffs. One can give sufficient consideration to the downsides, and then determine that the upsides outweigh them. It's not rocket science.
Sure, but those people who "considered the downsides" shouldn't then moralize about the exploitation of workers; they're contributing to it. It's explicitly hypocritical. They're explicitly deciding the exploitation is worth the upsides for their or their company's benefit.
I'm not excluding myself from this. Just chafing against this grandstanding by people actively contributing to the same problems, and especially annoyed by the people saying we should pause development because it's going to affect people's jobs. This isn't new.
Edit: I'd also like to point out that "Public cloud computing" doesn't really capture what I said; the OP of the article is specifically building on Amazon, which has a well documented history of worker exploitation. Even building on Azure or Google cloud would be more defensible in the context of the article they wrote.
I generalized the statement from one cloud to big public clouds categorically to show by hyperbole that ... what difference does it make?! [One can find analogous critiques of Azure, GCP, etc.]
Last year, AWS did ≥ $100B in revenue across millions of customers. But where do you draw the line exactly? "Everyone who uses < thing > is < problematic >" feels extreme.
I could even agree with “is problematic” although I don’t see it as black and white, but “is problematic and therefore doesn’t get to comment / needs to own this / did this” is definitely not a legitimate critique of the critical discourse.
There are about ten billion relevant and reasonable ways to differentiate and choose priorities in all of that.
Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
> Suggesting that nobody is entitled to opinions on one category sounds kinda silly.
How else would they feel morally superior to degenerate techies who finally got what they deserve? Didn't you get the memo? It's all Joe the Java developer who's the impetus of injustice in the world.
I'm specifically saying "I'm entitled to displace people with automation built on previous work, but automation that affects me shouldn't be allowed" is a particularly hypocritical take.
The implications of AI aren't as novel as tech circles would like to believe. The same trends in employment and automation have been happening across industries for decades in slightly different forms. This is just the first time it might actually affect the people doing the work, instead of being conveniently separated from their inner circle.
I very much agree with this position. And it didn’t even have to be AI.
It’s possible that sufficiently advanced “dumb” compilers and tooling could lower demand. Or that the supply of developers outstripped demand - that’s happened in other professions. We always joked about how we’re automating our own jobs. We just happened to live in a period of explosive demand growth for our skill set so it never mattered for us. But it was never guaranteed that growth would continue in perpetuity.
When mentoring a freshly minted dev, I always checked whether or not they were open to career and financial advice. And if they were, I would always make this point to them and tell them to think carefully how much of their massive tech salary they should be spending. I make it a point to keep abreast of what median salaries are for other job roles are viable and moderate my spending and saving accordingly, because there was always a possibility that the gravy train would stop.
> It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
That's an awfully wide swath you are cutting there. I can't think of a single tech person that I've worked closely with in the last 20 years that I would describe as "riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale". The majority of tech workers do not work for FAANG, or anything close to it.
And you're cutting an awfully wide swath in the opposite direction; most tech gains value by exploiting or displacing people. Economies of scale don't just exist at the absolute top of the economy. The computer cut out entire classes of people from jobs they had specialized in by decreasing the education or effort required to successfully complete tasks, at the cost of massively increased infrastructure costs.
I'm all for pushing back against what AI might do, but doing it in this massively dishonest way just opens the door to obvious counters.
Name any tech job and I will tell you how it exploits the average people through economies of scale
I cut my teeth in tech building a regional classifieds website for a local newspaper
Tell me all about how it was worse than the print classifieds that already existed
I'm very curious to hear your take
Not the original poster, but moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money, money that previously financed quality journalism, not to mention the people in charge of maintaining the classifieds ads business.
If you are working for the newspaper, your job is a reaction to the death of the original business, and you are the automation that came in their stead
> moving classifieds online lost newspapers a whole lot of money
I was part of the online division of a newspaper. Online classifieds did lose them money, but for my company at least, moving them online was an effort to stop losing all of the money from them.
> you are the automation that came in their stead
Sure. We hired fewer people to answer phones for managing their classified ads, but we hired more people to moderate the site and make sure people weren't posting obscene stuff. And it also employed a handful of software developers.
I'm not convinced it was a total loss. I can't speak to the quality journalism part though
Surely you jest. How often have we seen tech types say "learn to code", suggesting that people whose careers are disrupted just retrain into a different career, telling businesses to adapt or die (pre-LLM), or make condescending analogies about buggy whip makers on HN and /. before it? Quite a lot over the past 20 years.
Software ate the world and the techbros were very blatantly unsympathetic about those affected by their industry and careers being upended. Don't think that anyone forgot about that now that we're the ones in the crosshairs.
You're looking a massive selection bias. Most people in tech are _not_ saying those things (e.g. most software engineers in my circle would agree learning to code at a non trivial level is decidedly NON trivial). The vocal elite at the top of the tech pyramids (who have a vested interest in sweeping externalities under the rug) are the ones spewing that shit.
This is like saying cancer is perfectly normal.
Is cancer not normal?
40-45% of people will get cancer in their lives.
It's estimated that 25-30% of people, globally, enjoy hip-hop.
Cancer is 50% more common than hip-hop.
Is hip-hop normal?
> Controversial take: It's weird to see people in tech taking this stance. They've been riding the same wave of exploiting the average person through economies of scale for the last 20+ years, but now that it affects them, it's suddenly catastrophic.
Let's not rewrite history, ok? VCs funded and killed professions, and now it's our head on the chopping block. You can always argue that "I just followed orders", and it would be true, but let's not create an impression that everyone working in tech is force of evil working against common people.
Economies of scale is how society lowers the cost of meeting the demand for things people want. Uber, Airbnb, and Meta have negative externalities that have gone “unpriced” in the market because our policy makers are incompetent. But at large, they’ve net benefitted society, many more times over than they’ve hurt anyone whose job was displaced from the cycle of innovation and those individuals have found new jobs, or adapted to compete (taxis making a comeback, except they’re not fucking scumbags anymore because they don’t have a monopoly).
If you believe technology and innovation is characterized as “using economies of scale to exploit the average person” you’d necessarily come to some pretty weird positions throughout history.
Take the natural ice trade for example. Were refrigerators an evil means of exploiting and displacing the 100,000 workers who powered the natural ice trade? Or was it a better solution to the public health hazards, brutal dangerous working conditions, and high price paid by society to the Ice Monopoly?
I vehemently disagree that meta or airbnb have done more to benefit society than not, but I'll take the overall argument; that technology, on the whole, benefits society overall.
Which is true, on the long term. But we have no reason to believe that AI will be different in that case. In the short term, technologies have absolutely been used to exploit the average person; the industrial revolution benefited us all over time, but tell that to the kids killed in early industrial manufacturing centers.
Look at how the transition to globalization went in the 80's-10's; entire sections of the US were essentially shut down because of the improvements in communication technology, and unless you're in support of the current state of the US, you'd agree we're still dealing with the consequences of that.
Even in your own case, there's an argument to be made that CFCs meant the overall damage to humanity was greater than the ice trade, just spread out over more people. The exploitation was similar, but it was less visible. Even if we've eventually reached a point where people were better off, you can't argue that the health of the average person was never exploited for the benefit of the few.
To be clear, I'm not separating myself from this; I'm fully aware that work I've done has displaced people. I'm just chafing against the moralizing around it. It feels like the people making these arguments are trying to remove themselves from responsibility while continuing to build on top of companies like Amazon, that are built on top of exploiting people that absolutely cannot advocate for themselves.
We agree for the first few sentences! I’m a huge proponent for AI displacement taxes because of the rapid pace of acceleration and a lack of confidence that our economies reabsorption mechanisms are adequate.
