Most of these idealistic pieces about AI seem to come from senior, established or wealthy people who aren't very exposed to the labor market. In that view, the question of AI and its transformation is almost philosophical like this piece.
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
- AI make a number of programmers redundant and their work is replaced with code of dubious quality and uncertain ability to maintain. The same is true for QAs and designers.
- young and old replace human friendship, and fostering their social skills, for conversations with their AI bot
- people avoid using their brain or practicing their skills in favour of asking some LLM
- people's work stolen, with the possibility of an AI subscription in return
- the laws on hacking and thief ignored
- a school of dead girls blamed on AI
The main benefit I've seen so far is that, since Google turned the web into a SEO hellhole, using AI to search is much nicer than wading through javascript-heavy, heavily-tracked, websites for a morsel of information. And there's some nice free translation and OCR tools now.
It may work well for them, but is it replicable? Or is it a lottery winner trying to reverse explain the win?
For a tool to be deemed useful, the benefits needs to be generally applicable while the cons needs to be accidental or be reduced enough to not be immediately harmful.
While it is certainly right, I also find the take to be a bit fatalistic.
Nothing in this world is set in stone and everything can be changed if someone just injects enough energy into doing so.
This usually doesn't happen, as things often aren't as bad as they may seem, because lethargy and inertia are a thing and of course because self-preservation is an instinctual thing in humans. It could though.
As long as the status quo isn't defended by an infinitely scaling robotic enforcement war machine, physical leverage is always available. Just - depending on the scenario - at a steep price, of course.
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A lot of the bad in the world hinges on effective PR, insisting that the bad is inevitable and resistance is futile. You're supposed to feel this exact despair and choose to do nothing.
Don't support the bad causes by merely replicating it. (Which is not to say that we shouldn't be talking about these real differences you've pointed out, but we should probably do so differently.)
This discussion reminds me of “Only the Paranoid Survive” by Andy Grove (Intel co-founder). In this book, he talks about “a technological inflection point”, which is a time in the life of a business when its fundamental changes.
Intel had one in its early days. In the 1980s, HP notified Intel that new Japanese memory chips were way more reliable and cheaper than American products. Intel first denied vigorously, but then made a strategic decision to get out of the memory chip business, and enter into the new and unproven microprocessor business. This decision allowed Intel to survive the 80s, while Mostek and others basically disappeared.
Well sure, but labour isn't going to get much done by pretending that it isn't happening or making moral arguments. I'm put in mind of all the various powers that collapsed in the face of European colonialism - feel, argue and say whatever at some point only the massive power gap matters.
These AI don't get tired, they are still improving at unbelievable rates that can't really be matched by a human and they're already good enough to do most intellectual tasks to some sort of standard (often quite high). Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far at the rate things are going.
> Attempting to assert the primacy of meat-based thinking is not going to get very far
That's the exact opposite of what I'm trying to do. I know they're superior in many ways, that's why I'm worried about labor losing even more power. All I'm saying is the gains from AI have to be distributed society-wide instead of being captured by the same powers that control everything else and this is a political task that we need to participate in urgently.
European colonialism was not based on a massive power gap. In most places it was based on making the right alliances with groups in the places colonised, making favourable treaties etc.
1. They might want allies against their enemies
2. They might be subjects of an existing empire and prefer a new empire
3. They might be an oppressed ethnic or religious group
4. They might be a class that wants to take power from the ruling class
5. Empires typically allow freedom of trade and freedom of movement within them. People will want this.
6. They might be employed by the new power.
Lots of examples. Indian bankers financing the East India Company and even encouraging them to overthrow some rulers. The cast majority of both East India Company troop and, later British troops in India were Indians. People subjugated by the Aztecs allied with the conquistadores, lower caste Indians might well have got a better deal from the British, lots of people migrated within the British Empire for better opportunities, lots of people traded within the Empire too.
People from one colony might be used in another - IIRC the Portuguese used African mercenaries in South Asia.
Ultimately AI spend has been one of the largest infusions of funding into the small academic mathematics community in years. Just raw token spend alone probably dwarves whatever research budget increases have gone to that field in the past 5 years. That should tell you something about the economic value of that line of work
Like in any job market: generally you can easily get jobs most people don't want. Problem is that usually the reasons most people don't want the job are also the reasons you don't want the job. Sometimes (rarely?), it's not like that, and that's when you hit the jackpot.
