There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.
There are real use cases for this technology! But the idea that the generation of superficially plausible text is "the next Industrial Revolution" comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees. We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context, and leverage it without getting manic about it.
Social media isn’t always about consuming content. It’s also about getting jolts of momentary joy and reward. You get those in two ways: seeing cool things, and participating in cool things. Especially cool things before they go viral. Clicking like on a post that isn’t viral yet, and gambling to yourself whether it will go viral, has the same dopamine flux when it pays off as winning at the slots. Even my reward-defective brain manages to eke out a moment of reward from that. So if you simply remove the content, what’s left is the gambling market. Gambling on something you upvote going viral isn’t about how much content there is in what you placed your bets on, it’s about being able to have that special knowing look when someone tells you about it because you’ve just won the socio-memetic lottery. And AI isn’t doing anything whatsoever to stop that reward loop.
I proposed once a while back that we should have the HN admins strip all integer counts for a week server-side, to see if the site quality improved or worsened during that time. The mods suggested I ask HN, so I did. HN loathed the idea of it, for every possible reason except this one: removing all those integers would be like quitting gambling cold turkey after years of pulling the vote lever every day. I’m not much less vulnerable to this than everyone else, but I still want to see it happen someday. I remain reasonably confident that our social media site’s quality would skyrocket after a couple days of our posts and comments being disinfected of make-integer-go-up jackpots.
The content being untrustworthy doesn't matter when it comes to social media, as most of what is enticing about social media nowadays isn't the content of the content. It's the fact that there is a never-ending stream of content specifically catered to maximize your dopamine to keep you scrolling.
So much of social media nowadays is just low quality clips of TV shows/movies with an AI-generated song over them. Or the same Minecraft parkour map as an AI voice recites an r/AmITheAsshole post. Or AI-generated funny videos. The quality of the content doesn't matter at all.
Anyone I've talked to about how it was all just AI just responds with something akin to "I don't care if it's AI, it's funny! Let people enjoy things!"
That creates a market for lemons. This is not a good thing. People who create good, valuable things cannot distinguish themselves in such a market, so they exit it. The good creators hurt the most.
Like it or not, there is a lot of value in public discourse, and we lose all that value if we drown it in noise.
Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1]
Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection?
IMHO shrugging it off as “superficially plausible text” is the extreme to the other side.
We’re past plausible text since GPT-2 and it’s undeniable that the technology is making waves right now and is having an impact.
As you can’t judge the impact of the Industrial Revolution by the first steam engines, you can’t dismiss the impact the technology is having right now.
> comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees
I'm going to say up front that I'm not as familiar with this period of history as I should be, but -- would it be totally unfair to say the same of the "Industrial Revolution"?
I'm not gonna say they're equivalent by any means, but my understanding is the "Industrial Revolution" was hellish for many people. Maybe the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?
> the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?
They are good things. If you were an adult, male aristocrat, yes, your untouched meadows and streams got tainted. If you were a woman you stopped dying in childbirth. If you think of infants as people, they stopped massively dying.
The Industrial Revolution was good. But it also required erecting the modern administrative state to manage. People had to soberly measure the problems, weigh the benefits and risks, and then invent new institutions and ways of thinking to accommodate the new world.
The public can't see any trains, electricity, concrete or glass windows, they see employment going away as workers and zero benefit as consumers.
Maybe AI enables great inventions in a decade, but for now the only appeal is that multinational corporations get to fire workers and everything's filled with slop. Of course they're not happy.
> There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults.
The college-age students I interact with hate AI content from other people, but they love using AI for their own work.
They'll pump AI generated memes and AI altered images all day long. Then they'll use ChatGPT to do their homework and write their resume, then look for an AI tool that will spam apply to jobs for them. Then when they get the job they plan to use ChatGPT to level the playing field with more experienced, older peers.
That's not even getting into the AI entrepreneurs who think they're going to use AI to start a company or find a winning strategy to trade memecoins or bet on PolyMarket so they don't have to get a job at all.
