7 ms·

I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying peo

I like how the least optimistic scenario is simply LLMs not making a difference, instead of the very real possibility of them damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality and leading to class wars. I believe the net effect of LLMs is, at this point, firmly negative, and it’s going to take years until they start making up for the mess they’ve created.

ghm2199 7d ago
Altman, Amodei, Pinchai etc can get together and just put a self imposed ban on themselves and ask the us government to sanction any entity/state attempting to use/release a Recursive Self improving model until the risks are well understood. This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and fund these models that are more powerful and use them in situations they understand and a restricted setting. The pentagon has a larger budget than any VC. Remove the profit motive on self improving recursive models gained from retail/commercial use!
- bigbuppo 7d ago
  Would also mean their labs most be fully airgapped and made safe from all known covert channels, no matter how ridiculously theoretical. In fact, their meat proxies, who may be brainwashed into acting on the AI's behalf, must also be kept in extreme isolation. And to make sure that nobody will get close we will need to figure out a way to warn people. Probably start out with a series of signs... This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! This is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This mesage is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center...
  - vharuck 7d ago
    For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
- bloppe 7d ago
  No worries. The US can totally just sanction China into giving up on AI research.
boogieknite 7d ago
have one coworker whose clearly lost some ability to think critically because of their overreliance, near obsession, with llm chats. slightly worried they might lose their job another coworker seems to be early on a similar path but has made some comments about the former coworkers ability that makes me hopeful they dont end up the same way feels like im talking about old high school friends on a drug path or something. its only anecdotes and i imagine the "perceived damage" is reversible. point is: i think youre onto something about the net effect and were going to have popular definitions for the negative encounters were anecdotally sharing im a "user" but make Claude interact in an educational format and require sources on assertions. looking back, ive unintentionally cast it as The Librarian from Snow Crash, except if Hiro challenged it frequently. must have been natural after reading Snow Crash a few times. maybe im kidding myself but it feels like i havent lost a step. if im not deluding myself then i could see a world where elementary schools teach responsible llm use of to preserve cognition the same way we had to learn Google boolean search
pvab3 7d ago
I can't imagine trying to be a teacher in 2026. I would have never written a single paper or problem set myself in HS and college.
- bradfa 7d ago
  Hand written exams are coming back into fashion. You get a pencil and the exam book. Nothing else. Show your work. Catching cheaters is still hard but it will keep honest people more honest.
  - pixl97 7d ago
    >You get a pencil and the exam book. Nothing else. Show your work. Back in my day this was the only way! Well, scantron cards for testing became more common near the end of school.
  - pvab3 6d ago
    But if I were struggling with an assignment, stuck on a problem, I would have turned to AI after a few minutes of trying to figure it out, and thus lost out on the actual character-forming and memory-building aspects of college assignments.
- Quibblingeek 7d ago
  We won’t need teachers in ten years when the messiah’s of AI eliminate the need for real humans and their pesky needs for stupid things like..labor rights and human decency. But we must continue because we’ll lose some sort of ideological Cold War with a country better positioned to win anyway. It’s all in the name of capitalism so the ends justify the needs.
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]
FlowingRiver 7d ago
Long term I worry what happens when you absolutely gut out the mental capabilities of a generation or two. We are only just now seeing the first stages of this, we are at the Facebook in 2008 stage trying to warn people about the societal fluctuations coming but many aren't listening because it is too useful.
newsclues 7d ago
Same net negative with smartphones and social media.
nickpp 7d ago
You can say all that about pretty much any technological advancement, like the computer itself. Heck, people said it about the invention of writing or the printing press! However, looking back, each single invention was a net positive for us as a species.
tancop 6d ago
