In the survey, 31% Americans believe AI will have an "equally positive and negative impact", and 13% are "not sure"; it's 16% pro 44% N/A 40% anti.
I wish the survey also included non-Americans, because from a 2025 survey (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...) people from other countries were less concerned; those from Israel and South Korea were more optimistic than pessimistic.
Notably, Pew did this survey 14 months ago and the results were better, but not by much: 17% pro 49% N/A 35% anti. They also did a survey in 2023, and already 50% of US respondents were "more concerned than excited" about AI, while only 10% were "more excited than concerned".
> % of U.S. adults who say they think the impact of AI on __ over the next 20 years will be positive or negative
Blank | Negative | Positive | Equal | Not sure
Society | 40 | 16 | 31 | 13
Them, personally | 31 | 23 | 27 | 19
---
Probably as much a commentary on the fallacy that bad things won't happen to us, personally, as much as a commentary on AI. But I found the difference interesting.
Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs.
People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.
Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.
My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.
Similarly, I'm a grad school student studying AI (well, computer vision). When I called my internet provider to complain and ask for maintenance (a fool with a tall truck ran on our street and tore some of the cables) I could only get annoying AIs to talk with me. They kept arguing that my service was working properly despite the snapped cables. I reckon that the AI assistants were hallucinating the answer to a ping or something like that. I found another provider who actually gave me the option to talk with an actual human being and switched in the same day.
Similarly: was calling apartments to ask about them / schedule a tour before I moved in, rejected the second best option specifically because they only had AI agents on the phone
I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account
I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.
I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).
My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio
> I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I know that ads on radio always were and still are a thing, but on actual screens as well? This just gives another reason not to upgrade from my 2010 car.
The screen on my car displays navigation, climate/AC, & carplay. There is a pop-up dialog box that takes over the display and says either "special offer from sirius xm" or "Warning: extreme weather X miles away". The background of the popup is opaque so it blocks out the ENTIRE screen
I can't access navigation, radio, or climate controls until I dismiss the pop ups!
AND pop ups stack. I have a video in my phone of pressing 'dismiss' 23 times in a row before I am able to get back to navigation.
Imagine driving through a thunderstorm in an unfamiliar city and you have to dismiss 1-3 popups per mile to just see the map!
I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.
1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.
2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.
3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.
The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.
My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.
I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?
[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.
> My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.
I've had the same thing happen with my grandma. 'You know you can do X online [on a website she already uses for some other reasons]? - I don't want to do it that way.' If I start probing for an answer, she doesn't respond with anything tangible (she does in other cases, so it's not like she's incapable of explaining the problem at hand).
The only thing I can conclude with is that they either A.) want to do it the way it's always been done (applicable in some cases), or 2.) They want to do it the hard way. They somehow don't care that it takes 7 times the time and effort to do it whatever way they've figured out. Never mind that they're paying double the insurance rate they need to. They're fine with that. They're not fine with switching, since that will introduce change.
There's one case that sticks out in my mind that really was like this. I think it's a close relative of a whole family problems in IT along the lines of 'user has a 27 step process to convert a .docx to a PDF, which involves a printer, a scanner, a website, and probably more, and they also don't want to just 'export to PDF', since they're fine with the way their process works'. Most people seem to be happy to make processes like that more efficient, especially if they're done regularly. Others treat them like rituals, where nothing can change.
I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.
It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.
I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.
The escalation path is always too arduous though, because most people still prefer to talk to a human when they’ve got to the point of opening a chat window. You’ve always got to jump through a bunch of hoops which are basically answering yes when asked whether you’ve tried reading the website.
I don't doubt that's true for everyone who reads HN, but having seen the other side there are loads of people who don't make the effort and could've found their own answer in the knowledge base.
I find LLM customer service to be better than the historic dumber stuff. In those you can usually say "I want to talk to a human" and it will escalate. The customer service bots of yore were far dumber and made it harder to escalate.
Also the AI chat just straight up lies to you and is flat out wrong. When I landed in Peru and was trying to get my phone working, verizon AI told me my account had international calling set up and was working fine but when I finally got to a human they were like "oh I see what the problem is your account doesn't have that option activated, let me add it for you right now." It was a huge stressor as I was there for various meetings and couldn't call my contacts or use my phone! Trying to use the stupid AI agent wasted 2 hours of my jet-lagged time it was so miserable trying to get through to a human who could help me.
It's kind of hilarious, and a pretty obvious externality, most of these layoffs are clearly just restructuring that the companies want an excuse for but by labeling them as modernization and AI driven they've caused a major image problem for AI for the one thing it hasn't actually done much of (outside of really stupid companies - like the ones that fired their whole teams and moved their workforce to India as soon as they heard how cheap the labor was there).
I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.
Then why do you keep giving them your business? Have things gotten so bad where you live that there are no companies left who would treat you with respect?
In many cases - yes, they have gotten that bad. It's pure fantasy that we live in a free market - there are a handful of companies that own nearly everything, there is very little customer choice or power to "speak with your money".
I do agree though - if one doesn't like the way a company does business, do whatever you can to avoid giving them yours.
It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?
I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.
Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.
Yet, that 80s CEO, practically a peasant by modern standards of pay, had the option to cross the Atlantic in a Mach 2 supersonic airliner. If that's not the most obvious demonstration of technological prowess, I don't know what is. In contrast, the F-35, believed to be the world's most advanced fighter jet today, has a top speed of Mach 1.6
The Concorde was cramped. JFK to Heathrow took five hours (3 in the air, an hour in each airport) plus the time for first and last miles. JFK to Heathrow today is 7 to 8 hours with the same provisos.
If you're going to spend a quarter of the day travelling, why not spend a third of the day and do it more comfortably?
The F-35 isn't the fastest jet; fighter jets aren't business jets; apples are not rutabagas.
Clearly that's not a good proxy either then... even the article itself says:
> Ultimately, concerns over inequality should focus on differences within labor compensation rather than the split between labor and capital.
The main issues I can see are:
- This "labor share" includes multi-million dollar executive pay packages, so it's heavily skewed towards the 1%
- It also completely ignores unrealized capital gains and loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free, with a tiny income on paper
Do those factors meaningfully change the picture? For example, total compensation for Fortune 500 CEOs is only $8.5 billion, which is a rounding error compared to total labor income. And CEOs at the bottom of that range make a few million, so it’s unlikely that CEOs in non-Fortune 500 companies are making the eye popping salaries you’re talking about.
Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.
The income share of the top 1%—so including run of the mill doctors and lawyers—has grown from 15% in 1970 to 21% today: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-share-top-1-before.... There is no way that delta is enough to eat up all the income growth since then.
"The income tax base captures 60 % of economic income of the top 1 % of wealth-holders.".
I would love if only 60% of my income was taxed. Heck I'm now even taxed on used junk I sell using Paypal (that I bought with taxed income dollars and paid sales tax on). But a tax that includes that other 40% of the top 1%'s economic income, guys, we can't do that. But don't forget to file your Paypal taxes or waves at threat of prison.
"Focusing on the top 1 %, while total borrowing is substantial, new borrowing each year is fairly small (1–2 % of economic income) compared to their new unrealized gains"
"1 % of wealth-holders (above $14 million in 2022)"
1-2% of $14,000,000 is $140,000 to $280,000 a year. The median personal income is $45,140. They are benefiting untaxed to the tune of 3-6 times the median American income.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.
I would love to benefit annually by that 'insignificant' amount goin untaxed. We should either exclude all economic income below $140,000 to $2,000,000 from taxation or change to tax this loan scheme that allows the top 1% to avoid their share on income 44x the median and even higher.
That article actually proves the opposite of what you’re saying: “For the top 1 %, new borrowing each year is fairly small: 1–2 % of economic income. ‘Buy, borrow, die’ is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich.”
OP above said that billionaires pay for their lifestyle by taking loans they never pay lack, and the article says that isn’t a common approach.
> 1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.
No, it’s not substantial because very few people make $100 million a year, while many people make the median income.
For example, billionaires last year added $1.5 trillion to their wealth, of which 56% was unrealized gains. If you take 2% of those gains as in the article, you get $16.8 billion that should be taxed as income but isn’t being taxed. I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do. But it would raise a piddling amount of money. That’s a rounding error compared to total AGI, which is over $15 trillion. The U.S. governments spend $16.8 billion every 14 hours.
Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial benefit for someone to receive. They are benefiting from buy, borrow, die. You asked for proof, I gave you proof that it is happening and is providing a substantial unfunded lifestyle (44x median income is a substantial income).
Hopefully I won't see further posts from you saying it isn't happening/we don't need to tax it/we aren't loosing revenue. You agree it is happening, and you are ok with taxing it. You don't think it will fund the entire budget. OK. But we have multiple tax streams that don't fund the entire budget, and when patterns shift, we address it, such as now tracking/taxing paypal payments and in the future loans on unrealized gains.
> Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed.
Yes, but that’s not the topic. The topic is the labor share of income over time. Your link proves that these loans don’t have a meaningful effect on analyzing the division of income between capital and labor over time. They amount to 0.1% of total income.
I don’t understand why people bring this up so often. There’s dozens of tax loopholes that are greater in magnitude. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction for example would raise 5-7 times as much money as even a 50% tax on these loan proceeds.
Woah woah woah hold on. One thing at a time. You interjected:
>Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.
That is the topic being addressed, proof shown, and you replied "I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate". Please show me 24 loopholes (dozens) providing individuals such high multiples of median income tax free?
The mortgage interest deduction is not a loophole, it is government policy intelligently reached. A loophole would be when rich people abused the deduction by designating their yatch as a second home and deducting that. And that loophole was closed. The average person having to pay taxes on the old dresser that they bought with already taxed money and report the sale as paypal income earnings would be another loophole but in the other direction..
I look forward to your 24 stated existing examples of greater magnitude actual loopholes (and not intentional policy doing what it was intended, the opposite of an exploited loophole).
If depreciation accounts for the gap (difference in share of output vs net income), investing in replacing machines just means that more will accrue to owners of capital in future.
Tech isn't special. The value of pretty much all productivity improvements since ~1979 have been captured either via the stock market (97% owned by the top 10% in wealth) or land rents.
You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing.
Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1]
TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?
The stats I linked above show that those “new avenues of education and communication” didn’t actually benefit the average American financially in at least the relative sense. Do you have something to counter that evidence?
Those are just time series of wealth over time, they don't purport to establish any causal links. You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined. We can't say with any certainty what effect computers had on these values; maybe without them people would have been better off or worse off.
It is interesting how the wealth concentration started in the '80s. It could be computers that caused it, though I would be more likely to blame it on Reagan's economic policies.
>You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined.
Fine, I’ll include your disclaimer about confounding factors.
With all factors combined, it doesn’t appear that the average American financially benefited over the course of the computer revolution. Do you dispute that and if so, what is your evidence?
Yes, I dispute it. Firstly because it's literally not true by the numbers you're basing it off of, as the mean real family income grew by 40ish% between 1973 and 2023; and secondly because it's a very carefully-worded statement that lends itself to confusion by placing together things that are not necessarily related, like the graph comparing the number of pirates with the global temperature of the Earth. Yes, the data being presented is true (well, in your case it's not, but let's pretend you've rephrased it such that it is), but the manner in which it's being presented is communicating something other than the data.
Nicely done subtly shifting the conversation from wealth to income. I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased. Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living such as rising education costs being more impactful due to higher college enrollment rates? Who needs to accumulate wealth when your income is growing at almost 1% per year?
>Nicely done subtly shifting the conversation from wealth to income.
I don't see the data on absolute wealth in your link, so I went with what I had.
>I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased.
Well... yes? I mean, should I care that there's a multibillionaire I don't know somewhere in the country amassing an obscene fortune, if I'm living a little more comfortably every year? Most everyone is living better, isn't that fine?
>Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living
How is that my fault? It's the data you used. Why are you using it if you think it has flaws?
The conversation started with the question of who captures the wealth generated from this new tech. I pointed to numbers that show the ultra-wealthy have captured almost all the new wealth generated in the last 50 years.
The page I linked also having income numbers does not mean I agree they are a good analog for were this value is captured. I don't believe income increasing at slightly under 1% a year actually indicates that "Most everyone is living better" today for the reasons mentioned above. You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.
>The conversation started with the question of who captures the wealth generated from this new tech.
Regardless of how the conversation started, the statement I questioned, and which you chose to defend, was
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
I won't simply grant that relative wealth is equivalent to absolute wealth. That's like saying that if you have a dollar in each pocket, putting another dollar in your right pocket makes your left pocket poorer. No. Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know. But what you said was that you don't think personal computing has contributed to the financial wellbeing of Americans, on average. Even if you had data showing that most households are financially the same or worse since the dawn of personal computing, I don't know you would get from there to attributing it to personal computers (beyond post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I don't need to say is rather flimsy).
>You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.
I appreciate the offer to do work for no reason, but I'm fine, thanks. Why would I need to present any evidence to refute you when the evidence you presented doesn't back you up?
>Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know.
Well, we'll leave it there then. I don't know why you felt the need to debate a point you admit to not having any actual insight about, but I'm going to stop entertaining your devil's advocacy.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense.
Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.
Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff.
So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.
Look at the macro data. The overall median wage for all American workers combined has also drastically lagged behind economic productivity since the 70s.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about “economic productivity” as a single number. Productivity growth has been massively different for different jobs. For example, there has been zero productivity growth in food service from 1970 to present. So you’d need to look at wages by sector compared to productivity growth in that sector.
Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least.
And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim.
> End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
I was also struck by this. We are a far more regulated society today than in the 1960s. The total body of codified federal law, statutory plus regulatory, grew from roughly 78,000 pages in 1960 to roughly 246,000 pages by 2020. The content matters of course, but I’m skeptical that under-regulation is the problem.
> The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
> IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
The computer market was microscopic at the time.
> Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market.
The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory.
Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it.
To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right.
Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.
How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?
An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run by the number of jobs cut to fund AI rollouts.
So just to summarize, it seems like the most optimistic outcome that the collective of HN could come up with in the hour since my original comment was that medical care would improve and you might be able to pay for it if you retrain yourself for some yet unknown new career that might suddenly appear at some point in the future. That's the optimistic vision we're asking society to buy into? No wonder it's only 16%.
The upper limit for biomedicine is halting aging, ending all illnesses including cancer and congenital genetic illnesses, and being able to bioprint replacement parts not only in the event of trauma but also as a free choice for e.g. a fully functional gender swap.
Given present culture wars, that last one may cause a lot of drama all by itself no matter how good it gets. But hopefully you get the picture about how transformative it can be.
Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
>Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
Does Germany have a large enough share of these companies to be on the winning side of this or is the country effectively in the same position as the average American? Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
> Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
The time-limited and jurisdiction-limited nature of patents aside, one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
How taxes work when labour shifts to AI is anybody's guess.
>one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
But these companies aren’t based in Germany, so you’re talking about invading other nations. It’s starting to sound like this version of the optimistic outcome is World War 3.
If they want to do business in German* jurisdiction, they operate in Germany*. Doesn't matter where the HQ is, as Musk learned the hard way with the also-dramatic-but-less-so case in Brazil.
If they don't want to do business in Germany*, they don't get to file a patent in Germany*, they don't get to sue Germany* for ignoring a patent that was geographically limited to not include Germany*.
I'm saying the country doesn't need global influence. None do.
If you sell medicine to me here in Germany, you go through the German government.
If you decide not to, you inherently allow someone else to get the pantent for your tech in Germany.
Costs of medicine will get absorbed only to the extent they are considered acceptable, this is true for everyone. The biomedical firms know this, which is also why recently it is the US who pays the most for medicines.
You are very conservative with the upper limits, probably because you are limiting yourself to medicine. With bioengineering the upper limits are hard to grasp. Why build a house, when you can grow one. Re-imagine all machines as custom-made biology. Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
How much is possible there, is only constrained in our understanding of biology. How difficult that turns out to be for a super intelligence… who knows? If we are actually on the cusp of the AI singularity, the future is going to be weird and/or wonderful and/or horrible, but definitely unimaginable different than today.
My mind is kind of shooing away from this intuitively. Too hard to believe. My whole life experience has been living in a different world. But imagine if "we" could actually create human level intelligence, say, for the price of a 100k USD/EUR/GBP. It could only do knowledge work, of course, but it would easily pay for itself and thus be mass produced. What is the market cap for cheap knowledge work? I would be surprised if it is only a billion human-equivalents, given humans find new creative ways to pay for themselves all the time. That explosion alone is mind-boggling and it does not rely on super-intelligence.
All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
> You are very conservative with the upper limits, probably because you are limiting yourself to medicine. With bioengineering the upper limits are hard to grasp. Why build a house, when you can grow one. Re-imagine all machines as custom-made biology.
Sure, sure, but upthread said "biological and medical" so I was taking it that way.
> Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
I'd avoiding considering this one for now, simply because there's too many open questions. I don't expect it to be a physics problem, but I can't rule that out.
> All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
Yup.
Unfortunately, the human alignment problem is hard, let alone the AI alignment problem.
> An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At this point, it's condescending to keep rehashing the "this is just the next industrialization era". It's been beaten to death as an invalid comparison more on this website than maybe any other.
This argument is cute and all, but ... does a data-point of 1 from 200 years ago really give us much confidence? We replaced physical labor with a massive service sector.
Now we're automating the service sector so now people can go to... eeh... the 3rd category of jobs? Seems like physical labor is the most stable career at the moment; what machines have not already automated is pretty difficult to replace it turns out. But we outsourced most of that to low cost countries except plumbers and electricians.
But will a population of plumbers really be able to maintain a population of plumbers employed?
What would be “the task”, other than physical labor or doing dull RLHF work, unless you’re in the 1% of exceptional intellectual talent that AI won’t be able to replace yet?
It took decades if not hundreds of years for the social disruption of industrialization to clear.
I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.
> while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
Hell, you don't even need to have lost your job. Health insurance will just deny claims or call them as elective and not necessary type bullshit. Insurance is already using AI to deny claims, so yet again, how is it helping society and not the corps?
The problem is, at least in theory, that it entirely changes the calculus of how advancements take place. In the past, when the pace of advancement was stronger the primary factor was the cultivation of a culture that valued prestige and knowledge over monetary gains. It didn't really matter how much money you threw at a problem because the bulk of the people responsible for advancements weren't interested in obscene wealth. Obviously those people were well compensated but any number of entities could provide that compensation. It was about bringing prestige to your lab / school / town or even country.
If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.
That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.
Pretty much anytime in the past, but mainly industrial revolution, up until an inflection point sometime in the 1970s. While many major areas of knowledge work have suffered from becoming profit focused the advancement of technology for societal advancement is still in existence today, even many of the major AI involved researchers have done so irrespective of monetary gain and at least make the claim that much of the push for capital is simply as a necessary requirement to sustain the research as costs increase exponentially. That's one of the reasons long tail AI profitability is dubious, but also a indicator of the aforementioned risk. If capital becomes the primary driver, i.e. self advancing AI, then it's very unlikely to be continued in any way for the sake of benefits to humanity.
I don’t understand this logic, what would LLMs do here? Is thinking the bottleneck, or money to go and test all the ideas people have already thought of? Are we really missing the cure for cancer because we just haven’t thought about it enough and letting an LLM churn on all the data will figure it out? All the research is probably in its training set already, so why hasn’t it come up with the cure?
Yes, that's very nice. But that's very different models from LLMs and slop image generators. AI as a term has been butchered beyond recognition; when mentioning the current harm of AI investor hype and job automation, people are talking about generative models using LLMs or prompt based input, which have seen little to no use in "accelerate biological and medical discovery"
Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).
So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.
It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries.
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
I fear that at this rate the oligarchs will use medical breakthroughs to keep us alive and laboring against our and nature’s will like what industrial farming has done to chickens and other livestock
Superhuman abilities for the wealthy tech oligarchs, economic indentured servitude and slums for the rest of us.
Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.
Does accelerating biological and medical discovery require over a trillion dollars of capital to be misallocated while Americans do not have medicare for all or universal childcare?
Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.
Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves.
The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
> Who do you think will be answering these questions
Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts?
Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped.
But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost.
What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life?
What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated?
Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs?
Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.
Need work involve money? By far the most important work I do involves volunteer leadership roles above and beyond the things I do for money. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern tech rests on elements of FOSS that are, to within a rounding error, “volunteer”-built and -led. Elon’s an idol, but so is Linus.
The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking?
Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?
> The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
Or they all figure out how to just bugger off to some Elysium-like stronghold, isolating themselves from and leaving the rest of society economically irrelevant.
These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work.
But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
The system won't change until there is massive chaos and destruction. Why would it otherwise? The people with the means to gently and voluntarily change things are living like gods. They have no incentive to help. In fact, a sick and unhealthy society keeps competitors weak. No, I'm afraid to say there will be no fixing things.
How exactly are the superrich today living like gods? They use the same phones, have access to the same entertainment, same internet, same information. Most spend a lot more time stressed out and working. The poor today live better (or, at the very least more "preferenced") lives than ever in human history.
It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will?
If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't?
If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question.
There are no other answers.
There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.
Fair enough, we are no where near post-scarcity levels of automation yet despite what frontier lab marketing says.
