Comment by akagusu

No they don't want that, because it could lead to an uprising against them. They want us provided with the essentials in exchange for being dutiful workers, so we have something to lose.

Everyone should live in pods stacked together, eat insects, not drive our own automobiles around or fly places, we should be able to get our entertainment and everything to keep ourselves happy from their subscription entertainment services. Basically we are to consume as little as possible to barely keep ourselves alive and sane while they sail themselves around to pat one another on the backs at their climate and economic conferences on their billion dollar luxury yachts.

Actually no that would be stupid they don't have the time or patience to sail their yachts around. They have crew for that. They will fly in one of their handful of private jets and have the yacht meet them there.

Doubtful. More likely that there will be robocops to stop you from loitering in the scenic places.

It can even help you learn to tie a noose.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chatbot+suicide

14-year-old Sewell Setzer III https://apnews.com/article/chatbot-ai-lawsuit-suicide-teen-a...

16-year-old Adam Raine https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx...

Every strata of society has been getting richer and richer along with technological progress. What makes you think that would change now?

For just $19.99/mo no doubt.

Based on what evidence? The last few times this happened the whole world benefitted.

Yeah it’s a complicated picture and of course nobody knows, but it would be helpful to split “benefits” into things like;

- net benefits to the average person (considering drawbacks)

- overall relative benefits compared to income groups

- benefits in certain areas of society and topics

I think there’ll be some “benefits for all” in terms of things like medical advances and health technology. There will also be broader benefits to all in general areas but as a parent poster said it’ll benefit equity holders most and there might be some bad tradeoffs (like we’ll have access to much better information and entertainment but it may also affect the overall employment rate). It’s a very nuanced picture and it’s probably disingenuous of some tech leaders to say “we’ll all benefit) but some do believe that will be the future.

Energy, raw materials, and logistics still remain. I don't think we'll ever get to a place where there isn't some input to a production process that is not infinite and free.

I can’t speak for others countries but here in the UK special “VIP lanes” were used to steal billions using fraudulent PPE contracts.

I’m not just talking about Baroness Mone either. PPE Medpro was the tip of the iceberg.

Cite?

How so?

Are you being objective or just romanticizing the past?

Just to use your example: YouTube is filled with talented writers and storytellers, who would have never been able to share their content in the past. *And* the traditional media complex is richer than ever.

I don’t think average quality matters. Just what you want to consume.

If anything, I’d be more open to the opposite argument. Media is so much richer and more engaging that it actually makes our lives worse. The quality of the drugs is too high!

The political instability that came with social media isn't great, either.

Undeniably better off in every single way. Minimum is that the price of long distance phone calls is now zero, let alone video calls. Being able to speak to family and see them nonstop is incredible.

Expand the thinking to include impact on developing countries, the poor, minority groups who have few people like themselves in their local area, etc.

I’ll grant that for comparatively wealthy, privileged people who were always going to have an easy time (which frankly include me), the internet has been a mixed bag.

But for the kids growing up in comparatively poor countries, who can now access all of the world’s information, entertainment, and economy.. I think it’s a pretty clear win.

I expect AI will be similar: perhaps not a huge boon to the best off, but a substantial improvement for most people in the world. Even if we can sit back and say “oh, but they also get misinformation and lower quality YouTube content”

Ib the US, 1995 by far!!!

1995 (and I was 22 in 1995)

Given my skillset at age 22? Yeah, I'll take 1995. I was old enough to grow up hearing how great the world was going to be if I learned computer programming just to enter the job force at the start of the dotcom bubble burst. 1995 would have been a major upgrade.

Also, knocking that almost decade off my birthday would assure that I spent most of my adult life with the luxury of thinking that energy didn't have negative externalities that were being forced on later generations.

We had Chomsky-esq "any major world power is kind of fascist if you think about it" instead of literal talk by politicians about putting people in camps if they don't like your diet or country of origin.

TV was pretty bad I guess but music was great and I read more back then.

There was a lot of huffing and puffing about gang violence. I grew up on the street the local gang named themselves after and it only marginally touched my life at all.

Housing was dirt cheap, food was dirt cheap, gas was dirt cheap. There was undeveloped land everywhere around the city I live in and it gave a general sense of potential.

What exactly was so bad about the 90's?

Does it have to be for the analogy to work?

Probably. The the internet was more clear cut. Moores law all the things. Governments investing in pipe etc.

AI harder to tell. Will 2026 models kick 2025 ass or just be slightly better. Who knows.

> This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.

Totally agree with this

>The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software

I'm mixed on this, ultimately its the responsibility of individuals to adapt. AI makes people way more capable than they have ever been. It's on them to make something of it

> but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.

I'm not sure this is true, it enables individuals like they never have been before. Yes there are the model infrastructure providers, but they are in a race to the bottom

You're most likely correct in thinking 'we would get there eventually'. But in the case of medicine, would you like to make that case to those who don't have the time to wait for 'eventually' - or who'll spend their lives in misery?

It's a matter of prompt engineering, you have to be a really good engineer to pick the correct words in order to get the cure for cancer from ChatGPT, or the actual crabby patty recipe

;)

Here are some domain-specific examples of how AI improved (not replaced) human performance like a tool:

1. How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein...

This is about DeepMind's AlphaFold 2. It's arguably a big deal in medical science. How do you propose humans do it?

