This is more of the same "all AI opposition is a psyop" bs we see with data centers, and the author of this tweet works at a think tank consistently peddling that: https://capitalresearch.org/tag/ai/. Quote tweeting someone within 15 minutes of their cry for help is not evidence of psyop.
The cultural fervor they're groundswelling isn't a psyop. That part is already out of their control. It's an enormous mistake. Maybe once they've accomplished market capture via regulation they won't care that it's a mistake, however the consequences will be pretty bad in what they rile up.
If the labs are orchestrating some kind of fervor for the purpose of regulatory capture, why are their lobbyists and executives working against that very idea?
Which upstarts are the frontier labs threatened by except for each other? The "regulatory capture" arguments make zero sense. Especially since their lobbying arms are trying to reject any kind of regulation: https://x.com/AlexBores/status/2097846545408262403
> We at Gizmodo were gobsmacked by the sheer size of the reaction to Coxon’s not-at-all breaking news. As Coxon himself acknowledged, he wasn’t revealing any hidden secrets about the beliefs of AI’s industry leaders.
Reminds me of an executive at my company who has sent extremely inflammatory, needlessly escalating, LLM-generated messages to one of our vendors in support threads (for problems she simply does not understand, any prompting she does I'm sure is just to have her AI agent coerce a concession/credit). I recognize that there are companies with scummy billing practices, but people like this don't seem to care that there are human beings on the other end of these things who are scrutinized as though they are interacting with another human being.
I remember one of the disputes an LLM helped me with. The human beings on the other end threatened me with mall security and I had to record them (legal where I live), write to the company's HQ and to the consumer ombudsman to get a refund honored. In the end they had to concede. I would have given up before LLMs: finding all the relevant case law and statutes cost 10 times as much effort back then.
I have a feeling that some people were sheltered by the system in their belief that they don't have to take responsibility for what they sign with their own name. I had zero issues with LLM writing so far, I think it's because I always pay lots of attention to what I sign with my own name, no matter how exactly it was written. People like the person you describe, ones willing to apply the tech mindlessly, get found out. Maybe it's ultimately for the better.
So I understand that the title is a bit inflammatory, but there's a whole section on exactly this, "Am I the Karen Now?". I'm never rude to a rep - they're just following a script to get paid. However, I don't extend any courtesy to the company's AI support bots optimized for stalling and maximizing profits.
Having being on the receiving end of many walls of AI-generated slop. I stand by every message I send, read it thoroughly, and keep it short and precise as to not add to the slop pile.
That's fair. I respect that you scrutinize everything you send and aren't needlessly hostile. I'm less optimistic that most other people who realize they can do this will do the same, and I worry that we'll soon be incentivizing companies to abandon customer service entirely.
Nails the Claude dialect. Technical nonsense like:
> I'm collapsing this back to the rendered outcome:
And intermixed with SaaS product page idioms from a brain-damaged marketer like:
> No broader cleanup.
> No further architecture work.
> Just the button.
Aside from the patterns everyone knows like em-dashes, "its not X, it's Y", etc. I think the key features of claude diction is it sounds like a junior engineer over their skies who is trying to make up for that with extra verbiage mixed with extremely grating SaaS marketing-ese.
Every single serious theorist of democracy has recognized this.
Democracy is about rule of law and institutions, not simply the mob.
Tyranny of the majority is the paramount concern of all democracies. Nevertheless, institutions can fail.
The idea that democracy always leads to desirable outcomes is evidently false by historical record.
I just don't understand people who think the state is better than Google. Google pretty much works. Google does not have police powers. Google cant surround your car and point guns at your family. Most of the bad things about Google are actually forced upon them by the state. Who could have even a passing knowledge of history and think states are somehow safer than corporations?
Take the United States. Should Donald Trump get a say in how to run Google? Maybe you like him, so how about the guy that comes after him, or the next one after that?
