26 ms·

Where does next-token prediction leave us?

212 points by 0x5FC3 4mo ago

zuogl 4mo ago
[flagged]
sigmar 4mo ago
>But lately I’ve been thinking if it is just a class issue? This cohort of people likely have a cushion that softens the concussive blows they are doling out right now. They perhaps have the luxury of a somewhat functioning government and a social safety net that they are witness to in all walks of life. Over half the world does not. Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight the people at the bottom rungs. In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie... https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-around-ai-present-mixed-signals-brands https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou... https://www.mexc.com/news/161986 https://www.mexc.com/news/161986
- mxkopy 4mo ago
  The attitudes aren’t 1-1 comparable. China is on a winning streak in terms of socioeconomic development, and AI is likely seen as merely a new technology in the context of the social contract. The US is going the opposite way, and people here view AI through the lens of oligarchy more often than not. I wouldn’t say that a lot of people feel as optimistic, even if they are actually more economically secure.
  - seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
    Do you have direct experience with this? From what I understand China has huge youth employment issues right now, and the 35 and out (at even non tech companies) meme has some basis in reality. China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).
    - thrance 4mo ago
      China is still riding the high of its economic miracle, that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is why the population is so complacent toward their authoritarian government. For now, at least.
      - seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
        That's a pretty generic answer that would have been correct 10 or 20 years ago as well. But where are the recent trends in youth employment? Is automation reducing the need for workers going to cause (or is causing) social instability? I saw a tiktok a few days ago about the proliferation of autonomous food delivery taking away jobs from delivery bike riders (the ones pretty ubiquitous in China today), and this kind of job was sort of considered a safety net if you lost your normal job (in that you can can always deliver food). It was Chinese authored and I doubt anyone who has never been to China would have understood it anyways.
  - mmilunic 4mo ago
    The idea of the social contract impacting perceptions of AI is interesting to me. I hate to use the words “permanent underclass”, but perhaps the main difference is a fear of that permanent underclass actually materializing. In the US, it seems that that would be the logical endpoint of the capitalist system and many people predict AI simply replacing them permanently. Of course, China is not completely communist, but since their social contract is much less individualistic and more collectivist, maybe that makes people see AI as much more likely to uplift society as a whole or at least “trickle down”. I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.
- cautiouscat 4mo ago
  Maybe it has to do with % of blue collar vs. white collar jobs in those countries? I also wonder if they have stronger safety nets for displaced workers? It is curious. My anecdata has shown that people who feel "safe" job wise are either neutral or pro. Otherwise negative.
- zarzavat 4mo ago
  The classic progression of an economy is resource -> manufacturing -> knowledge. AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.
- umeshunni 4mo ago
  > In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.
- holoduke 4mo ago
  Maybe chinese are generally more positive about everything. Many European countries and the US are in a decline for some years now.
  - Gigachad 4mo ago
    From what I've seen, The Chinese are more likely to believe the government has their back and the benefits of AI will be spread across the population. While Americans believe it will go towards billionaire mega yachts while they starve on the street.
- ndiddy 4mo ago
  One large part of this is that all the heads of AI companies and business leaders in the US and Europe keep talking about how AI is going to take jobs away and displace "lower-value human capital", while we see power shortages and higher energy rates in areas where AI datacenters are built. Meanwhile, China's 15th 5 year plan involves integrating AI across the whole economy while expanding vocational retraining programs, and building out new renewable infrastructure to power datacenters. The Chinese Human Resources Ministry expects AI to create 6-10 million new jobs in the short term, and the Chinese government plans to use it in the long term to fill in gaps in the labor force caused by its demographic shortages. I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.
- arjie 4mo ago
  Seems to me that it is downstream from the fact that China's economy is growing strongly and strong state power means that they see infrastructural improvements. US and European governments reflect the views of their people which are generally retrogressive and aimed at a fictional view of the 1970s as described in The Simpsons. Consequently, the Chinese are enthusiastic about Nuclear Power, and Solar Power, and Wind Energy, and AI, and ship building, and space programs, and trains, and electric vehicles, and so on ad infinitum to the degree that they don't mind smoggy cities to get these. Meanwhile Western nations mostly want to live in whatever they already have and would prefer nothing change or if it does that this change moves them closer to a past world, while nonetheless enjoying clean air and water. I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.
- treebeard901 4mo ago