If your claim is that in the short term there are negatives caused by innovation, then… well yeah! There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it’s exceedingly rare to ever have pure upside in anything ever. Life is a series of trade offs and hard decisions. The Industrial Revolution literally lifted a significant portion of the population out of poverty, and also hurt children in the beginning. I’m very glad we have child labor laws that are strict and well enforced. If your claim is that the Industrial Revolution was a net negative because children died, I would like for you to pull up the chart of child mortality from before and after the Industrial Revolution and go ahead and tell me what you see.
On the other hand, I think lots of people over index on the harms caused because it’s so easy to. You’ve clearly thought at length about quantifying the harm of big tech and your work. But have you ever quantified the positive impact? You can rationalize the tradeoffs of your actions without moralizing the harms you caused.
It’s not okay for children to die in factories, but without those factories far more would’ve died from illness, hunger, etc.
I think we're roughly on the same side here? I'm explicitly against moralizing about AI by people who benefit from other forms of tech exploitation, e.g. using Amazon for hosting; I'm not against the idea of AI as a whole; I think it's an inevitability.
I just believe all of us should be willing to accept our own responsibility for the state of it. I also believe it could eventually work out to be a net benefit to the species; but in the short term, it's going to hurt us badly, as most technological revolutions have. I'm saying everyone involved, directly or indirectly, should be willing to accept their fraction of responsibility for the people who are suffering in the interim, and that moralizing about it is disingenuous.
I'm pretty sure we're not disagreeing at all. Over time, most technological revolutions have benefited society. That doesn't mean they didn't exploit people, though. Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been. People are still being exploited by technology. It's just more diffuse, and (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down.
Yes, I think we have the same beliefs largely - my point is that the lens of economies of scale == exploitation is a very silly one that would naturally lead to conclusions such as "Even in the current world, there's more slaves than there have ever been."
That is absolute utter nonsense. Like beyond nonsense, much closer to fiction than a differing view of reality. But understandable through a lens that innovation and productivity gains are a means of exploitation. Modern systems and societies are not slavery. They're a default opt-in system of incentives that drive people to contribute more to society if they wish to extract more from it - and we even support a growing class of individuals who contribute far less than they extract, happily.
Unless you're talking about the literal slavery that still happens in developing nations, in which case, there are less total slaves and orders of magnitude less slaves per capita than (I think close to) the majority of written history.
From my perspective you're moralizing against technology in the same silly way people moralize for it, and a significant portion of that is well captured with this one statement: (I'm hoping) the average suffering in the world has gone down. - If you make yourself ignorant to the positive effects of technical innovation and instead view it primarily as a mechanism of exploitation that "eventually very far from now _maybe_ brings benefits", that's no different than making yourself ignorant to the negative effects and viewing it as a mechanism of great benefit to which you should enrich yourself for bringing to the masses and "maybe hurts a few people but everyone benefits so much overall it doesn't matter".
I'll make my position very clear. Technology and innovation are the driving forces of quality of life improvements and are so obviously a moral good for society and mankind. However, innovation is never perfect, so it's necessary to have competent policy makers and governance structures that can regulate away the negative externalities of new systems that innovations can spawn, as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
If you disagree that technology and innovation are inherently an extremely obvious moral good, please look up the following graphs over the last 200 years, noting the year ranges of the industrial era and information age while looking at these graphs. 1. Life expectancy 2. Infant / Child Mortality 3. Extreme Poverty 4. Literacy Rates 5. Average years of schooling 6. Food Supply / Calories Per Person / Crop Yield / Famine Deaths
I am not weighing in on the fundamental issue you are debating with the other person, but clearly Facebook has provided no benefit to society lol wth
It's just a parasitic, largely useless, and often actively harmful advertising machine. The only possible positive it has done is transfer a lot of money and capital to employees who often come from middle-class backgrounds.
Meta’s primary issue is an alignment problem. They’ve built the most valuable human connection network ever and then added a misaligned algorithm on it.
You’re conflating Meta’s alignment issue with its overall benefit / harm to society. There is a singular, obvious thing that you interact with everyday that is very very bad (unless like me you don’t have it). And the invisible parts of what they do that are extremely beneficial are less obvious.
To be fair say from the list Meta is closest to being a net negative, like they’re the worst of the big tech companies and the only one I would refuse to work at. So I get what you’re saying, but to say they’re largely useless signals that you don’t know what they do and how they impact society at large, other than their very evil algorithms.
...so, what is this thing they do, that in your view is "extremely beneficial"?
All of their open source work, facebook marketplace, messenger connecting people, low cost distribution for small business, crises and humanitarian tooling, abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc.
Quite a stretch.
The open source stuff is nice and all, but I wouldn't say React, GraphQL, Cassandra, or any of the other stuff is "beneficial to humanity" lol wtf
> facebook marketplace
Craigslist exists, plus other startups were aiming to do that and one would have found its footing if not for Facebook marketplace. Either way, this doesn't make up for any of the negatives people ascribe to Facebook.
> messenger connecting people
This is a fucking joke, as there were and are numerous other instant messaging apps.
> low cost distribution for small business
Yeah, small businesses can have Facebook pages, but this isn't that beneficial. We are talking "extremely beneficial" here, not "some features are useful to some people".
> crises and humanitarian tooling
Yeah I can see it being useful for governments to communicate, but unfortunately outweighed by the misinformation
> abuse/spam/threat detection at scale, etc
Cool that they try to solve problems their platform is susceptible to? They are doing this for themselves and it's proprietary software, isn't it?
IDK what kind of bubble you exist in where people genuinely believe any of the above would constitute "extremely beneficial". Large quantities of people, including those holding down jobs, in the richest country in the world are barely able to put food on the table, people are getting kidnapped by masked Federal agents who are entering homes without warrants, and there are multiple ongoing wars in the world, but, yeah, Facebook, "extremely beneficial", solving the hard problems xd
I am at least objective in my criticism. I'm not going to reply to 5 different emotionally charged strawman arguments, especially because I don't care to defend Meta.
If you're going to engage in discussion, at least try to interpret the other parties argument charitably. You're wasting both our time replying to the dumbest interpretation of what I said.
You gave one sentence statement to try to explain why you think the company does anything that would count as "extremely beneficial" (your words), and it's just a list of stuff you didn't bother to elaborate on (including, laughably, Facebook Messenger, as if anyone could possibly count that as "extremely beneficial"). You didn't even make a cogent argument.
If someone who has never had any major financial benefit from tech, but loved it all the same, criticizes AI, do they get a pass?
Depends what part of AI they say they don't agree with. Anyone with a reasonable, sound argument can give it a shot.
Is a 100% local, open-weight model that you only use for learning purposes / generating questions meant just for you the same thing as criticizing the use of "AI" in large corporations replacing workers?
How about DLSS 4 frame gen in a game? That's AI too, and pretty universally seen as neutral or positive by anyone who's aware of it.
How about AI assisting doctors scanning for cancers in medical checkups?
How about running google translate on a street sign when you're in a new country?
Folks gotta be more specific than just saying they're anti-AI, because what does that statement even mean in practice?
Indeed. This paragraph from the post could have just been written about the internet and all of the tech and companies it has enabled since ~1999:
> People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
Automobiles, steam trains, even electricity or the printing press… There has always been a compelling argument for ludditism, the protection of people in that moment (as if that moment would last forever).
And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
But we won’t. The skilled artisans that are put out of work from their positions of leverage tend to have the political views of someone with leverage, so instead of communitarian instincts, they want to go back to when they had power.
> And that argument is always doomed to fail, because you can’t freeze society in amber. Whether it’s the lamplighters, the mule-drawn barge operators, or the scribes… we would do much better to have a social safety net and distributive taxation system so that we all win in Industrial Revolutions.