- Attention spans are overrated. I know that because I have a pretty short one to the point it's annoying for others. It measures how much you're willing to focus on something you don't want more than the ability to focus on something you do want, like writing this reply. Losing that is a sign that people are tired of boring jobs and badly designed school work and old forms of entertainment that are only alive because of nostalgia or elitism. - Asking an LLM is objectively a better learning method than reading books if the LLM is giving correct information (and I know that's a pretty big if). Cheating on homework is a workaround that only exists because graded homework is still a thing. If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced. - Inequality has been increasing for decades. It's an inevitable part of capitalism, when the rate of wealth increase is higher for the rich and well connected (like access to private funding rounds or portfolio managers) you get unlimited concentration. Even without that, when you have money left after basic expenses you can invest more of it than someone living paycheck to paycheck. - Class wars are great. Hopefully we can avoid physical violence but if we can't then tough luck. Should have paid your taxes.
- munksbeer 6d ago
  > If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced. Wow, I haven't thought deeply since seeing this comment, but on the surface this is actually a really nice idea.
beepbopboopp 6d ago
I mean, this clearly a technology change. Would you have stopped the printing press because young people got worse at verbally telling the ancient stories? Or when kids stopped understanding what a card catologe was? We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.
vouaobrasil 7d ago
I don't think they can make up for any mess. Because even if LLMs bring about a lack of scarcity across all domains, human beings will be alienated because indvidual differences and skills won't matter any more so we'll have to be genetically engineered to like that sort of future. I don't think a stable and healthy society can coexist with LLMs at all.
- idiotsecant 7d ago
  Individual skills and differences don't matter any less if the system of assigning value to human lives is divorced from how useful that human is to the collective. If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied? We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part. This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.
Dlemlo 7d ago
How? Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow. The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks. You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.
- somenameforme 7d ago
  You're describing the end of the digital world as we know it, and I feel fine.
  - Dlemlo 7d ago
    Yeah to a certain degree me too tbh. But the biggest growth from the last 20-30 years was digital. It allowed a lot of people around the planet to change things.
- treespace8 7d ago
  Like all automations it's not 100% perfect, and they all require a human to monitor them. Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves. Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
  - Dlemlo 7d ago
    If you look at certain documentations, we lost already how we d othings. USA forgot how to produce things. This will not prevent us from doing it.
  - Droobfest 7d ago
    Most people who drive a car have no idea how an engine works. I know and agree it's a scary future, but I wonder if it's really _essential_ to understand things on a deeper level. Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.
detectivestory 7d ago
LLMs themselves most definitely will not do that. You can still learn how to make a barrel, but not many people do.. The real fear is the destruction/hiding of public data/resources (which has already been happening for years)
api 7d ago
There's not nearly enough mention in these discussions of the real villain behind most of the negative cultural, social, and cognitive effects of things like social media: addiction engineering. AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics. Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.
- dgellow 7d ago
  I assumed it was a given in such discussions that companies will optimizing for the worst outcomes for their users. It’s a fairly straightforward incentive from our capitalist system, which is why capitalism needs regulation to re-align the incentives with humans needs
  - kian 7d ago
    if you think companies optimize for the worst outcome still acceptable for their users to please shareholders, why don't you think governments don't opt for the same with their citizens to please special interests? voting with your wallet is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than with your feet...
okaleniuk 7d ago
Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.
- dgellow 7d ago
  LLMs worsen all those existing problems, that’s the whole point being made here
airstrike 7d ago
Exactly. Bloomberg reports students who use AI perform worse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-students-who-use-ai-get-worse-test-scores-oecd-warns?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4ODk2NTkwNywiZXhwIjoxNzg5NTcwNzA3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTDFGOERLSkg2VjYwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4OTI0MzlFODUzMzM0MDJGQTUwRTgyQUFEQjc5ODgxRiJ9.6V1-fKixAAYsoWAf2Aq6Fz7k9QmqF4t4wCJgo6vWwOo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-st...
