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AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
- jongjong 8mo agoIt's disappointing how so many people blame AI for our problems. I see this pattern over and over; people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. Technological improvement is the only thing which allows us to survive the social, cultural and moral decline that we've been experiencing. People blame tech because it allows the system to be highly inefficient and still hold together. But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed.
- Avicebron 8mo ago> But if people blame tech, root issues will not be addressed. Agreed. I think people would be open to suggestions if you have actionable ways to improve the current socio-economic system.
- hackable_sand 8mo agoIf it involves work then no, people are not open to suggestions.
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- DetectDefect 8mo agoIt is pretty plain to see technology enables socio-economic disharmony, to say the least. While it may not be the "cause" it is certainly a potent accelerant.
- jongjong 8mo agoYes but we can't stop progress while scarcity is still causing suffering. I think that communication works long term, even with algorithm suppression. Insightful ideas tend to bubble up, especially during chaotic times.
- beedeebeedee 8mo agoAt this point, scarcity is an artifact of our economy
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>but we can't stop progress while scarcity is still causing suffering. That's what the billionaires are betting on. That or running away when the bombs hit. Whether that last sentence is figurative or literal relies on how we react in the next few years. Maybe even few months here in the US.
- kuerbel 8mo agoI don’t think the article is blaming AI as a technology. It’s criticizing how the current socio-economic system uses AI. The argument isn’t “tech is the problem,” but that autonomy narratives are used to shift risk, degrade labor, and justify valuations without real system-level productivity gains. That’s a critique of incentives and power structures, not of technological progress itself. In that sense, “don’t blame tech, blame the system” is very close to the article’s point, not opposed to it.
- netsharc 8mo agoHow to fix the human/society instead? Technology has enabled a lot of evil: the society that had guns came and colonized the society without, and made them slaves (here's the opening to argue that Genghis Khan managed to enslave many societies without guns). The rise of the Internet and online shopping ruined "main street shops". "Uber for ___" enabled the exploitative gig-economy with retirement meaning dropping dead... Yeah, we're back to feudal lords having the power to control society, they can even easily buy governments... Seems like the problem is with neo-liberalist capitalism, without any controls coming from the society (i.e. democractically elected governments) it will maximize exploitation.
- ares623 8mo agoI think technology has always been a tool to impose will over others. Computing was just such a unique kind of technology where, for a decently long time, only a subset of people knew how to use it, and that subset didn’t have existing wealth and power (or not enough). It’s taken upto now for the ones with real power to catch up, or a mix of the ones who didn’t now have real power. And they will use technology for what it ultimately is for, to impose their will on others.
- SideburnsOfDoom 8mo ago> people never blame the socio-economic system and blame technology instead. If by "people" you mean "Cory Doctorow, the author of the article", then you really don't know anything about their work. For example, he coined the term "enshitifacation" and talks often about the "enshitogenic policy environment" that gives rise to it.
- thundergolfer 8mo agoThe first 500+ words of this article are focused almost exclusively on the dynamics of corporate capitalism, not AI. Read the article.
- sodapopcan 8mo agoWell it's kinda both. One step towards socio-economic change would be if everyone just stopped giving billionaires upwards of $200/month, and didn't have their companies give it to them on their behalf.
- pixl97 8mo agoAny problem that is solved by "if everyone just" changed what they are doing is not solvable by everyone just changing what they are doing.
- sodapopcan 8mo agoYa, no shit! Just like "we should just" solve the socio-economic problems as if they didn't go hand-in-hand (I realize I'm paraphrasing OP a bit).
- dayofthedaleks 8mo agoMaybe worth noting in the title this is from Cory Doctorow. https://archive.is/ctuVG https://archive.is/ctuVG
- whimsicalism 8mo agoIt’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves. It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.
- meroes 8mo agoWhat masterful framing AI leaders developed that people say, “AI is doing my work”. Did other technologies get phrased this way? The accounting software is doing my work? The locomotive is doing my work?
- whimsicalism 8mo agoyeah it’s all branding. there is totally nothing different about this technology that might cause someone to say that… e:tone
- zdragnar 8mo agoThe technology is different, but we've been told that we'll be replaced by foreign teams for years. It's had some impact, but in all but two of the cases I've personally seen it has been significantly detrimental. In the majority of cases, the offshore team was either replaced or relegated to pointless busy work.
- whimsicalism 8mo agoi don’t find that at all a compelling argument, but maybe others will
- ctoth 8mo agoDo you not remember the early days of Covid? People are really, really, really good at not seeing what they don't want to see.
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- baron816 8mo ago> Start with monopolies: tech companies are gigantic and they don’t compete, they just take over whole sectors, either on their own or in cartels. >Google and Meta control the ad market. Google and Apple control the mobile market, “Tech companies are monopolies”, proceeds to describe how tech companies compete with each other.
- hippo22 8mo agoA market with only two players isn't much of a market.
- NitpickLawyer 8mo agoTBF on the LLM side we currently have 4 big players, and a bunch of smaller ones. Plus a healthy bunch of open models, lagging ~1y behind SotA. The best thing for us consumers is that it stays this way. Any of them winning would be bad in general.
- ares623 8mo agoOr nowadays, any number of players. Now that market data is made available by brokers and decisions can be colluded based on such data.
