HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).
A lot of my professional-pride and satisfaction kind of complaints with AI is that it uses space age technology for the stupidest and most primitive target: generating code. I’ve called this Flintstone Engineering. You have a remarkable technology but everything around it does not fit in. So you should definitely be more ambitious. You should think about formal verification and “super human” levels of testing and verification. You should consider making a very readable but maybe not performant oracle library to test alongside your really-used and maybe performance-tuned library. You should think of every avenue that before was too costly in terms of time and money—something that not even an independently wealthy OSS would think to do—and consider if the new kind of budget can accommodate it.
And these ideas were always plenty of. The problem for me is that the incentives, so to speak, is to wow people with the Old World software but with “see, no brain”. And in turn you get two-hundred projects like that for every piece about rethinking software. And those pieces might just be at the zygote idea level. Could it be done? Yeah maybe.
But the biggest problem is that this is not what GenAI or agentic AI is for. I don’t think it’s even debatable, even if you think the AI Cretins that a few years ago said that they will take everyone’s jobs out in public just changed their minds. Because the valuations and capital invested is to the point that they have to, really, make it possible to slash entire payrolls across sectors. If not they simply don’t get enough money back and the whole thing crashes.[1] And if you need these frontier models at subsidized electricity costs and not just the ones that can run on your desktop, either there is crash and no more frontier models or you are out of a job.
And then where are the people that care so much about software?
They are no where to be seen. All that are left are business people. To see business people software just open up any program from Established Tech, or any program from non-Tech but where they want to sell you something. There is apparently (let’s use revealed preference here) no business need to software that is good, stable, conforms to anything, or is nice to use. Because that cares so much about software person might want to make legible the prices on offer, the exact specifications, discovery—all things that business people want to frustrate in order to maintain information asymmetry.[2]
As for compilers and interpreters and such. Okay, for who? Sure. Some people believe that they are in the 999‰ of developers. And now AI can finally vanquish those mediocre developers and productivity-boost 999‰ developers so that they get to sit at the right-hand side of the other worthy and hard-working cohort, uh, the people who had money and dumped it into AI. And they might even double their pay because thinking and making connections at that level would just boil all the lakes if they tried to build an AI to do that. And what will they do with that power? Hmm, follow orders and keep making business software? Just looking at history here.
[1] Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
The koolaid drinking coupled with the impotence or indifference in this place towards all those societal implications makes my head spin, sometimes. It’s just three years, but the AI Overlords have “policy recommendations” (this is PR, it’s marketing) for the proles, and what would even be the point? I mean, judging by the track record of billionaires who want to be trillionaires and who have no reason or personality trait left in them to care about anything but their immediate reality (cf. the reality they are inventing for the world)?
(Robots. Social unrest can be solved with robots.)
This is the next iteration of: but without consumers those billionaires have no one to sell stuff to. So surely this will work out.
People change what they do when they go from full-time work to UBI teaters. You could either argue that they will go further into the feeds or something else, but to assume statis is suspect. So you actively have to argue that.
Joe Beergut sits in front of the television (scene from 1995). Is it relevant that he worked hard from eight to five prior to that? Probably.
If you look at, for example, post-industrial regions of the Nordic countries where a good amount of people have been terminally on state benefits, they didn't start using all that free time for political involvement.
Good point, and I see where you are coming from. The difference compared to UBI would be that UBI is unconditional while “terminal state benefits” can require means testing.
Where they might intersect or not is that they are poor. Having time is one precondition for political engagement but having money also helps.
Overall I’m not a fan of UBI. Especially if it would create people who you indirectly describe in the way you do. I don’t want a society of the haves and the merely can-survivs.
But this feels disconnected. The “terminal state benefits” group have been viewed that way long before algorithmic feeds and before the socializing less part got really obvious. So which is it? Both, all of the above?
I wouldn't agree that having money is necessarily for grassroots political involvement. Perhaps the opposite: since the mid 20th century, skint students have been among the most active political forces in many countries. True, deep-pocketed figures often then step in and try to use their money to coopt those young people's political energy, but this is often a negative thing.
> And then the policy you want is simple: Tax the bad capitalism, don’t tax the good capitalism.
Tax isn’t punishment. Imagine a company which has a thousand trucks. The trucks themselves are ethically pure EVs. They pay the land value tax for the parking lot and the auto shop. But they don’t indirectly pay taxes for the use of the roads? That’s a massive wear on the road infrastructure.
The "everyone is bad" argument deliberately ignores degree and scale, and just provides cover for the worst. You don't defend a murderer by pointing to someone else and saying "But he punched someone in the face. Both are bad!" See also: "Both sides are bad" political arguments.
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