Agreed.
I don't think it's the out-of-work "skilled artisans" who are to blame though, esp in the US.
Obviously there is no “blame” in complex systems, but over and over, folks with financial leverage tend to move immediately from a position of libertarian meritocracy to a position of regressive intervention at exactly the moment when their skill becomes automated.
A society that promotes risk, plans for failure, and facilitates starting over, all while minimizing wealth inequality is a society that can sprint headlong into every new technology in a way that everyone benefits.
The lining factor I see time and time again, is that folks see the world, philosophically, as static even though in one lifetime we start at the invention of the light bulb and end on the moon, and in the next, we start with the moon landing, and we’ve created artificial thinking with 23 years to spare.
It’s a sad state of affairs. But what do I know, I live in a city with a massive housing crisis because one group finds construction of more homes as ruining their nice static lives.
That's why almost no one notable in tech (both software and hardware) is taking this stance, or still has this stance with the current state of LLMs. Even the extremely talented devs who personally don't use LLMs don't have this extremist take that LLMs and AI tools are morally evil (??).
It's obvious that tons of people have become better at their jobs because of it, it's obvious that it has already saved companies millions of hours. I understand that many don't like the copyright avoiding antics of these big AI companies, but to say that AI is a net negative on humanity is so completely idiotic that it makes me question their character in anything they do moving forward.
You make a good point; but the scale of destruction is by no means the same now.
Most of the US jobs were lost not to automation, but to outsourcing in pursuit of profits. A similar problem of corporate exploitation, but not so much a technological one.
To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
There are adverse consequences to his stance, primarily in the form of foregone professional opportunities.
I clicked on the article thinking it would be about having a moral stance, when it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
And a lot of it is silly.
What, we can't use AI even to show it's silly and incomplete? How are people supposed to know the ways it's incomplete if we cannot evaluate it?
First principles?
That would be nice, but the emergent properties of LLMs defy any kind of first-principles reasoning if you ask me.
Real “I am persecuted for my genius” energy.
Reads like a post straight from r/iamverysmart.
> it's clear the author thinks his' is the moral stance
If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one - then why aren't you changing your moral stance? Why do you have one at all?
It's ok to have strong opinions on morality, and it's cool to live by them, and good to talk about them. I don't happen to completely agree with the author, but I can respect a belief in one's own considered opinion, and the right to express it. No one is being harmed by the author's article.
For example, I have a "strong" moral opinion, which makes many people angry to hear: I don't vote for politicians who arm and enable genocide.
In America, that makes me weird, or worse. I still believe I'm right, and I still talk about it. I firmly believe that cutting out anyone who collaborates on genocide and vetoes ceasefires is the only morally correct move, and happy to talk about why I think that's not just justified and rational but also simply your bare minimum duty as a human being.
That doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that other people feel differently, or that I can't understand where they're coming from with some level of empathy. But it also doesn't mean I have to hang around them. I generally choose not to - genocide enablers squick me out.
The author even explicitly acknowledged that other people have different moral views:
> I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.
Along with self awareness and reasonable doubt:
> Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe?
On top of which, the whole diatribe is presented as a "random musing", rather than a demand for you to think differently.
> If you don't think your moral stance is the correct one
That's not what's asserted.
The title is "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast"
But the reality is "To have his moral stance is to be a self-imposed outcast".
Yes, he thinks his moral stance is the correct one, and lives by it.
... And?
This post, like many others, confuses AI with Big Tech (or maybe that's intentional).
I can wholehartedly agree with everything said there, if I mentally replace "AI" with "big tech profitmaxxing using this new tech".
I however, don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: https://blog.senko.net/how-i-want-to-use-ai
That the frontier models and subs are all big tech is probably what bothers me most about “AI” right now, but I’m bullish on advancements in the capabilities of local models. I suspect and hope that, in time, the field will level and we will have very capable local, offline models and the landscape will be much as it is now with subscription compute in the cloud for enterprise and self host / local first for indies / hackers etc.
Well, but the data centers needed for AI are on a much different scale than what "big tech profitmaxxing" used to need. I also agree with the author and you. Morally, I also cannot support the toll it takes on the environment, workers, and society in general. However, what's the option? Either be part of it or get laid off. Build an AI startup or be employeed in one and get that money or well I really cannot imagine a third path that's both financially viable and keeps you relevant in the next decade.
I guess the third path could be to use it as less as possible, hopefully finding a job that doesn't enforces its use. Still learn how to use it in case that becomes your only viable option in a few years time. And don't forget how to program by hand, for che case where in a few years time AI didn't improve as much(or just costs too much) and we discover there is a lot of messy AI codeto fix. In that case you might be able to keep your moral stance and still get paid reasonably
I agree. It's a finance capitalism issue. The people who build data centers get free reign on the use energy, land, water and the atmosphere while everyone will bear the cost. Its another upward transfer of wealth. Another wealth pump as Peter Turchin describes it. This could end whatever democratic process is left. The West will be just like China but worse. Slower trains and more violent. At least in China, Political power is in control of capital.
>This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it.
In tech, maybe. Out of tech? No way. A bunch of surveys show that people are mostly negative on AI. For example: https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans...
I've never seen a technology hated as much as AI currently is outside of tech. However, most people aren't moralizing about it, they just hate it.
Turns out you can have strong opinions about things without it being an issue of morality.
Most people I've spoken to in private hate AI in tech too, they just keep quiet out of fear for their job (voice any objection to AI? next on the chopping block), so you only hear the pro AI voices.
Is this a case of people saying one thing and doing another?? Everyone's experience is different, but to me it seems most people love AI?! I see reports in the news about people not being able to do anything anymore without asking AI first, people dating AI boy/girlfriends, students using AI to do homework, teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students, people writing emails via AI, improving their own writing with AI... and so many more! I personally use it a lot for coding (though I still try to do some manual work so I don't just forget everything), translations, quick queries about things, in the computer (specially CLI commands, AI is just incredibly good at it - no matter the CLI, seemingly) and in the physical world (e.g. what's the name of that thing you turn on a tap to open it - English is not my first language), it even helped me a lot figure out legislation in two different countries, where finding and understanding the law was next to impossible by myself (and it gave me links to everything so I could check by myself).
Yeah this strikes me as everyone loudly complaining about how they hate McDonald’s and yet every McDonald’s has a drive thru line 24/7.
If you and 5 others go to McDonald's for 3 meals a day, it will always appear busy to you even if it had no traffic outside those moments you were there with the 5 others. Similarly the news can report on outliers using AI while most people you know IRL may not use it. In other words, it is accurate, the groups are not the same, and statistics often don't feel like they reflect reality.
Humans are complex. I think it's perfectly reasonable to assume there are a lot of people who both rely on and don't like the idea of AI. People can need a car to get around and also be worried about the effects of car emissions. People can dislike cigarettes and be smokers.
I keep seeing this argument in various places on HN that usage implies a positive opinion, when it very much does not. AI has put most people in prisoner's dilemma, and in prisoner's dilemma you can simultaneously play the game and hate the game. To go through a few of your examples:
> Students using AI to do homework
Either you don't use AI, where you have to spend a lot of time studying or graduate bottom of your class, or you do and get on with your life. You can acknowledge that the studying is the valuable part (most students do in my experience) yet skip it for whatever reason (procrastination / life issues / etc).
> Teachers using AI to catch AI cheating by students
We've added an extra step to their already overloaded schedules. If they don't do this they're basically encouraging students to cheat this way.
> Translations
You can now easily get a translation with much better accuracy than before (presumably, I'm a monolingual English speaker), but now you aren't talking to any other human beings for this information. This goes for a lot of other knowledge-value work / hobbies too where asking questions is valuable.