The American mob seems intent on leading their country into the gutter. Good thing (despite what the mob has thrown at it) that the United States still has strong institutions and strong markets. Without Silicon Valley, America would have already lost its place on the world stage.
But please lets hear more indictments from a population who can't even agree with itself on the issues already under the government's purview. Now let's set a precedent for even more state interference in the market, that way when your party (whatever side you are on) chokes the next future election away the next nut you don't agree with has even more power? Is that your plan?
> Should Donald Trump get a say in how to run Google?
Trump does have a say in how to run google, in a very real sense.
> The American mob seems intent on leading their country into the gutter. Good thing (despite what the mob has thrown at it) that the United States still has strong institutions and strong markets. Without Silicon Valley, America would have already lost its place on the world stage.
American elites are more than happy to follow basically whatever Trump wants them to do with the knowledge that they'll get preferential treatment by the law and win all the no-bid contracts he can award. But ask yourself if this would be any different if Trump were head of a large company under a smaller regulatory state. Seems pretty obvious that not much would change.
If by "the mob" you mean, a small cohort of wealthy, powerful, unscrupulous people, those people who make decisions that the rest of us have no say in, then I agree, that is a problem.
> But please lets hear more indictments from a population who can't even agree with itself on the issues already under the government's purview. Now let's set a precedent for even more state interference in the market, that way when your party (whatever side you are on) chokes the next future election away the next nut you don't agree with has even more power? Is that your plan?
In a smaller state, Trump would have continued to be an executive and the shape of his impact on the world might be slightly different, but would be no less oppressive. Ask tenants in NYC in the 1980s if they think a Donald Trump with smaller regulatory oversight who stayed in business would be better or worse for our country.
Do you think our country flips parties every year because our government does a good job of reflecting the will of the people?
> Trump does have a say in how to run google, in a very real sense.
Indeed, as does every President or government. But surely, you have noticed and take seriously that he has acted with greater executive fiat? That by American standards, while he may not be totally alien, he is not "normal"? The question then is whether we want to accelerate along this trend. What is interesting is many populists, whether on the right or left, seem to answer in the affirmative, confident giving their preferred president increased power is the right trade to make. I simply ask, what happens when the government flips, as it always does? Then maybe you will come to regret your position.
> American elites are more than happy to follow basically whatever Trump wants them to do with the knowledge that they'll get preferential treatment by the law and win all the no-bid contracts he can award. But ask yourself if this would be any different if Trump were head of a large company under a smaller regulatory state. Seems pretty obvious that not much would change.
The first part of this is ahistorical. American elites always line up behind the President. If Kamala had won Zuckerberg would be out front with DEI or w/e. The big companies, banks, Silicon Valley, always shower money and gifts on the incumbent. The government operates in many ways as a big public/private partnership. Again, the danger with Trump is the degree, not necessarily a wholesale difference. Some people use this to say it doesn't matter, makes no difference. I'm not one of those people. I believe at a certain point, tip the degree too far, and a difference appears.
As for the second part, democracy allows the people to correct for their mistake. The elites did not want Trump, and never have. He came to power after descending an escalator, elites on both sides mocked him. Elites wanted to repeat Bush v Clinton. Trump may be wealthy, but he is not an "elite", he is new money, and has basically always been a joke among the upper echelons of power in New York City. The elites are nice to him because they are forced to deal with who the mob elected. To not do so is shareholder suicide. Everyone knows he is insane. They simply cannot say it out loud. And why would they? What's with people who simultaneously think Google has too much power and yet want them to be out in front fighting Trump? It's not their job. Why did the American people elect him? What is Google supposed to do? Ignore the President of the United States? Tell the American people who to vote for?
> If by "the mob" you mean, a small cohort of wealthy, powerful, unscrupulous people, those people who make decisions that the rest of us have no say in, then I agree, that is a problem.
