Actually, much worse than ignoring climate change, because even in the worst case climate change is a self-correcting problem (civilization collapses but humans as a species survive) whereas AI could well end all life on the planet.
Mmm yes so thats why we ship a bunch of people off to the desolate red planet so they can wait out either! /s
Please wake me up when some AI becomes more of a threat than A) the people using it Pentagon confirms grok usage for target selection, B) the people betting the economy on it NYTimes Anthropic+SpaceX+etc IPO (mind you, anthropic and openai have costed over 3 times their revenue yesr after year, you can find those numbers, but now are being rolled into index funds, ie 401K money), C) the already low bar for manipulating public discourse online (I think thats evident in itself)
AI Doomists will say anything to get you to believe it’s Roko’s Basilisk in the making, but its jist ELIZA Syndrome yet again. Wake me up when it does CAD without someone pretending I’m a child in CAD that doesn’t see that their bullshit AI workflow returned dogshit. And I’m the one who has to do it properly.
And sorry PS that quote has gotta be one of the most Musk coded verbal drivel. End of game for us is if civilization collapses, because if the people meant to rebuild have this few functioning neurons, we will end up all dead anyway. And if thats so, lets just stop making the computer want to be my girlfriend by liquidating these companies, because they are the largest threat to every functioning democracy.
What an idiotic statement. “Nothing will happen until it’s capable of automating MY job…!”
By the time you’re ready to wake up it’ll be too late.
To anti-AI folk the technology exists in this cognitively dissonant superposition of simultaneously being a useless nothingburger and an existential threat to all white-collar labour. The first position is the cynicism and the second reveals the fear.
Why are all the artists and some fraction of the programmers so upset about this if it’s a nothingburger?
End of game for us is if civilization collapses, because if the people meant to rebuild have this few functioning neurons, we will end up all dead anyway.
No it’s not. Human history is an endless cycle of collapse and trying to do better. Collapse of the modern global civilization could set humans back hundreds or thousands of years, but we are not capable of wiping ourselves out, and the humans after us would learn from our mistakes.
Also, we will all end up dead anyway no matter what, unless transhumanism levels of development happen to occur during our lifetimes.
To anti-AI folk the technology exists in this cognitively dissonant superposition of simultaneously being a useless nothingburger and an existential threat to all white-collar labour. The first position is the cynicism and the second reveals the fear.
No, I’m just, not at all concerned.
You did nothing to address my real larger threats than AI currently, which proves my point further.
You’re too wrapped up thinking about possible sci fi futures that you haven’t sat down and thought of how these things could work. I’ve watched ML cancer screening advance, then watched as these new age “AI” companies tried the same research I saw years ago and unequivically fail because they strapped a fn language model that’s been trained off Reddit to patient health records, thinking it would become smarter (it didn’t).
None of that will matter if these companies run out of money before they unveil the singularity, which is quite statedly their bets. It won’t happen. Why? Because the true labor utility of these models is already known, and its only benefit is that its cheaper than human labor, for everything but the slightest critical task. Even
2 years later after I was told I’d be replaced, by a boss that sounded just like you, he got fired for continuously failing to meet targets, because he really thought he could have AI catch him up on every meeting and never attend. If it can’t even summarize meetings properly, how long is skynet gonna take??
Now if you actually wanted to talk some real threat like AI powered state sponsored surveilance, I’m all ears, but I’m getting really tired of Kurgesat sci bros suddenly thinking “oh yeah the end of civilization is actually the good option, but we also want the transhuman ultra singularity” while they actively cheer the richest people to trash the economy, environment, and democracy to make it happen. Who do you think will control AI when it takes over the world. Or it’s just gonna call itself AM, right?
You’re too wrapped up thinking about possible sci fi futures that you haven’t sat down and thought of how these things could work. I’ve watched ML cancer screening advance, then watched as these new age “AI” companies tried the same research I saw years ago and unequivically fail because they strapped a fn language model that’s been trained off Reddit to patient health records, thinking it would become smarter (it didn’t).