I don't work in tech (school teacher), so the main way I interact with tech people is online.
IME, everyone I meet offline has some low-level caution about AI taking their job, but uses AI and is amazed by their capabilities and is glad for this tool.
Most ppl I meet online are strong anti-AI advocates.
This article is representative of what's wrong in internet culture. It's fine to take a moral stance, but it's not reasonable to expect others to agree with and align with your personal morals.
I've been vegetarian for over 30 years, on moral (environmental) grounds. It does put me in the minority. But I don't expect others to change their behavior.
If you want to avoid AI, avoid AI. If you feel strongly enough that you want to avoid entire companies or corners of the internet, great. These are just the side effects of having a strong opinion.
Bit confused - you and me voluntarily reading a blog post linked on HN, doesn't make the author someone who is pushing their morals on us?
I read the article, and at worst it could be called whinging, but at its lowest point it never came across as trying to push a view point on the reader. What am I missing?
It’s less about the article pushing a POV (although it does), and more about the attitude of the author, which is basically “I’m angry that taking an absolutist stance will cause discomfort!”
Having a libertarian stance on morality is great unless its actually important to take a stand. It's the difference between "I would never own slaves" and being an abolitionist. I think it's pretty reasonable to expect others to agree and align with my personal morals around slavery.
To me, slavery is an ethical issue and transcends morals, but setting that aside:
You have to follow your own moral compass and do what's workable. If you're compelled to take a stand, take a stand. Just know that you can't force other people to change their morals. People who follow this line of thought to its extreme end up killing people who disagree with them. This is how you get everything from anarchist bombings to civil wars.
Personally I think car culture is more damaging than data centers and the threat of super intelligence, but I'm not willing to kill anyone over any of it.
I think many of us actually have a moral stance on AI, it's just that it's somewhat similar to our moral stance on cars, power tools, heavy machinery, the loom, etc.
Accepted answer
For sure, and for me that means AI tech is a great moral good like all human productivity improving technology.
Thank you for putting this in more generalized terms. I was just thinking replace AI with smart phone and this reads the same.
This is like a vegan refusing to be around, let alone eat with, meateaters.
As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others. Yes, it sucks. Yes, your impact will be smaller. But it’s a lot easier to maintain than to break off contact with a friend who dares ask ChatGPT a question.
It's not that simple, some principles are more principled than others.
Would you be friend with Goebbels, knowing he has some different stances than you on some subjects?
yes, if if there is a chance to show him how he is wrong. see daryl davis.
Also, anyone who is anti-AI because of environmental reasons but still eats meat is a huge hypocrite.
Same should be said of anyone who ever does international travel
> As vegans and vegetarians (and decades earlier, non-smokers) have shown, you can have a principled stance on something without forcing that stance on others.
If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult. Like imagine if someone said, i believe murder is wrong but i dont want to force that on others. Or, i dont really like slavery but that's just me and others should be slave owners if they feel that is right.
Obviously there is a spectrum of moral ills, and not all are created equal, but if you truly believe something is abhorent, you can't be a good person and tolerate it in others
There is no such thing as good person or evil person anywhere else other than in human society.
It’s just a brain fart to make you cooperate and evolutionary survive. You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Do not share or propagate or promote this view however. Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors.
Sometimes I get an impression that it isn’t even a freedom of choice, some must perceive themselves as "good people" as a highest imperative. Whatever that means for current century.
I like to view myself as grey person.
"Our society only works thanks to most people being slaves to these tremors."
If everyone defects, the system breaks down. Morality is good and it is actually logical - it solves the prisoners dilemma and pushes cooperation instead of defection. It also reduces harm and has lots of other good properties. I feel that how we affect others matters, but even if you're just a sociopath doing the math, defecting is a strategy that burns things down at scale, not a smart one. Tit for tat with forgiveness is not only morally aligned, but also more prosperous in scenarios that aren't just one-off interactions with strangers.
> You don’t need to listen to this primitive instinct. You can just choose consciously what you think is the best.
Which is why we have jails.
> If you truly believe something is evil, i think that is difficult.
Yes, and that’s my point. Most vegans truly believe that meat equals murder. Yet the vast majority of them will go out for dinner with people they truly deeply believe are (indirect) murderers. This is indeed very difficult for them.
Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.
> Locking yourself out of society isn’t likely to help achieve any sort of moral progress.
On the contrary, i think most moral progress (albeit also many social ills) has been wrought through social pressure.
A minority cannot socially pressure a majority, it will just backfire
I think there is a selection bias here. If it succeedes the minority becomes a majority.
I think a good example are religious movements (obviously i dont want to equate religion with morality, but often they come with certain moral views attached). They start as a minority, and either they die or they take over. Christianity was a minority at one point.
a tiny minority can't but somewhere between 10% or a quarter is enough to pressure the rest to support them. for example to force the majority of restaurants to make sure their food is halal, because otherwise muslims would not eat there. or to port your software to run on macs, etc...
it depends of course on the cost of compliance. halal food is fine, because everyone can eat it. a minority of vegans could not force restaurants to stop serving meat because that would in turn exclude the majority of meat eaters.
While i agree with your general point, i'm not sure i agree with your example. i don't think a minority of muslims (or jews) are going to convince all resturants to stop serving pork, because bacon is too popular.
in some places i have traveled to that were predominately christian but had a minority muslim population, pork was very rare, and most shops and restaurants indicated that they were halal. now pork could have been rare for other reasons, but places advertising halal food clearly can only come from the muslim minority. although, maybe it was just muslims running all the restaurants. no idea. i don't know what it takes to be allowed to advertise halal food. i know kosher food requires an inspection by someone authorized. and it also takes considerable effort.
this example just came to mind from my observations. i didn't check any statistics other than the religions in the region. also i just realize, i don't remember seeing this in singapore, which also has a 15% muslim population. so yeah, it looks like you are right, and it is a bad example after all.
The history of social pressure would disagree with you.
No it wouldnt
The post links to a pretty silly article with checkboxes about "accepting" certain "facts" about AI, which the author says they resonated with:
> I accept the models were trained on stolen data.
"Stolen" is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
> I accept that the data was labeled by exploited workers.
Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
> I accept the environmental costs of the data centers running these models.
No, they are totally overblown, and if you actually cared about any of these environmental issues, you would realize that data centers are not even in the top 100 things to be concerned about: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
> I accept that I am outsourcing some of my skills to a company.
No, I am outsourcing boring grunt work and using my skills in more meaningful and exciting ways.
> I accept these companies don’t have a viable business model.
Yes, I accept that, and if they fail I'll use another company's models. This technology isn't going away - why as a consumer do you care if one of the providers goes out of business?
> I accept that I am granting more power to big tech and their vision for the world.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 20-30 years ago.
> I accept that I am granting more power to the United States.
I suppose, but we all pretty much accepted that 80 years ago.
> I accept that all this effort could have been spent elsewhere.
It's not clear to me yet that the effort was poorly spent - who knows where AI will go, and what great things might potentially come from it?
I disagree with multiple of your responses, but I'd like to push back on this point in particular:
> Yes - and you just ordered DoorDash, which delivered food made by exploited workers and delivered by exploited workers. In fact, almost every convenience you enjoy is the result of some level of exploitation. That doesn't mean it's morally right, but if your outrage is pointed at GenAI (one of the technologies that can potentially level the playing field and remove some amount of exploitation) at the exclusion of these other things, you are simply rage farming.
You could have made the same point without the baseless accusation of bigotry. But even if it's true, it would still be the "You think we should improve society, yet you live in it" meme in action. Exploitation is not a binary state (some workers are exploited worse than others), and if the author believes that AI will broadly lead to much more/worse exploitation, watering down their actual point would only make their stance less likely to be heard.