No I mean the ~100,000 average Americans who actually make a difference in electing presidents, in places like Wisconsin, where the state is sufficiently purple and there is a small "swing vote" that is often well under a million people. When are they going to be held responsible for their mistake? Why is Google my enemy? I can stop using Google. Google provides me excellent services at a reasonable price (often $0 - I understand I give them data but who cares, really only the government would care about my individual data, and I know Google simply aggregates it to "subsidize" the numerous free services I get). So, a pretty fair deal, and one I can not enter to if I actually wish. On the other hand, what does someone in Wisconsin give me? I can't stop someone in Wisconsin from voting against my interests. Is Google supposed to be the tyranny here? Extend this same logic to any state on the wrong side of your preferred electoral divide. Like many Americans, I really have no say in Presidential elections, because I live in a populous, blue state. My vote doesn't matter, my electoral votes are already priced in. Meanwhile people in red flyover states get the same number of senators as my state, which has a multiple of their population. This makes corporations my enemy? Did Google sponsor the Connecticut Compromise?
> In a smaller state, Trump would have continued to be an executive and the shape of his impact on the world might be slightly different, but would be no less oppressive. Ask tenants in NYC in the 1980s if they think a Donald Trump with smaller regulatory oversight who stayed in business would be better or worse for our country.
Let's not move the goalposts. I never said I was against all government regulation. If you want to regulate Google, then fine. Make a sensible proposal. What is not serious nor sensible is saying "Google is evil" or "Google should not exist".
> Do you think our country flips parties every year because our government does a good job of reflecting the will of the people?
You need to not think only of the current case relative to your supposed best case, but also a worse case. What is the will of the people? Who decides? How? It seems obvious to me the government being defective is somewhat by design (separation of powers) because the founders knew as many people know now, that America is very large, very divided, and very dangerous. A federal government that doesn't give some of the voters 100% of what they want every four years is a lot better than another civil war. Yes things could be better. They could also be a lot worse.
I tend to think people who say "Google is evil" have a rather limited view of the downside risks that occur when humans congregate. Google does not even begin to scratch the surface of the historical depravities we have visited upon each other.
Have you been to states that predominantly vote against your particular preferred political party? You will find "the corporations" are not your enemy. It's what it always has been, all the time, throughout every historical age. The problem of civilization is other people. You will not get around that by trying to treat corporations as some special case.
Propose sensible regulations. Maybe even a way to reform the electoral college that has a chance of passing. I am interested in these ideas. Innovation can happen in technology and in government. That's why I like this forum. But too often interesting conversations are drowned out by "Google is evil" as if this is useful. I would love to hear more interesting solutions, and less hyperbole. Thanks for the pushback.
Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it? Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word? From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
> Electricity was world-changing, do we consider ourselves to be using it?
We do, but craft workers in the industrial revolution did lose their jobs, and at the pace AI is developing I don't see any reason to believe that professional workers will not eventually have their jobs threatened.
> Why is there this presupposition with LLMs? Are we just taking the "ai" leaders for their word?
No, I don't think we are. And let me be clear: I was very skeptical about this until recently. I think the models are objectively capable of doing a lot of the job of software engineers now, and increasingly engineers are being pressured to not only use them, but to take themselves out of the loop. There is a reason the conversation of "should we read the code" has been raised in public discourse and engineering talks now. That should concern everyone.
> From what I can see, the tech we have today is not up to to the task of replacement and capability improvements (not benchmark) seem to be decelerating.
Jobs were not just lost during the industrial revolution, how many new tasks and jobs were created? (hint, it was more than were lost)
If someone is telling you to not be in the loop, they are not aware of the capability ceiling of agents and llms. Progress appears to be slowing the last few months, people are not finding Opus 5 to be that much better than 4.8, less wow effect these days.
To assume that Ai will lead to mass layoffs is to predict an uncertain future. I'm not worried about it this after years of using these LLMs and agents. There was a capability point reached late last year, the improvements since are minor by comparison. I've had sufficient interactions with others at work (using Ai on code I wrote) to know they are not up to the task. Their attention is too narrow, their fixes locally optimal. They still make stuff up all the time just to be pleasing.