But you've just said that people want to coast toward tenure. My point is that it's extremely competitive position, not something you can coast to or that it's job people don't want. Something tells me that you actually DO talk about stuff you don't know about.
It was certainly not ideal that the end of ZIRP and the emergence of AI occurred simultaneously.
But, even as someone who is "labor" the one thing I appreciate about the situation is that the level of bullshit in companies has significantly declined.
Everyone seems hyper focused and results oriented. Maybe just my bubble.
Yes, that is definitely just your bubble. I suppose the word “everyone” is doing an awful lot of lifting here, but I fail to understand how anyone could see the level of bullshit in companies declining.
I feel bad for anyone getting laid off, but there was an unreasonable long hiring binge before the successive layoff waves - im sure a lot of people here have thought "what do we actually need so many people here for?" at the time.
Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work. The first step is to collectively agree that yes, AI is powerful and it can replace us at work. Then we can speak about how to protect livelihood. How does one even have a discussion when the other side doesn’t even believe in the capabilities of AI?
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted because there are replies literally taking the exact position that I'm saying is more prevalent.
There is a bit of a goomba fallacy going on, not everyone who is anti-AI is against it for the same reason. But from my own experience, I find people who are against it for reasons of it devaluing their labor also tend to take the view that it doesn't really work, but this latter half tends to be a bit of motivated reasoning (in the general trend that if you are against something you will be more inclined to believe every argument that it is bad even if some of those arguments are pretty weak).
I 'oppose' Ai for exactly the reasons parent mentions, seems like most common folks over long term will lose much more than they could ever gain from it. Societal loss by definition, on massive scale.
Don't reduce opposition to something you like to some primitive irrational luddites, thats cheap and doesn't represent reality.
>“AI is overhyped or less useful than claimed” was substantially more prevalent than “AI is genuinely capable and will take people’s jobs.” That held across two random samples of recent HN comments.
To steel-man your position, it is true that Bernie Sanders also opposes AI because it can cause automation. And that my bubble in tech might be biased because it consists of a certain kind of cynical person to think of everything as hype.
I wouldn't take that as a given. We don't know how AI will play out or how it will transform our lives. We could look to the industrial revolution to make a prediction, but the political, social and technological conditions today are hard to compare with those of Victorian England.
What AI lacks, I think, is a positive vision. The narrative is dictated by a small Silicon Valley subculture that unfortunately also happens to be a doomsday cult, and it is amplified by a media landscape hungry for the next clickbait headline.
By contrast, people in China seem a lot more relaxed and optimistic about AI. There are worries there too, but not to the same extent as in the West.
It would be interesting to compare the sentiment about AI with sentiment about computers in the 1950s. I think it reflects the stress of precarious employment more than anything else.
For me it's more that it doesn't matter whether it works or not, because funneling that wealth into those hands is reason enough to stop it in either case.
I think this is how society and politics works, there are a lot of people at different levels of understanding and different opinions all having parallel conversations. We don't need to have these conversations in serial order.
I can see the capital machine is sprinting at full force to create AI products for and replace labor in every industry, so the people who think it's hype now will soon see AI enter their workplace and understand its true capability. Even many reputed programmers said AI was overhyped say 6 months ago and one after another have changed their minds. I feel like there's also a large element of people saying its bad publicly BECAUSE they actually do understand its capabilities and fear being replaced, but they would rather say its bad to try to slow its adoption or as a kind of defense.
The understanding of AI's capabilities will diffuse naturally over time, although of course its worthwhile working on informing people there as well. Bill Gates recent interview with Ezra Klein was sort of on the same topic, where he says no one outside the industry understands its capabilities and that's why he's trying to use his platform to inform people about it.
As a matter of coalition building, all we have to do is agree that AI is being rolled out recklessly without any consideration for the consequences and apply pressure accordingly.
I'm not opposing AI per se since I'm using it, but I'm not blind to the danger and I actually do believe we will be worse than better with it in the long term. Anyway both opinions are right: I think that AI is massively overhyped, and is worse than the AI overlord pretends, but it's still good enough to massively affect the employment, especially with the overhype. I also believe that the privatisation of all human knowledge and culture by a handful of companies is very bad. And finally, the day they make an AI able to reason ( or even before if it happens that enough data is enough to replace reasoning for most tasks) is the day 99.99% of humanity will be considered as useless
It solved the navier stokes millennium prize problem without any reasoning? I could maybe believe it if it was just something like deep blue searching in axiom space with lean with some simple heuristics, but in this case the formalization came after as a separate step.