I think the next generation is all-in on AI for their own use. They see it as their advantage over the boomers occupying all the good jobs. They think ChatGPT is their cheat code for getting into these companies and taking those jobs.
We are about to experience the commoditization of intellectual work, in much the same way the Industrial Revolution commoditized manual production. I don’t expect a Musk-esque abundance utopia this decade, but the impact will exceed anything we’ve seen in centuries. There is not an industry on earth that won’t change in the next few decades.
To conceptualize AI as merely “superficially plausible text” would be like writing off a Watt steam engine in 1776. The current AI bubble might be early, but it won’t be wrong. The fervor with which corporations are exploring the space stems not from misplaced optimism but an existential threat. Right now every industry is vulnerable to disruption on a massive scale.
And we’re still in the early stages. Frontier models like Claude or GPT-5.5 are still just tuning 2017’s “Attention is All You Need” with MoE, RLHF, and more compute. We are roughly where online services were in the early 90s, when Prodigy and CompuServe were battling it out for market share before the open web swept them aside.
We are still waiting for the modern equivalents of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, never mind the lessers. As Tim Berners-Lee said of the web: “we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”
> a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults
I doubt it. AI seems fundamentally useful. If the guys at the top can’t get their shit together with messaging and strategy, and it increasingly looks like they can’t, they’ll be replaced before an entire generation is potentially rendered permanently uncompetitive. (And to be clear, there is no rush to adopt.)
> We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context
We need the public debate to stop being set by Altman, Musk et al. We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.
What are the ways potential futures with AI, on the spectrum from the familiar sci-fi AGI to more-subtle forms, could work? What are the novel ways it might not? How does capitalism need to evolve? Electoral democracy? Labour organization? If I think to the last few years of television and movies, Westworld is the only one to have contributed anything original to the discourse since Isaac Asimov’s era of science fiction.
> We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.
They're out there, but the artists are roundly anti-AI; if you want their input, you have to listen to what they're saying, rather than pretending that dissenting voices are uninformed.
That will happen inevitably, we are throwing spaghetti at the wall right now, and cleaning up the mess, lessons will be learned. The question is whether that phase will lead to real lasting damage and to what. For myself I no longer read cold emails, I believe they are all AI generated, and that communication method may legitimately die culturally. What else will be destroyed?
Many things will change, because many things are currently useless in the world right now, literally most jobs in a way shouldn't even exist. You think a guy behind the mcdo counter should exist? It shouldn't, that just an engineering "mistake" as it can already be solved, the world is just slow to catch-up, but it's not only AI, that's just automation. We banked for decades on jobs that virtually shouldn't exist except for the sole purpose of creating jobs, it's like a giant ponzi scheme literally and it will all catch-up at some point.
I think Society will completely reshape itself over the next decades, likely with UBI and other form of social help and the ones that don't want to partake into the whole "AI orchestration" will just not have any opportunity imo, sad, but this is the way I see it. I truly believe it because myself and ALL the people I know have pseudo-replaced their work with solely orchestrating AI, including very complex jobs and lately because some of my friends asked me, I've also built "agents" that replaced entirely their work, and their employer don't even know about it (customer management, remote) which proves that those jobs shouldn't even exist as they are ALREADY replaceable, all Zoom meetings are immediately recorded, agents do basic loop adversarial with all common models, then proceed with doing tasks and so-on, that last for about 30min and the whole week of work is done, all chats are directly sent to a triage agent as well then the whole rag thing and so on.
My work went from managing/developing 1 repo to 70 repo at once, evening to morning answering questions like a bot 10h a day with 8 monitors in front of my face, and I'm realistic, I know at some point I can literally replace my own self with an AI as well to answer for me, it's just a matter of time.
We need to rethink everything and the whole AI hate from the youth will not change anything about it.