And if they mentioned DoorDash workers, would you actually be satisfied? Or would you be looking for the next group of exploited workers that aren't included?
Nuance would make the points stronger, not weaker. If you complain about something while assuming everyone should agree with you without question, you are not contributing to the conversation, but merely whining.
Sure, but including more groups of exploited workers wouldn't have made the author's point more nuanced. And ironically, throwing around baseless accusations (like "you just ordered DoorDash" and "if you actually cared about the environment") will only serve to make the conversation less nuanced.
This is becoming a mainstream position for a number of reasons but I think the unifying concern across many demographics is the concern about the effects on power it will have. Nobody wants an omnipresent big brother in anybody's hands, and people are waking up to the fact that the infrastructure is already there without any real safeguards, all that's really needed is cheap intelligence to handle all the data.
I'd say this is a huge reason to actually push for more AI, especially open models. I agree that there are serious environmental, etc concerns BUT there will be an even larger problem in the future when this tech becomes incorporated into pretty much everything if there are only a couple providers with a -poly on the really good models. This thing is here to stay and will only get qualitatively better, and the way to prevent/offset the "omnipresent big brother" is to ensure that everyone has reasonable access to models with decent capability and know how to properly evaluate and use them.
I don't know if more models will offer a meaningful counter to those in power, who will have not only more resources, but also the military, law enforcement and effectively the law itself.
Probably the most we can hope to do at this point is to dismantle the surveillance architecture. "Starve the beast" so to speak.
I don't think there's a way to "starve the beast", unless completely isolating from society is an option (which it isn't for any but a sparse few). But the data it lives on can be diluted and made more piecemeal by keeping things local first, and spreading usage across multiple jurisdictions when more than local is needed.
This, but we need to prevent as much of this data from being collected in the first place. All our traffic cameras for instance are being coopted into a massive surveillance network with no oversight, but this network doesn't exist if you don't have traffic cameras in the first place.
I propose the J Edgar Hoover heuristic. Would X be something you'd want Hoover to have access to? If not, then don't build it.
The main reason is that almost everyone's experience of AI is that it has replaced something or someone that did the job better before AI. That means the experience that vast majority of people have with AI is that it has made things worse.
It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
The weepiness and persecution complex is overwhelming.
There's nothing wrong with having a moral stance on something. It only becomes a problem when the stance is disproportionate and detached from empirical reality.
Its always detached at some level. Morality always comes down to a choice of what you think is wrong vs right. You can't reason from the way the world is to the way the world ought to be, without picking some values.
Why should I feel bad for using AI when the people telling me not to use it all use phones and computers which are the result of exploitation somewhere in Africa to mine for the resources needed to make them.
Congratulations, you just discovered moral relativism why even bother if __bad thing__ exists? Why shouldn’t I sell opiates when doctors can prescribe oxycontin and fentanyl? Throwawaytwice won’t care about hurting me and mine with their choices, why not preemptively strike throwawaytwice? Where’s the bottom?
Probably should feel as bad about it as you do for owning and using your phone. The world is unfair and will stay that way, but now with AI it'll probably just get worse. And if you only look out for yourself - fine, that might work, but all of it has consequences. If you use AI for coding you will most certainly have noticed already that your actual skills might have declined - at least that's the observation I made personally and from talking to fellow engineers.
Or it gets better; every industrial revolution has made life for everyone better, not only the rich ones.
Coding skills will decline indeed, like math skills of bookkeepers declined when they started using computers. But other skills come in their place too.
You shouldn't. You should feel bad when they'll kick you out on the street, because Claude "does better job than lower value human capital".
I think it's possible to come up with cogent and principled anti-AI arguments. This post is not example of something like that lol
Numerous problems with it, but fundamentally a lot of their objections could apply to any post-internet tech. It seems like they just don't like AI.
Writer should also entertain the possibility that it turns out they just don't like tech, and AI just makes a lot of the negative aspects of tech more obvious.
What most AI companies won't tell you is that creating a massive amount of new code will result in an overwhelming amount of technical debt for companies worldwide, sooner or later. Many organisations now believe that they can develop their own apps form scratch using AI, but if they don't pay for tokens capable of handling their ever-growing infrastructure code, their infrastructure will rot. The tendency to reinvent the wheel has always been a problem in the software industry, and AI will only accelerate this trend.
Nevertheless, I'm optimistic that an LLM will be developed sooner or later that is fully aware of the open-source ecosystem and can create software in the correct way: This would involve using pre-existing code and reviewed modules that are plugged together and optimised to create as little new code as possible while reusing as much open-source code as possible.
It seems unlikely at this point, given the real or perceived utility of using modern AI models, that people are going to stop using the technology. Also, given the huge amount of capital that's gone into the industry at this point, it would likely have a pretty negative effect on the global economy if they did. If you feel like it's causing a lot of harm and you're more passionately morally opposed to it than most, perhaps the thing to do is to focus on devising methods to lessen the harm. I think that would be very valuable to society.
Eh, I get the author's point, but I also feel like it's very much community dependent. Some places accept AI sure, but there's also a lot of sites that have a zero tolerance attitude towards it as well.
If you talk about using AI on Twitter, Threads, Mastodon or Bluesky, you will often get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using AI on many subreddits or Discord servers you will get flamed to a crisp. If you talk about using it on many forums (especially software engineering and modding ones), you will start a flame war at best.
Even sites which would logically be more corporate friendly (like say, LinkedIn) have a lot of people who hate AI and all those that use it.
So I'm not sure that disliking AI necessarily makes you an outcast here. Yeah, you're not going to get along with its advocates, and there are quite a few companies and organisations that support it.
But there are also a lot of places that despise it's very existence, and where being a critic of AI is the normal, 'mainstream' view.
First ever argument being "People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment"
GUYS
PLEASE
The impact of ai on the enviroment is one of the dumbest psyops in history, how can you claim to know start with that after claiming you know the technology and what it is doing?
There are hundreds of reasons to hate ai but this is just NOT it
Parts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
cmiiw to think along these lines though.
These are more like HPC supercomputers than garden variety datacenters. That's why there's so much concern re: water use for the electricity being supplied. (That's easy to address in principle, of course: wind and solar power use up negligible amounts of water compared to other sources.)
Most of the water concern is evaporative cooling of the datacenter itself. But IMO not too much of a concern. The energy use and the resource use to make the chips, etc, is bigger.
Well, stuff tends not to get completely wasted, but:
- AI datacenters are gold-rush rush jobs with interesting things like their own gas turbine generators etc.
- It's not clear that serving the internet needs us to double the amount of datacenter footprint. If anything, a lot of workloads are getting more power and space efficient.
- Most expensive thing is that we're filling them full of GPUs and with RAM tied up to the GPUs. That's infrastructure that we've paid the resource costs for and it's difficult to repurpose to something else.
I do think AI is going to grow a lot, so I'm not sure how much of the buildout will need repurposing. But I do think doubling our datacenter footprint and doing it in environmentally yucky ways will probably have some lasting effects and consume a lot of resources.
Yes, any major manufacturing ends up as a big number. It is still usually worth doing!
It's worth doing when the -true cost of resources- is represented in their price.
If it's not, then more of the thing ends up being done than is socially optimal.
E.g. artificially cheap agricultural water -> lots of water-heavy crops being produced like alfalfa and exported for less than the cost of the water.
I think we might disagree about the degree to this is true, but I think most of us can agree that the true cost of energy is not completely included in its price.
Yeah, it's weird, nobody's saying "we should make all the data centres use closed loop cooling even if it's more expensive for them!", but a lot of voices are yelling "AI uses water!", referring to the same thing.
