Comment by honestthrow1

+65536

But, tech was not always a net negative.

As far as I can tell, the sharpest negative inflection came around the launch of the iPhone. Facebook was kind of fine when it was limited to universities and they weren't yet doing mobile apps, algorithmic feeds or extensive A:B testing..

It seems "optimizing engagement," was a grave initial sin...

Maybe some engineers should to go back to their childhoods and watch some Outer Limits and pay attention to the missed lessons..

Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others. Past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

So the problem is society’s lack of any coherent ethical framework that says building powerful disruptive technology shall be done like this. If you’re tired, then go fix that problem. Find the answer. Because I’m *exhausted* hearing about how everybody is supposed to risk putting food on their table by telling the big boss they won’t make the feature because it’s unclear whether it might be a net negative for society under one contorted version of an angsty ethical framework a small minority of people have ad-hoc adopted on that orange message board… and that _scares_ them.

The luddites get a bad rap these days, but we need more of them.

> net negative to the total population, without developer questioning their role in it.

I am tired of people blaming bottom developers, while CEOs get millions for "the burden of responsibility".

There is technology, related technical advancements and then there is this business incentives to make money. A lot of progress has indeed been made in NLP, information retrieval which is helpful in its own ways to speed up thing, it can easily be seen as next level of automation.

Everything else around it is a glamorous party cause everyones money is riding on it and one needs to appreciate it or risk being deserted by the crowd.

The basics of science is around questioning things until you get convinced. People depending on models too much may end up in a situation where they would loose the ability to triangulate information from multiple sources before being convinced about it.

Programming can be more complicated above a certain threshold even for humans so it would be interesting how the models perform with the complexity. I am skeptic but again I dont know the future either.

> They never mention the "skeptics" that are considered that because they aren't skeptical of what AI is and could be capable.

This is because most people on HN who say they are skeptical about AI mean skeptical of AI capabilities. This is usually paired with statements that AI is "hitting a wall." See e.g.

> I'm very skeptical. I see all the hype, listen to people say it's 2 more years until coding is fully automated but it's hard for me to believe seeing how the current models get stuck and have severe limitations despite a lot of impressive things it can do. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43634169]

(that was what I found with about 30 seconds of searching. I could probably find dozens of examples of this with more time)

I think software developers need to urgently think about the consequences of what you're saying, namely what happens if the capabilities that AI companies are saying are coming actually do materialize soon? What would that mean for society? Would that be good, would that be bad? Would that be catastrophic? How crazy do things get?

Or put it more bluntly, "if AI really goes crazy, what kind of future do you want to fight for?"

Pushing back on the wave because you take AI capabilities seriously is exactly what more developers should be doing. But dismissing AI as an AI skeptic who's skeptical of capabilities is a great way to cede the ground on actually shaping where things go for the better.

Ethical bottom for industry as a whole (there will always be niche exceptions) is typically the law. And sometimes not even that when law can't be enforced effectively or the incentives are in favor of breaking the law.

The current incentive is not improving humanity.

For ai companies, its to get a model which can be better on benchmarks and vibes so that it can be sota and get higher valuation for stakeholders.

For coders, they just want the shit done. Everyone wants the easy way if his objective is to complete a project but for some it is learning and they may not choose the easy way.

Why they want to do it the easy way, mostly as someone whose cousin's and brother's are in this cs field(i am still in high school), they say that if they get x money then the company at least takes a 10x value of work from them. (Of course, it may be figuratively). One must imagine why they should be the one morally bound in case ai goes bonkers.

Also, the best not using ai would probably stop it a little but the ai world moves so fast, its unpredictable, deepseek was unpredicted. I might argue that now its a matter of us vs China in this new arms race of ai. Would that stop if you stop using it? Many people are already hating ai but has that done much to stop it? If that is, you call ai stopping at the moment.

Its paradoxical. But to be Frank, LLM was created for the reason Its excelling at. Its a technological advancement and a moral degradation.

Its already affecting supply chain tbh. And to be frank, I am still using ai to build projects which I just want to experiment with and see if it can really work without getting the domain specific knowledge. Though I also want to learn more and am curious but just don't have much time in high school.

I don't think people cared about privacy and I don't think people would care about it now. And its the same as not using some big social media giant, you can't escape it. The tech giants also made it easier but less private. People chose the easier part and they would still choose the easy part ie llm. So I guess the future is bleak eh? Well the present isn't that great either. Time to just enjoy life while the world burns by the regret of its past actions for 1% shareholder profit. (For shareholders, it was all worth it though, am I right?)

My 0.02$

Unfortunately Capitalism unhindered by regulation is what we wanted, and Capitalism unhindered by regulation is what we have. We, in the western world, were in the privileged position of having a choice, and we chose individual profit over the communal good. I'm not entirely sure it could have been any other way outside of books given the fact we're essentially animals.

Hear! Hear!