2. Code vulnerability detection across different programming languages with AI Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11710

> What theorems are meaningful and impactful that humans can’t prove without AI?

I'm not a mathematician. I cannot give a definitive answer. But I read somewhere that some proofs these days fill an entire book. There is no way anybody is creating that without machine validation and assistance. AI is the next step in that, just like how programming support is advancing from complex tools to copilots. I know that overuse of copilots is a reason for making some developers lose quality. But there are also experienced developers who have found ways to use them optimally to significantly increase their speed without filling the code base with AI slop. The same will arguably happen with Mathematics.

The point ultimately is, I don't have definitive answers to any of the questions you ask. I'm not a domain expert in any of those fields and I can't see the future. But none of that is relevant here. What's relevant is to understand how LLMs and AI in general can be leveraged to augment your performance in any profession. The exact method may vary by domain. But the general tool use will be similar. Think of it like "How can a computer help me do accounting, cook a meal, predict weather, get me an xray or pay my bills?" It's as generic as that.

I would have loved to engage in a conversation, if only to learn something new. But something in the way you framed your reply tells me that that's not what you have in mind. Instead, here's what Dr. Terrence Tao thinks about the same subject [1]. Honestly, I can relate to what he says.

I'm not someone who likes or promotes LLMs due to the utterly unethical acts that the big corporations committed to make profits with them. However, people often forget that LLMs are a technology that was developed by people who practice Mathematics and Computer Science. That was also PhD level work. The fact that LLMs got such a bad reputation has nothing to do with those wonderful ideas, but was a result of the greed of those who are obsessed with endless profits. LLMs aren't just about vacuuming up the IP on the internet, dumping kilotonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere or endless streams of AI slop and low effort fakes.

Human minds process logic and the universe in extraordinary ways. But it's still very limited in the set of tools it uses to achieve that. That's where LLMs and AI in general raise the tantalizing possibility of perceiving and interpreting domains under Mathematics and Physics in ways that no living being has ever done or even imagined. Perhaps its training data won't be stolen text or art. It could be the petabytes of scientific data locked up in storage because nobody knows what to do with it yet. And instead of displacing us, it's likely to complement and augment us. That's where the brilliance of mathematicians and scientists are going to be needed. Nobody knows for sure. But how will one know if you close the doors to that possibility?

I admire Dr. Tao for keeping his mind open to anything new at his age. I wish I had as much curiosity as him.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-will-become-ma...

Yes, Facebook is a benefit. Among other things, it gave me React which much of the modern web is built on, and React Native, PyTorch, GraphQL, Cassandra, Presto, and RocksDB just to name a few.

The question is, what are billions of people doing on Facebook if it's harmful? I don't know. My daycare sends me updates, my barbershop tells me when they're closing and I used it to sell my fridge.

This hole Facebook irrational hate is ridiculously overblown. It's an app, and compared to things like TikTok that is essentially a Chinese psy-op, it's really a great product.

Facebook and many of these other VC companies have worked by building a moat through network effects by burning money to build something free and awesome. Then once you HAVE the network effect then it becomes hard to leave. Your history is on there, people know you through it, your friends and family are there; are you really going to leave? That’s when Facebook starts turning the screws. Ads. Manipulative algorithms. Polarizating recommendation algorithms. Social isolation. Making deals with dictatorships. Censorship of the worst crimes humanity can commit against itself (genocide).

Why? They are making money through all of it. It’s called rent extraction. You OWN something valuable. You no longer have to produce something of value. You can just charge people money for what you own. Rent. It’s various forms of rent. Sucking out money and souls into it. One of countless ways we’re leeched on by these companies and their billionaire owners.

Do the benefits outweigh the harms? Facebook and the VC playbook is boiling a frog and we are the frog.

Yes, just read reddit or this thread.

I'd love to see the people's lives saying how bad it is now. My guess is they have every luxury afforded to them. There is strong negativity bias.

What is demotivating people is negativist-framing-obsessed doomer assholes like you dooming and glooming all the possible negatives and absolutely none of the positives. There's no actual unmanageable bad things occurring, and a ton of upside occurring.

People are literally quitting CS majors because of this BS. Hopefully only the people who aren't meant to do it in the first place, but anyway.

> it’ll be a world that’s completely different

And this is all wild negative speculation by you. And if you deny that, you're lying. It may be different, but not unmanageably different.

> Everything had to be fought for: minimum wage, reasonable weekly hours, safe workplaces, child labor, retirement, healthcare...

Fair enough. True.

> Once AI is able to replace a significant part of workers

But it won't do that. It's going to shift people around a lot, like literally every other technological development in the history of mankind, sure. But there's literally no evidence that it's going to do what you're claiming, which means you're arguing against a spooky strawman. It's not like people are going to just sit around doing nothing and going homeless, dude. Ideas (and activity that ends up being economically-tangible) will fill the vacuum.

I bought a Mac IIci computer in 1990 from my savings working throughout high school, for my freshman year of college. It cost over $8k, which in today's dollars is over $20k.

So imagine my lack of sympathy when people complain about things being literally free (as long as you don't mind signing away your social media profile data)