  One of the billionaires on the All In Podcast, (which I listen to sometimes to get that kind of perspective), mentioned that one thing the U.S. and China could work on as far as regulating AI, is Know Your Customer controls. At first after one of the hosts said this I didn't think much of it but then started thinking through the second order effects later on. Why would that be such a main concern? He gave the example of dangerous people using AI to do bad things, but I think the subtext is much more complicated. At least from the ownership class point of view. Which also ties into the original idea behind OpenAI. Which is that the public should have access to the full abilities of any model equally. But the ownership class can't have this. In another post someone made a good point about licenses and this can be extended to stuff like the legal system, where at the end of the day the personal human connections decide things far more than what a model would compute the result of a case to be... So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S. In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.
- adamddev1 4mo ago
  Education systems and cultures that value "sounding" correct, repeating patterns and information, and immediate practical gain appear to like AI more that the cultures with a strong tradition of critical thinking. The cultures that love AI are the same cultures that will tend to build something cheap and quickly so that it can sell. The cultures that are less favorable are the ones that invest in building things correctly and solidly and value long term thinking. People with the immediate-gain-over-truth mindset love AI. > https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie... A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth. In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.
anematode 4mo ago
> The compartmentalisation that must be required by the scientists and engineers to reconcile with the fact that their work being used to bomb and kill people must be crazy. I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring? I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...
- BobbyTables2 4mo ago
  I’ve wondered about this. If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence. If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay? Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise. That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.
  - overgard 4mo ago
    > If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.
  - layer8 4mo ago
BobbyTables2 4mo ago
Author seems ill informed. The D.O.W is not exactly a fan of Anthropic…
- cautiouscat 4mo ago
  They're not now, but they went so far as to strong arm them because they wanted their product.
- layer8 4mo ago
  It’s a case of sour grapes though, in reality they’d still want Anthropic’s grapes.
- nl 4mo ago
  They aren't a fan of Dario, but seem very big fans of Claude!
mmilunic 4mo ago
> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted. I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote. I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?
- overgard 4mo ago
  I hate the term "democratization". It's putting a respectable face on something that shouldn't be respectable at all. In the age of the internet, coding and other creative skills have always been largely democratized to people that care enough to learn. Nothing is being "democratized" by AI, there's simply (an attempt) at driving the value of actual skill to zero so the skill-less and stupid can purchase their way to mediocrity (without the benefit of transferring that money to someone who has worked to be skilled). There is NOTHING "democratic" about that.
  - brookst 4mo ago
    It’s not coding that’s being democratized, it’s the ability to create games, tools, etc, that require coding. Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?
    - overgard 4mo ago
      That's a product, not a skill. We're not talking about people getting cheap cars, we're talking about nobody being able to make a living anymore. And no, this isn't like other revolutions, because there's no "upskilling" into it when it threatens all white collar work. (I'm sorry but I don't think prompting AI is going to be some amazing new profession, it'll be at best a transitory phase). Best case is to buy some durable jeans and learn a trade? Of course, I don't think this is happening any time soon because I don't believe the hype machine. But if you do believe the hype machine, you should be honest about what you're facing. Also, for what it's worth as a person that's written (and will continue to write) games and tools etc., there were already plenty of forces democratizing that (free engines, asset stores with reusable code and art, etc.) The difference was that there was still skill involved, and at the end of the day you were paying another human being for their effort if you bought or used pre-existing components. There's no skill in AI, not really. Also, I'm really not that interested in playing a game created by AI, and judging from the reaction gamers and game developers have had to this technology, I don't think many people are. So, yay, you can make a game that has a tiny audience with zero satisfaction from having done something hard and learned something? Also it's likely going to be extremely derivative, because the AI can only really work with what it's been trained on.
mlmonkey 4mo ago
I tuned out when I came across this: > Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs. Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.
- jack_pp 4mo ago
  do people at the bottom have access to medical advances or are they in lifelong debt in the unfortunate case when they need those medical advances?
  - brookst 4mo ago
    How accessible were covid vaccines?
    - selcuka 4mo ago
      Were the vaccines accessible because of the sympathy towards the people at the bottom, or so that they can go back to work as soon as possible? Medicine is subsidised when there is a global pandemic, but not when individual lives are at stake.