But still, there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society. It would be a good thing, with the proper safety nets and protections in place (something like UBI) to have a lot of the "bullshit" jobs automated away. That leaves us into a situation like I said that "no, not everyone has to work" nor should we just force everyone to work my effectively making up roles. If half or more of the population finds themselves unemployed due to AI/Automation, the answer shouldn't be make-work "dig a ditch then fill it back up" it should be use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
> there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society
Says who?
I think there is a valid statement to be made that the work required for basic necessities (food, clothing, and shelter) in developed countries today is not very large, if you look at it per person, and so the cost of getting those basic necessities, per person, should not be very large either. So it should not take very much in the way of work for a person to be able to subsist at a basic level. But "not very much" is still not zero, and none of this removes the issue I described.
But you didn't say "basic necessities". You said "providing for society". And that is a lot more than just basic necessities, because "society" in developed countries is a lot more than just people's basic subsistence. We have a huge amount of wealth over and above that, which nobody wants to just do away with, and which took a lot of time and effort and resources to build, and which takes time and effort and resources to maintain. And anyone who doesn't want to live completely off the grid, in some rural area where they grow their own food, maintain their own dwelling, and don't depend on anyone else, is taking advantage of some portion of that huge amount of wealth in a developed country. And it's not at all clear that the work required per person to build and maintain that huge amount of wealth is so small that a small fraction of the people on the planet could do it, still less that they would agree to do it just for funsies, without expecting something in return.
I'm all for eliminating bullshit jobs (and digging ditches and then filling them up again is certainly a bullshit job, though of course our technological society has invented much more elaborate ones), but...
> use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
This just goes right back to the question I asked: how are everyone's needs going to be taken care of? Who is going to do the work? Either other people are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep you, or machines are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep the machines running. And in either case, if you expect those other people to do that for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, you're fooling yourself. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you alive, you should expect to have to do nonzero work of some sort. Sure, you might not do just that minimum amount of work all the time--you might spend a working career doing a lot more work, saving up the surplus, and then living off it once you retire. But to expect to be taken care of while doing zero work, if nonzero work is actually required to take care of you, is unrealistic and will lead to disaster, as I said.
We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work.
You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever. And those without capital to invest in those machines will have nothing.
> We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work.
That's not the future I was talking about. I was talking about a future where machines do an even larger fraction (approaching 100 percent) of the work that humans don't like to do but currently have to because it can't be fully automated. But that still leaves work to be done to supervise the machines, as well as work that humans do like to do and won't offload to machines.
The future you're referring to, where machines literally do all the work, is very different. See further comments below.
> You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever.
No. I am saying that whoever does the work required to build, run, and maintain the machines is not going to simply give away what they produce for free, without expecting something in return. Not all of that work is investing capital (though of course much of it is, as with any highly technological product).
In the future I was talking about, there is still work that humans can do, not connected with building, running, and maintaining the machines, that produces something that can be traded. In that future, just as now, if you're not one of the people who is doing the work to build, run, and maintain the machines, you should expect to have to do some nonzero amount of work on something else that you can trade for what the machines produce, to get enough of what they produce to keep you, if you need what the machines produce to keep you. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you, you should expect to do nonzero work to be kept.
In the future you're talking about, where there is literally no work that humans can do that produces anything that can be traded, it doesn't really matter who owns the machines, because in this future, the machines are in control and every human, whether they have some piece of paper that says they "own" the machines or not, is at their mercy. Personally, I don't think that future is where we're headed, at least not with the machines that are making all the headlines now. But if that future is where we're headed, you'll have to ask the machines for UBI or whatever else you need, and no human will have any control over what the machines decide, no matter what political scheme we put in place now.
I fail to see how your scenario is qualitatively different than mine. Whether the machines do 100 percent of the work or only just approach 100 percent of the work, the value they produce will go almost exclusively to those who invested in the machines.
I notice you don’t give examples of work people will do or why it will have economic value when machines perform almost all work.
Whether the machines will take over is a philosophical question. Maybe they won’t have any desire to do so. Or maybe rogue actors will train belligerent models that will overwhelm the models serving humanity. Difficult to predict.
How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?
Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away.
The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world?
Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who.
Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social.
But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met?
I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!
No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved.
Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.
* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.
* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.
The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).
I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.
Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money.
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.
Agreed that power nearly always corrupts. It does so in often subtle and slow shifts. In general we have a paucity of leaders who wield their power on behalf of the oppressed.
The truth is that the "bad" leaders need powerful help. They need someone to come alongside them and love them into the light of the damage they've caused by drifting into complacency. And I'm not talking about "nice" love here, it might initially look more like shame.
> “The people running these companies certainly aren't good people”
That is an heavy understatement. After reading some biographies and books about the tech elite… it's just much weirder and sickly than i ever imagined. Strange cults, religions and beliefs. Surprisingly high stupidity mixed with intense hate of humans. Straight up anti-social anti-human behaviour… and drugs, so much drugs that lead to psychosis. Narcissism and superiority… you would have hard time finding anyone moderately nice to hang out with. It's a real curse that the system pushes up people like this.
You're not wrong. I also think it's a trap to think they're in a fundamentally different category than we are. Yes, the blast radius of their harm can be enormous. _And_ they're humans like you and me. Likely hiding deep wounds of their own that are screaming for care-full attention.
Most currently poor people would have the exact same failings if they suddenly found themselves with vast power.
One of the most important political developments in history was the realization that you can’t just replace a bad king with a good king. They all eventually go bad. Instead you need checks and balances to distribute power and make sure it’s not concentrated in only a few hands.
I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
They are not evil and there is no evil emerging in big systems. It is that in the above have advantage in winner takes all economy and use that advantage to gain more advantages. So they end up on top. And once they are high enough, law dont apply to them. Which makes them go even higher.
> I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
Likely true in many cases!
> there is no evil emerging in big systems
That's a very definitive statement!
What brings you to the conclusion that there aren't forces at play that we don't yet have a good name for or don't yet have the scientific means to study?
It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.
> Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive.
Hardly surprising given we are not collectively making sufficient change to avert climate disaster. There’s no negative bias or spin there - the majority of climate scientists agree that we’ve passed the tipping point.
> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.
Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.
I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.
It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.
According to the NVIDIA CEO, yes. He's quite ravenous at the possibility that before he only had humans as customers, but now he is potentially opening up a new customer base where agents are customers.
Why do economies need people? With a fractional reserve monetary system you can keep pumping more money in a system as the system creates more resources, so the game never has to stop. Just end up with an AI paving the Earth in solar panels buying minerals from another AI harvesting every metal in the crust of the Earth creating quadrillions of dollars in GDP.
> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes
This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.
That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.
> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:
> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.
I think the main reason for this outrage is partly a confluence of factors some of which you pointed it.
But my money/theory is on what I call `alonliness` specifically due to lack of labor mobility: There is no good rapid transport connecting american interior towns to big cities and people don't want to move due to a variety of factors(real estate debt, cultural affinity to area). To be clear these people are alone but not necessary lonely(there is that going on too in other segments of the population). And once you don't understand or never had the opportunity to understand something(or rather only experience its bad side effects), you distrust it at best and fear and hate it at the worst.
If you ask people 1:1 IRL who live in communities where the main source of employment is not whatever Silicon valley businesses are. They will ask you questions or make comments like " 'those' jobs are not real American jobs!" or "Aren't you afraid of getting thrown on subway tracks in NYC?". These are actual questions i got from people there.
These give an indication of the disjointedness of the sets in the venn-diagram of of the socio-economic equality and what creates such psyche. I am not sure why some think its a PR/Comms problem for big tech.
I say this as someone highly critical of social media. I'm not sure you can entirely blame Social Media for this. The fact is, outrageous things are happening constantly throughout the world. We just didn't hear about most of it before Internet connectivity and the reach of social media. It's not like social media suddenly created outrage. It's just informing people about the existing absolutely outrageous things happening. Are the algorithms tuned for outrage? Sure. But that doesn't mean these outrageous things are not happening.
Back in the 1960s there was widespread outrage over the Vietnam war, but no social media drip to blame it on. The difference was: The outrageous acts were getting press and constant attention, through non social media channels.
You can either be 1. ignorant / not paying attention to the state of the world, 2. paying attention but deliberately ignoring the state of the world, or 3. outraged all the time.
I'm not saying it is good to be outraged, but that's our world. The state of the world is absolutely outrageous, and a normal human being should be feeling outrage at what is constantly being done.
Anecdotally, my optimist and disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology, versus outcomes that rested on the social / political / power-dynamic side of things.
For example, instead of everyone being able to command the digital factory of capital-equipment on their desk (or in their palm) to pursue their personal interests and welfare, the devices feel like tools of someone else who considers you a resource to be exploited, and they can command people to beat you up if you use "your" property "wrong".
To cast things out in a future-direction, imagine being excited about the dawn of practical spaceships, and the disappoint when--somehow--there are no limits on launch pollution, monopolies abound, and the average migrant to cleaner worlds must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.
Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.
You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.
Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?
You are naive, you don't seriously expect people to "seek out the good ingredients" do you? When the shit ingredients are addictive, cheaper than the good ones and more available? The entire premise of these platforms is use whatever edges possible to get more ad money, they do that by getting people addicted to their phones and using psychological tricks that have been refined through over a decade of A/B testing to be effective.
you miss my point entirely. People are a product of their environment. Just because YOU or I don't fall down this trap doesn't mean our friends or family or people in our communities won't.
In my country we charge sales tax on processed foods but not on fresh foods. It's because we can make the good choice easier and the bad choice harder. We shouldn't be doing the opposite, then laying all the responsibility on individuals (many of which will still be children who aren't aware of the consequences of their actions)
Maturity is understanding that no matter who is to blame for the situation you are in or the problems you have, you as an individual are most of the time the only one who can fix your problems. Nothing is more effective than a determined person. And nobody knows you better than yourself.
Unless you think you can change the entire universe to do your bidding - then the best thing you can do is helping yourself and helping others. Nobody is helped by complaining. And I'm not missing your point, I just don't share your perspective.
People who want to be mislead will always find a way to be mislead, because they want somebody else to be blamed and "responsible" for their life and their mistakes. Failing to realize that it is always themselves in the end who pay the price and bear the burden. That's how they have been bred on this earth. "At least it was not my fault" feels perfectly good in the soul of many suffering people, because they have been raised within a guilt or shame culture. And there are plenty of unethical people willing to indulge them in this falsehood.
That's why I'm saying to seek out what is good instead of what is evil. And help those who want to be helped.
> Maturity is understanding that no matter who is to blame for the situation you are in or the problems you have, you as an individual are most of the time the only one who can fix your problems. Nothing is more effective than a determined person. And nobody knows you better than yourself.
This is not an individual problem, this is a social problem.
>Unless you think you can change the entire universe to do your bidding - then the best thing you can do is helping yourself and helping others. Nobody is helped by complaining. And I'm not missing your point, I just don't share your perspective.
There are things that are going wrong that are beyond the scope of individuals - we fix these things by regulations and laws
>because they want somebody else to be blamed and "responsible" for their life and their mistakes.
This is an irrelevant strawman, I don't care about blaming, I want to fix the issues that we have in society.
>That's why I'm saying to seek out what is good instead of what is evil. And help those who want to be helped.
This is not a solution, you may as well go to clinically depressed people and go "well why don't you just be happy?" - it doesn't work. Just like how saying "well don't use social media!" doesn't work.
I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.
Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!
People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.
I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.
nah, that was ass. i think the really major negative has just been scrollable video. all these other things - uber, airbnb, grocery pickup, etc. have largely just made my life better.
Can you imagine sitting around waiting for a phone call these days? At home? With a landline? Lol. Or going to the video store to drop $20 (with inflation today: $48) on three movies that you had to actually return by driving. The romantic waxing about hanging out with people is hilarious. More often than not it meant coming home at 10 pm and watching shitty network tv by yourself. Now I can play games with all my friends across the entire world.
I never done any of those things. And I was there, I was old enough. I was not desperately waiting for phone calls or paid a lot of money to borrow movies.
Somehow, I occupied myself just fine, was meeting friends regularly and did activities regularly. There was no societally wide lack of entertainment.
I think you are probably an outlier if you've never rented a movie in the 90s and shouldn't generally be used as a good example of how life was. It's frankly absurd that you would even bring it up as a virtue.
I did not brought it up as virtue. Virtue is entirely your framing. I just was not renting movies nor were my friends nor family. Meeting friends and occupying yourself was completely normal, any average person did it. In fact, healthy people will create fun and entertainment for themselves no matter the technological level of the society.
Frankly, it is super weird that you see doing fun stuff as some kind of virtue.
By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.
nah, i distinctly remember family road trips as a kid. Driving was super stressful with my mom yelling about missing an exit as she reads the map, getting lost in a not so nice neighborhood, etc.
Oh man I can tell you're young. Those directions weren't always right. You couldn't just pull out your phone and find the nearest hospital if something happened during your trip. Or call 911 and have them find you by GPS. And that's just one casual convenience you take for granted. People used to drive around asking random people to use their phone in emergencies. Not exactly fast when seconds matter.
Honestly legit response. I didn’t really think about the 911 tracking which is so precise now. It is a bummer though how that location privilege has been abused.
That's because you're measuring yesterday's worlds with today's demented expectations.
Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.
We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.
Those were wonderful times, I see no problem with driving by a paper map, emailing photos, and sending gpg-encrypted e-mails, which all the surveilling scum could go fuck themselves about, at all.
Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.
> the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions
It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.
It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
Everything you just said is readily available now. You can use a FOSS OS on a mobile device with an offline mapping program. They were available before Google Maps was even a thing on Android 1.x. I know because I used to download them and use them without even having mobile internet in rural areas. The only thing stopping you is yourself.
Has it? If we've saved hundreds of millions, then I would argue simply the amount of money spent in AdTech could have saved billions.
The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.
Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.
Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…
When I use a computer to do work I want the computer to be right. I want to be able to trust the computer. With the inherit non-determinism and probabilistic nature of generative-AI, that fundamental reason why I engage a computer is lost.
If the spreadsheet is wrong, it’s because the math is wrong, it’s because I made a mistake. It’s not because all of a sudden the computer decided the nature of algebra should be different than it is.
Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
One recalls the Pentium FDIV bug, where an estimated 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results[1]. A small subset of Pentium users would ever encounter the problem, yet it was considered a major controversy, and Intel ultimately replaced $475 million worth of CPUs (in 1994 dollars)[2].
The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.
That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.
For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.
Part of the reason coding agents are widely accepted and used is that human coders are chaos, and human coders have spent a lot of time building tooling to ameliorate chaos. Everything from git to language design, to lint, to profilers, etc. was built to keep the human chaos out. It's pretty good at keeping the LLM chaos out, and when it blows up anyway you can roll it back to the previous commit.
This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However:
Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness.
A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0].
The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
A Las Vegas algorithm requires that you have a deterministic test that can definitively determine the correctness of an intermediate result. So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. Well, if the human is there, why not just ask the human? What value is the random number generator adding?
Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results, without doing any checking. Solved problems stay solved.
> So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM.
No, that's not what I'm saying. Im saying determinism isn't required for correctness. And Im not saying that models are already perfect other than prematurely stopping. What I am saying is that non-determinism doesn't mean they cant be 100% correct.
Besides, humans baby-sitting LLMs is not even implied by the misinterpretation of what I'm saying. What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset. Which is totally reasonable.
> Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results
Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.
>What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset.
But the LLM is non-deterministic. LLM(x + y) or even LLM(LLM(x) + y) is just as non-deterministic as LLM(x).
>Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.
Obviously? But that's still is the reason why deterministic computers are useful. If you could enter a proven-correct program into a computer, run it, and get back a correct result only some of the time, that'd be okay maybe for some things, but we couldn't have built everything we have on top of that. It's the same reason why deductive reasoning is useful. Once you've proven something true, you're done, it's proven. No further work is necessary.
The economics of it (token cost) means, however, that what will be chosen most often is the barely sustainable minimum level of quality, aka race to the bottom. AI is more cost-sensitive in that way than humans caring or not caring about making things robust and correct used to be.
For sure, that's why I say in theory. Also models aren't perfect. You can't plug in an explicit target and ensure it doesnt stop prematurely and expect 100 accuracy. But that's not because it's non-deterministic, since clearly non-deterministic systems can be 100% accurate.
Correctness can also be guaranteed by non-deterministic systems [0]. You do trade time predictability though. It will eventually give the correct answer, we just dont know when.
I keep thinking about the implications of this. So in some sense it's less about being inaccurate and more about prematurely stopping (or not having a well defined target, but that's a whole other mess).
In theory, if the target is well defined and it never prematurely stops, the question changes from "will the output be correct" to "when will it be done?"
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
I don't care about human vs AI, I just want my issue resolved. Whatever does that the best and fastest. Or even better, for there to not be an issue in the first place.
The root of all our evils, right here. We only want the fastest cheapest thing possible, without thinking about how it impacts literally everything else about our world.
Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice). We do strange things to balance this out all the time. Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange, and concerns itself too much with the ideal of a tool and not enough with the more important question: What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years? Who would be okay to say "yeah but you know, artists, copyright" and deny those who benefit most from this the opportunity?
How could we not take this shot? I understand perfectly well that a lot of things will need reconfiguration and that it's going to be painful, but dear lord, let's focus on making it go well instead of ending it.
> Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange
Software is deterministic, it has been since its inception[0]. Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former? It's like making bricks out of paper and declaring "actually, this is logical next step for bricks because stuff waves in the wind".
> What if our lives get much, much better?
What if not?
[0] (Yes not really/actually if we're being pedantic)
> Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former?
Because we like computers to feel like they are fast, mainly. Most compilers, for example, are non-deterministic because they can be made to run faster if they ignore things like thread execution order. Same goes for LLMs. Technically they are as deterministic as any other software, but we allow GPUs to play fast and loose with floating point numbers to speed things up, which gives the impression of "strange things".
Here is a simple and possibly clarifying thought experiment: Would you be willing to switch your standard of living with the standard of the median person living on this planet? (And I would urge you to look up what that looks like, in case you are unsure).
As long as you are not (and I sympathize) I have zero clue how to justify any delay in getting everyone at least to our current level.
I understand that there are risks and we should work hard to guard against them. But no society has seriously considered giving up driving while we figure out global warming. People want a good life, that's just the selfish fucks we are, and it's upon those with clout to will it for everyone.
> Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former?
Because it does something different. It's not from/to. LLMs are subbing in for humans, not for deterministic computing. Replacing deterministic computing with LLMs for tasks that have be perfectly solved without LLMs would be wasteful and silly.
All software written will not disappear. There is nothing keeping us from using partly undeterministic software (see: humans) to write deterministic programs.
I'm a bit joking, but we've been working in deterministic computation for so long, we don't even think of there being another way.
But seriously, I do view AI as the input to a deterministic machine. Junior engineers (well all engineers) aren't deterministic, and we've made processes to direct their behavior towards making better software. AI agents do a better job of following my processes than engineers. We move up the stack towards testing and verification rather than writing. That doesn't make me sad, after 40 years of coding, I'm kind of tired of it. I have more ideas than I can code, so I'm happy to give AI my ideas and have it code for me.
I had a former manager tell me that all technology problems are really people problems, now maybe all technology problems are all agent problems and we just have to get comfortable with managing agents like we got comfortable with managing people.
> How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
By trying! How else is it going to happen? Are we going to deny the immense potential? Nobody needs to draw up a specific plan for that to hold true, we are good at figuring shit out and using tools.
I am not saying it's going to work but we are not getting much smarter right now, and we really need all the help we can get to accelerate more complicated stuff.
And it is accelerating! Will it be as useful as I hope it will be? That is entirely beside the point. This post was not at all about me assigning any chance of the good outcome. Just that there is no other ethical option.
> By trying! How else is it going to happen? Are we going to deny the immense potential?
Trying what, though? What is it? Immense potential for what? So far this entire comment doesn't actually say what you think we should do in any capacity. It doesn't really say anything at all.
>What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
This is satire, right?
If you seriously think that AI is going to improve the lives of anyone except the robber barons who own the AI you are absolutely delusional.
Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.
Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.
AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.
I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.
working with a non deterministic tool requires taste and judgement. if you want full determinism AI is not for you but it has a market for other people?
> Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.
Yeah, we don't have a choice. These things were foisted upon us, and now we all just have to deal with it, so long as we want to keep being employed/employable.
Yes, "use this or be fired" tends to have an impact. A friend once made a analogy to opium: Sure, it's supposed to be addictive, but if you say no anyways, we're going to show up with gunboats.
Does not at all surprise me that people don't think losing their livelihoods would have a positive impact. Maybe AI companies should stop bragging about trying to do that if they're concerned about people hating them.
The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.
Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
I'll be more forgiving: I found it gets confused easily when it extracts text from a PDF because datasheets tend to be written in a not so parseable way for a machine. But 1) if you tell it to take screenshots of said datasheet, it'll have greater success. 2) We're in year n<5 (depends how you count) of the age of LLMs, this will get better over time. Either on the LLM side or the thing you feed to it.
Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
"There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human."
I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.
Conversations about the costs of inference never consider the reality that API pricing is significantly higher than the operating costs.