I have multiple friends also running pretty large businesses with 30 or more staff, and right now they are literally at a point where they argue about why they shouldn't fire most of them, it's fuckin sad, but it's the reality.
That's the only statement that's true. Admiting to AI use is unfashionable in the western world at this time.
But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.
Technology doesn't make anything banal or a hellscape, or fire people. Technology is a lever.
If humans use AI to produce worse output because they are too lazy to bother reviewing and iterating on it, that is a human problem. If humans are going to use AI to help them exploit other humans more efficiently, that is also caused by the human rather than the technology.
Also, the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robots is coming this year or next. It will become very obvious that AI use in these robots is not just superficially plausible text.
> But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.
This is like saying a smoker can't criticize the tobacco industry. It's entirely possible to recognize that AI in school is a huge problem while (hypothetically, in this case) still using it. Indeed, if enough of your peers are using it and you do not, you are effectively being punished for being virtuous. It's a lot like being the one cyclist in the Tour de France who isn't doping.
Similarly, if your peers aren't able to keep a conversation going in a seminar because they had AI do their reading and assignments for them, then you, as a student, are having your education stolen from you in a very real way. Education is something that happens in community. When enough of your community is using AI, your education will suffer.
> The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.
The AI output you are referring to mostly seems to refer to “AI slop”. It’s not hard to argue that AI slop sucks.
There is a lot that AI does that has created joy for me or people around me:
- whimsical profile pics for online profiles for me, family, and friends
- writing e-mails for community groups — good for a family member who doesn’t have the most sociable writing style
- automating data capture and organization
- automating scheduling with multiple and variable constraints
- catching obvious errors that somehow still happen (e.g., off by one errors)
- filling in gaps in analysis either due to gaps in knowledge or simply an oversight
These are sample of things that I have done or helped people do in the past week, and the results have been well-received.
Maybe I’m part of that solution that you propose, but I have used words similar to “biggest change since…” (I usually say spreadsheets, but I don’t think “Industrial Revolution” is wrong).
Fwiw, I don’t think the result will be dystopian the way most people seem to think that it will. I firmly believe that meat space interactions will gain much more traction, and that will change the way we live and work.
I don't really think we should talk about it with "use cases" anymore when it can virtually replace/enhance literally almost any form of white collar work and soon physical labor as well (people will act surprised the moment it comes of course, the same as with LLMs despite all the researchs made prior, if theory supports it = it will be), of course humanoids will be in every homes and they'll cost the same as a phone, soon enough, and we will also not be able to live without.
We don't talk about human intelligence with "use cases", I think we need to be realistic about what AI will be in our lives, most people already can't do without, and this will without doubt expand further.
If AI works you'll be able to make more stuff with fewer people. While that could lead to unemployment historically it's not gone that way. You get more stuff.
Like agricultural employment has gone from ~70% to ~2% but the people who would have dug potatoes make cars, houses, aircraft and the like.
That's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.
It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.
Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.
Unemployment rampant. All production remains in the hands of a few. All power (tokens) remains in the hands of a few. Goods are cheaper but no one can buy them. Path to the upper class now guarded closely by tokens, potential avenues for entrepreneurs diminish rapidly. Own an AI or compute, get someone to give you tokens, or live in poverty.
Distribution of abundance in current time is close to evil, America reducing entitlements and support (not expanding). Rampant waste. No reason to think any of this will change.
> Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.
That sounds great, but how are LLMs supposed to achieve this? You can't just say "AI will make a utopia". You have to present a vision for how it will get us there.
I'm tired of hearing about how AI will solve all the worlds problems. I want to see actual progress towards achieving these goals. And for the most part that hasn't manifested. Most people would consider AI to have had a net negative impact on their lives.
How? The biggest cost of most products comes down to energy cost and the profit margins of each proccess and middleman. Actual labor costs are already a pretty small portion of most products and even if you mine and smelt twice as much material per worker with AI somehow, that is at best a few percentage off the final price. And adding in AI processing isn't going to reduce energy costs or increases wages.