      - brookst 4mo ago
        I don’t really find it fruitful to speculate about motives in complex systems. The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances, which seems clearly untrue. Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available, sure, there are lots of plausible theories that may or may be true, in whole or part, and which we’ll never prove one way or the other. Believe what makes you happy, or angry, or whatever mood you prefer.
        selcuka 4mo ago
perching_aix 4mo ago
Every time someone invokes the "playing God" / "the hubris of creation" card, it makes me think they're the proud ones, and this case is none the different. I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all. I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either. One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923
Lerc 4mo ago
Calling this a straw man would be attributing an unnecessarily sturdy construction. Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc. The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal" The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative. Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature. I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you. I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.
- overgard 4mo ago
  > Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.
  - 4mo ago
Npovview 4mo ago
People have bargaining power through their military services. If even that job is taken by AI, there is truly no recourse for the people left at all. These are the sentiments of Yuval Noah Harari.
- futune 4mo ago
  The first person videos of drones hunting terrified soldiers coming out of Ukraine seem relevant. Apparently the last moments of the hunt are pretty much automated now, which increased the kill-rate considerably.
alanwreath 4mo ago
It’s a cliff we’re all being push to. Don’t know about you, I’m just struggling to put on my parachute !!!
- layer8 4mo ago
  Where did you find a parachute?
  - perching_aix 4mo ago
    On Hugging Face, presumably.
jstummbillig 4mo ago
> So, where does next token prediction leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class. In what way is this different to electricity?
- naktinis 4mo ago
  The question is what classes of jobs will replace the ones made obsolete by a particular innovation, and how many vacancies there will be. With electricity we had managerial, creative, high dexterity, etc. jobs. If a sufficient amount of human capabilities are replaced then that may be different to electricity. Also it's about how many top-tier "power plants" (AI, robotics) there are, who owns them, and once "everything is solved" (which it isn't yet) how much of that will trickle down to everyone else's life quality.
- customguy 4mo ago
  In what way is it similar?
  - jstummbillig 4mo ago
    So, where does electricity leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.
    - thrance 4mo ago
      What? People made electricity manually for centuries, collectively? And who were the electricity rent-seekers? Electricity has almost always been a public service.
      - jstummbillig 4mo ago
        People also don't make data centers, GPU, or do AI research collectively. The part that is made, collectively, are the layers of knowledge required to provide either. > Electricity has almost always been a public service. I have no clue where that would be true, if anywhere. Not where I live. I am paying a private company, and the electricity that they are selling me is generated by other private companies.
overgard 4mo ago
I have a more depressing theory. I think class is part of it, but I'm starting to suspect that a shockingly large number of people lack the critical thinking skills needed to think out the implications of this stuff. I say that because I've met so many people of the managerial class that seem to think it's going to replace the annoying people they have to pay, but somehow they don't think it's going to come for them. It's like we have some sort of society-wide main-character syndrome where a bunch of people just think that somehow the machine can replace every other job, and yet after ingesting all of human knowledge it somehow won't be able to compete with someone with "domain expertise"? Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe? I don't think this doomsday scenario is going to happen, but I think the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
- rootusrootus 4mo ago
  Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first. I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.
  - energy123 4mo ago
    > Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.
    - supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
      Realistically, I've only seen evidence about AI taking people's jobs, as is the case with LLMs, and in the case of robotics, killing people. Augmentation has always been something that gets talked about in research labs but I've never seen an actual product; and curing disease and old age is the domain of more traditional ML methods. I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.
osigurdson 4mo ago
The title is a little misleading as it sounds like it might hint at the end state of next token prediction - i.e. will we reach AGI with it and so on. Instead, this is entirely about "means of production" and "class war" stuff. While that may be coming, it isn't clear that this is the most likely outcome, its just the most pessimistic one. The author might as well have included that it will "be the end of the human race" as well, since once you get to the future state described, there is no alternative outcome that I can see.
- birdsongs 4mo ago
  I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing. Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long. But I might just be overly radicalised.
  - ares623 4mo ago