- palmotea 7d ago
  > Exactly. Bloomberg reports students who use AI perform worse That's good news! The worse students perform, the less competition AI will have in the future and the less effective any resistance will be. The ultimate goal should be to abolish education except for the elite, but we can't get there in one step. The ideal future we should be shooting for is cross between Idocracy and Elysium: a paradise for tech oligarchy and masses so stupid and dependent that can't possible challenge them.
- vonneumannstan 5d ago
  Used in what way though. Obviously using them to do your homework and doing nothing on your own will hurt your learning.
- jmathai 7d ago
  I don't even need to read a Bloomberg report to know this. I've personally experienced noticeable mental decline as my AI usage at work has gone up. I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing. I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.
sublinear 7d ago
Do a few bad grades really harm economic outcomes, though? Educators took a hard stance against AI rather quickly. Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low. Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.
- wing-_-nuts 7d ago
  Oh hey, it's my point of view from a year ago... It's definitely changed in that time
  - sublinear 7d ago
    I've been hearing this retort every year. The only difference this time is you're not a green account. If things have actually changed, you wouldn't be begging the question. LLMs, as popularly used, are still just a new kind of search engine for natural language answers to natural language questions. They're portable in a way, too. That's really cool tech, but not a revolution. It's pretty underwhelming compared to previous decades of change. It's a lot more error prone too, since it's a mudball of stats. If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. At that point, we're not even talking about AI anymore.
    - wing-_-nuts 7d ago
      >If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. I'm sorry, what? I'll put it to you again, you sound like me after playing around with gpt 3.5. It was interesting, but it wasn't good. There were still questions as to whether scaling would persist. My doubts were pretty much obliterated. LLMs haven't been mere text completion for a while now. Heck, even a model small enough to fit on my 3090 is now shockingly competent and useful. Does claude sometimes go off on weird tangents making me reel it in? Yeah, but it's genuinely great in present form, and it's the worst it'll ever be. You're welcome to your opinion. It used to be mine too, but I disagree now. I find pretty much every AI benchmark has shown forward progress, some with non public datasets, and some things have gotten scarily better.
keybored 7d ago
> and leading to class wars. Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.
- timacles 7d ago
  Class war started about 15 years ago post 2007 financial crisis. The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy. Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
  - keybored 7d ago
    Yup, caught me falling for the propaganda. 1. When the capitalists wage class war: bussiness as usual, some murmuring about widening wealth gap by progressive, diffuse threats to democracy 2. When workers complain about the system: all hands on deck, class war immiment, please think of the children and the stability of society
  - brailsafe 7d ago
    They might own it, but at a certain point it only matters whether the concept of ownership means anything to the people who don't "own" it. Ownership only works for those with assets because they have police working for them to protect the concept of ownership to begin with, but that only works at a certain scale of disenfranchisement and lack of upheaval. There isn't that much in-practice stopping a sufficiently angry group from attacking most politicians or even every-day wealthy people in their home. Money talks, but if the amount everyone else earns isn't enough to meaningfully contribute to "owning" anything, then those people would reasonably stop agreeing to respect the idea of property or non-violence. People without assets, facing down a continual decline in living standards from 15 years ago, should evaluate whether the system they operate in does anything beneficial for them at all, or whether it mainly serves those who they serve. We're starting to see it in discrete bursts with Mangione, the paper warehouse fire, and in other non-violent ways with farmer protests, trucker protests, etc.. which have varying levels of support from regular people depending on their wealth class, background, and inclination to agree with the government.
akomtu 7d ago
I noticed that LLMs prevent you from thinking on your own, or at least try to, by injecting their "helpful" suggestions when you need some idle time to think. On Amazon, for example, I was about to find something when their chatbot distracted me with its suggestions I didn't ask for.

