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AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about c

AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

tptacek 4mo ago
There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  Upset with what aspect(s) of databases? The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create? That latter seems to have aged quite well.
  - kalleboo 4mo ago
    Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information). Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
- knuckleheads 4mo ago
  The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.
- lacewing 4mo ago
  There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
  - brandon272 4mo ago
    I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption. Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
    - andrekandre 4mo ago
      > Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI. its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms. right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...
- hansmayer 4mo ago
  > People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?
- keybored 4mo ago
  Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be. So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily. Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
  - TrnsltLife 4mo ago
    Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.
- anonzzzies 4mo ago
  People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
  - andrekandre 4mo ago
    > But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc
- d0liver 4mo ago
  What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
  - dmantis 4mo ago
    Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.
    - the_gastropod 4mo ago
      In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it? The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
      - KptMarchewa 4mo ago
        Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
        AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
        No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech? You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
        satvikpendem 4mo ago
- the_gastropod 4mo ago
  Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
- bdangubic 4mo ago
  > It really isn't going anywhere It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
- barnabee 4mo ago
  TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it. AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
- customguy 4mo ago
  The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.
empath75 4mo ago
I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train. You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass. There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  > There is no possible universe where AI is banned Yes there is It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
  - nba456_ 4mo ago
    No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI. And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
    - csande17 4mo ago
      You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
      - joquarky 4mo ago
        Do you think that's going to erase every copy of "Attention is all you need"?
      - empath75 4mo ago
        Why do you imagine this would change _anything_? There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models. If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.
elpocko 4mo ago
> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in. Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
- PotatoPrime 4mo ago
  Could you give an example of an issue we tell people to suck it up about? I'd like to think a reasonable society would hear the worries and complaints of everyone within it.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago
  > Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
- miltonlost 4mo ago
  AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
- goda90 4mo ago
  Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
- miyoji 4mo ago
  > It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues. No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
logicchains 4mo ago
>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
- hack1312 4mo ago
  [dead]
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
  Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.
potsandpans 4mo ago
I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children." There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair. This is the world now.

tptacek 4mo ago

There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).

dredmorbius 4mo ago
Upset with what aspect(s) of databases? The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create? That latter seems to have aged quite well.
- kalleboo 4mo ago
  Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information). Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
knuckleheads 4mo ago
The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.
lacewing 4mo ago
There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
- brandon272 4mo ago
  I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption. Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
  - andrekandre 4mo ago
    > Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI. its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms. right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...
hansmayer 4mo ago
> People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?
keybored 4mo ago
Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be. So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily. Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
- TrnsltLife 4mo ago
  Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.
anonzzzies 4mo ago
People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
- andrekandre 4mo ago
  > But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc
d0liver 4mo ago
What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
- dmantis 4mo ago
  Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.
  - the_gastropod 4mo ago
    In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it? The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
    - KptMarchewa 4mo ago
      Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
      - AnimalMuppet 4mo ago
        No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech? You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
        satvikpendem 4mo ago
the_gastropod 4mo ago
Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
bdangubic 4mo ago
> It really isn't going anywhere It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
barnabee 4mo ago
TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it. AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
customguy 4mo ago
The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.

empath75 4mo ago

I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train. You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass. There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.

bluefirebrand 4mo ago
> There is no possible universe where AI is banned Yes there is It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
- nba456_ 4mo ago
  No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI. And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
  - csande17 4mo ago
    You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
    - joquarky 4mo ago
      Do you think that's going to erase every copy of "Attention is all you need"?
    - empath75 4mo ago
      Why do you imagine this would change _anything_? There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models. If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.

b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago

none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.

elpocko 4mo ago

> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in. Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.

PotatoPrime 4mo ago
Could you give an example of an issue we tell people to suck it up about? I'd like to think a reasonable society would hear the worries and complaints of everyone within it.
swiftcoder 4mo ago
> Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
miltonlost 4mo ago
AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
goda90 4mo ago
Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
miyoji 4mo ago
> It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues. No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.

logicchains 4mo ago

>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.

hack1312 4mo ago
[dead]
satvikpendem 4mo ago
Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.

potsandpans 4mo ago

I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children." There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair. This is the world now.