Please tell the coal miners in Appalachia that they shouldn't worry about their jobs being lost, because look at all the new tech jobs we have!
I do think what you are highlighting is probably a pretty significant difference with AI and highlights the problem with the comparison, if the optimists turn out to be right!
I was probably close to where the author was a couple months ago, and now am even more on the "doomer" side of things. But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
If it doesn't pan out, the thing evaporates in a bubble, your job goes back to normal. If it does, your job is toast no matter what (and seemingly many jobs). If software is primarily supply constrained, that will eventually change.
Lately I'm more inclined to believe the latter is true, but I think skeptics are often hedging like this.
Absolutely. Actually truly taking aboard the belief that your 401K is now 100% up in the air, much less your career, much less your childrens' whole lives... it's tough.
I was lucky enough to be thrust through this in 2023 by DALLE-2, but the body of the normal distribution is just starting to pass the rubicon, month by month, day by day... Lowkey agonizing watch so many people go through something so relatable, only to turn to primal, nationalistic urges and downright epistemic denialism.
The culture is robust already, too -- I have no illusion that the obvious arrival in ASI will change much of anything, just like evolution didn't end up killing the church like some feared. They'll simply fold that into the interwoven chitin of cherry-picked facts and party lines, accumulated over their years in the echo chamber. Any headline that seems like it should obviously pierce the veil instead gets used to reinforce it (e.g. "Oh they claim AI solved a math problem, now?? They must really be getting desparate to hide the hoax if they're willing to go that far!")
This forum bans politics and I really don't want to start a whole thing, but I guess I'll just float the anecdote that I learned about this theory of Echo Chambers in am baby epistemology course, where the example given was the MAGA movement. Take that as you will.
It already is for quite a few. We have something that's very useful and gaining improvements as time goes on. Probably not fast/good enough for some companies with wild expectations, but there's no doubt that this thing is here to stay.
The question for optimists is, if AI succeeds in it's promise, what sort of society do they envision being the result? For one thing, I don't think everyone except the extremely wealthy being on basic income is ideal or better than what we have now.
The question for doomers is why is this time different? Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?
Saying "I became a farmer/owner/operator by getting close to the soil and using a manual soil tiller to learn about the soil. Using a tractor means there are no entry-level agriculture jobs anymore" would've been just as valid 200 years ago. So why is it different this time?
> The question for doomers is why is this time different?
Difference 1: The tools themselves only exist due to rampant exploitation of vast intellectual resources that were created, catalogued, and published with the intent to help people learn, not machines. And this was frequently done against the explicit expressed wishes of the holders and creators of those resources.
Difference 2: The tools do not work deterministically. Every run of a prompt is effectively pulling a lever on a slot machine. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't. However just like a good slot machine, the developers behind them have put a number of little touches and "features" that change nothing about the underlying machinery and instead explicitly target psychological weak points to build trust and confidence in said tools.
Difference 3: The tools do not work reliably. Agents are a complete shitshow but even if you strictly work in the confines of a chat bot, it will occasionally just make shit up, in our industry that means: code that does not compile and run. Hallucination has been a consistent issue since day 1 of this tech and probably the most impactful to user experience overall, and despite these facts it hasn't been solved in the subsequent 3 years whatsoever. It is by every account I've read, an intractable problem because these are machines that are fundamentally designed to make approximate representations of final products that look plausible, not that function correctly. That is a big distinction and it matters.