No I’m not. Like I said above, AI tech even as it is now is enough to dramatically change the labour market. And I use the word “AI” in the broad sense, not in the normie sense of talking exclusively about ChatGPT.
Even if progress on frontier models stopped being made right now, there’d be a ton of potential left to unlock just by refining and optimizing existing breakthroughs. You are not recognizing the sheer quantity of breakthroughs that have happened even just within the past 5 years, most of which are still poorly explored because (1) it generally takes science more than five years to go from breakthrough to practice, and (2) the big money is gambling on developing AGI.
I couldn’t care less about AI companies trying to sell chatbot subscriptions to every sucker in a suit, that has absolutely nothing to do with my assessment. A lot of people, including you, cling to these marketing ploys as examples of AI being a nothingburger, when all it is is the eternal cycle of companies scamming other companies. Someone somewhere being sold a lie does not diminish the stuff AI can do in the slightest.
I’m getting really tired of Kurgesat sci bros suddenly thinking “oh yeah the end of civilization is actually the good option, but we also want the transhuman ultra singularity” while they actively cheer the richest people to trash the economy, environment, and democracy to make it happen.
If you think that’s my position then you’re mistaken. It’s possible to recognize the risks and possibilities of the technology without supporting the way American tech companies are going about it. In fact my position is what it is precisely because I recognise the danger the American tech hegemony controlling AI represents.
Why are… some fraction of the programmers so upset about this if it’s a nothingburger?
Because it’s being used as an excuse to fire people ans overwork whoever’s left. Nobody wants to work in a sweatshop.
I’ve been using the new models ever since the initial release of GPT-3 at work. It’s been my job to find practical uses for it. There exist a few, but the biggest issue with these models (and with LLMs as a whole) is that they cannot be guaranteed to work 100%, or close to 100%, of the time. Naturally, that’s a high bar to hit, but it includes things like safeguards against generating offensive, discriminatory, or even defamatory material.
Your problem space is limited to places where either an informed human must review the output, or you accept the liability for when it fails. Most businesses do not want to accept that liability.
Now onto programming specifically: a human reviews the output and is expected to take ownership of it. Sure, you can use it in that way as a tool if you want, regardless of the quality of the output. However, when someone comes to me on a Friday and asks me to review their 700+ file AI-generated PR (true story), I’m sorry, but that’s going to take at least a week. By the time I’m done reviewing your PR, the demo we were rushing to prepare for will have already passed. Yet now I’m expected to review this slop (which I would not have, and didn’t, approve regardless of the author) in addition to doing the work I was doing before. Keep in mind, of course, that my job before included the rare 100hr work week to rush to meet a deadline. So all I can do with these gigantic PRs of actual garbage is either reject them, which looks bad on me because we’re rushing even harder now, or rubber stamp them because I know nobody cares if the code works anyway.
So yeah, wake me up when it’s actually capable of automating my job and not just an excuse for some idiotic management to fire their programmers who, according to the garbage they’re saying about AI, should be the most productive people in the company by a huge margin and therefore more valuable than any of their other employees, at least according to their claims about AI.
Because it’s being used as an excuse to fire people and overwork whoever’s left. Nobody wants to work in a sweatshop.
If this was all it is, there would be no real reason for anyone to be complaining. If the technology really were a dead end and all the managers were just deluded by marketing, then the situation will self-correct sooner rather than later when companies run into trouble when AI fails to produce results after they fired most of their developers.
We’re currently into year 2 (or more, depending on how you count) of this shift happening and I’m not seeing many signs of such a correction on the horizon.
So yeah, wake me up when it’s actually capable of automating my job
Automation does not need to replace every human to have an impact on the labour economy. It’s enough for it to increase efficiency to make some portion of the workforce redundant. AI doesn’t need to automate your job to put you out of a job. All it has to do is enable a colleague of yours to do both their job and yours.
This is factually happening particularly to entry level programming jobs. Rejecting AI is not going to change this reality. The only sane choice is to accept it on our terms and fight to ensure the change works in our favour and not against us.
We’re currently into year 2 (or more, depending on how you count) of this shift happening and I’m not seeing many signs of such a correction on the horizon.