Nor do they ever consider that the cost of datacenter hosted inference has to crash when the bubble pops and hardware vendors can't fill orders at sky high prices created by demand anymore and the hyperscalers can't keep things running near capacity at the high demand prices.
All of which leads to the ROI math for implementing AI looking much different.
Has everybody forgotten how much money Nvidia, TSMC, and all the hyperscalers are making, today, in pure profit? The costs of inference are high because we're in a bubble.
I think many of these problems still arise if inference is effectively free in monetary terms to the end user. In many economic processes, time to getting the final and correct answer is the major driver of profitability.
A human that hand-compiles 10,000 lines of C code is a very silly person. A human that works on device drivers and drops into assembly code for a dozen highly critical lines to enable real time communication can be irreplaceable. AI is a tool that can be highly useful and it's a tool with a number of large flaws that you need to acknowledge and account for. Knowing when it's worth using is a vital skill.
I think also, just seeing non-technical friends and family interact with it, there’s a lot of massaging you have to do right now to get it to work that just goes over their heads. Until they gets pushed behind an abstraction layer I see adoption crawling at a certain point.
Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.
Current layoffs are more correlated with overhiring during/after Covid. The fed money printer, growing national debt and low interest rates are more to blame.
It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.
If you mean the technology diffuses into all products and processes instead of some standalone production that maybe makes sense to me but the models themselves feel like a product
The models themselves feel like a product in the same way weather data/models are a product. Consumers don't buy/interact with them directly. They are built into more consumer facing products that people actually buy and use.
While some weather obsessed people will bemoan the difference between various data providers, most people just see the weather and don't know or care how the data gets there.
With the new Siri that's rolling out, I don't think most users would know or care if it was using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or even xAI on the backend. It's mostly trivia when they're all reasonably capable.
Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.
I don't disagree that coding agents have high adoption when it comes to software, but I do disagree that there's high adoption outside of this industry. There's no breakthrough "Claude Code but for non-tech industries" product out there that people are picking up in droves. My brother-in-law isn't using AI to manage his construction business, for example, and my sister isn't using it to run her non-profit daycare.
The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.
I think that's an optimistic take; the load bearing portion hasn't permeated traditional development.
Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.
To me I don’t really see this; electricity, the internet, etc: aggregate employment numbers don’t change work just gets shifted around. But your workers at the very least will be way more productive and that’s the sell.
Absolutely, you are right even though many may consider this too snarky. But herein lies the fork in the road.
- consider that right now autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models
- consider that fascist or authoritarian governments will now have a kind of access to their citizenry’s deeply personal lives that they’ve only dreamed about before. “Show me everyone who has insulted me” is now feasible to do at scale, today. A system that can monitor, in real time, a global sigint network on every single person equivalent or better than having a dedicated person or team of people monitoring them. Every home has microphones, every square inch of street has satellite imagery, security cameras, etc.
Now, given today where we are: what do we do? Do we regulate ourselves into a situation where people feel better about things like data center construction but that impact our ability to compete, ceding these technologies to other countries that would gain an incredible amount of leverage and power over us? Do we continue unabated, damaging communities and industries in a fervor to be at the top that later down the road we realize is not worth the tradeoff?
I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad.
The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
Well, my conspiracy theory is that it’s the other way around: AI leaders know they’re never going to recoup money for their investors. Money will be become useless and no one will be any richer than anyone else (though everyone will be far richer than the riches person is today). But they have to promise a mountain of riches in the future because they need those resources today to build that future.
44% of Americans believe AI will have a neutral impact while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Just to note - about half as many Americans believe AI will have a positive impact as believe in telepathy. Believing AI will have a positive impact is officially a fringe belief.
The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field.
> I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though
That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
Altman, Amodei, Musk and other tech industry leaders (not to mention technologists like Hinton) are constantly making public statements that predict everything from massive job loss, to restructuring of society to the possibility of an end to our species. The media is taking their cue from the tech industry itself.
Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable.
>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet
Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
Right now they have to lobby and manipulate the government just to keep from being shut down on a mad king's whim. A mad king elected and re-elected by the same morons who now demand a say in how AI is built and used. No, thanks.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem. The Republicans told us that, and they were right, just not in the way they meant.
Citation needed. Most people use it once a while but not daily; they tried it once and played a bit with it but then forgot about it because it’s not clear what they should use it for.
I don’t think that’s a useful metric. WhatsApp, TikTok have way more MAUs (3x and 2x) than ChatGPT and yet they are below it in that ranking, because people use apps rather than websites.
I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out.
This is very basic in technology products.
It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)
A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest.
You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.
How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)
Asian countries have governments that are at least seemingly vested in the interests of their populace. They have significant political and economic safety nets in place that can assure their populations that the government is at least somewhat aligned with the populace.
Instead for many western countries, chiefly The USA, You have a society that very blatantly is restructuring itself to service capital holders and not the population.
These Governments are not aligned with their people, and are instead trying to solidify Stratified Economies where the entire engine of the country moves in service of its rich.
If the promise of AI is to provide intellectual labor in exchange for capital, the population loses its only remaining middle class made up of knowledge-workers which still hold a semblance of political power.
If the middle collapses like this, the only means of social mobility will become high-risk gambles or crime.
Part of it is the ridiculous fear-based marketing campaign spearheaded by Anthropic et al. about how AI will automate all jobs and you'll be left behind. Works for enterprise/CEOs, predictably makes regular people hate the mere mention of AI, Asian countries don't have this nearly to the same extent.
Well most of it not really fear mongering, more like Americans are slowly waking up to the realization that consolidating the nations wealth to a few dozen people is not healthy for the country nor democracy.
Especially when you see what big tech spends on LLMs per year while Americans lack medicare for all, universal childcare, or free community college.
People have long hated the leadership of big tech well before ChatGPT, let's not act like this is all new and shocking. More like the naked power grabs are filling people with righteous digust.
it seems like Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries, and subsequently trust them more in distributing the benefits of AI (in aggregate ofc)
I guess I'd say the latter, although I think that fact does not quite have the valence that Western critics might assume. Vietnam, one of the most AI-positive countries in this poll, is explicitly planning (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/commun...) to use AI to suppress dissent and achieve permanent authoritarian control of the Vietnamese information ecosystem. I think they might be right that it'll work!
AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.
I love AI and use it every day. But comparing it to PC/internet/manufacturing/etc is IMHO not the right comparison.
Technology revolutions like PC, internet, smartphones, communication, etc – unfolded in this way: They create more jobs NOW in the hope of automating and reducing jobs in FUTURE.
AI is more comparable to outsourcing. It works in reverse: It reduces jobs NOW (which is happening right now) in the hope of creating more jobs in FUTURE (which is known not to happen).
> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.
> The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind.
Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok?
No wonder the general public still think AI is junk.
The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.
I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.
By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.
The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)
I had a big culture shock moment when I had to prep some slides a few weeks back. I'd assumed it would be a breeze now: I've always been good at making slide decks, I had a clear classification-friendly idea of exactly what I wanted them to look like, and there's even an AI native integration! Nope, didn't work, just had to shuffle components around like I always have.
Weaker models and less powerful harnesses give people a very sub-par experience compared to what you get if you pay for access to the better tools and models.
Normal users aren't using harnesses in the sense developers think of them. They're interacting with models where they've been shoehorned in for no good reason, or they're using them nearly entirely through chat interfaces.
Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.
My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary".
So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.
Not surprising and well deserved: our industry has done a remarkably poor job at balancing public and shareholder interests. Of course that isn’t the _only_ industry in this situation, but its deep intricacies into personal lives and psyches has made it particularly bad.
The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.
Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.
The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.
My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.
> Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?
After hearing recently that oil is very likely going to $160 per barrel or more, I knew that I had to get out of the S&P500 in my 401k (FXAIX) and similar growth funds in my Roth.
He really laid out the case for alternate funds in real estate and mortgage securities, with a bit more precious metals.
I really didn't want to lose the gains I have made over the last year, and I think this will do it.
This is not surprising. The AI folks, especially people like Dario, kept screaming from the bottom of their lungs that AI is bad, AI is dangerous, AI is going to grab X% of the jobs, wealth is going to concentrate to about 10M people, and etc. Why would average Americans think positively of AI at all?
It looks those guys are acting on asymmetrical risks: if they speak optimistically about AI yet they are wrong down the road, they may get angry mobs. If they speak pessimistically about AI and they are wrong, the worst is that they get mocked.
It is to America’s great fortune that her technological innovations are not passed by committee. In particular, polls always capture the status quo. Other things that were widely unpopular: interracial marriage, gay marriage. And especially for technology, public opinion led to the stalling of fission power in the US.
So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.
Interracial and gay marriage were not "wildly unpopular" "technological innovations". What an extraordinary stretch to try to tie the in-fact deeply unpopular, job-destroying and wealth-concentrating AI boom to human--HUMAN--rights victories.
Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.
Amusingly, I actually tried something like this using /r/wallstreetbets and there was no signal I could extract on a sufficiently small scale. Far dominated by Trump antics and rate actions. Perhaps others will have better luck.
At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well
The industrial revolution is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements in human history.
What everyone glosses over is that it really sucked for the workers that lived thru it.
Highly skilled jobs like weaving became obsolete and the low-skill factory work that replaced it, paid little more than a starvation wage.
I believe the current pessimistic atmosphere has very little to do with AI.
Sure, only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact. But if you ask if they believe smart phone, social media, metaverse, crypto, etc will have a positive impact I highly doubt you'll get a much bigger number.
It's hard to balance the downsides (devastating job losses that will affect certain fields) with the upsides (curing diseases, increasing efficiency in ways that will reduce costs of many goods).
Is something a net benefit if everything is cheaper and cancer is cured, but you have no job?
You think it's unclear as to whether AI will accelerate the rate at which diseases are cured? And if jobs are eliminated, that means costs will necessarily go down.
I'm surprised how much people downvoted this comment. It acknowledges the upsides and downsides and doesn't say which is greater. It acknowledges that some people will have some very negative impacts. I guess if you think it's all good or all bad, then you would disagree with my open minded take...
AI is still a tool for complex tasks. Reaching impactful everyday use for regular users will take time. It is not clear who they interviewed for this study. It would be good to see how people in specific industries feel about AI.
It's weird. For me the problem stems from how society uses AI, not from AI itself. I personally had totally positive experiences in my job but seeing people using ChatGPT like some magic truth machien is scary.
Well, everywhere AI is being sold in a way to replace humans. Humans don't want to think about having to use a product at work that is genuinely aimed at actually replacing their job.
I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.
This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.
The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.
Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.
That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.
I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.
Agree. I actually think we'll see a resurgence in art and graphic design as a consequence. At least for now people can spot AI generated artifacts and many immediately have a negative reaction to it. I don't read blog posts that feature AI generated images, even though they are only slightly worse than stuff cribbed form Unsplash.
The thing is the vast majority has never given a shit about authenticity though. All of the top pop stars are performing music made by committees and designed by marketing teams. Most music sold is and has been lowest common denominator trash since TV was invented. It's hilarious to see some Katy Perry fan frothing at the mouth about AI not being authentic art. As if they ever cared. Most mainstream entertainment is designed to placate and distract. And I'm not even saying mainstream is bad, there's nothing wrong with catchy. It's the crocodile tears over authenticity that bothers me.
I think it's a sliding scale. I love a well cooked meal and would never eat McDonalds, but I could see how someone who does eat at McDonalds wouldn't want to live off Soylent. Maybe a better way to put it is that Katy Perry is on the right side of the uncanny valley.
AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.
You sound like people who claim AI is freeing because it has removed the gatekeeping of programming when programming was never gatekept, all you needed to do was dedicate time to learn.
Your premise doesn't even make that much sense given that Knockin' on Heaven's Door uses only the three chords(G, C, Am) and they are some of the most common chords in music.
> We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art.
Who is “we” in this sentence? A tiny subsection of metalheads? The vast majority of people aren’t seeking out the most mechanically dexterous musicians to listen to.
That makes sense, but I would love to see the data on it. I don't doubt at all that capitalism in isolation is viewed more favourably in the US, but that doesn't preclude the intersection of AI and capitalism being viewed less favourably.
I suppose my comment should've said "views on AI aren't solely views on AI, they are views on AI as it intersects with capitalism"
The one and only product for AI is labor displacement and wage suppression. That's why companies love it. That's why people hate it. We don't live in a society where the benefits will be shared. We live in a society that would rather let people die in the streets than potentially hurt shareholder value.
We are bouldering towards the total collapse of society. To me, it's like 10,000 people want to rule the post-apocalyptic world (Fallout style) where asking "maybe we shouldn't have the apocalypse?" is heresy.
the AI bros would counterargue and say that with all the increased productivity, it will just open up more opportunities and thus more jobs. But, i don't think we're seeing that. Net jobs seems to be going down.
That's what I am thinking. Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI. That is not true for most people.
This isn't terribly surprising. Americans either think AI is so good that it will replace their jobs, or AI is so bad that it will cause too many mistakes. Their beliefs aren't unfounded, but it gets more accurate by the quarter. I personally think it all just shifts - AI becomes much more reliable and accurate over time, and as such, we all use it to be 30-100% more effective at our work.
It behooves every company working on some form of actual AI to immediately switch branding to distance themselves from the slop bots. Call it image recognition, automated translate, inventory automation, what have you.
I tried to use claude for a completely menial task yesterday, adding some resistant-starch foods to my diet, and it was worse than useless. Actively wasting my time with claims that buckled as soon as I questioned them and completely falsified citations from product pages that it recommended.
If you are branding your product as "AI" when these word salad spitters are still dominating headlines, you deserve all the headwinds coming to you.
Most of the west is going to be fucked. We, in the west, are optimizing towards more profit. Poor get poorer every year and rich get richer. We lead multiple wars which we finance with public money. The profits go to the rich again.
China is confucian, and, unlike the west, they value a different thing.
The rich seem to forget that one can not take the riches to the grave. All the great art that explains it is forgotten and never looked at.
If in the past the rich subsidized building churches and schools and housing for the poor, nowadays rich just rake more money. They never have enough.
I think one positive thing that might come of this is for AI to act as a sort of counterweight to the fragmentation of reality into different filter bubbles.
It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.
Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.
I think that the smartphone is the single worst thing to happen, not so much AI. AI will hopefully help deal with reckless people typing in their smartphones while driving etc.
Make no mistake: I am as much perpetrator as victim. While I am having even days off of my smartphone and never use it during driving, I am at least as much affected and addicted as most of us.
Most of what AI is visibly used for is very unwelcome for American consumers: spam, propaganda, bad art, bad memes, marketing calls, bad phone support... Then the future promise is mass unemployment... of course Americans are negative on it. What is the upside for them?
It's the people not technology. Way back before AI was the hot issue, Eric Schmidt set a new bar for being tone deaf by going straight for saying privacy is dead get over it. Not "here are some tools to retain some privacy," not "here is some legislation to punish privacy violations," just get over it.
It's gotten worse from there. The "dark enlightenment." Flirting with fascism. Creating the biggest meme stocks in history and promoting that as accomplishment. You're not fooling enough people. We might not be in your face about it, but we know you're not good people.
It's pretty telling that only 16% have a positive view on it, then. If even Trump has more than twice as high approval than your product, you've royally fucked up.
It's interesting that you (and, I'm guessing, a majority of HN folk who comment) feel that conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson,
John Mearsheimer, Niall Ferguson, Harvey Mansfield, Heather Mac Donald to quote only a few, voted for Trump. Are these people idiots or partook of some low scheming advantage as a result?
This wildly assumes that "I voted for $candidate" means "I like $candidate." Every presidential election cycle we get served up two turds, one with a (D) and the other with an (R) by their name, and we have to pick which turd we'd like to ruin our country for us the least.
while I’d say that was true in most elections, this one the choices for the future couldn’t be more stark. The dude just had a UFC on the white house lawn, for instance, and fell into the Iran/Israel trap every previous president had avoided. But yeah, Kamala and Trump are the same level of turdness /s.
Kamala is a turd regardless of how much worse Trump is. She was advocating the status quo while people are worried we are maintaining an unsustainable path and their lives are only getting harder.
When one person says we are going to slowly drive a train off a cliff and the other says they will drive quickly but may or may not drive off a cliff, I understand why many people at the front of the train would take the risk of voting for an unpredictable speed demon.
I agree. But when the opposition tells you your shitty life will remain shitty in a best case scenario it isn't very inspiring or invigorating which you need to entice people to actually go vote for someone.
I never said he did, I never said I support him or anything he does. But Trump being a complete idiot doesn't make Kamala not shitty and uninspiring to voters.
50% of the S&P 500 valuation is now directly related to AI as are 40% of new layoffs.
A quote often attributed to Stalin/Lenin/Marx is something like, "Capitalists will sell the rope to be used to hang them".
AI is taking this even further. Corps are effectively borrowing tons of money in order to build the rope to hang the middle class --- to be followed by hanging themselves.
The idea that you can lay off the middle class and business will continue as usual is a capitalistic fantasy. Without jobs, people can't afford to buy products built with AI.
It's a shame, as AI will improve healthcare on an unprecedented scale.
I cannot get a specialist without referrals and endless appointments to spend more than 30min to discuss how to fix a serious issues. Claude? Hours and hours of back and forth. Public models now beat the specialized ones like OpenEvidence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
Diagnostics is getting blown apart by AI, the best cancer screening will be available in even remote corners of this world.
We were constrained by the available brain mass of highly trained specialists - and this bottleneck is getting removed.
Hard not to be optimistic on AI if you're in healthcare.
it’s not been useful anywhere else - no self driving cars, no laundry helpers - just some idiotic animatronic carcasses that are barely able to walk around, and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
I saw over a dozen self driving cars on my way to work today. Weave Robotics launched a laundry helper months ago, although my sense is that "laundry folding" is a bit of a meme and people don't actually care very much about automating it.
Yes, but we just don’t fold that much laundry and you can easily do it while watching streaming videos. Most people don’t even own a laundry folding board.
I think you're underestimating how much laundry there is for families. But in general, it's one of the tedious things that people want automation to handle. They may not buy something just for folding laundry, but if it can do other household chores I think it could be a big success. That's a ways off in the future, though.
> and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
They did fully autonomous tests in 2022 through 2024. Something like everything in a 5km radius was dead. Various sources in mainstream media online about this now.
This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.
On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.
That's a false dichotomy; I prefer kayaking over work, but I still have to work.
We've all seen stories about performance evaluations that include "how much AI are you using?" We've all seen Microsoft shove it into the OS and even the physical keyboard. We've all had the little suggestions pop up in Gmail.
ChatGPT has a billion users and it's estimated most are consumers not enterprise users. It's about 40 million paid consumer vs 9 million enterprise users. Once they file their S-1 we'll see exact figures.
I think people don't like it being shoved in their faces and crammed down every hole. No one needs a Copilot key on their keyboard, or an AI summary in prime screen real estate of a Google search. These things (EDIT: by which I mean LLMs) are useful, but they're not that useful. They're not so useful that they should suffuse through every part of every piece of software.
I don’t like “AI”, and I don’t use it. I read lots of stories where people are forced to use it at work but don’t use it otherwise. Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?
> Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?
Yes. Per your previous statement, those people who are “forced” to use it at work. While it might be a requirement of their job, what job they do is usually a choice.
People say it will have negative impact on society. That does not mean they think they can avoid using it in work. That does not have to imply they will jump hoops to avoid it in google search.
This has absolutely nothing with stated vs revealed preference.
Please link to the actual survey instead of this commission outlet, which didn't even link it themselves: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
In the survey, 31% Americans believe AI will have an "equally positive and negative impact", and 13% are "not sure"; it's 16% pro 44% N/A 40% anti.
I wish the survey also included non-Americans, because from a 2025 survey (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...) people from other countries were less concerned; those from Israel and South Korea were more optimistic than pessimistic.
Notably, Pew did this survey 14 months ago and the results were better, but not by much: 17% pro 49% N/A 35% anti. They also did a survey in 2023, and already 50% of US respondents were "more concerned than excited" about AI, while only 10% were "more excited than concerned".
> % of U.S. adults who say they think the impact of AI on __ over the next 20 years will be positive or negative
Blank | Negative | Positive | Equal | Not sure
Society | 40 | 16 | 31 | 13
Them, personally | 31 | 23 | 27 | 19
---
Probably as much a commentary on the fallacy that bad things won't happen to us, personally, as much as a commentary on AI. But I found the difference interesting.
> the results were better
They were worse.
Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs.
People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.
Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.
My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.
Similarly, I'm a grad school student studying AI (well, computer vision). When I called my internet provider to complain and ask for maintenance (a fool with a tall truck ran on our street and tore some of the cables) I could only get annoying AIs to talk with me. They kept arguing that my service was working properly despite the snapped cables. I reckon that the AI assistants were hallucinating the answer to a ping or something like that. I found another provider who actually gave me the option to talk with an actual human being and switched in the same day.
Similarly: was calling apartments to ask about them / schedule a tour before I moved in, rejected the second best option specifically because they only had AI agents on the phone
I had an AI agent lie to me
I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account
I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.
I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).
My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio
> I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment
I know that ads on radio always were and still are a thing, but on actual screens as well? This just gives another reason not to upgrade from my 2010 car.