The funny thing is that it's not even true. People invested in AI just glee at the thought of common men in abject poverty, so this is the marketing that stuck.
Shows you don't need to have red skin and horns to delight in the suffering of starving people.
Right, read the room. Tell them that "there are challenges ahead, but their excellent education and optimism will overcome even the most ominous obstacles, technological or otherwise."
> their excellent education and optimism will overcome even the most ominous obstacles, technological or otherwise
Or, alternatively, that we need the humanities today in a fundamental, possibly existential, way. If AI is another Industrial Revolution, rise to be our Sinclairs, Dickens and Tolstoys.
It's interesting that I'm only seeing this kind of anti-ai tendency only in American/Western art circles. Anywhere else in Middle East/Asia, artists are having fun experimenting with it.
They are both right, the revolution needs to be oriented for ordinary people and college kids to benefit from it or else their attitude is wholly justified. There's basically no reason for them to cheer on a future of trillion dollar corporations using AI services to battle for knowledge work market share.
Number of industrial revolutions: generously, two (though the distinction between the first and second Industrial Revolution is more or less only of interest to historians).
Number of things called the next industrial revolution: roughly five billion.
(The offending speaker appears to work for a private equity firm that does mostly property stuff, so probably not a leading authority on what is the next Industrial Revolution.)
Governments and companies are so bad at selling AI to the population.The reason is the elephant in the room. Everyone or at least most understand the consequences. You can't sit and be amazed at the speed an AI does tasks and not be able to extrapolate what that would mean for jobs.
AI does potentially upend the main developed world model of spend fifteen plus years in education learning skills and then go employ those in work. If AI can do the skilled stuff it changes the economics.
AI has been the “next industrial revolution” since the 70’s and 80’s. We’ll have a few more RoboCop movies and then things will be as they always are after hype cycles
I wonder how many bright people are choosing not to pursue higher education due to the current message around AI, and what the long-term consequences will be.
I suspect for CS it would have been outright food riots. The humanities are probably the best insulated from AI as the uncanny valley is really obvious in AI literature and art. CS is the final stage in the “programming myself out of a job” meme which is quite depressing if you’re just getting your first job (or, more likely at the moment, not.)
Rightfully so. Unfettered capitalism will only end with a bunch of rich people producing and selling the means of living to the rest of us at just the right markup to keep their feet on our throats. Organized labor needs a resurgence in a big way.
That is nauseating to watch, she is an abysmal public speaker, arrogant, extremely uninspiring, and generally very out of touch. I would feel this way if she was reading a review of cat in the hat. Letting this woman speak about AI, what a disaster.
Timestamp 1:20:50 is about where the clown show starts. Totally out of touch. Her nervous giggling and throwing her hands up when she realizes the audience doesn't think AI is the greatest invention since sliced bread.... Wow.
Owe is an interesting choice of a word. Don't get me wrong, I personally am of the opinion that, by default, most schools for most programs, the related body of works can be accomplished by a warm body ( some of it based on personal anecdotes -- in US mind you ). There are exceptions and those include some non-humanities and, well, people who are curious ( but that was always true for them ).
Still, just because a technology facilitates something does not make their distaste any less potent. If anything, they recognize how much of world's building blocks are a fancy facade ( mild alliteration intended ).
Perhaps, owe was a poor word to use too. I will admit that, however I did not think that would be a point of focus in my comment at the time.
> in US mind you
That is my only reference.
> Still, just because a technology facilitates something does not make their distaste any less potent.
Sure, I agree once again. I may have not explained my position well initially. I just cannot help but feel it's a little hypocritical. And again, hypocritical might be a poor word to use.
We have kids booing a commencement speaker after her AI comment (which I think was a distasteful comment), but at UCLA's graduation a few days ago, we had this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zSqOPOzrIig
I think why I am having difficulty describing what I am thinking is because there is not one homogeneous group of students. There is clearly a subset of students that oppose AI's current and future costs/benefits. Though, at the same time, there is a different subset of students that heavily rely on AI. Some to even a problematic degree.