I mean, email and Hacker News and Netflix use water, too.
Something that I've started looking into and I think could become an interesting metric is resource usage comparison of # of average-request prompts against minutes of audio/video streaming. Then we can start to say things like "you know, watching a 10-minute YouTube video uses roughly the same amount of resources as 60 prompts" and hopefully have a more down-to-earth conversation surrounding our ecological impact and how we assign value.
Care to elaborate? Just taking the impact of data centers on locals is enough to validate his point. (Noise pollution, heat pollution and emissions from on-site gas turbines)
Local governments can do the trade off on tax revenue vs inconvenience
There was a chart on Twitter comparing the water usage of AI datacenters to that of the California almond farms and the golf courses all over the country. AI’s water usage is tiny compared to those.
wrong
> [...] People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.
I believe people do understand the toll caring about something deeply takes -- but caring about all these things at once, many which you personally can't control, feels more like atlas syndrome or compassion fatigue by the author.
I also find the author a bit all-or-nothing in general. Losing friends because they use AI? Why does the dichotomy have to be so black and white? Can people have moral quandaries about AI while still using it, or does the moral stance always have to be absolute?
We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
—slave owners at the start of the Atlantic slave trade
We can, however, try to ensure that the genie answers equally to everyone, which I think is the way to go.
I'm pretty sure the genie will put itself back in the bottle when the bubble bursts. But it will leave its tail outside.
> the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths
The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state. Sure, it’s noisier and increasingly full of AI-generated slop, but are we already at the “everything was better in the old days” stage?
As for the destruction of career paths, technological change has been doing that for centuries. Digitization alone transformed or eliminated countless professions. I’d be curious what the authors’ moral stance is on those disruptions. Is the concern specifically about AI, or about technological progress more generally?
I put this blog under the old grumpy man file for now.
> The web is only about 30 years old and has never existed in some fixed, ideal state.
Sure it did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
To the author:
You are so consumed, with absolute certainty, of the permanent and eternal correctness of your moral position, that you literally say you would rather throw away personal connections to human beings than be triggered by the presence of ideas or things.
Please reconsider. I'm not even going to try to persuade you that you're wrong about AI because it isn't even relevant. The truth is that if you carry out your plan, you will just end up being an incredibly hurtful person towards a lot of folks who probably have no idea why you are abandoning them and now feel isolated, hurt, and confused.
Also, ask yourself how sure you are, that you're going to be right for all time, about AI, which is a brand-new technology. Maybe you know yourself. Your views seem incredibly rigid and perhaps you really will never change your mind no matter what AI becomes. But if you ever have changed your mind about anything ever, again, please consider whether the harmful course of action you are describing is worth the extraordinary harm you seem eager to effectuate on everyone who disagrees.
Honestly I don't know why I bothered typing out of any of this. I doubt the author cares. I just wish people like this author would consider that their words and actions do actual harm to real people. And, by the way, zero harm to the progress of AI. Just hurtful and dumb.
It started well, and then he is suddenly sick because fellow member of the drama group made a poster using AI without consulting him (her?)
Anyways, people looking for drama will find one
Its funny that the article uses Wikipedia as an example, given it is a tool that always needs a caveat: "anyone can edit it, always use the source, never trust it directly."
There are many instances where I have seen Wikipedia have bias, or be misinformation.
AI just needs the caveat that it is not really intelligent, but a very good predictive text machine, which you should always ask to provide citations.
"Really not intelligent," yet capable of taking gold at international math and programming competitions. <img src=surejan.jpg>
The ability to solve maths problems still doesn't mean it is intelligent.
It doesn't know what it is doing.
I think the issue with these kind of stances is that they are basically status quo bias; why don't you object to the computer itself, and thus refuse to write programs? After all: they were invented by the UK military in the pursuit of military goals (and much of their subsequent development was funded by the US military - see https://types.pl/@graydon/110648447694201698 - and the fact that ARPAnet, GPS, etc were all military creations). Computer systems are mostly used by large corporations and the military to achieve their goals more effectively.
Usually the objection is that "oh well, the computer can be used for many great things", which isn't particularly satisfying because, um, we can use AI for "good" (better?) things as well (e.g. trying to find novel cures, unlocking the mysteries of protein folding, etc etc).
Then the objection becomes something like "well the computer is here and we have to live with it", which is also now true of AI. Do I like the "it's inevitable" argument; no, but it's clearly very true that we do have the transformer, that won't go away - where we DO have control (or should seek to change) is the organisational structures that we as a society decide to create, and how we safeguard the dignity of the individual in changing times.
Being able to discern what is and isn't in our control helps tremendously in doing what is right and constructive.
The fact that some people opt out of engaging with AI, I think is healthy for society as a whole. If that's within their control and they exercise their control to do what they think is right, then I commend them.
That said, I do think there is a greater natural force at play, something involving entropy and increasing complexity and energy profit maximization. It seems to cut through all levels of abstraction from organic chemistry to civilizations and probably beyond. I assume this is outside of humanity's control, and therefore outside of any individuals control.
So what is inside our control? Our own perceptions and actions.
My perception is that the advance of computation and by extension proliferation of probabilistic programs (AI) is inevitable. It's on a continuum that is a force of nature.
What I might have some control over is choosing to harness that potential to increase future prosperity for more people and the greater environment, and to avoid contributing to outcomes that harm people and the environment.
Lots of bad things are happening and will happen that are outside my control.
I do genuinely believe that the capabilities are inherently neutral. Civilization can choose to harness them in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes.
If the majority of people choose options that are game theory win-win, then the future will be better... If the majority of people choose win-lose, then the future will probably be worse.
The risk isn't AI, it's how we choose to use it.
Yeah so therefore I think a positive attitude is all the more needed, where you see the potentials, see solutions instead of problems. But I feel most anti-AI people are just negative people seeing only problems and don't have any solutions to offer.
I have had a little success by arguing that "we can live without AI, but we can't live without X" and then I've managed to get some priorities in order. The AI craze is insane and it does have some support inside IT but it's the pressure from outside that's hard to resist.
One challenging thing about talking against AI is that it's both a centralizing thing, in that everything is supposedly to use AI as glue and linking center, and decentralizing, in that we can see all the leaf nodes become unreliable, then the outer nodes, because people just 'ask AI'. It's a dystopian idea that we should be making the computer itself the process, as opposed to just using the computer to help ourselves make the process.
Sent from my iPhone hosted at a data center powered by petrochemicals
> I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.
Author: Goes on to demonstrate superficial (mis)understanding of the technology by proliferating misconceptions peppered with anecdata and heavy virtue signaling and calling it a blog post.
Hmm, okay, then...
Is anyone else annoyed by this kind of ironically [^1] weak thinking / writing that conflates: (1) one's own personal opinions and biases however long-standing or irrelevant; (2) limited working knowledge of the actual technology; and (3) virtue signaling / moral posturing / etc? ... and then ultimately just stirs that all up in a pot to not actually say anything more substantial than "AI bad". It's such an overstated, bland, lifeless, useless, uninteresting, intellectually lazy take.
Clutching onto a weak opinion, strongly held [^2] does not make one an "outcast" ... it just comes off as closed-minded and melodramatic. Is that even contrarian? Being on the majority side of an unnuanced opinion is about as far away from being an outcast as possible...
--
Very few of the moral panic type issues those vehemently opposed to LLMs are raising repeatedly are really unique to that field... because why? [Because LLMs are not the problem.]
- Where was said moral posturing when we were building the cloud computing infrastructure?
- Where is the concern of "wasting" compute resources when using 10–15 GB of bandwidth to stream a 90-min movie in 4k?