    The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. Was working in an office and being in countless standups that bad?
    - customguy 4mo ago
      > The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. You could also say what it is you think you already know that others are about to find out, and what it has to do with class war.
  - NoGravitas 4mo ago
    All of history is the history of class war. The post-WWII social-democratic years were a kind of truce, but truces in the class war are always unstable.
cubefox 4mo ago
For a more thoughtful and very different analysis: "Implications Of Predicting The Next Token" https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicting-the-next-token/ https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...
simianwords 4mo ago
This author fundamentally doesn't understand the mental model of the people they are describing and makes huge sweeping claims in what they think is a in a savvy manner but they are completely wrong. Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about. 1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes 2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this? 3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should. The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.
- 0x5FC3 4mo ago
  > good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed How exactly? Is this a version of trickle down economics I am unfamiliar with? > What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question How are the curious going to eat or have a roof over their heads? Or how are the curious going to pay for the tokens? > civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe Maybe, we ought to think real hard and slow about it?
- agnosticmantis 4mo ago
  > If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been) This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume. > What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.
xyzal 4mo ago
Don't worry guys, if the situation gets too bad, the social contract breaks, heads will roll for a while and then it will get better. "Inevitable"
haeseong 4mo ago
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madbo1 4mo ago
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Melamune 4mo ago
LLMs reveal an important truth that we were already deeply aware of. With this cognitive offloading, the interests that drive us lose their meaning. If friction disappears, there is no longer any desire, pleasure, longing, obstacle, or demand. It is indolence, and it goes by the name of apathy. All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished? The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it. I doubt that after having experienced deprivation, shame, and death; as well as their positive counterparts, we will ever fail to overcome entropy. We will adapt, for that is all we know and can do by default. What is given without effort does not transform.
- shinycode 4mo ago
  That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate. I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.
  - selcuka 4mo ago
    I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim. Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.
    - shinycode 4mo ago
      Completely, we even added Claude and Cubic in our ci that drop comments on their own. It’s laziness and/or « I don’t care » on his part
  - gspr 4mo ago
ares623 4mo ago
Thanks for writing this. It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to. The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means? My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."
- basicoperation 4mo ago
  Do you have the same opinion of labour-saving inventions that were created before you were born, or is it just future ones that are evil?
  - ares623 4mo ago
    I did not have a voice to inventions created before I was an adult. I have one now. And in fact, we have lessons from very similar technologies on how this would play out (internet + social media), so we can't say "how could we have known?!".
simianwords 4mo ago
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bambax 4mo ago
> The promise of capitalism has always been - you will have a spin at the roulette table. This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people. The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.
deleted 4mo ago
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jstrebel 4mo ago
AI is like TV in that old saying: AI makes the smart ones smarter and the dumb ones dumber. LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).
harrouet 4mo ago
AI has already replaced a lot of workers, but there is still no AI-managed business out there, regardless of doomsday PR. I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing. Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident. In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.
est 4mo ago
> The founding tenet of AI, “saving us” from all sorts of difficult things: climate, disease, poverty, conflict is falling, fast No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.
ETH_start 4mo ago
[dead]
birdland 4mo ago
What are these complaints really other than "I had a nice position in the previous system and I'm afraid of losing it"? Many felt disposable and not valued already, maybe it was a good system for you but not for many. You have a valued skill and you enjoy working in a field using that skill, well for 90+% of people that isn't what work is, you're lamenting the loss of something that the vast majority never had access to in the first place. What exactly is so great about our current predicament that it needs to be protected from new technology?
- 6510 4mo ago
  There is nothing new about machines displacing jobs and it will happen the same way as before.
deterministic 4mo ago
> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted. Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI. Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.