YES. it's absurd
The screen on my car displays navigation, climate/AC, & carplay. There is a pop-up dialog box that takes over the display and says either "special offer from sirius xm" or "Warning: extreme weather X miles away". The background of the popup is opaque so it blocks out the ENTIRE screen
I can't access navigation, radio, or climate controls until I dismiss the pop ups!
AND pop ups stack. I have a video in my phone of pressing 'dismiss' 23 times in a row before I am able to get back to navigation.
Imagine driving through a thunderstorm in an unfamiliar city and you have to dismiss 1-3 popups per mile to just see the map!
I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.
Three things are true:
1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.
2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.
3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.
The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.
My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.
I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?
[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.
> My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.
I've had the same thing happen with my grandma. 'You know you can do X online [on a website she already uses for some other reasons]? - I don't want to do it that way.' If I start probing for an answer, she doesn't respond with anything tangible (she does in other cases, so it's not like she's incapable of explaining the problem at hand).
The only thing I can conclude with is that they either A.) want to do it the way it's always been done (applicable in some cases), or 2.) They want to do it the hard way. They somehow don't care that it takes 7 times the time and effort to do it whatever way they've figured out. Never mind that they're paying double the insurance rate they need to. They're fine with that. They're not fine with switching, since that will introduce change.
There's one case that sticks out in my mind that really was like this. I think it's a close relative of a whole family problems in IT along the lines of 'user has a 27 step process to convert a .docx to a PDF, which involves a printer, a scanner, a website, and probably more, and they also don't want to just 'export to PDF', since they're fine with the way their process works'. Most people seem to be happy to make processes like that more efficient, especially if they're done regularly. Others treat them like rituals, where nothing can change.
I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.
It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.
I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.
The escalation path is always too arduous though, because most people still prefer to talk to a human when they’ve got to the point of opening a chat window. You’ve always got to jump through a bunch of hoops which are basically answering yes when asked whether you’ve tried reading the website.
I don't doubt that's true for everyone who reads HN, but having seen the other side there are loads of people who don't make the effort and could've found their own answer in the knowledge base.
I find LLM customer service to be better than the historic dumber stuff. In those you can usually say "I want to talk to a human" and it will escalate. The customer service bots of yore were far dumber and made it harder to escalate.
Also the AI chat just straight up lies to you and is flat out wrong. When I landed in Peru and was trying to get my phone working, verizon AI told me my account had international calling set up and was working fine but when I finally got to a human they were like "oh I see what the problem is your account doesn't have that option activated, let me add it for you right now." It was a huge stressor as I was there for various meetings and couldn't call my contacts or use my phone! Trying to use the stupid AI agent wasted 2 hours of my jet-lagged time it was so miserable trying to get through to a human who could help me.
> Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", who hasn't been annoyed with "customer service", period
It's not envisioned. There have been mass layoffs and a lot has been pinned on AI, even if it's true or not.
It's kind of hilarious, and a pretty obvious externality, most of these layoffs are clearly just restructuring that the companies want an excuse for but by labeling them as modernization and AI driven they've caused a major image problem for AI for the one thing it hasn't actually done much of (outside of really stupid companies - like the ones that fired their whole teams and moved their workforce to India as soon as they heard how cheap the labor was there).
I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.
Then why do you keep giving them your business? Have things gotten so bad where you live that there are no companies left who would treat you with respect?
In many cases - yes, they have gotten that bad. It's pure fantasy that we live in a free market - there are a handful of companies that own nearly everything, there is very little customer choice or power to "speak with your money".
I do agree though - if one doesn't like the way a company does business, do whatever you can to avoid giving them yours.
I'm thinking it has more to do with the fascism of the oligarchs at this point. These are just thinwrappers over the failure of American democracy.
It's no surprise. The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s has completely fallen apart as time and time again tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime and partisan hatred. (which itself, of course, is stoked to the absolute maximum in part due to technology trends in the past 15 years or so)
The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money, distracted driving. Nearly every single service becoming worse over time, etc. Since then, the tech CEOs has been sidling up to the halls of power and effectively begging to help destroy privacy as thoroughly as possible.
I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worse by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes. There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
So a few years ago, nearly everywhere you went people are talking about how thoroughly AI was going to transform society. You couldn't go anywhere without hearing it. Of course people are wary. Big tech has been a net negative in very loud, intrusive, and obvious ways in _most_ people's lives. And now they're saying they're going to radically reform society.
The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal. For sure, if they really how the power to radically change everything, they would change it for the worse and would never spend a moment worrying about the damage they had done.
>The only hope we have is that they're wrong, and their power to change things will be minimal.
What even is the optimistic outcome if they are right? What are we all working towards? Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness? Because I legitimately can't see a realistic outcome that actually benefits society as a whole. It all ends with very few obscenely rich people getting even more obscenely rich. But I guess we could tell an AI to put ourselves in the new Marvel movie to pass the time since we no longer have any jobs.
> Like do people think that these AI companies will create some superintelligence, suck up all the financial benefits of that, and then just decide to share it with the rest of us out of kindness?
I don’t get this. It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense. There is no secret formula to any of this. The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
> The math underlying the models is widely known, and there are tons of competitors, including foreign competitors.
Foreign militaries investing in autonomous warfare does not assuage my concerns about my country investing in autonomous warfare.
Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s? The benefits of computing really have gone to the captains of industry.
Yet, that 80s CEO, practically a peasant by modern standards of pay, had the option to cross the Atlantic in a Mach 2 supersonic airliner. If that's not the most obvious demonstration of technological prowess, I don't know what is. In contrast, the F-35, believed to be the world's most advanced fighter jet today, has a top speed of Mach 1.6
Today's CEOs get a gold-plated sky bus.
The Concorde was cramped. JFK to Heathrow took five hours (3 in the air, an hour in each airport) plus the time for first and last miles. JFK to Heathrow today is 7 to 8 hours with the same provisos.
If you're going to spend a quarter of the day travelling, why not spend a third of the day and do it more comfortably?
The F-35 isn't the fastest jet; fighter jets aren't business jets; apples are not rutabagas.
If travelling fast were an essential component of living a good life or having a good civilization, then that would say something.
> Also, have you been paying attention to median wages vs median CEO wages since the 1960s
CEO pay isn’t a good proxy for “captains of industry.” What you want to look at is the labor versus capital share of income. That’s been very stable since the 1960s: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/labor-share-net-income-within....
Clearly that's not a good proxy either then... even the article itself says:
> Ultimately, concerns over inequality should focus on differences within labor compensation rather than the split between labor and capital.
The main issues I can see are:
- This "labor share" includes multi-million dollar executive pay packages, so it's heavily skewed towards the 1%
- It also completely ignores unrealized capital gains and loans against them, which is how the ultra-wealthy actually fund their lifestyles tax-free, with a tiny income on paper
Do those factors meaningfully change the picture? For example, total compensation for Fortune 500 CEOs is only $8.5 billion, which is a rounding error compared to total labor income. And CEOs at the bottom of that range make a few million, so it’s unlikely that CEOs in non-Fortune 500 companies are making the eye popping salaries you’re talking about.
Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.
The income share of the top 1%—so including run of the mill doctors and lawyers—has grown from 15% in 1970 to 21% today: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/income-share-top-1-before.... There is no way that delta is enough to eat up all the income growth since then.
Some numbers
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
"The income tax base captures 60 % of economic income of the top 1 % of wealth-holders.".
I would love if only 60% of my income was taxed. Heck I'm now even taxed on used junk I sell using Paypal (that I bought with taxed income dollars and paid sales tax on). But a tax that includes that other 40% of the top 1%'s economic income, guys, we can't do that. But don't forget to file your Paypal taxes or waves at threat of prison.
"Focusing on the top 1 %, while total borrowing is substantial, new borrowing each year is fairly small (1–2 % of economic income) compared to their new unrealized gains" "1 % of wealth-holders (above $14 million in 2022)"
1-2% of $14,000,000 is $140,000 to $280,000 a year. The median personal income is $45,140. They are benefiting untaxed to the tune of 3-6 times the median American income.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.
I would love to benefit annually by that 'insignificant' amount goin untaxed. We should either exclude all economic income below $140,000 to $2,000,000 from taxation or change to tax this loan scheme that allows the top 1% to avoid their share on income 44x the median and even higher.
That article actually proves the opposite of what you’re saying: “For the top 1 %, new borrowing each year is fairly small: 1–2 % of economic income. ‘Buy, borrow, die’ is not a dominant tax avoidance strategy for the rich.”
OP above said that billionaires pay for their lifestyle by taking loans they never pay lack, and the article says that isn’t a common approach.
> 1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial.
No, it’s not substantial because very few people make $100 million a year, while many people make the median income.
For example, billionaires last year added $1.5 trillion to their wealth, of which 56% was unrealized gains. If you take 2% of those gains as in the article, you get $16.8 billion that should be taxed as income but isn’t being taxed. I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate or whatever you want to do. But it would raise a piddling amount of money. That’s a rounding error compared to total AGI, which is over $15 trillion. The U.S. governments spend $16.8 billion every 14 hours.
Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed.
1-2% of 100 million is 1-2 million dollars a year untaxed benefit (44x median income). That is substantial benefit for someone to receive. They are benefiting from buy, borrow, die. You asked for proof, I gave you proof that it is happening and is providing a substantial unfunded lifestyle (44x median income is a substantial income).
Hopefully I won't see further posts from you saying it isn't happening/we don't need to tax it/we aren't loosing revenue. You agree it is happening, and you are ok with taxing it. You don't think it will fund the entire budget. OK. But we have multiple tax streams that don't fund the entire budget, and when patterns shift, we address it, such as now tracking/taxing paypal payments and in the future loans on unrealized gains.
> Great, we are in agreement. It is happening, to the tune of billions of dollars, and we both are fine with it being taxed.
Yes, but that’s not the topic. The topic is the labor share of income over time. Your link proves that these loans don’t have a meaningful effect on analyzing the division of income between capital and labor over time. They amount to 0.1% of total income.
I don’t understand why people bring this up so often. There’s dozens of tax loopholes that are greater in magnitude. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction for example would raise 5-7 times as much money as even a 50% tax on these loan proceeds.
Woah woah woah hold on. One thing at a time. You interjected:
>Similarly, what percentage of wealthy people take loans against their assets to fund their lifestyle? You should be able to quantify this if it’s happening at scale.
That is the topic being addressed, proof shown, and you replied "I’d be fine taxing that money at the top marginal rate". Please show me 24 loopholes (dozens) providing individuals such high multiples of median income tax free?
The mortgage interest deduction is not a loophole, it is government policy intelligently reached. A loophole would be when rich people abused the deduction by designating their yatch as a second home and deducting that. And that loophole was closed. The average person having to pay taxes on the old dresser that they bought with already taxed money and report the sale as paypal income earnings would be another loophole but in the other direction..
I look forward to your 24 stated existing examples of greater magnitude actual loopholes (and not intentional policy doing what it was intended, the opposite of an exploited loophole).
If depreciation accounts for the gap (difference in share of output vs net income), investing in replacing machines just means that more will accrue to owners of capital in future.
Tech isn't special. The value of pretty much all productivity improvements since ~1979 have been captured either via the stock market (97% owned by the top 10% in wealth) or land rents.
If tech isn't special, why are nine of the ten richest Americans in tech?
You could say that about any big tech product and yet we've all seen power and wealth become concentrated on an incredible scale since the 60s. The immense resources needed to train frontier models gives the few companies that can manage it more of a moat than most tech products. So empirically I expect that we'll see the current wealth hording keep going at at least the same rate.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing.
Isn't that what happened? There was enough competition among computing companies that they weren't able to completely monopolize all the productivity improvements, but the financial benefits were mostly captured by the capital class in one way or another.[1]
TVs might be cheaper today and we all like watching Netflix, but I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
[1] - https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
Really? Even with all the new avenues of education and communication that they opened up? You think the positives and negatives balance out to close to zero?
The stats I linked above show that those “new avenues of education and communication” didn’t actually benefit the average American financially in at least the relative sense. Do you have something to counter that evidence?
Those are just time series of wealth over time, they don't purport to establish any causal links. You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined. We can't say with any certainty what effect computers had on these values; maybe without them people would have been better off or worse off.
It is interesting how the wealth concentration started in the '80s. It could be computers that caused it, though I would be more likely to blame it on Reagan's economic policies.
>You can't conclude that computers didn't "actually benefit the average American financially" from these numbers, because these are measuring the total wealth of the household with all factors combined.
Fine, I’ll include your disclaimer about confounding factors.
With all factors combined, it doesn’t appear that the average American financially benefited over the course of the computer revolution. Do you dispute that and if so, what is your evidence?
Yes, I dispute it. Firstly because it's literally not true by the numbers you're basing it off of, as the mean real family income grew by 40ish% between 1973 and 2023; and secondly because it's a very carefully-worded statement that lends itself to confusion by placing together things that are not necessarily related, like the graph comparing the number of pirates with the global temperature of the Earth. Yes, the data being presented is true (well, in your case it's not, but let's pretend you've rephrased it such that it is), but the manner in which it's being presented is communicating something other than the data.
Nicely done subtly shifting the conversation from wealth to income. I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased. Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living such as rising education costs being more impactful due to higher college enrollment rates? Who needs to accumulate wealth when your income is growing at almost 1% per year?
>Nicely done subtly shifting the conversation from wealth to income.
I don't see the data on absolute wealth in your link, so I went with what I had.
>I guess it shouldn't matter that the bottom 90% of Americans have seen their share of wealth decrease since that started being measured in 1989. The median worker should be thrilled as long as their real wages have increased.
Well... yes? I mean, should I care that there's a multibillionaire I don't know somewhere in the country amassing an obscene fortune, if I'm living a little more comfortably every year? Most everyone is living better, isn't that fine?
>Who cares if inflation numbers fail to account properly for more nuanced changes to cost of living
How is that my fault? It's the data you used. Why are you using it if you think it has flaws?
The conversation started with the question of who captures the wealth generated from this new tech. I pointed to numbers that show the ultra-wealthy have captured almost all the new wealth generated in the last 50 years.
The page I linked also having income numbers does not mean I agree they are a good analog for were this value is captured. I don't believe income increasing at slightly under 1% a year actually indicates that "Most everyone is living better" today for the reasons mentioned above. You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.
>The conversation started with the question of who captures the wealth generated from this new tech.
Regardless of how the conversation started, the statement I questioned, and which you chose to defend, was
>I'm skeptical of the idea that the financial wellbeing of the average American has been improved by computers.
I won't simply grant that relative wealth is equivalent to absolute wealth. That's like saying that if you have a dollar in each pocket, putting another dollar in your right pocket makes your left pocket poorer. No. Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know. But what you said was that you don't think personal computing has contributed to the financial wellbeing of Americans, on average. Even if you had data showing that most households are financially the same or worse since the dawn of personal computing, I don't know you would get from there to attributing it to personal computers (beyond post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I don't need to say is rather flimsy).
>You're free to offer counter evidence and I don't know why you're acting like you were limited to only referencing the source I provided.
I appreciate the offer to do work for no reason, but I'm fine, thanks. Why would I need to present any evidence to refute you when the evidence you presented doesn't back you up?
>Maybe it's really true that the rich have captured the productivity gained from personal computing. I don't know.
Well, we'll leave it there then. I don't know why you felt the need to debate a point you admit to not having any actual insight about, but I'm going to stop entertaining your devil's advocacy.
>It’s like worrying in 1960 that the companies that invented computers will hoard the benefits of computing. It doesn’t make any sense.
Not only is that exactly what happened, they weren't satisfied with accumulating most of the wealth produced by it, they've also taken it upon themselves to take over democracy and media and act like a state within a state. You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
People who used to have good jobs can now drive for Doordash and what the last wave of digitalization did over 30 years the AI gurus now promise to do in 10 again, and not just to the working class. The only reason to be optimistic is that they're snake oil salesmen.
> You only need one statistic to understand America today, that working class Americans without college degrees have had their purchasing power stagnate since the 1970s(https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/)
Having a college degree was a much more selective measure in 1970 (about 10% of the population) than today (almost 40%). Consider a large law firm. In 1970, the only 4-year degree holders would have been the attorneys. A lot of work would have been done by well-compensated paralegals with high school diplomas. Today, everyone down to the receptionist will have a degree and the non-degree holders would basically be the maintenance and cafeteria staff.
So using your math, the income of non-college workers at the law firm could be stagnant from 1970 to today, even if the income of each specific position had increased significantly.
Look at the macro data. The overall median wage for all American workers combined has also drastically lagged behind economic productivity since the 70s.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about “economic productivity” as a single number. Productivity growth has been massively different for different jobs. For example, there has been zero productivity growth in food service from 1970 to present. So you’d need to look at wages by sector compared to productivity growth in that sector.
I mean. From a financial PoV that's exactly what happened
Did they, though? Intel, IBM, DEC and Honeywell were big names, but they're not FAANG.
Other than Nintendo, how many games companies today were around back then?
... so your argument is "no actually the second generation did that"?
End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
Other than Apple, FAANG is fourth or fifth generation at least.
And my argument is straight assuming you're OK to say the financial PoV is a good PoV, I'm not arguing for or against that claim.
> End result for 100-16 % of Americans is the same
Yes, but FAANG got all the money without the hate AI has. Well, perhaps, I'm not sure when the public decided F had horns rather than a halo, so I can't be sure how much money they had at the time, but other than that the hate came long after the money.
The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
I want to be optimistic and agree with you, but I don't think the parallels are as strong as you say they are. We already have Anthropic withhold Mythos from the public, the governement now allowing the use of Fable, I don't think its farfetched to think that the US will start regulating access to Chinese/open-source models, pricing for compute isn't slowing down. The problem isn't AI, but who controls the compute that powers it.
What regulations do you feel protected common folk from capitalism during the development of computing, and how have they weakened?
I was also struck by this. We are a far more regulated society today than in the 1960s. The total body of codified federal law, statutory plus regulatory, grew from roughly 78,000 pages in 1960 to roughly 246,000 pages by 2020. The content matters of course, but I’m skeptical that under-regulation is the problem.
More pages isn't necessarily the same as more regulated.
Antitrust enforcement.
> The 60s were 60 years ago. There were regulations back then that protected the common folk and capitalism wasn't as ruthless and aligned with the will of the 0.1% as it is now.
No company in the 1990s ever achieved as much market power as IBM did in the 1960s-1980s. IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
The computer market was also much smaller and society much more independent from it at the time.
> IBM controlled 70% of the computer market at the time.
The computer market was microscopic at the time.
> Can you give me a concrete example that’s relevant to the deployment of computers?
Nvidia. 92% of domestic GPU market, 85% of AI datacenter market.
The AI investment bubble is exploding the cost of everything that contains RAM or SSD storage. This is having and will have detrimental effects on the global economy, as supply shortages enormously increase the cost of consumer electronics, cars, anything which requires memory.
Not because AI is making so much money, far from it - it's a money sink. Rather, it's because the global supply of money got so large and so unequal that it ran out of vehicles which would provide sufficient returns for the indolent investment class. So they jumped into speculation - first crypto, now AI and the tech that enables it.
To the benefit of whom? Mass layoffs, tech industry consolidation, new products being cancelled left and right.
Ironically there's no equivalent in the modern era. This is peak social inequality breaking the economy for everyone outside the .001%. And it didn't happen because of a shortage of a raw material, or physics breaking Moore's law. It happened because big tech centralised power into a handful of gigacorporations - creating a handful of ultra-billionaires - who are enormously incentivised to centralise technology itself.
I'm legit pretty excited about applying AI to accelerate biological and medical discovery.
It's already happening right now, still in relatively mundane ways, but there's so much to do.
How much of American society will get to share in the benefits of those new biological and medical discoveries when we don't have any health insurance because we lost our jobs to AI?
An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At least one data point in favor of this view is the middling success of the AI rollout so far. Of course it’s eclipsed in the short run by the number of jobs cut to fund AI rollouts.
So just to summarize, it seems like the most optimistic outcome that the collective of HN could come up with in the hour since my original comment was that medical care would improve and you might be able to pay for it if you retrain yourself for some yet unknown new career that might suddenly appear at some point in the future. That's the optimistic vision we're asking society to buy into? No wonder it's only 16%.
The upper limit for biomedicine is halting aging, ending all illnesses including cancer and congenital genetic illnesses, and being able to bioprint replacement parts not only in the event of trauma but also as a free choice for e.g. a fully functional gender swap.
Given present culture wars, that last one may cause a lot of drama all by itself no matter how good it gets. But hopefully you get the picture about how transformative it can be.
Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
>Paying for it? Well, there's a reason I chose to move to Germany rather than the USA after the Brexit referendum.
Does Germany have a large enough share of these companies to be on the winning side of this or is the country effectively in the same position as the average American? Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
> Just think how much could a company charge Germany to extend the life of its citizens, could Germany actually afford to pay that price especially if and when it tax base shrinks?
The time-limited and jurisdiction-limited nature of patents aside, one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
How taxes work when labour shifts to AI is anybody's guess.
>one of the great things about being a country is you can do things like pass laws saying "we have decided to force you to sell to us at the price we specify, and if you refuse we will shoot you".