ghm2199 7d ago

Altman, Amodei, Pinchai etc can get together and just put a self imposed ban on themselves and ask the us government to sanction any entity/state attempting to use/release a Recursive Self improving model until the risks are well understood. This does not mean they can't keep developing it. But it would mean they do not release them to the general public or the public domain. The US government can continue to use and fund these models that are more powerful and use them in situations they understand and a restricted setting. The pentagon has a larger budget than any VC. Remove the profit motive on self improving recursive models gained from retail/commercial use!

bigbuppo 7d ago
Would also mean their labs most be fully airgapped and made safe from all known covert channels, no matter how ridiculously theoretical. In fact, their meat proxies, who may be brainwashed into acting on the AI's behalf, must also be kept in extreme isolation. And to make sure that nobody will get close we will need to figure out a way to warn people. Probably start out with a series of signs... This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it! This is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This mesage is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center...
- vharuck 7d ago
  For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
bloppe 7d ago
No worries. The US can totally just sanction China into giving up on AI research.

boogieknite 7d ago

have one coworker whose clearly lost some ability to think critically because of their overreliance, near obsession, with llm chats. slightly worried they might lose their job another coworker seems to be early on a similar path but has made some comments about the former coworkers ability that makes me hopeful they dont end up the same way feels like im talking about old high school friends on a drug path or something. its only anecdotes and i imagine the "perceived damage" is reversible. point is: i think youre onto something about the net effect and were going to have popular definitions for the negative encounters were anecdotally sharing im a "user" but make Claude interact in an educational format and require sources on assertions. looking back, ive unintentionally cast it as The Librarian from Snow Crash, except if Hiro challenged it frequently. must have been natural after reading Snow Crash a few times. maybe im kidding myself but it feels like i havent lost a step. if im not deluding myself then i could see a world where elementary schools teach responsible llm use of to preserve cognition the same way we had to learn Google boolean search

pvab3 7d ago

I can't imagine trying to be a teacher in 2026. I would have never written a single paper or problem set myself in HS and college.

bradfa 7d ago
Hand written exams are coming back into fashion. You get a pencil and the exam book. Nothing else. Show your work. Catching cheaters is still hard but it will keep honest people more honest.
- pixl97 7d ago
  >You get a pencil and the exam book. Nothing else. Show your work. Back in my day this was the only way! Well, scantron cards for testing became more common near the end of school.
- pvab3 6d ago
  But if I were struggling with an assignment, stuck on a problem, I would have turned to AI after a few minutes of trying to figure it out, and thus lost out on the actual character-forming and memory-building aspects of college assignments.
Quibblingeek 7d ago
We won’t need teachers in ten years when the messiah’s of AI eliminate the need for real humans and their pesky needs for stupid things like..labor rights and human decency. But we must continue because we’ll lose some sort of ideological Cold War with a country better positioned to win anyway. It’s all in the name of capitalism so the ends justify the needs.
deleted 7d ago
[deleted]

FlowingRiver 7d ago

Long term I worry what happens when you absolutely gut out the mental capabilities of a generation or two. We are only just now seeing the first stages of this, we are at the Facebook in 2008 stage trying to warn people about the societal fluctuations coming but many aren't listening because it is too useful.

newsclues 7d ago

Same net negative with smartphones and social media.

nickpp 7d ago

You can say all that about pretty much any technological advancement, like the computer itself. Heck, people said it about the invention of writing or the printing press! However, looking back, each single invention was a net positive for us as a species.

tancop 6d ago

- Attention spans are overrated. I know that because I have a pretty short one to the point it's annoying for others. It measures how much you're willing to focus on something you don't want more than the ability to focus on something you do want, like writing this reply. Losing that is a sign that people are tired of boring jobs and badly designed school work and old forms of entertainment that are only alive because of nostalgia or elitism. - Asking an LLM is objectively a better learning method than reading books if the LLM is giving correct information (and I know that's a pretty big if). Cheating on homework is a workaround that only exists because graded homework is still a thing. If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced. - Inequality has been increasing for decades. It's an inevitable part of capitalism, when the rate of wealth increase is higher for the rich and well connected (like access to private funding rounds or portfolio managers) you get unlimited concentration. Even without that, when you have money left after basic expenses you can invest more of it than someone living paycheck to paycheck. - Class wars are great. Hopefully we can avoid physical violence but if we can't then tough luck. Should have paid your taxes.

munksbeer 6d ago
> If tests are hard enough and have unlimited retakes, kids will learn that practice is worth it and do it with way more focus than if it was forced. Wow, I haven't thought deeply since seeing this comment, but on the surface this is actually a really nice idea.

beepbopboopp 6d ago

I mean, this clearly a technology change. Would you have stopped the printing press because young people got worse at verbally telling the ancient stories? Or when kids stopped understanding what a card catologe was? We are in the middle of a major change and it very well could be net negative, but for the most part history just keeps marching and its fine, just different.

vouaobrasil 7d ago

I don't think they can make up for any mess. Because even if LLMs bring about a lack of scarcity across all domains, human beings will be alienated because indvidual differences and skills won't matter any more so we'll have to be genetically engineered to like that sort of future. I don't think a stable and healthy society can coexist with LLMs at all.

idiotsecant 7d ago
Individual skills and differences don't matter any less if the system of assigning value to human lives is divorced from how useful that human is to the collective. If I am not graded on how many widgets I make in a shift and instead can focus on making the most beautiful widget, or the most novel widget, or simply the widget that is most useful to my particular life am I less satisfied? We've somehow built a worldview based on our whole value as humans being equivalent to how good of a worker bee we are. Let's fix that part. This is of course a much harder problem than achieving AGI, since it's a messy human problem.