212 points by 0x5FC3 4mo ago

zuogl 4mo ago

[flagged]

>But lately I’ve been thinking if it is just a class issue? This cohort of people likely have a cushion that softens the concussive blows they are doling out right now. They perhaps have the luxury of a somewhat functioning government and a social safety net that they are witness to in all walks of life. Over half the world does not. Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight the people at the bottom rungs. In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie... https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-around-ai-present-mixed-signals-brands https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou... https://www.mexc.com/news/161986 https://www.mexc.com/news/161986

mxkopy 4mo ago
The attitudes aren’t 1-1 comparable. China is on a winning streak in terms of socioeconomic development, and AI is likely seen as merely a new technology in the context of the social contract. The US is going the opposite way, and people here view AI through the lens of oligarchy more often than not. I wouldn’t say that a lot of people feel as optimistic, even if they are actually more economically secure.
- seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
  Do you have direct experience with this? From what I understand China has huge youth employment issues right now, and the 35 and out (at even non tech companies) meme has some basis in reality. China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).
  - thrance 4mo ago
    China is still riding the high of its economic miracle, that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is why the population is so complacent toward their authoritarian government. For now, at least.
    - seanmcdirmid 4mo ago
      That's a pretty generic answer that would have been correct 10 or 20 years ago as well. But where are the recent trends in youth employment? Is automation reducing the need for workers going to cause (or is causing) social instability? I saw a tiktok a few days ago about the proliferation of autonomous food delivery taking away jobs from delivery bike riders (the ones pretty ubiquitous in China today), and this kind of job was sort of considered a safety net if you lost your normal job (in that you can can always deliver food). It was Chinese authored and I doubt anyone who has never been to China would have understood it anyways.
- mmilunic 4mo ago
  The idea of the social contract impacting perceptions of AI is interesting to me. I hate to use the words “permanent underclass”, but perhaps the main difference is a fear of that permanent underclass actually materializing. In the US, it seems that that would be the logical endpoint of the capitalist system and many people predict AI simply replacing them permanently. Of course, China is not completely communist, but since their social contract is much less individualistic and more collectivist, maybe that makes people see AI as much more likely to uplift society as a whole or at least “trickle down”. I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.
cautiouscat 4mo ago
Maybe it has to do with % of blue collar vs. white collar jobs in those countries? I also wonder if they have stronger safety nets for displaced workers? It is curious. My anecdata has shown that people who feel "safe" job wise are either neutral or pro. Otherwise negative.
zarzavat 4mo ago
The classic progression of an economy is resource -> manufacturing -> knowledge. AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.
umeshunni 4mo ago
> In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.
holoduke 4mo ago
Maybe chinese are generally more positive about everything. Many European countries and the US are in a decline for some years now.
- Gigachad 4mo ago
  From what I've seen, The Chinese are more likely to believe the government has their back and the benefits of AI will be spread across the population. While Americans believe it will go towards billionaire mega yachts while they starve on the street.
ndiddy 4mo ago
One large part of this is that all the heads of AI companies and business leaders in the US and Europe keep talking about how AI is going to take jobs away and displace "lower-value human capital", while we see power shortages and higher energy rates in areas where AI datacenters are built. Meanwhile, China's 15th 5 year plan involves integrating AI across the whole economy while expanding vocational retraining programs, and building out new renewable infrastructure to power datacenters. The Chinese Human Resources Ministry expects AI to create 6-10 million new jobs in the short term, and the Chinese government plans to use it in the long term to fill in gaps in the labor force caused by its demographic shortages. I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.
arjie 4mo ago
Seems to me that it is downstream from the fact that China's economy is growing strongly and strong state power means that they see infrastructural improvements. US and European governments reflect the views of their people which are generally retrogressive and aimed at a fictional view of the 1970s as described in The Simpsons. Consequently, the Chinese are enthusiastic about Nuclear Power, and Solar Power, and Wind Energy, and AI, and ship building, and space programs, and trains, and electric vehicles, and so on ad infinitum to the degree that they don't mind smoggy cities to get these. Meanwhile Western nations mostly want to live in whatever they already have and would prefer nothing change or if it does that this change moves them closer to a past world, while nonetheless enjoying clean air and water. I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.
treebeard901 4mo ago
One of the billionaires on the All In Podcast, (which I listen to sometimes to get that kind of perspective), mentioned that one thing the U.S. and China could work on as far as regulating AI, is Know Your Customer controls. At first after one of the hosts said this I didn't think much of it but then started thinking through the second order effects later on. Why would that be such a main concern? He gave the example of dangerous people using AI to do bad things, but I think the subtext is much more complicated. At least from the ownership class point of view. Which also ties into the original idea behind OpenAI. Which is that the public should have access to the full abilities of any model equally. But the ownership class can't have this. In another post someone made a good point about licenses and this can be extended to stuff like the legal system, where at the end of the day the personal human connections decide things far more than what a model would compute the result of a case to be... So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S. In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.
adamddev1 4mo ago
Education systems and cultures that value "sounding" correct, repeating patterns and information, and immediate practical gain appear to like AI more that the cultures with a strong tradition of critical thinking. The cultures that love AI are the same cultures that will tend to build something cheap and quickly so that it can sell. The cultures that are less favorable are the ones that invest in building things correctly and solidly and value long term thinking. People with the immediate-gain-over-truth mindset love AI. > https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie... A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth. In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.