The version that you use in your browser is not capable of this though
It's important to remember that "AI" is a pretty big spectrum right now. The cutting edge is not exactly available to consumers like us, and it probably never will actually be
Why should we all need to agree that 'ai can replace us' when 'us' can mean such different things to different people: someone pushing out content on TikTok has a lower bar for accuracy than someone signing off on documents to be submitted for review by a court. I think that's the origin of a lot of discrepancy between viewpoints on AI that gets in the way of talking about the benefits and harms that we can each identify and framing the discussion around how those are changing when these tools are used. There is no inevitability about AI everywhere - we have the agency to decide when it's right to use it and when it's wrong.
"AI is not as good as it is hyped up to be" and "AI is 'good enough' for the overlords to replace some amount of workers, or at least to leverage into depressing their wages significantly and permanently" are not mutually exclusive claims. You don't have to buy the hype to agree that it is dangerous.
A chimp with a gun is not dangerous because of how good a shot he is.
> Most people who oppose AI don’t oppose it because it’s so good it can replace us. They oppose it because, in their own words, they think it’s hype and it doesn’t work.
It's the opposite - they claim it's bad because they are afraid of being replaced. That's why absurd claims about stochastic parrot or plateau get repeated so much. It's pure copium.
And many math elites are financed by AI boosters like the Simons Foundation. That is why the online mathematicians at least leave no opportunity to boost AI. True opposition has been crushed by capital.
Isolated opposition comes from professors tenured in Germany:
> the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme
This is cynical fatalism. Western governments have been overrun by neoliberal zealots for decades, and they've changed Government's purpose to near total obeisance to private interests. But Government doesn't have to be this way. If we don't want all future decision-making to be concentrated in AI/Robotics behemoths - or more accurately in a handful of oligarchs running AI companies - we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments and institutions meeting the principles of democracy again (representation of citizens, not companies).
> we'll need renovated and extremely strong Governments
And how do you practically attain that without resetting everything in a full-blown Apocalypse? By rigged voting set up within the framework of the old terminally corrupt government?
There's zero reason to believe that. If AI becomes better at mental tasks than humans (that's assumption, not something I claim will 100% happen), why would human oversee AI instead of AI supervising another AI?
Bc humans can be responsible for approving / denying decisions in the end. Bchumans have the context a brand new prompt might miss. Bc the most intelligent and brightest and smartest AI ever built will do the wrong thing if given the wrong prompt. It can't presume to know things it was never told or has no way to know
Was the last time you've used LLM two years ago? Current SOTA makes good judgement calls and works well even with shitty prompts. And current SOTA is the worst these models will be.
I use unreleased models at work every day. When they work they work great. But almost every day I run into a case where they make a mistake. Also, the humans prompting them may be themselves wrong or understand the problem wrongly or not include important context. That's not a solvable problem either really.
We are all going to learn the hard way, this is what the economy is like for many people. Always on the precipice of losing everything and thus willing to do anything like the capital owners want it.
Whatever cushy career path you think is safe now will probably not be so safe by the time you go to university, train, land a job in it etc. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, cleaner, prostitute for elderly retirees. Welcome to the aging fascist AI technoutopia.
Company known for innumerable privacy violations and predatory behaviour moves fast and breaks a couple of things to win a new market. People sign up in droves for their product anyways, giving it access to every little most private piece of data about themselves.
Not sure what else journalism is supposed to do here. People don’t care about their privacy. Maybe in another 5 years after the entirely predictable outcomes have happened, they’ll start complaining.
> A library for sharing books and articles that should be partly public domain because they were paid for by the public
This is some incredible mental gymnastics here, wow. Some books should be public domain (even if they actually aren't), and this magically justifies stealing from an 80TB library of a large fraction of every book ever published including millions of books that have no public funding.
There's no actual argument here, just name-calling. Meta literally pirated 80TB of books off of Anna's Archive. OpenAI pirated off LibGen as well. You could be prosecuted for doing the same thing, because its illegal. Piracy is illegal, piracy at the scale they committed is extremely illegal. This shouldn't be a hard or controversial concept.
Yeah maybe make a few author friends and tell them that they don't deserve any payment for their work. I'm sure the world will be much better once we even further reduce the incentives to do hard intellectual work and increase the incentives to churn out AI slop tiktok videos instead.