But these companies aren’t based in Germany, so you’re talking about invading other nations. It’s starting to sound like this version of the optimistic outcome is World War 3.
If they want to do business in German* jurisdiction, they operate in Germany*. Doesn't matter where the HQ is, as Musk learned the hard way with the also-dramatic-but-less-so case in Brazil.
If they don't want to do business in Germany*, they don't get to file a patent in Germany*, they don't get to sue Germany* for ignoring a patent that was geographically limited to not include Germany*.
* might be "EU", I have not checked.
Germany does not have the global influence you seem to imply.
I'm saying the country doesn't need global influence. None do.
If you sell medicine to me here in Germany, you go through the German government.
If you decide not to, you inherently allow someone else to get the pantent for your tech in Germany.
Costs of medicine will get absorbed only to the extent they are considered acceptable, this is true for everyone. The biomedical firms know this, which is also why recently it is the US who pays the most for medicines.
You are very conservative with the upper limits, probably because you are limiting yourself to medicine. With bioengineering the upper limits are hard to grasp. Why build a house, when you can grow one. Re-imagine all machines as custom-made biology. Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
How much is possible there, is only constrained in our understanding of biology. How difficult that turns out to be for a super intelligence… who knows? If we are actually on the cusp of the AI singularity, the future is going to be weird and/or wonderful and/or horrible, but definitely unimaginable different than today.
My mind is kind of shooing away from this intuitively. Too hard to believe. My whole life experience has been living in a different world. But imagine if "we" could actually create human level intelligence, say, for the price of a 100k USD/EUR/GBP. It could only do knowledge work, of course, but it would easily pay for itself and thus be mass produced. What is the market cap for cheap knowledge work? I would be surprised if it is only a billion human-equivalents, given humans find new creative ways to pay for themselves all the time. That explosion alone is mind-boggling and it does not rely on super-intelligence.
All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
> You are very conservative with the upper limits, probably because you are limiting yourself to medicine. With bioengineering the upper limits are hard to grasp. Why build a house, when you can grow one. Re-imagine all machines as custom-made biology.
Sure, sure, but upthread said "biological and medical" so I was taking it that way.
> Why upload your conscience to silicon, when your body can be anything, your brain can experience anything, you brain can be reshaped to be anything.
I'd avoiding considering this one for now, simply because there's too many open questions. I don't expect it to be a physics problem, but I can't rule that out.
> All of this should make one point clear: At no other point in history has it been more important to have our power structures be aligned with the interests of society.
Yup.
Unfortunately, the human alignment problem is hard, let alone the AI alignment problem.
> An optimistic view is that the jobs displaced by AI will be like the jobs displaced by industrialization: while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
At this point, it's condescending to keep rehashing the "this is just the next industrialization era". It's been beaten to death as an invalid comparison more on this website than maybe any other.
I’d love to read why it’s a wrong comparison.
> jobs displaced by industrialization
This argument is cute and all, but ... does a data-point of 1 from 200 years ago really give us much confidence? We replaced physical labor with a massive service sector.
Now we're automating the service sector so now people can go to... eeh... the 3rd category of jobs? Seems like physical labor is the most stable career at the moment; what machines have not already automated is pretty difficult to replace it turns out. But we outsourced most of that to low cost countries except plumbers and electricians.
But will a population of plumbers really be able to maintain a population of plumbers employed?
What would be “the task”, other than physical labor or doing dull RLHF work, unless you’re in the 1% of exceptional intellectual talent that AI won’t be able to replace yet?
It took decades if not hundreds of years for the social disruption of industrialization to clear.
I literally do not give a fuck about some hypothetical more productive activity I might be able to do in 150 years if it destroys my very real present ability to take care of my family today.
Indeed. The industrial age led to great things to be sure but there were also 11 year old girls working in factories and families living in basements.
It took a long time for politicians to notice that Karl Marx had a fucking point.
"May you live in interesting times" as the Chinese say.
> while fewer people will be needed to do the task, there will be more demand for the task over time, opening up new jobs with different skill sets than the previous job required.
“The task”
You really did not answer the question.
most of the big players are advertising giants. How is advertising worth anything if people don't have money to buy goods and services?
Hell, you don't even need to have lost your job. Health insurance will just deny claims or call them as elective and not necessary type bullshit. Insurance is already using AI to deny claims, so yet again, how is it helping society and not the corps?
The problem is, at least in theory, that it entirely changes the calculus of how advancements take place. In the past, when the pace of advancement was stronger the primary factor was the cultivation of a culture that valued prestige and knowledge over monetary gains. It didn't really matter how much money you threw at a problem because the bulk of the people responsible for advancements weren't interested in obscene wealth. Obviously those people were well compensated but any number of entities could provide that compensation. It was about bringing prestige to your lab / school / town or even country.
If AI becomes a primary catalyst for advancement it further moves the needle in the monetary direction.
That redfines advancement to mean something different than what is beneficial to society to be what is monetarily best for the owners of said advancment.
When exactly in history was this utopian age?
Pretty much anytime in the past, but mainly industrial revolution, up until an inflection point sometime in the 1970s. While many major areas of knowledge work have suffered from becoming profit focused the advancement of technology for societal advancement is still in existence today, even many of the major AI involved researchers have done so irrespective of monetary gain and at least make the claim that much of the push for capital is simply as a necessary requirement to sustain the research as costs increase exponentially. That's one of the reasons long tail AI profitability is dubious, but also a indicator of the aforementioned risk. If capital becomes the primary driver, i.e. self advancing AI, then it's very unlikely to be continued in any way for the sake of benefits to humanity.
I don’t understand this logic, what would LLMs do here? Is thinking the bottleneck, or money to go and test all the ideas people have already thought of? Are we really missing the cure for cancer because we just haven’t thought about it enough and letting an LLM churn on all the data will figure it out? All the research is probably in its training set already, so why hasn’t it come up with the cure?
Yes, that's very nice. But that's very different models from LLMs and slop image generators. AI as a term has been butchered beyond recognition; when mentioning the current harm of AI investor hype and job automation, people are talking about generative models using LLMs or prompt based input, which have seen little to no use in "accelerate biological and medical discovery"
Sure, the transformer is great for making larger neural networks with better learning potential, which are improving protein folding models a fair bit. But do we need the combined budget of the Apollo program or interstate highway system (adjusted for inflation) per year, to develop better molecular simulation models? (no, the most advanced ones run on mundane hardware and trained just fine on pre 2020 infrastructure).
So while it's true that; "AI" ((primarily) Neural network based deep learning techniques) are wonderful tools to make society better; slop generators absorbing the entire energy budget of a few small nations to generate infinite propaganda, linked-in posts and shrimp Jesus is only tangentially helping in that goal while destabilization civilization in the process.
I don't think that is realistic. But, it can write your child's essay for them.
But someone has to be able to buy the results, right?
It feels like at some point we're going to need to re-evaluate the concept of intellectual property. I don't know how to bring about this conversation in a way that broader society will actually engage with it, but it really feels like software and digital assets are just too fundamentally different from the things we've been selling and buying for most of human history. Even if you think about a printed book, sure we've been defending peoples' rights to restrict reprinting of their ideas for a long time, but that came alongside broad support for institutions like libraries.
We now live in a world where you cannot be a professional engineer without expensive CAD software, you cannot run most businesses without some expensive licensed software for managing your books, HR, supply chain, etc. or you will just get destroyed in the market by more efficient competition. I guess my thought process on this is a little simplified, as I was thinking about how software you can run yourself is "infinitely copyable" for free. This question gets more nuanced with SaaS. While some of the enshittification can be argued to be rent-seeking behavior to have a bigger moat, you cannot perform a "DRM crack" of a webapp like you could with software restricted by CD keys and the like, creating SaaS versions of most products provide real benefits. Running a large hosted service is a serious ongoing commitment that takes real investment to maintain.
It feels like we haven't finished this necessary conversation in the pre-LLM world, about how software was creating giant powerful institutions that we were totally unprepared to regulate. In a world that looks so likely to be coming pretty soon, where LLMs can maintain a SaaS with very little human input, I just don't think we're ready for the consolidation of power that is coming.
And to the particular point being made about biomedical research, it is already pretty trivial to argue we have cartoon villain levels of evil already happening with both deciding how research dollars are allocated (diseases that disproportionately affect the poor are worked on less), and how many people we are leaving out of the modern medical system to just suffer or die at home.
We need to grapple with the fact that we have developed really powerful tools to reduce suffering, and alongside that development we have created legal tools and institutions that indefinitely keep innovations behind paywalls with prices chosen by powerful rich people. Maybe these two things need to exist together to create incentives for investment, but it feels like we need to have better conversations about how we can actively manage the knobs and levers of the economy to produce better outcomes for more people.
I fear that at this rate the oligarchs will use medical breakthroughs to keep us alive and laboring against our and nature’s will like what industrial farming has done to chickens and other livestock
I worry that you're right, although they might change what "alive" means
https://www.science.org/content/article/not-alive-not-dead-d...
Superhuman abilities for the wealthy tech oligarchs, economic indentured servitude and slums for the rest of us.
Tens of millions of people in the US alone cannot obtain basic healthcare today, how would this outcome change for them because AI solved it? The only solid paths are regulation or prying the machine from the hands of those who hold it. GLP-1s are only widely available globally affordably because the patent expired, for example.
Indentured servitude implies they still need us for something once they have superhuman robots doing their bidding.
There are some grim desires these people have today they’d still have even with robots. I will not enumerate, out of decorum.
Does accelerating biological and medical discovery require over a trillion dollars of capital to be misallocated while Americans do not have medicare for all or universal childcare?
Who is exactly going to benefit here because Americans have been given a rotten deal by neoliberalism for the last 40 years.
What are jobs for?
Should we have them?
Should they be mandatory?
What does it mean to have to work to eat, is this a good setup?
Does everyone have to work?
Should they?
Who do you think will be answering these questions in a future in which these AI companies visions become a reality? Because they already have a huge influence on society and that will only increase as the tech improves.
The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
> Who do you think will be answering these questions
Yes, this is the conversation we should probably be having! Thoughts?
Given that this is what is happening, given that we aren't going to stop physics, getting a handle on this indeed seems like one of the more important things we can do. If it will have any chance of working at all. If we don't get paperclipped.
But this is at least a much ... (forgive me) less wrong conversation to have compared to the one where everybody assumes we've already lost.
What do you think we should do? What powers do we still have where we is general humans who just want a pretty good life?
What do we do about the inherent centralization that big models seem to require, but how do we trade that off at the same time from everybody being able to synthesize the next Covid by asking their cell phone a question? What does it mean when most if not all white collar work actually can be automated?
Do we all end up playing VCs in our underwear swiping left/right on ideas our agents have to make money? Are we still competing in the market with the AIs?
Is there a class war? Is there some other weird thing? I don't know but man ... I sure would like to have those conversations.
Need work involve money? By far the most important work I do involves volunteer leadership roles above and beyond the things I do for money. Indeed, the whole edifice of modern tech rests on elements of FOSS that are, to within a rounding error, “volunteer”-built and -led. Elon’s an idol, but so is Linus.
The Biggest And Richest have Mythos. But does that diminish the utility, to me personally, of my open-weights model? Or even my humble-individual-grade Opus subscription? Relative to what I could do three years ago, computationally speaking?
Does a pretty good life have to involve controlling more material relative to members of a specific class, rather than just… deciding what’s enough, materially speaking; and stopping there?
> The most optimistic answer I can think of is that they will eventually agree to share their wealth under credible threats of violent revolution. That's the most optimistic outcome I see, they concede to threats of violence rather than needing actual violence.
Or they all figure out how to just bugger off to some Elysium-like stronghold, isolating themselves from and leaving the rest of society economically irrelevant.
At a guess, one of the unspoken reasons why there is so much interest in robot armi^H^H^H^H factory automation.
These are the right questions to ask. I think about stuff like this often, and just as often people I discuss this with think I'm off my rocker. I, on the other hand, think some can't see past what they have been programmed to see. It's sad really, our lives are finite and much is wasted on a less than optimal layout.
I'd answer: No, we should not have to work to eat, they should not be mandatory, and no not everyone has to work.
But those problems need solved first before completely upending the current system. The system does need changed, but that change must happen before mass unemployment, not after the fact.
The system won't change until there is massive chaos and destruction. Why would it otherwise? The people with the means to gently and voluntarily change things are living like gods. They have no incentive to help. In fact, a sick and unhealthy society keeps competitors weak. No, I'm afraid to say there will be no fixing things.
How exactly are the superrich today living like gods? They use the same phones, have access to the same entertainment, same internet, same information. Most spend a lot more time stressed out and working. The poor today live better (or, at the very least more "preferenced") lives than ever in human history.
Big houses, yachts, nice cars I guess?
> How exactly are the superrich today living like gods?
A lot of us are, not just the super-rich.
"We are close to gods, and on the far side", as Banks put it. Or, as I wrote a while ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40874779
I really ought to turn this into a youtube video.
Love this
Hey guys, we don't have ebola or malaria ok, shut up and go back to work.
You're confusing "things have gotten better" with "things are good enough and shouldn't improve further"
These are close to opposites in their implications
> we should not have to work to eat
It takes time and effort and resources to produce the food you eat. If you aren't expending that time and effort and resources yourself, either to produce the food, or to produce something you can trade for it (or trade for money you use to buy it), who will?
If the answer is "other people", why should other people have to work to produce the food you eat while you don't?
If the answer is "machines", then it takes time and effort and resources to produce the machines, and we're right back to the same question.
There are no other answers.
There is no magical way to let people eat (much less have all the other things besides food, clothing and shelter that we all want to make our lives richer, such as the medium in which we're having this conversation) without work being done. Ignoring that fact of life is a recipe for disaster.
Fair enough, we are no where near post-scarcity levels of automation yet despite what frontier lab marketing says.
But still, there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society. It would be a good thing, with the proper safety nets and protections in place (something like UBI) to have a lot of the "bullshit" jobs automated away. That leaves us into a situation like I said that "no, not everyone has to work" nor should we just force everyone to work my effectively making up roles. If half or more of the population finds themselves unemployed due to AI/Automation, the answer shouldn't be make-work "dig a ditch then fill it back up" it should be use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
> there are more people on the planet than necessary for all of the "meaningful" work of providing for society
Says who?
I think there is a valid statement to be made that the work required for basic necessities (food, clothing, and shelter) in developed countries today is not very large, if you look at it per person, and so the cost of getting those basic necessities, per person, should not be very large either. So it should not take very much in the way of work for a person to be able to subsist at a basic level. But "not very much" is still not zero, and none of this removes the issue I described.
But you didn't say "basic necessities". You said "providing for society". And that is a lot more than just basic necessities, because "society" in developed countries is a lot more than just people's basic subsistence. We have a huge amount of wealth over and above that, which nobody wants to just do away with, and which took a lot of time and effort and resources to build, and which takes time and effort and resources to maintain. And anyone who doesn't want to live completely off the grid, in some rural area where they grow their own food, maintain their own dwelling, and don't depend on anyone else, is taking advantage of some portion of that huge amount of wealth in a developed country. And it's not at all clear that the work required per person to build and maintain that huge amount of wealth is so small that a small fraction of the people on the planet could do it, still less that they would agree to do it just for funsies, without expecting something in return.
I'm all for eliminating bullshit jobs (and digging ditches and then filling them up again is certainly a bullshit job, though of course our technological society has invented much more elaborate ones), but...
> use our new found productivity and surplus to just take care of everyone's needs without it being tied to employment.
This just goes right back to the question I asked: how are everyone's needs going to be taken care of? Who is going to do the work? Either other people are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep you, or machines are, which means you're making other people do the work required to keep the machines running. And in either case, if you expect those other people to do that for free, out of the goodness of their hearts, you're fooling yourself. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you alive, you should expect to have to do nonzero work of some sort. Sure, you might not do just that minimum amount of work all the time--you might spend a working career doing a lot more work, saving up the surplus, and then living off it once you retire. But to expect to be taken care of while doing zero work, if nonzero work is actually required to take care of you, is unrealistic and will lead to disaster, as I said.
You give the answer then skip past it.
We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work.
You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever. And those without capital to invest in those machines will have nothing.
Why is that a good system?
> We are looking at a foreseeable future where machines do all the work.
That's not the future I was talking about. I was talking about a future where machines do an even larger fraction (approaching 100 percent) of the work that humans don't like to do but currently have to because it can't be fully automated. But that still leaves work to be done to supervise the machines, as well as work that humans do like to do and won't offload to machines.
The future you're referring to, where machines literally do all the work, is very different. See further comments below.
> You are saying all the benefits from those machines should go to those who invested their capital to create them, forever.
No. I am saying that whoever does the work required to build, run, and maintain the machines is not going to simply give away what they produce for free, without expecting something in return. Not all of that work is investing capital (though of course much of it is, as with any highly technological product).
In the future I was talking about, there is still work that humans can do, not connected with building, running, and maintaining the machines, that produces something that can be traded. In that future, just as now, if you're not one of the people who is doing the work to build, run, and maintain the machines, you should expect to have to do some nonzero amount of work on something else that you can trade for what the machines produce, to get enough of what they produce to keep you, if you need what the machines produce to keep you. As long as nonzero work is required to keep you, you should expect to do nonzero work to be kept.
In the future you're talking about, where there is literally no work that humans can do that produces anything that can be traded, it doesn't really matter who owns the machines, because in this future, the machines are in control and every human, whether they have some piece of paper that says they "own" the machines or not, is at their mercy. Personally, I don't think that future is where we're headed, at least not with the machines that are making all the headlines now. But if that future is where we're headed, you'll have to ask the machines for UBI or whatever else you need, and no human will have any control over what the machines decide, no matter what political scheme we put in place now.
I fail to see how your scenario is qualitatively different than mine. Whether the machines do 100 percent of the work or only just approach 100 percent of the work, the value they produce will go almost exclusively to those who invested in the machines.
I notice you don’t give examples of work people will do or why it will have economic value when machines perform almost all work.
Whether the machines will take over is a philosophical question. Maybe they won’t have any desire to do so. Or maybe rogue actors will train belligerent models that will overwhelm the models serving humanity. Difficult to predict.
How much do you trust the current US administration to guide us into a future where no one needs a job in order to get health care, food, shelter, etc?
Maybe figure out the answers to that before forcing everyone into an economy where they still need to work to make money, but any worthwhile jobs have been automated away.
The other question, of course, is what happens to the political power of the newly disposable?
Brother, I'm trying to. Any thoughts?
Also, what's a "worthwhile" job?
Have you read Player Piano?
Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs?
If we can automate musclejobs so people don't have to die in the heat and we can automate brainjobs so people don't have to lose their sanity in offices, wouldn't that be a better world?
Note: it probably won't be, because of what I like to call the "Enterprise High" effect, but here we are. Basically once the only thing people have to compete over is status, shit gets nasty quicklike, think PG's high school essay but for everything and forever. Everything goes into rivalrous goods like who's sleeping with who.
Star Trek as soap opera where all their needs are met and the only concern is purely social.
But this is probably better than a world where people don't actually have material needs met?
I legit don't actually know. Would love to figure it out though, what do you think!
> Are brainjobs more important than musclejobs?
Try answering that without your brain.
We're trying to build a world where there's no advantage to having one, so start living in the future you want to build.
No, but what are the odds of the robust welfare state that would be required to actually enable some sort of post-work society taking shape here in America? I'd truly like to be optimistic but, politically we have been moving in the opposite direction ever since the end of the New Deal, and the oligarchs who control the technologies are not exactly benevolent.
No. But capitalism requires them. I'm down to end capitalism, but maybe we should figure that out before we destroy the thing that kinda-sorta made it work?
Most optimistic outcome: Hardware & software advances keep pace; Open weights & locally runnable models keep pace with frontier (at least the open weights part seems to hold), making AI advances widely available to anyone; Individual productivity skyrockets, having knock-on effects in most industries, slowly allowing less and less people to do the work required to maintain the basic needs of our civilization(s); UBI utopia achieved.
Do I think that's likely? No, but mostly because it would require parallel uprising of the global working class, which doesn't seem to materialize.
If they're right:
* Use AI to eliminate all white collar jobs.
* Combine AI with robotics to eliminate all blue collar jobs.
* Combine AI with military hardware to kill any rabble who may become threats to the ruling class.
The most optimistic outcome is that it doesn't happen in our lifetimes. Aside from that, the best you can hope for is that the ruling class enslaves the rest but treats them well enough that most don't realize they are slaves (e.g., the Eloi from the Time Machine).
I'm cautiously optimistic about the former, but I expect the resources required by the latter will far exceed what the greed inherent to the ruling class will allow without first purging a significant fraction of the population. All we can hope for is they stop the purge before it takes everyone not in the ruling class, but given how many ultra-wealthy individuals already see the rest of us, I wouldn't bet on that.
Well the most optimistic outcome is that our democratically elected representatives start acting in the interests of all they represent, not just those with a lot of money.
Ok, you didn’t need to laugh that hard.
One not-so-bad outcome would be that open weight models get better, smaller, more efficient, and easier to use while hardware gets faster, more efficient, and more widespread. Imagine when mobile CPUs have the GPU/NPU power of today's discrete GPUs and models are smaller and faster than today's models.