anematode 4mo ago

> The compartmentalisation that must be required by the scientists and engineers to reconcile with the fact that their work being used to bomb and kill people must be crazy. I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring? I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...

BobbyTables2 4mo ago
I’ve wondered about this. If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence. If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay? Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise. That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.
- overgard 4mo ago
  > If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.
- layer8 4mo ago

BobbyTables2 4mo ago

Author seems ill informed. The D.O.W is not exactly a fan of Anthropic…

cautiouscat 4mo ago
They're not now, but they went so far as to strong arm them because they wanted their product.
layer8 4mo ago
It’s a case of sour grapes though, in reality they’d still want Anthropic’s grapes.
nl 4mo ago
They aren't a fan of Dario, but seem very big fans of Claude!

mmilunic 4mo ago

> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted. I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote. I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?

overgard 4mo ago
I hate the term "democratization". It's putting a respectable face on something that shouldn't be respectable at all. In the age of the internet, coding and other creative skills have always been largely democratized to people that care enough to learn. Nothing is being "democratized" by AI, there's simply (an attempt) at driving the value of actual skill to zero so the skill-less and stupid can purchase their way to mediocrity (without the benefit of transferring that money to someone who has worked to be skilled). There is NOTHING "democratic" about that.
- brookst 4mo ago
  It’s not coding that’s being democratized, it’s the ability to create games, tools, etc, that require coding. Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?
  - overgard 4mo ago
    That's a product, not a skill. We're not talking about people getting cheap cars, we're talking about nobody being able to make a living anymore. And no, this isn't like other revolutions, because there's no "upskilling" into it when it threatens all white collar work. (I'm sorry but I don't think prompting AI is going to be some amazing new profession, it'll be at best a transitory phase). Best case is to buy some durable jeans and learn a trade? Of course, I don't think this is happening any time soon because I don't believe the hype machine. But if you do believe the hype machine, you should be honest about what you're facing. Also, for what it's worth as a person that's written (and will continue to write) games and tools etc., there were already plenty of forces democratizing that (free engines, asset stores with reusable code and art, etc.) The difference was that there was still skill involved, and at the end of the day you were paying another human being for their effort if you bought or used pre-existing components. There's no skill in AI, not really. Also, I'm really not that interested in playing a game created by AI, and judging from the reaction gamers and game developers have had to this technology, I don't think many people are. So, yay, you can make a game that has a tiny audience with zero satisfaction from having done something hard and learned something? Also it's likely going to be extremely derivative, because the AI can only really work with what it's been trained on.

mlmonkey 4mo ago

I tuned out when I came across this: > Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs. Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.