- hamdingers 8mo ago> or in cartels
- ahachete 8mo agoThere's a fundamental disconnect: OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. And that premise seems like a quite plausible one...
- NitpickLawyer 8mo agoI think the junior thing started ~24, early ~25. Because back then the level of the current models was at or above that level, with somewhat flaky reliability. In the past year that's changed. We are now at "mostly reliable" in any junior-level stuff, and "surprisingly capable, maybe still needs some hand-holding" at advanced / senior-level stuff. And somewhat super-human if the problem is easily verifiable in a feedback loop (see the atcoder stuff).
- ahachete 8mo agoNot my experience. It's junior level coding and maybe senior level advising, but even then only when clearly directed with the right questions and guardrails. As an autonomous thing? Junior at best. That's why I think it's extremely helpful for seniors: with proper guidance, it really boosts your productivity, writing notable parts of the code.
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- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>OP refers to senior engineers being replaced with AI, whereas the evidence and logical reasoning points much more to junior engineers being replaced by AI. If industry cared about future seniors, they'd invest in juniors. But that's not what's happening. AI will effectively replace seniors in 20 years with the current trajectory. Whether or not that replacement is adequate or not is the bigger question.
- baron816 8mo agoIt’s so strange to see people accusing tech companies of using AI to concentrate power and wealth when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. You have crazily high competition in the industry that allows you the consumer to use SOTA models for free, or even run them yourself. My prediction is that this will keep going all the way to the AGI stage. Someone will release (or leak) an AGI capable model that’s able to design AI chips, as well as the Fabs needed to build them, as well as robots to build and operate the Fabs and robot factories and raw material mines and refineries.
- Eggpants 8mo agoOpenAI and Microsoft have defined AGI as a revenue number so yeah maybe using that definition. I believe AGI will require the ability to self tune its own Neutral network coefficients which the current tech cannot do because I can’t deduce it’s own errors. Oh sorry “hallucinations”. Developing brains learn from both pain and verbal feedback (no, not food!) etc. It’s an interesting problem where just telling a LLM model it’s wrong is not enough to adjust Billions of parameters with.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago> when thus far, AI has almost entirely been all consumer surplus. Tell that to the 2025 job numbers. Who do you think benefits from a millipn+ layoffs? The consumers? The new grads who can't even get their career started?
- pessimizer 8mo agoThey're so obviously going to fail, but in a good way. The idea is that they were going to get the world addicted then raise the prices, but the reality is that there's going to be a race for the bottom in pricing because none of them are significantly better than the others. They don't own anything, it's just math; they can be undercut by an OSS bomb from China at any given moment. Even worse, they've bet against the math not advancing. If it gets significantly more power-efficient, which literally could happen tomorrow if the right paper goes up on arxiv, maybe a 10 year old laptop could give "good enough" results. All those data centers are now trash and your companies are now worth a negative trillion dollars. I think all of these factors are completely independent of whether AI works or not, or how well it works. Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. I just have experienced it, and it is at this point mediocre. Of course I am not using the bleeding edge, and I am not privy to the top secret insider stuff which may well be orders of magnitude better. But if they've got it, why would they keep it a secret when people are desperate to give them money? If they're hiding it, it's something that they know that somebody could analyze and knock off, and then it's a race for the bottom again. In a race for the bottom, we all win. Except the people and economies who bet their lives on it being a race to the top.
- johnnyanmac 8mo ago>Personally, I don't care if it replaces programmers: get another job. In this economy? Restarting in a world that doesn't want to train is expensive at best and suicide at worst.
- stephc_int13 8mo agoHow ironic would it be if the AI productivity miracle ends up being negative growth because of the cost of cleaning up of slop?
- takeda 8mo agoHonestly I think it already is. A lot of people who talk about massive gains seem to forget about code review. Then in a company someone who has to review is is f*cked because that code is much more complex and takes much longer to review.
- winstonwinston 8mo agoThe race to the bottom of software quality accelerates using AI to generate software. Based on my experience using Claude for software development.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 8mo ago"I'm a science-fiction writer - my job is to think of a dozen alternatives before breakfast." The author should have a team of programmers trying to implement some of these alternatives I'm confident "new method of collecting data, performing surveillance and providing ad services" would not be one of them Programmers are generally not good sources of novel ideas They tend to focus on copying ("implementing") the ideas of others Today's "AI", designed by programmers, IMO (other opinions may differ), is an automated form of copying
- daxfohl 8mo agoThe whole AGI industry is like one of those projects that claims "90% finished" from the time of the first demo, then for the next N years, all the way up until the project is eventually canceled. Yeah we can spew out millions of lines of unmaintainable slop code! Now we can even write a slop unusable browser! All this shit looks like progress, but it's all really a cover for lack of progress. And now we've got the entire economy as a bet on it. None of this is to say there's nothing useful coming out of the industry. I use it productively for a ton of things. But, the reverse centaur thing is a great analogy. The money getting ploughed into it is assuming reverse centaur will be the final outcome, not a set of useful productivity tools. Once investors start to realize that all we're going to get out of it is the latter, we'll be in for a world of hurt. Granted, one nice thing about the AI wave is that I bet it'll be able to keep slinging new and idiotic slop for decades that'll keep successfully unburdening investors from their money, because, "hey look, it's 90% finished!" Who knows, maybe that's the point.