The entire stock market is in a bubble. You don’t need me to explain why - there are so many articles and videos online covering it, from well-known video journalists like GamersNexus to written articles by Financial Times. This Wikipedia article covers both sides, though you’ll notice that the oppositions on that page come from people with a financial interest in it. The correction to this bubble would cripple the economy (which seems to be a recurring phenomenon these days).
This is factually happening particularly to entry level programming jobs.
Entry level jobs were never about productivity. They were about investment. Weird to say that AI is “replacing” them when it was never about them being super productive.
The rest makes no sense. You’d hire more people if their output is so high because every programmer would be worth way more than what you’re paying them.
Mmm yes so thats why we ship a bunch of people off to the desolate red planet so they can wait out either! /s
Please wake me up when some AI becomes more of a threat than A) the people using it Pentagon confirms grok usage for target selection, B) the people betting the economy on it NYTimes Anthropic+SpaceX+etc IPO (mind you, anthropic and openai have costed over 3 times their revenue yesr after year, you can find those numbers, but now are being rolled into index funds, ie 401K money), C) the already low bar for manipulating public discourse online (I think thats evident in itself)
AI Doomists will say anything to get you to believe it’s Roko’s Basilisk in the making, but its jist ELIZA Syndrome yet again. Wake me up when it does CAD without someone pretending I’m a child in CAD that doesn’t see that their bullshit AI workflow returned dogshit. And I’m the one who has to do it properly.
And sorry PS that quote has gotta be one of the most Musk coded verbal drivel. End of game for us is if civilization collapses, because if the people meant to rebuild have this few functioning neurons, we will end up all dead anyway. And if thats so, lets just stop making the computer want to be my girlfriend by liquidating these companies, because they are the largest threat to every functioning democracy.
What an idiotic statement. “Nothing will happen until it’s capable of automating MY job…!”
By the time you’re ready to wake up it’ll be too late.
To anti-AI folk the technology exists in this cognitively dissonant superposition of simultaneously being a useless nothingburger and an existential threat to all white-collar labour. The first position is the cynicism and the second reveals the fear.
Why are all the artists and some fraction of the programmers so upset about this if it’s a nothingburger?
No it’s not. Human history is an endless cycle of collapse and trying to do better. Collapse of the modern global civilization could set humans back hundreds or thousands of years, but we are not capable of wiping ourselves out, and the humans after us would learn from our mistakes.
Also, we will all end up dead anyway no matter what, unless transhumanism levels of development happen to occur during our lifetimes.
No, I’m just, not at all concerned.
You did nothing to address my real larger threats than AI currently, which proves my point further.
You’re too wrapped up thinking about possible sci fi futures that you haven’t sat down and thought of how these things could work. I’ve watched ML cancer screening advance, then watched as these new age “AI” companies tried the same research I saw years ago and unequivically fail because they strapped a fn language model that’s been trained off Reddit to patient health records, thinking it would become smarter (it didn’t).
None of that will matter if these companies run out of money before they unveil the singularity, which is quite statedly their bets. It won’t happen. Why? Because the true labor utility of these models is already known, and its only benefit is that its cheaper than human labor, for everything but the slightest critical task. Even
2 years later after I was told I’d be replaced, by a boss that sounded just like you, he got fired for continuously failing to meet targets, because he really thought he could have AI catch him up on every meeting and never attend. If it can’t even summarize meetings properly, how long is skynet gonna take??
Now if you actually wanted to talk some real threat like AI powered state sponsored surveilance, I’m all ears, but I’m getting really tired of Kurgesat sci bros suddenly thinking “oh yeah the end of civilization is actually the good option, but we also want the transhuman ultra singularity” while they actively cheer the richest people to trash the economy, environment, and democracy to make it happen. Who do you think will control AI when it takes over the world. Or it’s just gonna call itself AM, right?
No I’m not. Like I said above, AI tech even as it is now is enough to dramatically change the labour market. And I use the word “AI” in the broad sense, not in the normie sense of talking exclusively about ChatGPT.