Dlemlo 7d ago

How? Whatever an LLM can do today, will not come back as is tomorrow. The biggest issue the LLM today: It kills all the small and niche things. The things were we fit all the other people is getting destroyed. You know the guy who makes websites, the fiverr blender person provoding some basic modelling tasks. You will just ask AI or AI will use your tool or AI will just produce it for you.

somenameforme 7d ago
You're describing the end of the digital world as we know it, and I feel fine.
- Dlemlo 7d ago
  Yeah to a certain degree me too tbh. But the biggest growth from the last 20-30 years was digital. It allowed a lot of people around the planet to change things.
treespace8 7d ago
Like all automations it's not 100% perfect, and they all require a human to monitor them. Turning over a problem to a LLM as solved means we won't be able to do the task anymore. Because we will never learn how. We will not know that the LLM has made a mistake, and will be unable to fix it ourselves. Right now we can correct the LLM, as the years go on we will become unable to do so.
- Dlemlo 7d ago
  If you look at certain documentations, we lost already how we d othings. USA forgot how to produce things. This will not prevent us from doing it.
- Droobfest 7d ago
  Most people who drive a car have no idea how an engine works. I know and agree it's a scary future, but I wonder if it's really _essential_ to understand things on a deeper level. Most people are quite capable of understanding higher-order ideas without fully grasping the underlying details too.

detectivestory 7d ago

LLMs themselves most definitely will not do that. You can still learn how to make a barrel, but not many people do.. The real fear is the destruction/hiding of public data/resources (which has already been happening for years)

api 7d ago

There's not nearly enough mention in these discussions of the real villain behind most of the negative cultural, social, and cognitive effects of things like social media: addiction engineering. AI will be a net positive unless companies start optimizing it for "time in app" or "time on site" or other "engagement" (addiction) metrics. Every time that's been done, the result has been a nightmare for everything but those KPIs (of course). Service degrades, discourse degrades, everything becomes toxic and addictive and destructive.

dgellow 7d ago
I assumed it was a given in such discussions that companies will optimizing for the worst outcomes for their users. It’s a fairly straightforward incentive from our capitalist system, which is why capitalism needs regulation to re-align the incentives with humans needs
- kian 7d ago
  if you think companies optimize for the worst outcome still acceptable for their users to please shareholders, why don't you think governments don't opt for the same with their citizens to please special interests? voting with your wallet is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than with your feet...

okaleniuk 7d ago

Um. Damaging education, destroying people’s attention spans and their ability to learn, eroding trust within societies, increasing the wealth inequality, - all of that has already been done. Long before LLMs. And the only reason there is no class war is... exactly that. Uneducated people with short attention spans and no means beyond basic level are exemplary bad at modern warfare.

dgellow 7d ago
LLMs worsen all those existing problems, that’s the whole point being made here

airstrike 7d ago

Exactly. Bloomberg reports students who use AI perform worse https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-students-who-use-ai-get-worse-test-scores-oecd-warns?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4ODk2NTkwNywiZXhwIjoxNzg5NTcwNzA3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTDFGOERLSkg2VjYwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4OTI0MzlFODUzMzM0MDJGQTUwRTgyQUFEQjc5ODgxRiJ9.6V1-fKixAAYsoWAf2Aq6Fz7k9QmqF4t4wCJgo6vWwOo https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-08/school-st...

palmotea 7d ago
> Exactly. Bloomberg reports students who use AI perform worse That's good news! The worse students perform, the less competition AI will have in the future and the less effective any resistance will be. The ultimate goal should be to abolish education except for the elite, but we can't get there in one step. The ideal future we should be shooting for is cross between Idocracy and Elysium: a paradise for tech oligarchy and masses so stupid and dependent that can't possible challenge them.
vonneumannstan 5d ago
Used in what way though. Obviously using them to do your homework and doing nothing on your own will hurt your learning.
jmathai 7d ago
I don't even need to read a Bloomberg report to know this. I've personally experienced noticeable mental decline as my AI usage at work has gone up. I can only imagine what it does to children whose brains are still developing. I'm not anti AI and I don't know how to quantify the pros and cons but we need to be honest about what they are.