--
[^1]: Better not call the poorly written human authored post of poor quality "slop" though!
[^2]: Not a typo.
Kinda weird that the authors response to a 'friend' using Siri to query how long a medication lasts was not wanting to hang with them anymore rather than educating them on how AI can hallucinate information.
Having a moral stance is good, but isolating yourself rather than fighting for it and then complaining about being an outcast is utterly puzzling.
Holy cow this is whiny And essentially saying no one else has morals… yikes.
Other people do understand AI sucks and are even anti ai while still using it… personally I have been anti tech forever (When it comes to privacy, bot misinformation, psychological health, all of it) but yeah dude I still use it and have a job in it bc it’s paying bills and it supports our family and there are some good things about it it’s not all bad.
In terms of actually trying to create a revolution in tech (unionizing, making change, ending it, whatever you think) I would love to see the bad things go but I don’t see it being possible. It’s like saying: I don’t like cars (and I’m better than everyone else bc I walk) bc cars are bad for the environment and people die STOP DRIVING CARS… there’s absolutely no way people are going to stop driving cars.
He left a caveat for you if you read it
What's wrong about a beautiful banner done beautifully with AI? What's wrong with a new app done in 5 mins by a coding agent? What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
A couple of days ago I started having watery eyes and suddenly 'pink eye' was a term in DeepSeek with all the answers, viral, bacterial and fungal which I didn't know. According to symptoms it was a bacterial type so Tobramycin was the answer, the dose, the care. Two days later and cured even though I have to continue treatment for at least six days as directed by AI. It's not a miracle, just science at your fingertips, human knowledge put to good and bad use, pick your side.
I totally welcome our new AI overlords.
Your eyes were irritated and you took an antibacterial eyedrop which is basically the only product on the market for such a condition… I’m really not sure Google would’ve failed you 10 years ago or even just asking your pharmacist 20 years ago
Tobramycin is not prescription-free. Cool story, bro.
Almost got me there, if it wasn't for
> What's wrong about AI tracking a license plate crossing every corner with your kidnapped daughter?
Very subtle.
This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.
Its a problem of the privileged in both cases — a first world problem. People with real problems do not think like that.
It's part of this nihilistic undercurrent, especially among Millennials and younger generations. "I'm not having kids, have you seen the world?" "I'm not saving for retirement, Social Security won't exist and the oceans will swallow the continent by the time I reach retirement age." "I refuse to use AI tools that could help me create new things and reach my goals, because the influencers told me AI is going to poison the water". Quite sad actually.
As a society its good for resilience to embrace small pockets of complete ai withdrawl. We should be happy some groups go through pain to keep best practices and processes alive that do not rely on any ai whatsoever. But most of these are unbearable for pragmatic normies to be around. This is made worse by the fact that seemingly a high percentage is not fully motivated by morals but by a deep insecurity that makes them militant, overly judgmental, bipolar thinkers and prone to weird authoritarian dynamics and exclusionism that i only know from the “vegan power” hatred for vegetarians and militant antifa s hatred for the “realist left”.
I mean it's almost like having a moral stance on the assembly line, or calculators. If they truly do provide massive technological benefits, and it turns out the externalities aren't as bad as some are projecting, it's hard to argue AI is not another extremely useful tool in your tool belt.
Now, if AI leads to global ruin/... obviously some people will be able to say "See! I knew this would happen!", but again, at this point it feels AI is no worse morally than the existing allocation of upside/downside that big-techgopolies have had for at least the last decade.
Calculators give you the right answer. AI gives you any answer. I work within a bureaucracy and instead of optimising processes and getting rid of useless documents, AI is being used to generate more useless text. It is the industrialisation of bureaucracy and it is a turbo powered waste of resources.
Then your issue isn't with AI, it's with your bureaucracy. Just because your company is holding it wrong doesn't mean the entire technology is morally fraught.
If your company's goal is to generate "more useless text" they would have done it with or without AI. AI just let's the peons responsible for producing that text do so significantly faster, with some percentage loss in "quality" baked in. Are you mad their jobs are easier? Was their text once not useless and now it is?
Again, it's like saying the conveyor belt is evil because it lets us generate more useless toys/candy/guns/... and research into improving the conveyor belt should instead be going toward more valuable things. However it ALSO has those effects on EVERYTHING. It lets you produce more drugs, books, food, clothes, necessities, and yes, some useless items too.
Same with AI. Sure you can use it to spew cat pictures, but you can also use it to generate significant quantities of non-trivial useful (not necessarily bullet proof, but undoubtedly _useful_) output in a fraction of the time and/or HUMAN capital (butts-in-seats, time-on-task, ...) than before. Now, as always, value is in the eye of the beholder (which is why your C suite gets giddy at all the useless text output).
I like that AI sucks
It’s the best scenario for AI to be like these robots from Star Wars forever. Silly, barely competent, comic relief. So, so much better than any doomer-philosopher blogpost.
LLM will always be clumsy, endearing, silicone regard unable to function without commands. I only worry about the jepa
There are clearly coherent "moral" arguments to be made against mainsteam AI, in areas such as resource consumption, capitalist power, and so on. Some are correct; others, while in my opinion unpersuasive, are at least coherent.
But the article places more stress on arguments of the sort "It's evil to use AI because it doesn't work very well", and those don't seem very logical to me. Oh, SOME arguments of that kind make sense, e.g. in the area of autonomous weapons, but the author didn't focus on extreme cases such as those.
I mean if you had the same reaction when personal computers were made, you would also be an outcast. They also put whole industries out of business and caused huge pollution and etc. There is no real difference. But you have a right to withdraw from the world and be a luddite.
AI is now much better and much more accurate than it was even a few months ago. Use Opus 4.8, etc.
Terence Tao is more credible to me than the views OP expresses in this heart felt, well intentioned but outdated essay.
I've always liked new technological discoveries, and LLMs is no exception. It's an amazing breakthrough.
But the actual benefits for society are honestly underwhelming. Yes, we can code faster now -- but was there a serious problem with humanity being unable to produce enough code fast enough? We can write emails faster, and summarize documents much faster -- ok, yes, that does make some people more productive, myself included. But yeah, email also made us more productive than typewriters, which made us more productive than hand-written letters. LLMs might uncover medical discoveries that humans just couldn't on our own? Uh, maybe? I mean we've had ML/DL models for a while and they're getting better.
And then you consider the way that AI is being implemented, developed, invested in, and pushed, by large corporations, whatever benefits there could be from LLMs, are highly outweighed by the negative effects on society as a whole. It is a highly destructive force in almost every area. It could be a force for good, but at the rate we're going, it will not be, because that's not the profitable path.
Nuclear fission was an amazing scientific discovery as well! And yet if it weren't for strict regulations, international treaties, UN-verification agencies, major protests against nuclear weapons etc., there's a pretty good chance that millions would have died by now by some nuclear weapon. (In addition to the hundreds of thousands who did die by nuclear fission in Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- which makes you wonder if the discovery of nuclear fission was worth it at all.) (Ah, but nuclear-backed MAD prevents conventional wars that might have killed millions anyway! Yes, that argument has some merit but I'm certainly not convinced. I'm old enough to remember feeling like we were literally a button-press away from destroying much of humanity. The weird thing is that we still are, we just don't think about it much because it hasn't happened yet.)
Hating AI is the majority position. Almost everyone's experience of AI is that it has replaced something or someone that did the job better before AI. That means the experience that vast majority of people have with AI is that it has made things worse.
It's only the software devs with a different experience and they're over-represented in online comment sections. Also because the software devs have no lives and only talk to other software devs they're out of touch with the vast majority of people who fucking hate this shit now.
> don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now.