Even if progress on frontier models stopped being made right now, there’d be a ton of potential left to unlock just by refining and optimizing existing breakthroughs. You are not recognizing the sheer quantity of breakthroughs that have happened even just within the past 5 years, most of which are still poorly explored because (1) it generally takes science more than five years to go from breakthrough to practice, and (2) the big money is gambling on developing AGI.
I couldn’t care less about AI companies trying to sell chatbot subscriptions to every sucker in a suit, that has absolutely nothing to do with my assessment. A lot of people, including you, cling to these marketing ploys as examples of AI being a nothingburger, when all it is is the eternal cycle of companies scamming other companies. Someone somewhere being sold a lie does not diminish the stuff AI can do in the slightest.
If you think that’s my position then you’re mistaken. It’s possible to recognize the risks and possibilities of the technology without supporting the way American tech companies are going about it. In fact my position is what it is precisely because I recognise the danger the American tech hegemony controlling AI represents.
Because it’s being used as an excuse to fire people ans overwork whoever’s left. Nobody wants to work in a sweatshop.
I’ve been using the new models ever since the initial release of GPT-3 at work. It’s been my job to find practical uses for it. There exist a few, but the biggest issue with these models (and with LLMs as a whole) is that they cannot be guaranteed to work 100%, or close to 100%, of the time. Naturally, that’s a high bar to hit, but it includes things like safeguards against generating offensive, discriminatory, or even defamatory material.
Your problem space is limited to places where either an informed human must review the output, or you accept the liability for when it fails. Most businesses do not want to accept that liability.
Now onto programming specifically: a human reviews the output and is expected to take ownership of it. Sure, you can use it in that way as a tool if you want, regardless of the quality of the output. However, when someone comes to me on a Friday and asks me to review their 700+ file AI-generated PR (true story), I’m sorry, but that’s going to take at least a week. By the time I’m done reviewing your PR, the demo we were rushing to prepare for will have already passed. Yet now I’m expected to review this slop (which I would not have, and didn’t, approve regardless of the author) in addition to doing the work I was doing before. Keep in mind, of course, that my job before included the rare 100hr work week to rush to meet a deadline. So all I can do with these gigantic PRs of actual garbage is either reject them, which looks bad on me because we’re rushing even harder now, or rubber stamp them because I know nobody cares if the code works anyway.
So yeah, wake me up when it’s actually capable of automating my job and not just an excuse for some idiotic management to fire their programmers who, according to the garbage they’re saying about AI, should be the most productive people in the company by a huge margin and therefore more valuable than any of their other employees, at least according to their claims about AI.
If this was all it is, there would be no real reason for anyone to be complaining. If the technology really were a dead end and all the managers were just deluded by marketing, then the situation will self-correct sooner rather than later when companies run into trouble when AI fails to produce results after they fired most of their developers.
We’re currently into year 2 (or more, depending on how you count) of this shift happening and I’m not seeing many signs of such a correction on the horizon.
Automation does not need to replace every human to have an impact on the labour economy. It’s enough for it to increase efficiency to make some portion of the workforce redundant. AI doesn’t need to automate your job to put you out of a job. All it has to do is enable a colleague of yours to do both their job and yours.
This is factually happening particularly to entry level programming jobs. Rejecting AI is not going to change this reality. The only sane choice is to accept it on our terms and fight to ensure the change works in our favour and not against us.
The entire stock market is in a bubble. You don’t need me to explain why - there are so many articles and videos online covering it, from well-known video journalists like GamersNexus to written articles by Financial Times. This Wikipedia article covers both sides, though you’ll notice that the oppositions on that page come from people with a financial interest in it. The correction to this bubble would cripple the economy (which seems to be a recurring phenomenon these days).
Entry level jobs were never about productivity. They were about investment. Weird to say that AI is “replacing” them when it was never about them being super productive.
The rest makes no sense. You’d hire more people if their output is so high because every programmer would be worth way more than what you’re paying them.
Yeah I’m kinda done arguing with that guy too, probably asking Grok to come up with arguments 😭