jack_pp 4mo ago
do people at the bottom have access to medical advances or are they in lifelong debt in the unfortunate case when they need those medical advances?
- brookst 4mo ago
  How accessible were covid vaccines?
  - selcuka 4mo ago
    Were the vaccines accessible because of the sympathy towards the people at the bottom, or so that they can go back to work as soon as possible? Medicine is subsidised when there is a global pandemic, but not when individual lives are at stake.
    - brookst 4mo ago
      I don’t really find it fruitful to speculate about motives in complex systems. The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances, which seems clearly untrue. Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available, sure, there are lots of plausible theories that may or may be true, in whole or part, and which we’ll never prove one way or the other. Believe what makes you happy, or angry, or whatever mood you prefer.
      - selcuka 4mo ago

perching_aix 4mo ago

Every time someone invokes the "playing God" / "the hubris of creation" card, it makes me think they're the proud ones, and this case is none the different. I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all. I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either. One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923

Lerc 4mo ago

Calling this a straw man would be attributing an unnecessarily sturdy construction. Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc. The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal" The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative. Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature. I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you. I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.

overgard 4mo ago
> Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.
- 4mo ago

Npovview 4mo ago

People have bargaining power through their military services. If even that job is taken by AI, there is truly no recourse for the people left at all. These are the sentiments of Yuval Noah Harari.

futune 4mo ago
The first person videos of drones hunting terrified soldiers coming out of Ukraine seem relevant. Apparently the last moments of the hunt are pretty much automated now, which increased the kill-rate considerably.

alanwreath 4mo ago

It’s a cliff we’re all being push to. Don’t know about you, I’m just struggling to put on my parachute !!!

layer8 4mo ago
Where did you find a parachute?
- perching_aix 4mo ago
  On Hugging Face, presumably.

jstummbillig 4mo ago

> So, where does next token prediction leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class. In what way is this different to electricity?

naktinis 4mo ago
The question is what classes of jobs will replace the ones made obsolete by a particular innovation, and how many vacancies there will be. With electricity we had managerial, creative, high dexterity, etc. jobs. If a sufficient amount of human capabilities are replaced then that may be different to electricity. Also it's about how many top-tier "power plants" (AI, robotics) there are, who owns them, and once "everything is solved" (which it isn't yet) how much of that will trickle down to everyone else's life quality.
customguy 4mo ago
In what way is it similar?
- jstummbillig 4mo ago
  So, where does electricity leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.
  - thrance 4mo ago
    What? People made electricity manually for centuries, collectively? And who were the electricity rent-seekers? Electricity has almost always been a public service.
    - jstummbillig 4mo ago
      People also don't make data centers, GPU, or do AI research collectively. The part that is made, collectively, are the layers of knowledge required to provide either. > Electricity has almost always been a public service. I have no clue where that would be true, if anywhere. Not where I live. I am paying a private company, and the electricity that they are selling me is generated by other private companies.

overgard 4mo ago

I have a more depressing theory. I think class is part of it, but I'm starting to suspect that a shockingly large number of people lack the critical thinking skills needed to think out the implications of this stuff. I say that because I've met so many people of the managerial class that seem to think it's going to replace the annoying people they have to pay, but somehow they don't think it's going to come for them. It's like we have some sort of society-wide main-character syndrome where a bunch of people just think that somehow the machine can replace every other job, and yet after ingesting all of human knowledge it somehow won't be able to compete with someone with "domain expertise"? Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe? I don't think this doomsday scenario is going to happen, but I think the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

rootusrootus 4mo ago
Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first. I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.
- energy123 4mo ago
  > Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.
  - supriyo-biswas 4mo ago
    Realistically, I've only seen evidence about AI taking people's jobs, as is the case with LLMs, and in the case of robotics, killing people. Augmentation has always been something that gets talked about in research labs but I've never seen an actual product; and curing disease and old age is the domain of more traditional ML methods. I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.