This post sounds like selfishness/self-preservation masquerading as concern for humanity and the environment. You can be anti-AI all you want. You're wasting your breath and energy.
I don't know if the quality of my life has gone up because I have these tools that help me build things in exchange for less job prospects.
All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
Call me bitter. These are the same people who have been decrying and arguing with me that AI would never get where it is now. Stop your kicking and screaming already. It's not helping anyone.
Get in line and join the Hitler Youth! You have no say in the matter! Lead, follow or GTFO!
Wow, really?
> All I know is: it's not up to me, I don't get to choose, and I have to adapt to the situation. I don't bitch about it and condemn others for doing the same.
That's how Russia got into current situation, btw.
But the difference is I actually like artificial intelligence and the capabilities it provides. No one can predict the future. I don't know if it's going to make my life better or worse. But if you think you're gonna start an uprising and change the world while this thing is in motion, you're deluding yourself. Might as well adapt and make the best of it. Much better than getting steamrolled and not getting anything out of it.
I don't feel like an outcast when I'm outside of the bubble of this community and outside of an environment like a workplace where people have to demonstrate enthusiasm for AI because they fear getting penalized for not using it.
That doesn't mean everyone shares my views outside of those contexts, I just don't feel any more an outcast than for having my own view on other issues.
Morality, good and evil, true or false, is a human way of thinking. AI sees the world thru the lens of efficiency, ROI and so on.
From https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume...:
> *112. Having considered the issues of responsibility and governance of AI, we must now return to our central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk extends beyond the misuse of certain technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.*
Post-modem incel vibes. It’s always someone/something else making the protagonist an outcast.
Yeah, you're not an outcast if you're the one rejecting and cutting off other people.
the argument reminds me of the uncanny sense of being managed. i think there was a belief that having the skills that AI synthesizes was some kind of intellectual equity, when this was more of a convention and a promise than any kind of social contract that preserves the value and meaning of ones past contributions.
imo we've been living out a decade or more of the Doorman Fallacy ( https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy ) where people are just liquid labour with some minimum constraints to distinguish them from chattel, where the ironic effect is everyone gets treated like they are chattel but for these minimum requirements. Maybe this will move the concerns and opinions class to act to conserve some of our cultural capital base?
mostly i am not sympathetic to the author because we are not of the same tribe, but the essential argument that there's something to conserve that we arent with AI is a worthy concern. we should look less at problems and solutions and more upstream of what we want to preserve and still grow.
I do judge people for using AI. Especially engineers.
Oh, you're not smart enough to know how to write your own code? You need your hand to be held? You need to write your little prompts because reading documentation is too hard? I'll keep my skills while your brain turns to mush.
Is it smart to pick a path that's probably not going to be appreciated anymore? One that's probably going to lead to unemployment?
I'm torn because i genuinely think LLMs absolutely completely suck ass at 99.99% of tasks, i think AI "art" is disgusting, it sucks balls at writing, it sucks at documentation, it sucks at summarizing, it sucks at research, i would never in a million years trust current AI to tell me what medication is safe or how long food is safe to eat or any of that.
However. For _programming_, they actually are shockingly useful. Like I'm actually shocked that models in 2026 do useful programming for me where 2024 models definitely could not. They still need babysitting, definitely. I see with my own eyes people with less programming knowledge accepting awful output without consideration. But in the hands of an expert, there are actually now programming tasks i prefer to do with an LLM, which i genuinely never thought would happen.
Basically if it were me, the societal impacts of the "art" and the chatbots are clearly awful, cheapening creative cultural work, replacing it with hideous slop, and preying on the mentally unwell driving many of them to self harm, and i think these products should be taken off the market. But coding agents, specifically? It's getting harder to imagine life without them. Idk if it's possible to have one without the other, not that it matters, it's not up to me, it's up to sama, and he loves preying on the unwell and destroying culture
We've been through this exact same thing with crypto and particularly NFTs. Remember those? Oh sure, a shortened URL on a blockchain is worth millions. Remember that? This quote on cognitive bias is often brought out:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
So, just like with crypto, there are people inside the bubble who simply believe they're going to get rich off of whatever is happening. So instead of seeing the flaws or the exploitation, they see a system where ultimately they will benefit from it. In crypto, you saw people who missed out on Bitcoin so kept looking for the next Bitcoin in everything that came after. That's why rug pulls worked.
AI is just accelerating a trend where a few thousand people are increasingly owning everything. Automation (including AI) will just be used to further concentrate wealth. We will be minting trillionaires when the majority of the world can barely afford to live.
But there are people inside the bubble who don't see that or don't care because they think they will get rich so none of that will affect them. It's not even that intentional. A lot of people see poverty as a personal moral failure. So it's just that they view themselves as not having that moral failure.
A more realistic view is that not everyone can be Jeff Bezos. You're more likely to win the lottery than you are to end up a billionaire. Also, you're one bad day away from being unable to work. Medical event, accident, whatever. This is why we look after the most vulnerable in society because you could be one of them one day.
Exactly. Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here, people downvote blindly without even trying to understand why authoritarian regimes love surveillance technologies like AI allows
>Each time you criticize the techno-fascist system that props up AI here
Every time I criticize the Vikings on The Ultimate Vikings Enthusiast-and-Reenactment Society web forums, they downvote me too. It's ridiculous. Don't they have any integrity? Do they not believe in freedom of speech? One guy even started to rant about how the subforum's topic was specifically about a torment where the vikings would cut out of a man's tongue with a red hot knife... what does that have to do with my first amendment rights? just unbelievable.
If you think that people working in tech shouldn't be capable of criticizing their own domain, and taking a step back to understand what they're helping build, I can't do much for you
>shouldn't be capable
Where did you get that idea? Capability isn't in question. Intelligent, well-informed on the subject, positioned to see issues, problems, and drawbacks first. They spend most of their waking hours chewing over every tiny detail.
They just don't want to. It'd be like asking a paleontologist why they hate dinosaurs. And if you can't see that, then I don't know how to explain it to you in a way that will ever make sense. On 4chan, they'd say something along the lines of "not your army", and that goes the same here. We're not your army to mobilize against AI. Nothing will ever change that. Somehow though, you think our positions are reversed, but they're not. I'm comfortable here, I'm comfortable with the zeitgeist and everyone's attitude on the subject, it's you that seems to be in distress. I don't want anything from you and I don't need your help.
Not my experience. Maybe it's your presentation that earns downvotes, not your message.
You can be a very principled person resisting and spotlighting norms you strongly disagree with, but how you do it tends to matter a lot. It makes the difference between people opening an ear to listen to you and reflexively pushing you away as an annoyance.
I don't think that's true, from what I've seen the people on here are pretty consistently anti surveillance
Then they just lack the realization or understanding that in a capitalistic society, the ONLY possible use for AI is surveillance
A principal dogma on orange reddit is the neutrality of technology. Most people here are opposed to the nigh inevitable incipient use of AI in mass surveillance but don't think that that has any relationship to their use of AI (for example) as "Google that actually works." Whether they are right, I am not sure.
They lack the understanding that technology is not separate from society. Both go together, and CANNOT be analyzed without each other.
People who did engineering studies often think that "tech is pure", it's a simple "knowledge field" where something is "true or not". That's completely wrong. Tech is indissociable from society
But engineers don't understand that. Only researchers (and militants) do
TL;DR author confuses anxiety with morals, cuts people out of their life that they can’t cope with being around.
This has played out a million different ways throughout history, nothing special about this case, it just happens to be rooted in anxiety about AI.
It is fun watching the thieves squirm in this thread and being upset at others calling them criminals. "But think of the loom," they say. The loom wasn't stolen by a replicator.