Which is fine if you like human culture to never change for the next ten thousand years. LLMs can only ever interpolate or extrapolate things they’ve already been trained on.
We have proof that Meta torrented TBs of books off Anna's Archive. They didn't even buy the books legally in the first place. Fair use doesn't magically make piracy legal. The only reason they haven't been punished is the pathetic state of our government and court system.
Would you be happy if they bought exactly one copy of each book? That might be a dozen sales between the AI labs, some tens of dollars to the author. Is this really what you're so upset over?
And the solution to avoid this piracy has been to buy up rare editions of old books, cut them up and scan them. Better?
Is it okay to rob a bank for a billion if each individual customer only loses $10? Stealing $10 is fine right, why don't we just let every company with your credit card steal a little $10 from you? You don't mind right?
Excusing illegal behavior creates a moral hazard and over time leads to the kind of amoral and corrupt government and business leaders we have today. There's a pervasive sense in society that money can buy you out of any consequences and morality is basically irrelevant, every little thing like this is how it happens. It's the same dynamic as SF failing to police minor shoplifting for years, which led to stores closing and metal bars everywhere that we have today. Even then we actually do punish a few shoplifters for stealing $100 worth of goods, but we don't punish these companies for stealing billions worth?
If this is the issue you actually care about then you're in the minority. Most seem to be using it as a proxy for complaining about how the LLM uses the content, not that they didn't pay $10 for the content to start with.
People care about rich and powerful entities being completely immune to any law or consequences, over and over again. It's a caste system with money. The law needs to actually be enforced without fear or favor. This issue is widespread and is a centerpiece of midterm elections. Calling it a minority view is a convenient way to disengage after I showed your argument of "eh its just $10" is nonsense.
BTW AoE4 is nowhere near doomed, i play AoE4 multiplayer regularly and hear this often. AoE4 has about half the number of daily players (12-15K) that AoE2 does, but it’s easily enough to play multiplayer. It also gets regular DLCs and updates and has had a stable playerbase for years now. Basically its less popular and many AoE2 players will never switch, but it’s an active game.
Probably went something like - we need infinite growth to appease the stock market morons - we can’t raise prices any more for our shoes - what if we cut out the middlemen retail stores and disintermediated to save money - we will be digital native, COVID is here, the world is digital - RIP.
Also, ironically, the pitch was supposed to be a win win: If we cut out the middleman and stop spending so much on sponsoring athletes and sports, we can pass those savings on to customers, bringing us more sales at lower cost to consumers and higher margin for us because our cost structure is lower.
Turns out people don't always want lower-priced products.
Man weve lived through this playbook already with Facebook and Google and an entire industry already over the last decade, we can’t be this naively trusting of entities which ultimately maximize shareholder/owner value and nothing else.
Meta already pirated all the books in the world to train the models, lied about it and got caught. We know the models all stole copyrighted information and somehow got away with it - where even if it is fair use to train on it, they pirated it in the first place. Sam Altman is already known to have made serious lies throughout his career. OpenAI apparently doesn’t even know what websites their own damn models are hacking.
It’s insane to trust these same people at their word now. The whole company will not know, someone at a high level could easily steal the data. Apparently even this tweet is saying they use your de-identified data to train on even when you explicitly turn off those options in settings. It’s the same old tricks again.
Im really concerned about what big tech is going to do the nezt few years. They have historically been on a good day mediocre stuarts of trust. This was when they had no competition and a money only flows in business model.
Now they are facing near unlimited CAPex expenses and possibly existential threat to their product. I think we will be astounded at how vile they become.
> This is how brazen, how toxic and destructive, we’ve allowed the industry formerly known as venture capital to become. We must understand that it is no longer a financial machine that is used to fund startups, but a political and social machine focused on dismantling democracy and civil society. And it’s time to act accordingly.
Its at least heartening to see a broad recognition across many circles and communities of how insane wealth/power concentration, corruption and insane laws like Citizens United are dismantling democracy today. But a16z and others are still pushing their own techno-utopia anti-doomer message that a lot of useful idiots buy into, even though it serves to detract from the political and social root causes of our problems today and instead says even more technology will fix it all.
It's more a question of survival if you're labor though. It's very transformative tech but it's coming at a time when the scales are heavily tilted in favor of capital over labor, the government is the most corrupt its ever been and AI is going to make that much more extreme. It doesn't matter how amazing the technology is if all the benefits are going to accrue to the same few people who already have everything and destroy everyone else's bargaining power.
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