That allows really powerful local-first AI applications, rather than being beholden to AI providers. With the advance of coding agents, anyone can build their own applications.
The downstream effects of widespread local AIs is a rise in AI slop that feeds the distraction machine and attention economy as well as surveillance. I don't know what the solution to those is, but the local experience is going to be powerful.
Now you are fired by a computer not a completely disinterested person! Progress.
This... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.
I did say "ostensibly" ;)
Agreed that power nearly always corrupts. It does so in often subtle and slow shifts. In general we have a paucity of leaders who wield their power on behalf of the oppressed.
The truth is that the "bad" leaders need powerful help. They need someone to come alongside them and love them into the light of the damage they've caused by drifting into complacency. And I'm not talking about "nice" love here, it might initially look more like shame.
> “The people running these companies certainly aren't good people”
That is an heavy understatement. After reading some biographies and books about the tech elite… it's just much weirder and sickly than i ever imagined. Strange cults, religions and beliefs. Surprisingly high stupidity mixed with intense hate of humans. Straight up anti-social anti-human behaviour… and drugs, so much drugs that lead to psychosis. Narcissism and superiority… you would have hard time finding anyone moderately nice to hang out with. It's a real curse that the system pushes up people like this.
You're not wrong. I also think it's a trap to think they're in a fundamentally different category than we are. Yes, the blast radius of their harm can be enormous. _And_ they're humans like you and me. Likely hiding deep wounds of their own that are screaming for care-full attention.
Oh I agree. System that puts people like this in power also doesn't allow for them to really get help. Nobody should have this kind of power.
Most currently poor people would have the exact same failings if they suddenly found themselves with vast power.
One of the most important political developments in history was the realization that you can’t just replace a bad king with a good king. They all eventually go bad. Instead you need checks and balances to distribute power and make sure it’s not concentrated in only a few hands.
Too many tech people only focus on developing enhanced capabilities and find philosophy, let alone moral systems like religion, useless or absurd.
But with powerful AI models the philosophical and moral and religious questions have become impossible to ignore.
I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
They are not evil and there is no evil emerging in big systems. It is that in the above have advantage in winner takes all economy and use that advantage to gain more advantages. So they end up on top. And once they are high enough, law dont apply to them. Which makes them go even higher.
> I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
Likely true in many cases!
> there is no evil emerging in big systems
That's a very definitive statement!
What brings you to the conclusion that there aren't forces at play that we don't yet have a good name for or don't yet have the scientific means to study?
The vast majority of people suddenly become ethically challenged narcissists and sociopaths if given too much power.
It's beyond tech. Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive. The technology for delivering bad news and highly-engaging outrage-bait has developed much faster than our society has been able to adapt to it.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
It's scrollable algo video. This is at the root of essentially all of our current cultural woes. I was in denial about this for a long time, but atp it's undeniable.
> Optimism in general is out of fashion, and pessimism is pervasive.
Hardly surprising given we are not collectively making sufficient change to avert climate disaster. There’s no negative bias or spin there - the majority of climate scientists agree that we’ve passed the tipping point.
> And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes -- rather common culture was hollowed out, friends were distracted, friends fell down their own extremist rabbit holes.
Yeah... It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media. The big struggle is that what I'd like to leave more than anything is a world born of its influence. The small percentage of people who are willing to go outward to places beyond the bounds of ten or so websites/apps of the Internet are still vastly influenced by them even when they reach outside. And despite that it would only take a handful of people "defecting" to form a nice tightly knit community, it's hard to find that many people with a common thread tying them together that aren't afflicted with behavior influenced by social media.
I don't want to just have places on the Internet that are actually "secretly" kind of like offshoots of Twitter/Reddit/Discord communities. That's almost not better and yet it's what a lot of attempts at "hey we're doing forums again" tends to feel like.
It’s like trying to give up smoking when all your friends still smoke. Even if you do give it up you either also give up your friends or still reek of cigarettes.
> It's actually not so hard for me to just not take part in social media
Unfortunately that’s not quite as easy for people in creative professions that must now use social media to promote themselves and their work.
> tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives
This. Many of us are cogs in these machines doing the harm...to ourselves and others around us.
The thing is, these companies can't exist without employees. But employees need the companies for money to pay the other companies.
We are rapidly reaching a point where companies will exist without human employees, there'll just be the owners and an ai workforce.
Who is going to buy what they're selling? More AI?
According to the NVIDIA CEO, yes. He's quite ravenous at the possibility that before he only had humans as customers, but now he is potentially opening up a new customer base where agents are customers.
Why do economies need people? With a fractional reserve monetary system you can keep pumping more money in a system as the system creates more resources, so the game never has to stop. Just end up with an AI paving the Earth in solar panels buying minerals from another AI harvesting every metal in the crust of the Earth creating quadrillions of dollars in GDP.
We call this system Moloch.
> I certainly know that my life was transformed for the worst by social media. And I don't mean that I went down any rabbit holes
This aspect isn't talked about enough. We discuss plenty the direct impact of social media on its users, but little about how it effects even those who don't use social media at all, by proxy. Little is said how it's impossible to escape being profiled and having shadow profiles on these products just by virtue of everyone else in your life around you using them.
That's a huge problem. There is no possible way to opt out, at all.
> ... tech companies have proved to be some of the most hostile actors in most American's lives. Perhaps edged out only by things such as actual violent crime
Not so fast. Violent crime has been declining for about 30 years. Tech has been ascendant in that time.
This comment resonated with me in a way that few pieces of writing do. My only complaint is that it’s perhaps too short. I get the impression that you could turn this comment into longer post (with citations) and I encourage you to do so.
I think social media is almost an oxymoron, as a medium is something "in the middle" and social contacts should be direct and not mediated (IMHO).
> There is no successful social media company that actually cares about the negative impacts it has had on society. They speak about things such as "providing value" where value = time spent on the platform. They do not care if they ruin lives.
I will never forget Ruchi Sanghvi’s remarks at the Female Founders Conference talk in 2015[0]:
> It [the News Feed] became this virtuous cycle that we all dream of: consumption and production that just kept on giving. […] Even though everyone said they hated it, engagement had doubled.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FjJyBAOUE#t=6m29s
> The loneliness epidemic, a constant drip-feed of outrage -- all so that people can make a small amount of money
I think that should read "all so that a very small number of people can make a very large amount of money"
I think the main reason for this outrage is partly a confluence of factors some of which you pointed it.
But my money/theory is on what I call `alonliness` specifically due to lack of labor mobility: There is no good rapid transport connecting american interior towns to big cities and people don't want to move due to a variety of factors(real estate debt, cultural affinity to area). To be clear these people are alone but not necessary lonely(there is that going on too in other segments of the population). And once you don't understand or never had the opportunity to understand something(or rather only experience its bad side effects), you distrust it at best and fear and hate it at the worst.
If you ask people 1:1 IRL who live in communities where the main source of employment is not whatever Silicon valley businesses are. They will ask you questions or make comments like " 'those' jobs are not real American jobs!" or "Aren't you afraid of getting thrown on subway tracks in NYC?". These are actual questions i got from people there.
These give an indication of the disjointedness of the sets in the venn-diagram of of the socio-economic equality and what creates such psyche. I am not sure why some think its a PR/Comms problem for big tech.
> a constant drip-feed of outrage
I say this as someone highly critical of social media. I'm not sure you can entirely blame Social Media for this. The fact is, outrageous things are happening constantly throughout the world. We just didn't hear about most of it before Internet connectivity and the reach of social media. It's not like social media suddenly created outrage. It's just informing people about the existing absolutely outrageous things happening. Are the algorithms tuned for outrage? Sure. But that doesn't mean these outrageous things are not happening.
Back in the 1960s there was widespread outrage over the Vietnam war, but no social media drip to blame it on. The difference was: The outrageous acts were getting press and constant attention, through non social media channels.
You can either be 1. ignorant / not paying attention to the state of the world, 2. paying attention but deliberately ignoring the state of the world, or 3. outraged all the time.
I'm not saying it is good to be outraged, but that's our world. The state of the world is absolutely outrageous, and a normal human being should be feeling outrage at what is constantly being done.
At the moment, the main visible effect is disruption in the job market.
Everyone knows it's just another stake in the coffin.
> The wild tech optimism of the 1990s and 2000s
Anecdotally, my optimist and disappointment has a lot less to do with flaws in the technology, versus outcomes that rested on the social / political / power-dynamic side of things.
For example, instead of everyone being able to command the digital factory of capital-equipment on their desk (or in their palm) to pursue their personal interests and welfare, the devices feel like tools of someone else who considers you a resource to be exploited, and they can command people to beat you up if you use "your" property "wrong".
To cast things out in a future-direction, imagine being excited about the dawn of practical spaceships, and the disappoint when--somehow--there are no limits on launch pollution, monopolies abound, and the average migrant to cleaner worlds must enter into multi-generational indentured servitude.
Life is like a supermarket. You are supposed to seek out the good things. You can't stop and stand and rage in the first aisle, which is filled with ultra processed food for the masses. You have to seek out the good ingredients in the back and make an effort.
You can't get stuck in life being disappointed in average people. You have to seek out good people. And good places and good things.
Or stay in the cranky cynic rabbit hole. God knows there are unlimited amounts of other cranky people to back you up. Maybe even the majority?
You are naive, you don't seriously expect people to "seek out the good ingredients" do you? When the shit ingredients are addictive, cheaper than the good ones and more available? The entire premise of these platforms is use whatever edges possible to get more ad money, they do that by getting people addicted to their phones and using psychological tricks that have been refined through over a decade of A/B testing to be effective.
I'm speaking to whoever wants to listen. Advice is a gift that you are free to refuse.
you miss my point entirely. People are a product of their environment. Just because YOU or I don't fall down this trap doesn't mean our friends or family or people in our communities won't.
In my country we charge sales tax on processed foods but not on fresh foods. It's because we can make the good choice easier and the bad choice harder. We shouldn't be doing the opposite, then laying all the responsibility on individuals (many of which will still be children who aren't aware of the consequences of their actions)
Maturity is understanding that no matter who is to blame for the situation you are in or the problems you have, you as an individual are most of the time the only one who can fix your problems. Nothing is more effective than a determined person. And nobody knows you better than yourself.
Unless you think you can change the entire universe to do your bidding - then the best thing you can do is helping yourself and helping others. Nobody is helped by complaining. And I'm not missing your point, I just don't share your perspective.
People who want to be mislead will always find a way to be mislead, because they want somebody else to be blamed and "responsible" for their life and their mistakes. Failing to realize that it is always themselves in the end who pay the price and bear the burden. That's how they have been bred on this earth. "At least it was not my fault" feels perfectly good in the soul of many suffering people, because they have been raised within a guilt or shame culture. And there are plenty of unethical people willing to indulge them in this falsehood.
That's why I'm saying to seek out what is good instead of what is evil. And help those who want to be helped.
> Maturity is understanding that no matter who is to blame for the situation you are in or the problems you have, you as an individual are most of the time the only one who can fix your problems. Nothing is more effective than a determined person. And nobody knows you better than yourself.
This is not an individual problem, this is a social problem.
>Unless you think you can change the entire universe to do your bidding - then the best thing you can do is helping yourself and helping others. Nobody is helped by complaining. And I'm not missing your point, I just don't share your perspective.
There are things that are going wrong that are beyond the scope of individuals - we fix these things by regulations and laws
>because they want somebody else to be blamed and "responsible" for their life and their mistakes.
This is an irrelevant strawman, I don't care about blaming, I want to fix the issues that we have in society.
>That's why I'm saying to seek out what is good instead of what is evil. And help those who want to be helped. This is not a solution, you may as well go to clinically depressed people and go "well why don't you just be happy?" - it doesn't work. Just like how saying "well don't use social media!" doesn't work.
I wish we could unplug AI especially when you watch videos of tech folks saying it could destroy us. Umm well then.
Yet i guess it's here to stay and AI needs us, our human content to stay relevant and thrive. Personally, I think it should pay all of us (set up some system or systems) for every piece of content we create daily & choose to publish. THat way we all thrive for keeping it relevant and it thrives alongside us. Wrote about one idea / a system that would get us paid for the daily content we produce via living each day https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
But, again I'd be happy if all of society and cultures unplugged it!
People just forget the before times. No one wants to go back to printing out driving directions or emailing photos. We take all these things for granted now but I am 100 certain the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions of lives through downstream butterfly effects.
I am not so sure. The world of printing out driving directions or emailing photos sounds a lot more calm. Also, simply quite enjoyable. The current world is cramming too many events in too little time, it seems. Stress is quite bad for health so I am not so sure about these hundreds of millions of lives saved. It may also have costed quite a few.
nah, that was ass. i think the really major negative has just been scrollable video. all these other things - uber, airbnb, grocery pickup, etc. have largely just made my life better.
Can you imagine sitting around waiting for a phone call these days? At home? With a landline? Lol. Or going to the video store to drop $20 (with inflation today: $48) on three movies that you had to actually return by driving. The romantic waxing about hanging out with people is hilarious. More often than not it meant coming home at 10 pm and watching shitty network tv by yourself. Now I can play games with all my friends across the entire world.
I never done any of those things. And I was there, I was old enough. I was not desperately waiting for phone calls or paid a lot of money to borrow movies.
Somehow, I occupied myself just fine, was meeting friends regularly and did activities regularly. There was no societally wide lack of entertainment.
I think you are probably an outlier if you've never rented a movie in the 90s and shouldn't generally be used as a good example of how life was. It's frankly absurd that you would even bring it up as a virtue.
I did not brought it up as virtue. Virtue is entirely your framing. I just was not renting movies nor were my friends nor family. Meeting friends and occupying yourself was completely normal, any average person did it. In fact, healthy people will create fun and entertainment for themselves no matter the technological level of the society.
Frankly, it is super weird that you see doing fun stuff as some kind of virtue.
By the way, I am old enough to remember that world. When I was young, people had fat books with maps of most large and medium size places in the country.
nah, i distinctly remember family road trips as a kid. Driving was super stressful with my mom yelling about missing an exit as she reads the map, getting lost in a not so nice neighborhood, etc.
you're romanticizing the past
lol this still happens today
right - so imagine how much worse it would be with a paper map or printed instructions
No it doesn't. Not in a healthy relationship. Blink twice if you need help getting out of an abusive relationship.
It's possible to have both internet maps and photo web sites, and not have unregulated* social media.
*Or rampant or whatever other word you feel fits the current state of social media.
How does not printing directions save hundreds of millions of lives?
Oh man I can tell you're young. Those directions weren't always right. You couldn't just pull out your phone and find the nearest hospital if something happened during your trip. Or call 911 and have them find you by GPS. And that's just one casual convenience you take for granted. People used to drive around asking random people to use their phone in emergencies. Not exactly fast when seconds matter.
Honestly legit response. I didn’t really think about the 911 tracking which is so precise now. It is a bummer though how that location privilege has been abused.
I mean, you make it sound like a horrible horror movie, but none of that was perceived as large issue at all
That's because you're measuring yesterday's worlds with today's demented expectations.
Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.
We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.
Those were wonderful times, I see no problem with driving by a paper map, emailing photos, and sending gpg-encrypted e-mails, which all the surveilling scum could go fuck themselves about, at all.
Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.
> the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions
Oh wow, are you sure it's not billions?
It was always an option to have the technology without the bullshit. We can have GPS without allowing Google or Apple to track our every movement. We can have useful websites without allowing the people running those websites to mine every scrap of data we upload and sell our private information to anyone willing to pay for it.
It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
Everything you just said is readily available now. You can use a FOSS OS on a mobile device with an offline mapping program. They were available before Google Maps was even a thing on Android 1.x. I know because I used to download them and use them without even having mobile internet in rural areas. The only thing stopping you is yourself.
Has it? If we've saved hundreds of millions, then I would argue simply the amount of money spent in AdTech could have saved billions.
The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.
Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.
Yes, I am from the olden times, the dark times… Times of fear and terror, printer not working, having to write things down by hand, ach, the horror… Today much better, says me, yass the foundations of democracy and fabric of society has been eaten away like by millions of worms, teenagers constantly fighting with mental illnesses, lies and disinformation, young strong lads drug or gambling addicts… but, the minor conveniences, my lad! Ach, those I would not live without. The minor conveniences…
> $230 notebooks, digital cameras and tiny dollhouse furniture: How Gen Z’s desire to get offline is a boon for businesses
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/going-analog-gen-z-desire-to...
When I use a computer to do work I want the computer to be right. I want to be able to trust the computer. With the inherit non-determinism and probabilistic nature of generative-AI, that fundamental reason why I engage a computer is lost.
If the spreadsheet is wrong, it’s because the math is wrong, it’s because I made a mistake. It’s not because all of a sudden the computer decided the nature of algebra should be different than it is.
Part of the reason why humans are rejecting AI is that we are putting it in places where it makes no sense, or places where humans prefer a human in the loop, there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
One recalls the Pentium FDIV bug, where an estimated 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results[1]. A small subset of Pentium users would ever encounter the problem, yet it was considered a major controversy, and Intel ultimately replaced $475 million worth of CPUs (in 1994 dollars)[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/its-been-30-...
Heavily agree.
The computer should be a force for order, because being a living creature is chaos.
That said LLMs can be used in ways that promote order. People just got excited and wanted to believe they could be trusted in chaos mode.
For reference chaos mode would be prompting something like: "Look at my journal entries and tell me what I should do to fix my life". Versus using one to build a table of common themes and analyzing the resulting spreadsheet yourself.
I think we got excited / wanted to believe that we won't have to expend any effort whatsoever, and the AI could "do it all".
The reality (as far as I can comprehend it) seems to be that AI expanded the scope of what we can shove into one mouthful, and now it takes much more effort to chew. Metaphorically speaking.
Part of the reason coding agents are widely accepted and used is that human coders are chaos, and human coders have spent a lot of time building tooling to ameliorate chaos. Everything from git to language design, to lint, to profilers, etc. was built to keep the human chaos out. It's pretty good at keeping the LLM chaos out, and when it blows up anyway you can roll it back to the previous commit.
This is an interesting way of thinking about it. I generally agree. I especially agree that anti-AI sentiment partially comes from miss-using it. However:
Determinism isn't a requirement for 100% correctness.
A Las Vegas algorithm is randomized, non-deterministic and guarantees 100% correctness [0].
The execution can be different every time but the result will always be correct. determinism does not lose accuracy. It does lose time predictability.
So if your problem with AI is accuracy, then in theory your problem is just premature stopping.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm
A Las Vegas algorithm requires that you have a deterministic test that can definitively determine the correctness of an intermediate result. So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM. Well, if the human is there, why not just ask the human? What value is the random number generator adding?
Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results, without doing any checking. Solved problems stay solved.
> So what you're saying is that what it takes to make LLMs give 100% correct results is having a human between the LLM and the user, who's capable of re-prompting on incorrect answers from the LLM.
No, that's not what I'm saying. Im saying determinism isn't required for correctness. And Im not saying that models are already perfect other than prematurely stopping. What I am saying is that non-determinism doesn't mean they cant be 100% correct.
Besides, humans baby-sitting LLMs is not even implied by the misinterpretation of what I'm saying. What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset. Which is totally reasonable.
> Like the GP said, the point of determinism is that you can trust the correctness of the results
Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.
>What's implied by that is humans needing to give the LLM explicit success criteria from the outset.
But the LLM is non-deterministic. LLM(x + y) or even LLM(LLM(x) + y) is just as non-deterministic as LLM(x).
>Well, no. Now you are waaaay overstating determinism. Deterministic results might be incorrect.
Obviously? But that's still is the reason why deterministic computers are useful. If you could enter a proven-correct program into a computer, run it, and get back a correct result only some of the time, that'd be okay maybe for some things, but we couldn't have built everything we have on top of that. It's the same reason why deductive reasoning is useful. Once you've proven something true, you're done, it's proven. No further work is necessary.
The economics of it (token cost) means, however, that what will be chosen most often is the barely sustainable minimum level of quality, aka race to the bottom. AI is more cost-sensitive in that way than humans caring or not caring about making things robust and correct used to be.
For sure, that's why I say in theory. Also models aren't perfect. You can't plug in an explicit target and ensure it doesnt stop prematurely and expect 100 accuracy. But that's not because it's non-deterministic, since clearly non-deterministic systems can be 100% accurate.
I'm not sure I fully agree with this. We can use the computer to build a deterministic system.
People aren't fully deterministic either.
Correctness can also be guaranteed by non-deterministic systems [0]. You do trade time predictability though. It will eventually give the correct answer, we just dont know when.
I keep thinking about the implications of this. So in some sense it's less about being inaccurate and more about prematurely stopping (or not having a well defined target, but that's a whole other mess).
In theory, if the target is well defined and it never prematurely stops, the question changes from "will the output be correct" to "when will it be done?"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_algorithm
> we just dont know when
Ah, so it's merely functionally useless, if not theoretically.
Guaranteed correctness on an unknown timeline is a pretty interesting tradeoff and not novel. It's just how probabilistic systems work.
I dont really understand your position. Do you think AI is useless?
Correct.
Also, the better one gets at using AI, the better they can predict where AI might fail.