osigurdson 4mo ago

The title is a little misleading as it sounds like it might hint at the end state of next token prediction - i.e. will we reach AGI with it and so on. Instead, this is entirely about "means of production" and "class war" stuff. While that may be coming, it isn't clear that this is the most likely outcome, its just the most pessimistic one. The author might as well have included that it will "be the end of the human race" as well, since once you get to the future state described, there is no alternative outcome that I can see.

birdsongs 4mo ago
I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing. Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long. But I might just be overly radicalised.
- ares623 4mo ago
  The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. Was working in an office and being in countless standups that bad?
  - customguy 4mo ago
    > The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. You could also say what it is you think you already know that others are about to find out, and what it has to do with class war.
- NoGravitas 4mo ago
  All of history is the history of class war. The post-WWII social-democratic years were a kind of truce, but truces in the class war are always unstable.

cubefox 4mo ago

For a more thoughtful and very different analysis: "Implications Of Predicting The Next Token" https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicting-the-next-token/ https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...

simianwords 4mo ago

This author fundamentally doesn't understand the mental model of the people they are describing and makes huge sweeping claims in what they think is a in a savvy manner but they are completely wrong. Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about. 1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes 2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this? 3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should. The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.

0x5FC3 4mo ago
> good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed How exactly? Is this a version of trickle down economics I am unfamiliar with? > What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question How are the curious going to eat or have a roof over their heads? Or how are the curious going to pay for the tokens? > civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe Maybe, we ought to think real hard and slow about it?
agnosticmantis 4mo ago
> If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been) This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume. > What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.

xyzal 4mo ago

Don't worry guys, if the situation gets too bad, the social contract breaks, heads will roll for a while and then it will get better. "Inevitable"

haeseong 4mo ago

[flagged]

madbo1 4mo ago

[flagged]

Melamune 4mo ago

LLMs reveal an important truth that we were already deeply aware of. With this cognitive offloading, the interests that drive us lose their meaning. If friction disappears, there is no longer any desire, pleasure, longing, obstacle, or demand. It is indolence, and it goes by the name of apathy. All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished? The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it. I doubt that after having experienced deprivation, shame, and death; as well as their positive counterparts, we will ever fail to overcome entropy. We will adapt, for that is all we know and can do by default. What is given without effort does not transform.

shinycode 4mo ago
That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate. I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.
- selcuka 4mo ago
  I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim. Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.
  - shinycode 4mo ago
    Completely, we even added Claude and Cubic in our ci that drop comments on their own. It’s laziness and/or « I don’t care » on his part
- gspr 4mo ago

ares623 4mo ago

Thanks for writing this. It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to. The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means? My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."

basicoperation 4mo ago
Do you have the same opinion of labour-saving inventions that were created before you were born, or is it just future ones that are evil?
- ares623 4mo ago
  I did not have a voice to inventions created before I was an adult. I have one now. And in fact, we have lessons from very similar technologies on how this would play out (internet + social media), so we can't say "how could we have known?!".

simianwords 4mo ago

[flagged]

bambax 4mo ago

> The promise of capitalism has always been - you will have a spin at the roulette table. This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people. The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.

deleted 4mo ago

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jstrebel 4mo ago

AI is like TV in that old saying: AI makes the smart ones smarter and the dumb ones dumber. LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).

harrouet 4mo ago

AI has already replaced a lot of workers, but there is still no AI-managed business out there, regardless of doomsday PR. I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing. Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident. In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.

est 4mo ago

> The founding tenet of AI, “saving us” from all sorts of difficult things: climate, disease, poverty, conflict is falling, fast No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.

ETH_start 4mo ago

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birdland 4mo ago

What are these complaints really other than "I had a nice position in the previous system and I'm afraid of losing it"? Many felt disposable and not valued already, maybe it was a good system for you but not for many. You have a valued skill and you enjoy working in a field using that skill, well for 90+% of people that isn't what work is, you're lamenting the loss of something that the vast majority never had access to in the first place. What exactly is so great about our current predicament that it needs to be protected from new technology?

6510 4mo ago
There is nothing new about machines displacing jobs and it will happen the same way as before.

deterministic 4mo ago

> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted. Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI. Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.