sublinear 7d ago

Do a few bad grades really harm economic outcomes, though? Educators took a hard stance against AI rather quickly. Outside of delusional grifty startups, the broader corporate world is only using copilot for taking meeting notes and (sort of) entertaining the notion of non-devs writing (and not maintaining) their own experimental janky apps where impact is low. Outside of all the shit-stirrers on HN and clueless bubble social media, I don't see LLMs making a difference. In fact, the fearmongering is at this point insulting to the intelligence of the people who are supposedly helpless against big bad AI.

wing-_-nuts 7d ago
Oh hey, it's my point of view from a year ago... It's definitely changed in that time
- sublinear 7d ago
  I've been hearing this retort every year. The only difference this time is you're not a green account. If things have actually changed, you wouldn't be begging the question. LLMs, as popularly used, are still just a new kind of search engine for natural language answers to natural language questions. They're portable in a way, too. That's really cool tech, but not a revolution. It's pretty underwhelming compared to previous decades of change. It's a lot more error prone too, since it's a mudball of stats. If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. At that point, we're not even talking about AI anymore.
  - wing-_-nuts 7d ago
    >If we filter out the unsubstantiated fearmongering, all we've got left to discuss are NIMBY rants and geopolitics. I'm sorry, what? I'll put it to you again, you sound like me after playing around with gpt 3.5. It was interesting, but it wasn't good. There were still questions as to whether scaling would persist. My doubts were pretty much obliterated. LLMs haven't been mere text completion for a while now. Heck, even a model small enough to fit on my 3090 is now shockingly competent and useful. Does claude sometimes go off on weird tangents making me reel it in? Yeah, but it's genuinely great in present form, and it's the worst it'll ever be. You're welcome to your opinion. It used to be mine too, but I disagree now. I find pretty much every AI benchmark has shown forward progress, some with non public datasets, and some things have gotten scarily better.

keybored 7d ago

> and leading to class wars. Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.

timacles 7d ago
Class war started about 15 years ago post 2007 financial crisis. The banks and those who control them all knew where we are headed, so they got a little head start destabilizing democracy. Once us working class get a grasp of the actual situation, we are going to be so deep in the hole, fighting back is going to be quite difficult when the "asset owners" own and control the majority of the worlds resources, all media, forms of communication, AI, technology infrastructure, mass surveillance. You name it, and they have already made massive efforts to make sure they own it.
- keybored 7d ago
  Yup, caught me falling for the propaganda. 1. When the capitalists wage class war: bussiness as usual, some murmuring about widening wealth gap by progressive, diffuse threats to democracy 2. When workers complain about the system: all hands on deck, class war immiment, please think of the children and the stability of society
- brailsafe 7d ago
  They might own it, but at a certain point it only matters whether the concept of ownership means anything to the people who don't "own" it. Ownership only works for those with assets because they have police working for them to protect the concept of ownership to begin with, but that only works at a certain scale of disenfranchisement and lack of upheaval. There isn't that much in-practice stopping a sufficiently angry group from attacking most politicians or even every-day wealthy people in their home. Money talks, but if the amount everyone else earns isn't enough to meaningfully contribute to "owning" anything, then those people would reasonably stop agreeing to respect the idea of property or non-violence. People without assets, facing down a continual decline in living standards from 15 years ago, should evaluate whether the system they operate in does anything beneficial for them at all, or whether it mainly serves those who they serve. We're starting to see it in discrete bursts with Mangione, the paper warehouse fire, and in other non-violent ways with farmer protests, trucker protests, etc.. which have varying levels of support from regular people depending on their wealth class, background, and inclination to agree with the government.

akomtu 7d ago

I noticed that LLMs prevent you from thinking on your own, or at least try to, by injecting their "helpful" suggestions when you need some idle time to think. On Amazon, for example, I was about to find something when their chatbot distracted me with its suggestions I didn't ask for.