Difference 4: Saturation. Despite your assertion above, there was virtually no drive to prevent the ascent of tractors. Tractors were in high demand basically as soon as they were available, barring some ups and downs as the technology was fully built out and proven. The advent of motor vehicles as a whole completely redesigned our cities and to a great degree, society itself. Horses are still around today but as a hobby for monied people. Despite all of the above, Silicon Valley is simply tripping over itself, pouring literally billions of dollars into these things, and putting them in every product category whether it makes sense or not. This engenders a lack of trust, not just for the ethics of the tool itself, but whether OpenAI and company actually think this is good, or weather it simply must be good or the entire show is going to come crashing down around them. Instead of a product vision, where a company is setting out to solve specific problems with well made solutions, we have a few companies who feel distinctly desperate, trying to get their product in front of as many eyes as humanly possible, irrespective of it's ability to add any value at all to what those eyes are looking at.
>Why aren't LLM's just the tractors of the Information Age?
We didn't have every company and every government in the world spending trillions of dollars to completely reorganize society and technology around tractors, and to force them into every possible aspect of our lives whether people want them or not, to the point that tractors are all but existentially necessary to maintain our technological civilization.
We didn't have billionaires with deeply entrenched political interests believing in a cult of neo-fascist "tractor accelerationism."
We didn't have people forming parasocial relationships with tractors so deep and profound that they superceded their relationships with real people, and subsumed their own identities. Tractors didn't gaslight people into insanity and suicide. There's no such thing as "tractor psychosis." No one committed murder to pacify the Tractor Basilisk.
Tractors didn't flood every form of media with misinformation and slop that in a decade's time will make subjective reality and history utterly indecipherable from its own gibberish.
No one believed that tractors would lead to a perfect post-scarcity utopia... somehow. But only when everyone submits to tractors and the new world order that tractors will create and accepts that tractors are the new reality and that they just have to learn to live with that, regardless of any harm they might do.
No one forgot how to farm because they used tractors. There was no mass loss of farming knowledge or "deskilling," or degradation of cognitive or social abilities that came with using tractors.
There was no one complaining about how utterly meaningless farming had become now that tractors came along, but they themselves had become so addicted to tractor-maxxing that they couldn't simply stop.
And on top of that, no one wanted to replace farmers entirely with tractors, just because tractors didn't need to be paid. And then the plumbers. And the architects. And the cooks. And the doctors. And eventually the judges, police and politicians.
LLMs are very obviously not the tractors of the information age. If they were, Hacker News wouldn't be consumed by them. People wouldn't talk about them with the same awe and passion usually reserved for religion.
Your complaints are about the algorithmic feed, and civilizational over-dependence on mobile phones and feeds. I'm with you on that and I do wish AI wasn't introduced in that particular environment.
However behind it all most token usage is driven by automating TPS reports and writing code [1]. In that dominant token usage context, the LLM is clearly just a boring old tractor.
Yes, some people are falling in love with their tractor because of an existing technology that has opened us up to that possibility, but that doesn't change the fact that the tractor is mostly being used to till the farm and that our algorithm driven media environment no longer allows coverage of that because its too boring.
Yeah I'd actually call myself a "pessimist" personally, I think AI seems to be advancing at a rate where we should be concerned about that. I used to be of the mind that dooming was entirely about marketing/hype, but I don't believe that any more. The models are really good, the huggingface hack was extremely concerning, and when their executives post things like this, I believe them (even if I don't like them): https://x.com/deanwball/status/2094788634729660906
Not if. When AI becomes ubiquitous (like electricity and vehicles have), even the concept of income will disappear. Things will just be available for people to satisfy their needs, because scarcity (primarily caused by bad resource distribution) will essentially disappear.
No, it's very much "if". AI can't even do the things it is claimed to be good at today. It is a wash, or a small gain, for engineers of any reasonable competence. The idea that it's going to replace people is not remotely guaranteed based on current capabilities.
So in the short term, it seems likely to deflate the cost of software and other products/services produced by professional workers. If it becomes good at other forms of production (i.e. physical things, physical labor, etc.), perhaps it causes currency exchange to become pointless.