This allows you to both work 10x faster and prevent many mistakes, which puts you far ahead of not-using-AI.
Yep. Exactly why we use machines. They do the deterministic bit quickly. We do the other bits.
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
I don't care about human vs AI, I just want my issue resolved. Whatever does that the best and fastest. Or even better, for there to not be an issue in the first place.
The root of all our evils, right here. We only want the fastest cheapest thing possible, without thinking about how it impacts literally everything else about our world.
They never said fastest or cheapest, they said it should resolve the issue. A fast cheap human who can't is not better than an AI that can.
Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice). We do strange things to balance this out all the time. Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange, and concerns itself too much with the ideal of a tool and not enough with the more important question: What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years? Who would be okay to say "yeah but you know, artists, copyright" and deny those who benefit most from this the opportunity?
How could we not take this shot? I understand perfectly well that a lot of things will need reconfiguration and that it's going to be painful, but dear lord, let's focus on making it go well instead of ending it.
> Thinking that computer software must be exempt from that mess as a goal is just strange
Software is deterministic, it has been since its inception[0]. Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former? It's like making bricks out of paper and declaring "actually, this is logical next step for bricks because stuff waves in the wind".
> What if our lives get much, much better?
What if not?
[0] (Yes not really/actually if we're being pedantic)
> Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former?
Because we like computers to feel like they are fast, mainly. Most compilers, for example, are non-deterministic because they can be made to run faster if they ignore things like thread execution order. Same goes for LLMs. Technically they are as deterministic as any other software, but we allow GPUs to play fast and loose with floating point numbers to speed things up, which gives the impression of "strange things".
Here is a simple and possibly clarifying thought experiment: Would you be willing to switch your standard of living with the standard of the median person living on this planet? (And I would urge you to look up what that looks like, in case you are unsure).
As long as you are not (and I sympathize) I have zero clue how to justify any delay in getting everyone at least to our current level.
I understand that there are risks and we should work hard to guard against them. But no society has seriously considered giving up driving while we figure out global warming. People want a good life, that's just the selfish fucks we are, and it's upon those with clout to will it for everyone.
> Why go from something objective/provable to something that does "strange things", when we already have former?
Because it does something different. It's not from/to. LLMs are subbing in for humans, not for deterministic computing. Replacing deterministic computing with LLMs for tasks that have be perfectly solved without LLMs would be wasteful and silly.
This is completely incoherent. Of course we need deterministic computer programs; much of society depends on it.
All software written will not disappear. There is nothing keeping us from using partly undeterministic software (see: humans) to write deterministic programs.
What does the N in NP stand for?
I'm a bit joking, but we've been working in deterministic computation for so long, we don't even think of there being another way.
But seriously, I do view AI as the input to a deterministic machine. Junior engineers (well all engineers) aren't deterministic, and we've made processes to direct their behavior towards making better software. AI agents do a better job of following my processes than engineers. We move up the stack towards testing and verification rather than writing. That doesn't make me sad, after 40 years of coding, I'm kind of tired of it. I have more ideas than I can code, so I'm happy to give AI my ideas and have it code for me.
I had a former manager tell me that all technology problems are really people problems, now maybe all technology problems are all agent problems and we just have to get comfortable with managing agents like we got comfortable with managing people.
> How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
How exactly do you think this is going to happen?
By trying! How else is it going to happen? Are we going to deny the immense potential? Nobody needs to draw up a specific plan for that to hold true, we are good at figuring shit out and using tools.
I am not saying it's going to work but we are not getting much smarter right now, and we really need all the help we can get to accelerate more complicated stuff.
And it is accelerating! Will it be as useful as I hope it will be? That is entirely beside the point. This post was not at all about me assigning any chance of the good outcome. Just that there is no other ethical option.
> By trying! How else is it going to happen? Are we going to deny the immense potential?
Trying what, though? What is it? Immense potential for what? So far this entire comment doesn't actually say what you think we should do in any capacity. It doesn't really say anything at all.
> Reality is non-deterministic (not actually, but in practice).
At a quantum level, it is also actually non-deterministic.
That's a common misconception.
Care to elaborate?
>What if our lives get much, much better? Roughly everyone wants more out of life including the top one percent (and I don't mean the top 0.0001%, just your ordinary industrial nation doctors). How could we possibly morally justify denying everyone the best shot to get at least to that level, and I mean living people RIGHT NOW, ASAP not in a few hundred years?
This is satire, right?
If you seriously think that AI is going to improve the lives of anyone except the robber barons who own the AI you are absolutely delusional.
Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.
Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.
> there are plenty of places where machine learning algorithms make sense, but customer service is not one of them.
You're optimising for quality, where as companies optimise for some balance of quality and cost.
AI might not be quite as good as a skilled human, but it's often good enough and a lot cheaper, so companies use it.
I actually think customer service is one of the few places it makes sense to use AI – at least to some degree. AI can provide immediate support to customer queries, and can usually handle the majority of basic issues customers have. You might need to escalate to a human in edge cases, but that's how you balance quality and cost.
working with a non deterministic tool requires taste and judgement. if you want full determinism AI is not for you but it has a market for other people?
> Despite all of the skepticism, a whole lot of Americans also report using AI in their daily lives on an increasingly regular basis. About a quarter of Americans say they use AI chatbots on a daily basis. Those who do are typically using the chatbots for research purposes or for work, Pew says.
Yeah, we don't have a choice. These things were foisted upon us, and now we all just have to deal with it, so long as we want to keep being employed/employable.
Exactly, there is no full opt-out in any product people use daily.
Yes, "use this or be fired" tends to have an impact. A friend once made a analogy to opium: Sure, it's supposed to be addictive, but if you say no anyways, we're going to show up with gunboats.
Does not at all surprise me that people don't think losing their livelihoods would have a positive impact. Maybe AI companies should stop bragging about trying to do that if they're concerned about people hating them.
The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems.
Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
The success of AI doesn't hinge on whether you can vibecode it all or even one particular sector really well. For example, despite several attempts to make vibecoding PCBs, it's still pretty crap. But it's really useful as a copilot, human in the loop for targeted tasks in electronics. Same for CAD work, not so good at drawing but still useful at looking at an image, understanding it, and answering specific questions.
Whether the value attached to these companies is grounded in reality is a different question.
The reality is experience isn't codified in text.
It's passed person to person over long periods of time.
And you can't train an LLM on that.
Yes. For every line of code or documentation I write there is a lengthy internal dialog that can never be scraped & used by an LLM.
It can barely read a datasheet correctly, in my experience, getting confused between different registers.
I'll be more forgiving: I found it gets confused easily when it extracts text from a PDF because datasheets tend to be written in a not so parseable way for a machine. But 1) if you tell it to take screenshots of said datasheet, it'll have greater success. 2) We're in year n<5 (depends how you count) of the age of LLMs, this will get better over time. Either on the LLM side or the thing you feed to it.
screenshot of the 300-page datasheet? (not to mention the 4000 page TRM?) no thanks.
If the datasheet is only a few pages I'll read it myself :).
Yeah throw it at a moderately complex STM32 clock arrangement and see what comes out.
Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
"There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human."
I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.
Conversations about the costs of inference never consider the reality that API pricing is significantly higher than the operating costs.
Nor do they ever consider that the cost of datacenter hosted inference has to crash when the bubble pops and hardware vendors can't fill orders at sky high prices created by demand anymore and the hyperscalers can't keep things running near capacity at the high demand prices.
All of which leads to the ROI math for implementing AI looking much different.
Has everybody forgotten how much money Nvidia, TSMC, and all the hyperscalers are making, today, in pure profit? The costs of inference are high because we're in a bubble.
I think many of these problems still arise if inference is effectively free in monetary terms to the end user. In many economic processes, time to getting the final and correct answer is the major driver of profitability.
A human that hand-compiles 10,000 lines of C code is a very silly person. A human that works on device drivers and drops into assembly code for a dozen highly critical lines to enable real time communication can be irreplaceable. AI is a tool that can be highly useful and it's a tool with a number of large flaws that you need to acknowledge and account for. Knowing when it's worth using is a vital skill.
I think also, just seeing non-technical friends and family interact with it, there’s a lot of massaging you have to do right now to get it to work that just goes over their heads. Until they gets pushed behind an abstraction layer I see adoption crawling at a certain point.
Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
I'd argue the economy is propped up on pointless work providing employment. If you throw AI in that it'll contract and it'll either collapse entirely or move to a social care model that no one will foot and rapid class division. You'll end up with burning or unused datacentres that is all.
Any economic model that I've seen leads to failure. The only reason it's popular now is that numbers are going up. People are just edging it.
I’ve never seen these style arguments pass the “show me a good example” phase, at the scale that would be needed to “prop up the economy.”
Well look at my 500 seat company. We laid off 200 people with no measurable productivity impact. And we didn't embrace AI in the process.
We were just keeping the unemployment figures down.
Also look at the large tech companies. Same story.
Current layoffs are more correlated with overhiring during/after Covid. The fed money printer, growing national debt and low interest rates are more to blame.
I’m not in the US
Ok what’s your country’s monetary policy? Most print debt
It's more telling of the state of economy right now than AI.
Capital is simply going from bubble to bubble to pop. It was NFTs and Web3, then the metaverse, now it's AI. You need a new speculative product, market demand be damned. Ultimately the tech itself is inconsequential. Sure, AI is somehow more useful than an hashed png picture of a monkey smoking a joint, but the AI frenzy would've happened anyway.
I can imagine some other alternate universe where it's the turn of something already commonplace instead, like cloud computing; and the same CEOs who are screaming right now that we need to burn the ecosystem to build their new AI data centers would've told us that "The Cloud is inevitable", and that we need to spend 80% of the GDP to finance their AWS competitors.
AI seems more like a feature than a product.
If you mean the technology diffuses into all products and processes instead of some standalone production that maybe makes sense to me but the models themselves feel like a product
The models themselves feel like a product in the same way weather data/models are a product. Consumers don't buy/interact with them directly. They are built into more consumer facing products that people actually buy and use.
While some weather obsessed people will bemoan the difference between various data providers, most people just see the weather and don't know or care how the data gets there.
With the new Siri that's rolling out, I don't think most users would know or care if it was using Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, or even xAI on the backend. It's mostly trivia when they're all reasonably capable.
Well, they hope they are on such a path.
Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.
I don't disagree that coding agents have high adoption when it comes to software, but I do disagree that there's high adoption outside of this industry. There's no breakthrough "Claude Code but for non-tech industries" product out there that people are picking up in droves. My brother-in-law isn't using AI to manage his construction business, for example, and my sister isn't using it to run her non-profit daycare.
The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.
I think that's an optimistic take; the load bearing portion hasn't permeated traditional development.
Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.
The product is firing half your workforce. You don't need marketing, that sells itself in the B2B space.
To me I don’t really see this; electricity, the internet, etc: aggregate employment numbers don’t change work just gets shifted around. But your workers at the very least will be way more productive and that’s the sell.
On the other hand horse employment has taken a significant dive from the pre-electrification era.
And in response to this we have a very robust UBI system for horses
~~economy~~fascism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism#Techno-feudalism
This is hitting the nail exactly on the head.
Absolutely, you are right even though many may consider this too snarky. But herein lies the fork in the road.
- consider that right now autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models
- consider that fascist or authoritarian governments will now have a kind of access to their citizenry’s deeply personal lives that they’ve only dreamed about before. “Show me everyone who has insulted me” is now feasible to do at scale, today. A system that can monitor, in real time, a global sigint network on every single person equivalent or better than having a dedicated person or team of people monitoring them. Every home has microphones, every square inch of street has satellite imagery, security cameras, etc.
Now, given today where we are: what do we do? Do we regulate ourselves into a situation where people feel better about things like data center construction but that impact our ability to compete, ceding these technologies to other countries that would gain an incredible amount of leverage and power over us? Do we continue unabated, damaging communities and industries in a fervor to be at the top that later down the road we realize is not worth the tradeoff?
> autonomous drones operate in Ukraine using the latest and greatest frontier models
link? Seems infeasible from a latency standpoint.
I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad.
The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is.
Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view.
It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
Well, my conspiracy theory is that it’s the other way around: AI leaders know they’re never going to recoup money for their investors. Money will be become useless and no one will be any richer than anyone else (though everyone will be far richer than the riches person is today). But they have to promise a mountain of riches in the future because they need those resources today to build that future.
> writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
I honestly don't think writers have much of a say regarding what they write. The tone is set top down.
But given that most people hate AI it's a polarizing topic to write about, they have incentives to poor some oil, for sure.
Fine by me, AI is an anti-human technology.
44% of Americans believe AI will have a neutral impact while 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Just to note - about half as many Americans believe AI will have a positive impact as believe in telepathy. Believing AI will have a positive impact is officially a fringe belief.
I'm not even media and I'm demonising it. It's the hubris of the technology industry attempting to destroy society for financial gain only.
You should change the world by playing chess, not creating a new game and shitting on everyone playing the old one.
My only objective is doing damage it to it before it kills our pensions and 401k's etc.
The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
> I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though
That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
The media is largely owned by tech billionaires, so why would they be against their own products?
Altman, Amodei, Musk and other tech industry leaders (not to mention technologists like Hinton) are constantly making public statements that predict everything from massive job loss, to restructuring of society to the possibility of an end to our species. The media is taking their cue from the tech industry itself.
It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?
Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
I mean I can make a good meme with AI but it requires effort to ensure it is indistinguishable from a homegrown meme.
Does it need to?
If anything, it should continue and apply to anyone using AI.
nope!
Not ever profession has an insatiable desire to automate away their own jobs.
They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable.
>The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet
Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
Not quite. They don't operate like that.
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
They are having no problems raising capital. People are offering up their homes to get Anthropic stock.
>It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
How are they doing this? What are you referring to?
It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public.
Right now they have to lobby and manipulate the government just to keep from being shut down on a mad king's whim. A mad king elected and re-elected by the same morons who now demand a say in how AI is built and used. No, thanks.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem. The Republicans told us that, and they were right, just not in the way they meant.
They literally helped create the situation they are in.
No sympathy!
Anthropic, in particular, made a good-faith effort to meet the government halfway. You're seeing the (entirely predictable) result.
Right now Sam Altman is sitting at Trump's literal right hand, while Amodei is exiled to the kids' table: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u8gg19/anthrop...
Yep. He'll go down with them and your 401k's.
> ChatGPT is extremely popular
Citation needed. Most people use it once a while but not daily; they tried it once and played a bit with it but then forgot about it because it’s not clear what they should use it for.
It is the 5th most commonly visited website in the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-visited_websites
I don’t think that’s a useful metric. WhatsApp, TikTok have way more MAUs (3x and 2x) than ChatGPT and yet they are below it in that ranking, because people use apps rather than websites.
I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out.
This is very basic in technology products.
It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features)
A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
There needs to be a brutal humbling
Definitely. That'll have to come through economic instruments though rather than failure.
> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest.
You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.
It's interesting that many developing and Asian countries have a more positive view of AI: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/15/people-around-the-w...
How much of this is due to AI vs. the government and corporate structures in society? (Saw elsewhere that Chinese people were also much more optimistic)
Asian countries have governments that are at least seemingly vested in the interests of their populace. They have significant political and economic safety nets in place that can assure their populations that the government is at least somewhat aligned with the populace.
Instead for many western countries, chiefly The USA, You have a society that very blatantly is restructuring itself to service capital holders and not the population. These Governments are not aligned with their people, and are instead trying to solidify Stratified Economies where the entire engine of the country moves in service of its rich.
If the promise of AI is to provide intellectual labor in exchange for capital, the population loses its only remaining middle class made up of knowledge-workers which still hold a semblance of political power. If the middle collapses like this, the only means of social mobility will become high-risk gambles or crime.
Part of it is the ridiculous fear-based marketing campaign spearheaded by Anthropic et al. about how AI will automate all jobs and you'll be left behind. Works for enterprise/CEOs, predictably makes regular people hate the mere mention of AI, Asian countries don't have this nearly to the same extent.
Well most of it not really fear mongering, more like Americans are slowly waking up to the realization that consolidating the nations wealth to a few dozen people is not healthy for the country nor democracy.
Especially when you see what big tech spends on LLMs per year while Americans lack medicare for all, universal childcare, or free community college.
People have long hated the leadership of big tech well before ChatGPT, let's not act like this is all new and shocking. More like the naked power grabs are filling people with righteous digust.
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/01/nx-s1-5807131/tech-worker-chi...
an article on one person? cmon
it seems like Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries, and subsequently trust them more in distributing the benefits of AI (in aggregate ofc)
> Chinese people have much more faith in their govt than Western countries,
but you know why that is right (really hoping you know the difference and where this comes from and its not culture)
the govt helped lift many, many millions out of poverty since opening to the rest of the world?
polls/census/surveys mean absolutely nothing when publicly expressing distrust or criticism of the government carries severe penalties.
especially when the "poverty lift" is basically 600 million Chinese people struggling to make more than $140 USD / month
so you can't really hear anything bad about it when its illegal to say anything bad
probably because none of these polls can be trusted or accurate representation
but we trust the stat that 16 pct of americans have a positive view?
none includes the article in question.
polls are often done in a way to prove their own biases
if they were taken serious then what we are allowed to say or not would change drastically and political correctness would be laughed out of the room.
I guess I'd say the latter, although I think that fact does not quite have the valence that Western critics might assume. Vietnam, one of the most AI-positive countries in this poll, is explicitly planning (https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/commun...) to use AI to suppress dissent and achieve permanent authoritarian control of the Vietnamese information ecosystem. I think they might be right that it'll work!
The promoters of AI themselves seem pretty convinced of the negative impact to society. It seems to even be part of the marketing.
There’s very clearly a Substack of putting everyone out of work, reducing the power of labor, so a few can profit.
AI epitomises chasing a narrow definition of progress that benefits the few (increasing profits via automation) over a holistic definition of progress that benefits the many (reducing poverty, improving health, providing meaning). It's no wonder people hate it.
I love AI and use it every day. But comparing it to PC/internet/manufacturing/etc is IMHO not the right comparison.
Technology revolutions like PC, internet, smartphones, communication, etc – unfolded in this way: They create more jobs NOW in the hope of automating and reducing jobs in FUTURE.
AI is more comparable to outsourcing. It works in reverse: It reduces jobs NOW (which is happening right now) in the hope of creating more jobs in FUTURE (which is known not to happen).
> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.
> The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind.
Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok?
No wonder the general public still think AI is junk.
Update: here's the underlying report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.
I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.
By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.
The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)
I had a big culture shock moment when I had to prep some slides a few weeks back. I'd assumed it would be a breeze now: I've always been good at making slide decks, I had a clear classification-friendly idea of exactly what I wanted them to look like, and there's even an AI native integration! Nope, didn't work, just had to shuffle components around like I always have.
Ah, they're using the wrong model, of course. "AI" hasn't failed, it's the users who are wrong.
Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?
It's not that Claude is better, it's that Gemini and Copilot are so overwhelmingly bad.
Especially the free tiers. Meta AI, too.
Weaker models and less powerful harnesses give people a very sub-par experience compared to what you get if you pay for access to the better tools and models.
Normal users aren't using harnesses in the sense developers think of them. They're interacting with models where they've been shoehorned in for no good reason, or they're using them nearly entirely through chat interfaces.
Yes. There’s not really any doubt about it.
Yeah, I'm sure the public will totally 180 on AI as soon as the newest model release rolls out lmfao
People here genuinely think public perception on AI is a model issue, that's how you know it's become an echo chamber.
Surprisingly high number given that people are being told by tech CEO that AI will replace all white collar jobs soon and a few years later AI guided robots will replace all blue collar jobs too.
Source Link - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an... is a better link.
My observation of society is that, by default, people tend to have a belief system of "most tech that existed before I was born was fine; any new tech is bad/unnecessary".
So it doesn't surprise me that people are predisposed to not like this particular new tech.
AI seems to have a different impact here: https://fortune.com/2026/05/20/why-do-kids-hate-ai-gen-z-bac...
Not surprising and well deserved: our industry has done a remarkably poor job at balancing public and shareholder interests. Of course that isn’t the _only_ industry in this situation, but its deep intricacies into personal lives and psyches has made it particularly bad.
The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.
I am mixed on the question.
Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Professionally, I have run my programs and scripts through Copilot/OpenAI and sometimes received caustic and fiery criticism, but others praise with helpful suggestions. Oftentimes it does make fundamental mistakes.
The threats of the end of the white collar class are not unduely worrying to me, as my retirement is close. Still, the whole of the culture is begin driven neurotic.
My answers to this question are personal, and atypical. Perhaps there will be general good in this somewhere, though it may be hard to see.
> Claude has been quite helpful in reviewing my investments, and I have made a fair amount of money on his advice. His availability is unparalleled compared to any sort of financial planner.
Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?
"In a bull market, everyone's a genius."
This. The gains made by Claude stock picks should be compared a reasonable alternative investment strategy over the same timeframe.
After hearing recently that oil is very likely going to $160 per barrel or more, I knew that I had to get out of the S&P500 in my 401k (FXAIX) and similar growth funds in my Roth.
He really laid out the case for alternate funds in real estate and mortgage securities, with a bit more precious metals.