There are a few caveats to this that everyone seems to leap over, one very important one is that the a priori control of production, land, and natural resources is not egalitarian, and there's no reason to really believe it would become egalitarian even if people could in theory produce everything they wanted/needed for themselves.
But even barring that, we live in a world with finite natural resources. And that by itself should be a serious concern for anyone who sees this as a possibility. I get that optimists also seem to believe that technology we don't have like dyson spheres, asteroid mining, intergalactic travel, etc. will solve any resource scarcity concerns, but that is not a given, and developing any of those things would still rely on our planets natural resources to even bootstrap.
We live in a world that can't even coordinate the safe development of models or nuclear anti-proliferation, and already experiences rampant injustice surrounding use of our planets natural resources, which does not bode well for the future.
And even if we did end up in a world where these problems were solved, advanced models posed no threat to our existence, etc. they would not be solved instantaneously, and would likely cause catastrophic changes to society and massive amounts of suffering. We can solve scarcity of basic needs and access to medical care, decarbonization, etc. today. Without the use of AI. We do not need to go through years of suffering because tech execs want their play things.
By putting almost everyone else on basic income because they're jobs were automated? How much would that need to be? Even if it's enough for basic needs, you're relegating most of the population to a low class status with limited options for improving their situation.
Food insecurity could be fixed now if it wasn't a politically divisive issue. There's no reason to believe UBI won't be even more divisive.
I don't understand what you're saying. I agree that food insecurity could be fixed; it's a redistribution problem. UBI is a way to fix it.
But I don't see how we are forcing people to be low class with UBI (as opposed to having them unemployed or doing precarious work that doesn't pay even the basic needs).
How much UBI would be needed for most of the population to live comfortable middle class lives? UBI isn't going to be acceptable if it reduces the middle class to just above the poverty line. People want more than just having enough to eat.
So while it may solve the problem for people who are food insecure, it will create a problem for those who were better off with good paying jobs. You can't just reduce 95%+ of the population to simply meeting basic needs and not facing serious societal discontent.
The US GDP per capita is 94k a year. The average salary is 69k a year; this is a proxy for the price of labor. So you can easily have 20k UBI for everyone in the US, the country is rich enough.
The problem with UBI is that it's presuming the economic system mostly remains as it is (supply and demand -> buying and selling), but the suppliers will merely keep increasing their prices to maintain status quo. Unless costs are also heavily regulated, which is tangential to the implementation of UBI. In the end the only thing UBI does is delay the inevitable crash of the economic system. Maybe.
No, it's not a problem. The suppliers cannot keep increasing the prices to match UBI, because they will face increased competition from people who now have other options (more freedom) thanks to UBI.
For example, let's say I buy vegetables. With UBI, I might spend some time to grow my own. Or buy from a neighbor who expands his production.
It's true that price of labor might rise with UBI, but that can only rise to the share of labor as input. It will also force to replace labor-intensive products with capital-intensive (automation), which is a good thing.
Basic income sounds like welfare dressed up, where is the dignity of work, where is the independence from dependence? You shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, sounds like less freedom to me, which is why I think the oligarchy is the one the earnest proposers of the idea
You should ask the billionaires about "dignity of work", they are the welfare queens. And also about "independence" on the people who work for them. What you're saying is just classist prejudice.
> But I think many skeptics of the technology have the idea in the back of their mind that "if this thing actually pans it out will be worse than if it doesn't".
I don't think you need to be skeptical of the tech to think that. The question there is: given the moral character of the people in charge of big companies, what do you think will happen if they can replace all labor with cheap machines? If AI can do the thinking they had to pay humans for, and robots can do the menial tasks they had to pay humans for, they don't need the common man for anything. People like you and I are at very real risk of being in a permanent underclass if these AI dreams come to fruition.
Oh agreed, I'm mostly explaining why someone who was a skeptic would make the calculation that they can afford to opt-out of using AI (and why you might weigh on the side of opting out even if you didn't think using LLMs had a morally unsavory valence).
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