I really didn't want to lose the gains I have made over the last year, and I think this will do it.
When oil hits even $145/bbl come back here and say “I told you so”. Until then I firmly believe oil will never get to anywhere close to $160/bbl.
This is not surprising. The AI folks, especially people like Dario, kept screaming from the bottom of their lungs that AI is bad, AI is dangerous, AI is going to grab X% of the jobs, wealth is going to concentrate to about 10M people, and etc. Why would average Americans think positively of AI at all?
It looks those guys are acting on asymmetrical risks: if they speak optimistically about AI yet they are wrong down the road, they may get angry mobs. If they speak pessimistically about AI and they are wrong, the worst is that they get mocked.
It is to America’s great fortune that her technological innovations are not passed by committee. In particular, polls always capture the status quo. Other things that were widely unpopular: interracial marriage, gay marriage. And especially for technology, public opinion led to the stalling of fission power in the US.
So hurray for ignoring the majority of people. I’m glad people can offer other people services in a generally neutral way without needing to pass a committee.
Interracial and gay marriage were not "wildly unpopular" "technological innovations". What an extraordinary stretch to try to tie the in-fact deeply unpopular, job-destroying and wealth-concentrating AI boom to human--HUMAN--rights victories.
Stubbing my toe fucking sucks, but perhaps the fact that I think it sucks is actually evidence that it is secretly a good thing!
This but unironically
Slavery is currently wildly unpopular in the US. Does that mean that the public is therefore wrong and slavery will be making a comeback soon?
Everyone is going to dislike this comment because you're cutting across two different polarized groups and comment sections rarely champion the middle ground.
Also because it’s factually false, and it’s doubtful to compare human rights and AI.
Everyone is going to dislike because the opinion is moronic, frankly. Should we compare emancipation of slaves to a toaster next?
Polls like these always remimnd me that I need set up a investing strategy that does the opposite of public sentiment.
Amusingly, I actually tried something like this using /r/wallstreetbets and there was no signal I could extract on a sufficiently small scale. Far dominated by Trump antics and rate actions. Perhaps others will have better luck.
Throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not think the Apollo moon missions were worth the cost.
This comment is a fantastic example of AI-proponents' hubris, delusion, and fundamental lack of understanding of humanity these days. Great work.
This is definitely a take.
This is an insane take.
Also wrong, gay marriage had 60% support before Obergefell v. Hodges.
imo the negative sentiment is less a practical response to AI specifically, and more an emotional response to digital technology in general.
Eg: i think my kids will likely be more comfortable, have more convenience, than me — but i worry a lot they will be more anxious and lonely.
I don’t personally believe this gets solved through regulation, religion, or self-discipline.
imo we just need technology products that drastically reduce the cost of things that make us less anxious and lonely
Unless you’re in the top 5-10% of American society, it’s unclear that your kids will be more comfortable than you. Data here:
https://economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Needs-...
At the core, this is what the pessimism is about. If AI replicates the advent of personal computers and the Internet, our society will look more like India where everyone has technology but only 5-10% of people live really well
The biggest threat isn't the bomb, bioweapon or AI supremacy. The true threat is AI's impact on human learning and development.
Will AI have a positive impact on society in China?
The industrial revolution is undoubtedly one of the greatest achievements in human history.
What everyone glosses over is that it really sucked for the workers that lived thru it. Highly skilled jobs like weaving became obsolete and the low-skill factory work that replaced it, paid little more than a starvation wage.
I believe the current pessimistic atmosphere has very little to do with AI.
Sure, only 16% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact. But if you ask if they believe smart phone, social media, metaverse, crypto, etc will have a positive impact I highly doubt you'll get a much bigger number.
It's hard to balance the downsides (devastating job losses that will affect certain fields) with the upsides (curing diseases, increasing efficiency in ways that will reduce costs of many goods).
Is something a net benefit if everything is cheaper and cancer is cured, but you have no job?
Is something a net benefit if the upsides are hypothetical and the downsides are extant?
You think it's unclear as to whether AI will accelerate the rate at which diseases are cured? And if jobs are eliminated, that means costs will necessarily go down.
I'm surprised how much people downvoted this comment. It acknowledges the upsides and downsides and doesn't say which is greater. It acknowledges that some people will have some very negative impacts. I guess if you think it's all good or all bad, then you would disagree with my open minded take...
AI is still a tool for complex tasks. Reaching impactful everyday use for regular users will take time. It is not clear who they interviewed for this study. It would be good to see how people in specific industries feel about AI.
It's weird. For me the problem stems from how society uses AI, not from AI itself. I personally had totally positive experiences in my job but seeing people using ChatGPT like some magic truth machien is scary.
Without corporations and trillionaires involved would they think differently perhaps?
I don't think it's AI. I think it's the apathetic voterbase finally waking up to just how much tax dodging is going on.
They are all on this forum!
Well, everywhere AI is being sold in a way to replace humans. Humans don't want to think about having to use a product at work that is genuinely aimed at actually replacing their job.
I think views on AI are not really views on AI, they are views on capitalism. People don't feel optimistic that AI's impact will benefit ordinary people because, even if works out, the benefit will accrue only to capital owners. This view feels pretty understandable to me, but is ultimately orthogonal to whether AI is useful and effective for the kind of tasks we want to leverage it for.
This is an accurate take. From a tech perspective, AI and ML are great. It's a neat and successful experiment that has a lot to offer.
The fact it's being pushed on all of us as this panacea for the cost of human effort is just disgusting, even if the technology is truly impressive.
Every company salivated at the thought of using AI to enrich themselves, but not a single thought seems to have been given to the human element of it all.
That's part of it, but views on AI are also views on art and authenticity. I'm a huge fan of AI for coding, research and writing for work. When I see AI generated images, music or anything else "creative" my reaction has grown to be pretty negative. It's all got NFT vibes aesthetically.
I was absolutely blown away by Stable Diffusion and that AI could generate images, now I'm kind of disgusted with it. We've been flooded with low artistic value output and people are having a natural reaction to that.
Agree. I actually think we'll see a resurgence in art and graphic design as a consequence. At least for now people can spot AI generated artifacts and many immediately have a negative reaction to it. I don't read blog posts that feature AI generated images, even though they are only slightly worse than stuff cribbed form Unsplash.
The thing is the vast majority has never given a shit about authenticity though. All of the top pop stars are performing music made by committees and designed by marketing teams. Most music sold is and has been lowest common denominator trash since TV was invented. It's hilarious to see some Katy Perry fan frothing at the mouth about AI not being authentic art. As if they ever cared. Most mainstream entertainment is designed to placate and distract. And I'm not even saying mainstream is bad, there's nothing wrong with catchy. It's the crocodile tears over authenticity that bothers me.
I think it's a sliding scale. I love a well cooked meal and would never eat McDonalds, but I could see how someone who does eat at McDonalds wouldn't want to live off Soylent. Maybe a better way to put it is that Katy Perry is on the right side of the uncanny valley.
Yeah but it's a sliding scale where average food is a 5 out of 10, McDonald's is a 1, and soylent is 0.5. It's nonsensical.
I think there are some gems in the media space, the Lord Of The Rings Disco song is a certified banger, AI or not.
But yes, there is so so much slop as well
AI will be the most important thing to happen to art. We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art. Art is not valuable because of this. AI removes the part I never cared about. I never cared that a guitarist can physically play 1500 notes a second.
You sound like people who claim AI is freeing because it has removed the gatekeeping of programming when programming was never gatekept, all you needed to do was dedicate time to learn.
Your premise doesn't even make that much sense given that Knockin' on Heaven's Door uses only the three chords(G, C, Am) and they are some of the most common chords in music.
> We have tolerated low quality art for far too long because we pretend mechanical dexterity is what makes art, art.
Who is “we” in this sentence? A tiny subsection of metalheads? The vast majority of people aren’t seeking out the most mechanically dexterous musicians to listen to.
The empirical data doesn’t support this view.
Capitalism approval rates in the US is much more favorable than 16%.
That makes sense, but I would love to see the data on it. I don't doubt at all that capitalism in isolation is viewed more favourably in the US, but that doesn't preclude the intersection of AI and capitalism being viewed less favourably.
I suppose my comment should've said "views on AI aren't solely views on AI, they are views on AI as it intersects with capitalism"
Here’s a recent gallup poll.
You’re right that the AI opinions are largely colored by the business practices around it.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694835/image-capitalism-slips.a...
The one and only product for AI is labor displacement and wage suppression. That's why companies love it. That's why people hate it. We don't live in a society where the benefits will be shared. We live in a society that would rather let people die in the streets than potentially hurt shareholder value.
We are bouldering towards the total collapse of society. To me, it's like 10,000 people want to rule the post-apocalyptic world (Fallout style) where asking "maybe we shouldn't have the apocalypse?" is heresy.
the AI bros would counterargue and say that with all the increased productivity, it will just open up more opportunities and thus more jobs. But, i don't think we're seeing that. Net jobs seems to be going down.
It'd be interesting to see how many people thought cars would have a positive impact on society back in the day.
Cars are not something that didn’t exist and then was suddendly invented; it has slowly evolved over centuries.
This number will go up in maybe ... 10 years?
That's what I am thinking. Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI. That is not true for most people.
> Things are moving fast so from the inside the tech bubble it seems that everyone wants to use AI.
Is it really 'want', or is it FOMO?
This isn't terribly surprising. Americans either think AI is so good that it will replace their jobs, or AI is so bad that it will cause too many mistakes. Their beliefs aren't unfounded, but it gets more accurate by the quarter. I personally think it all just shifts - AI becomes much more reliable and accurate over time, and as such, we all use it to be 30-100% more effective at our work.
An instantaneous measure of a sentiment undergoing an exponential decay I sense
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
Also relevant: Ten Percent Of U.S. High School Students Graduating Without Basic Object Permanence Skills - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssjokgx0pUQ
It behooves every company working on some form of actual AI to immediately switch branding to distance themselves from the slop bots. Call it image recognition, automated translate, inventory automation, what have you.
I tried to use claude for a completely menial task yesterday, adding some resistant-starch foods to my diet, and it was worse than useless. Actively wasting my time with claims that buckled as soon as I questioned them and completely falsified citations from product pages that it recommended.
If you are branding your product as "AI" when these word salad spitters are still dominating headlines, you deserve all the headwinds coming to you.
Most of the west is going to be fucked. We, in the west, are optimizing towards more profit. Poor get poorer every year and rich get richer. We lead multiple wars which we finance with public money. The profits go to the rich again.
China is confucian, and, unlike the west, they value a different thing.
The rich seem to forget that one can not take the riches to the grave. All the great art that explains it is forgotten and never looked at.
If in the past the rich subsidized building churches and schools and housing for the poor, nowadays rich just rake more money. They never have enough.
The outlook is bleak.
I think one positive thing that might come of this is for AI to act as a sort of counterweight to the fragmentation of reality into different filter bubbles.
It might be difficult to make models that have useful, high intelligence, but also are very biased. It could create a sort of grounding in logic and reality.
Grok might actually be early evidence of this. Despite the bad press it gets, it's really not so bad.
One can always hope ...
I think that the smartphone is the single worst thing to happen, not so much AI. AI will hopefully help deal with reckless people typing in their smartphones while driving etc.
Make no mistake: I am as much perpetrator as victim. While I am having even days off of my smartphone and never use it during driving, I am at least as much affected and addicted as most of us.
Tech companies have basically just milked advertising dollars from trad media, and centralized malls into websites.
Now we have dystopian warehouses and cars driving all over.
We get more, but we do less.
We interact with more of the world, but we interact with people less.
It makes us unhappy.
Do you think we came to this opinion via an understanding of AI? I don't.
Like any positive at all, or a net positive?
Given the overall effects on society, AI use is a little like setting your neighbor's house on fire so that you can roast marshmallows.
Marshmallows are pretty tasty, I guess.
Most of what AI is visibly used for is very unwelcome for American consumers: spam, propaganda, bad art, bad memes, marketing calls, bad phone support... Then the future promise is mass unemployment... of course Americans are negative on it. What is the upside for them?
Must be missing some zeroes. There's no way that AI techbros and major shareholders are 16% of the US. Must be more like .0016%.
Not everyone who likes something that you don't like is an X-bro, so maybe that clears things up.
It's the people not technology. Way back before AI was the hot issue, Eric Schmidt set a new bar for being tone deaf by going straight for saying privacy is dead get over it. Not "here are some tools to retain some privacy," not "here is some legislation to punish privacy violations," just get over it.
It's gotten worse from there. The "dark enlightenment." Flirting with fascism. Creating the biggest meme stocks in history and promoting that as accomplishment. You're not fooling enough people. We might not be in your face about it, but we know you're not good people.
Now I wonder what they think will have a positive impact on society.
I think that AI would make a good replacement for the government. Or at least the executive branch.
I think that AI is a great way to sum our collective will. Better than representation by ambitious businessmen.
And a foolish 16 % at that
The public is always against new technology that makes jobs obsolete.
This is awkward because the immense progress of the last 250 years has mostly come from such technology. Yet few people are aware of this.
I hope we can continue to progress by eliminating jobs, but the current backlash is probably the biggest I've seen in my life.
>The public is always against new technology that makes jobs obsolete.
What backlash was there to the computer?
A lot of boomers to this day have an intense phobia of computers. My grandpa retired early because he refused to learn how to use a computer.
Half of Americans voters elected Trump. Most people are idiots, I wouldn’t use that as a gauge yet.
It's pretty telling that only 16% have a positive view on it, then. If even Trump has more than twice as high approval than your product, you've royally fucked up.
It's interesting that you (and, I'm guessing, a majority of HN folk who comment) feel that conservative intellectuals like Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hanson, John Mearsheimer, Niall Ferguson, Harvey Mansfield, Heather Mac Donald to quote only a few, voted for Trump. Are these people idiots or partook of some low scheming advantage as a result?
This wildly assumes that "I voted for $candidate" means "I like $candidate." Every presidential election cycle we get served up two turds, one with a (D) and the other with an (R) by their name, and we have to pick which turd we'd like to ruin our country for us the least.
Ah, you must be one of those enlightened centrists that doesn't recognize a shifting overton window even if it grabs you by the....
while I’d say that was true in most elections, this one the choices for the future couldn’t be more stark. The dude just had a UFC on the white house lawn, for instance, and fell into the Iran/Israel trap every previous president had avoided. But yeah, Kamala and Trump are the same level of turdness /s.
But, Brawndo's got electrolytes.
What do combat sports have to do with anything?
Correctly punctuated it's "combat" "sports" being neither combat nor a sport.
A generous response
Kamala is a turd regardless of how much worse Trump is. She was advocating the status quo while people are worried we are maintaining an unsustainable path and their lives are only getting harder.
When one person says we are going to slowly drive a train off a cliff and the other says they will drive quickly but may or may not drive off a cliff, I understand why many people at the front of the train would take the risk of voting for an unpredictable speed demon.
Trump sells all sorts of things. Anyone buying any of it is a fool.
I agree. But when the opposition tells you your shitty life will remain shitty in a best case scenario it isn't very inspiring or invigorating which you need to entice people to actually go vote for someone.
Yeah, why not make up a bunch of lies?
Or why not make an actual plan to improve things and solve problems instead of throwing in the towel before you even start?
It also doesn't help to be a prosecuting attorney that extorted poor people for judicial profit. Only the wealthy view prosecutors as good people.
>Or why not make an actual plan to improve things and solve problems instead of throwing in the towel before you even start?
I don't know, you tell me? According to you it's reasonable enough in this scenario.
What has Trump done that makes a meaningful positive difference in the lives of people making less than $250k/year?
I never said he did, I never said I support him or anything he does. But Trump being a complete idiot doesn't make Kamala not shitty and uninspiring to voters.
> But Trump being a complete idiot doesn't make Kamala not shitty and uninspiring to voters
Okay, and? Did anyone even dispute that?
Just a reminder that the baddie isn't technology, but capitalism.
It's the medium, not the message.
AI is capitalism gone wild.
50% of the S&P 500 valuation is now directly related to AI as are 40% of new layoffs.
A quote often attributed to Stalin/Lenin/Marx is something like, "Capitalists will sell the rope to be used to hang them".
AI is taking this even further. Corps are effectively borrowing tons of money in order to build the rope to hang the middle class --- to be followed by hanging themselves.
The idea that you can lay off the middle class and business will continue as usual is a capitalistic fantasy. Without jobs, people can't afford to buy products built with AI.
Citations, please
Just ask AI --- "What percentage of S&P 500 market cap is AI related?".
AI wouldn't lie to you --- would it?
- polls can manipulate people to give the answer a pollster wants.
- half of everyone is below average.
- americans, unbelievably, voted to re-elect Trump.
The fact that 16 percent of americans are short-sited, ignorant and speak in contradiction to their best interests should surprise no one.
It's a shame, as AI will improve healthcare on an unprecedented scale.
I cannot get a specialist without referrals and endless appointments to spend more than 30min to discuss how to fix a serious issues. Claude? Hours and hours of back and forth. Public models now beat the specialized ones like OpenEvidence. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04431-5
Diagnostics is getting blown apart by AI, the best cancer screening will be available in even remote corners of this world.
We were constrained by the available brain mass of highly trained specialists - and this bottleneck is getting removed.
Hard not to be optimistic on AI if you're in healthcare.
People don’t even know what it is, they think it’s chat bots. Useless statistic.
In the meantime, AI has given scientists 20 years of incredible tools, from which we now reap the fruits in our daily lives
it’s not been useful anywhere else - no self driving cars, no laundry helpers - just some idiotic animatronic carcasses that are barely able to walk around, and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
No this is just the ones people understand. An AI that folds proteins for you is world altering, it’s just not as sexy as “killer drone”.
The most lucrative uses of deep neural networks today are ad targeting and recommendation algorithms. Those are other places.
No this is, again, just the front facing uses that people fixate on.
The most lucrative uses should be in fintec, just by the shear volumes of cash there
I saw over a dozen self driving cars on my way to work today. Weave Robotics launched a laundry helper months ago, although my sense is that "laundry folding" is a bit of a meme and people don't actually care very much about automating it.
I strongly disagree. Tedious yet necessary and ultimately unending tasks are exactly what the average person wants from automation.
Yes, but we just don’t fold that much laundry and you can easily do it while watching streaming videos. Most people don’t even own a laundry folding board.
I think you're underestimating how much laundry there is for families. But in general, it's one of the tedious things that people want automation to handle. They may not buy something just for folding laundry, but if it can do other household chores I think it could be a big success. That's a ways off in the future, though.
> and semi autonomous killer bots on ukraine frontlines.
They did fully autonomous tests in 2022 through 2024. Something like everything in a 5km radius was dead. Various sources in mainstream media online about this now.
Replace 'AI' with any other technology. Imagine if only 16% of people thought that the invention of the wheel or soap would have a positive impact.
The overall greater good of humanity matters more than anything else.
This is less insightful than what people might want to read into it. The democratic party has adopted an anti-ai stance as a position in the partisan football game. NPR tote bag carriers read with great concern about AI's terrible water usage (in reality a tiny fraction of that used in things such as lawns), and about the fact that it can do a better job than amateur artists.
On the other side, you don't see a similar upswell in support from the right. AI companies are from San Francisco, and their CEOs are weird, awkward, and probably gay abortion lovers.
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
Stated preferences vs revealed preferences. People say they don't like it but they still use it.
That's a false dichotomy; I prefer kayaking over work, but I still have to work.
We've all seen stories about performance evaluations that include "how much AI are you using?" We've all seen Microsoft shove it into the OS and even the physical keyboard. We've all had the little suggestions pop up in Gmail.
ChatGPT has a billion users and it's estimated most are consumers not enterprise users. It's about 40 million paid consumer vs 9 million enterprise users. Once they file their S-1 we'll see exact figures.
How does a billion break down into 49 million? I'm assuming you mean 400 and 90 million?
I think they mean the vast majority are using the free version to do silly shit.
I think people don't like it being shoved in their faces and crammed down every hole. No one needs a Copilot key on their keyboard, or an AI summary in prime screen real estate of a Google search. These things (EDIT: by which I mean LLMs) are useful, but they're not that useful. They're not so useful that they should suffuse through every part of every piece of software.
> No one needs a Copilot key on their keyboard [...]
You mean the thing that replaced the right Ctrl key on new laptops? Microsoft needs to leave my modifiers alone, dammit!
Come to think of it, bringing back "Hyper" (both left and right) could be cool.
Present me with the option to ban generative AI worldwide, and I will show you what my revealed preference is.
If you're going to lose your job if you don't use it, you may use it (but still wish you lived in a world where AI does not exist).
Do they? And if so, by choice?
I don’t like “AI”, and I don’t use it. I read lots of stories where people are forced to use it at work but don’t use it otherwise. Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?
> Do you know of people who don’t think “AI” will have a positive impact on society but still choose to use it?
Yes. Per your previous statement, those people who are “forced” to use it at work. While it might be a requirement of their job, what job they do is usually a choice.
People say it will have negative impact on society. That does not mean they think they can avoid using it in work. That does not have to imply they will jump hoops to avoid it in google search.
This has absolutely nothing with stated vs revealed preference.
Or maybe people are forced to use it whether they like it or not? Come on.