I have a few friends that are professors at a prestigious, private university in my city. They have all shared their little tricks in how they are trying to combat AI usage in academics. Some put hidden white text in the margins of their assignments. When citations are submitted with work, they look for the the 'utm?=chatgpt' in the urls. Some of the foreign language professors craft writing prompts with words that they know LLMs often tend to translate incorrectly.
Based on the research I can find via a few quick searches, it appears that in the populations of the studies, AI usage is far more common than AI abstinence. I imagine these students want to use AI to benefit themselves but not harm themselves in the future. I do not fault them for that in the slightest, but I do not think that is how things are going to end up working out. I strongly believe the students that misuse AI to do their work for them -- not help them -- will be in for a rude awaking.
Most people in uni have compulsory humanities courses, so I imagine it's not too hard for them to attribute actions by moneyed interests to boost AI to the furtherance of capital, surveillance, and a widening of the economic gap. The fact remains, though, most of these degrees (with the obvious exception of those specific to current AI/LLM technologies) could have been attained without AI before.
Sure, I do not disagree in the slightest. However, I think degrees, while optimistically serving as a certification of a certain level of understanding/knowledge, also provide a sort of social signal. However, Goodhart's Law is still in full effect, so that does complicate matters a bit.
> Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light
The message to a group of graduating artists should have been about the literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits. (And then, after WWII and the Green Revolution, encouraged us to start reckoning with its environmental cost.)
AI is potentially—and with increasing confidence day to day—showing itself to be useful. That deserves neither worship nor demonization. Yet history—told by the humanities!—tell us, it probably hasn’t started in the right leaders’ hands. It is the role of the humanities to show and guide the public through that debate and reconciliation.
> literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits
those all played a part to be sure, but it was workers organizing and striking en masse, bringing factories to a halt, battling with private armies or gov troops (and getting killed), and hard-fought progressive campaigns that achieved it
no one is willing to do that these days, until it gets much much worse; plus workers don't have the leverage that they did back at that time -- factories still relied on them -- sure you could ship in replacements for striking workers but that required considerable effort. the goal here is not to rely on labor at all, effectively eliminating any leverage that labor has over capital.
I mean, duh. Do we really think someone with the title of "vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group" lives in the same universe as the rest of us? In her alternative universe, Zucc and Bezos are heroes to look up to. These people have no actual interaction with the rest of us, and just assume their world view is universally held.
Look how genuinely surprised she was by the audience's reaction. In their world, AI is an unambiguous good.
https://archive.ph/EvzqM
There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.
There are real use cases for this technology! But the idea that the generation of superficially plausible text is "the next Industrial Revolution" comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees. We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context, and leverage it without getting manic about it.
My great hope for AI is that it kills social media by making 99% of content and comments untrustworthy and not worth consuming.
Social media isn’t always about consuming content. It’s also about getting jolts of momentary joy and reward. You get those in two ways: seeing cool things, and participating in cool things. Especially cool things before they go viral. Clicking like on a post that isn’t viral yet, and gambling to yourself whether it will go viral, has the same dopamine flux when it pays off as winning at the slots. Even my reward-defective brain manages to eke out a moment of reward from that. So if you simply remove the content, what’s left is the gambling market. Gambling on something you upvote going viral isn’t about how much content there is in what you placed your bets on, it’s about being able to have that special knowing look when someone tells you about it because you’ve just won the socio-memetic lottery. And AI isn’t doing anything whatsoever to stop that reward loop.
I proposed once a while back that we should have the HN admins strip all integer counts for a week server-side, to see if the site quality improved or worsened during that time. The mods suggested I ask HN, so I did. HN loathed the idea of it, for every possible reason except this one: removing all those integers would be like quitting gambling cold turkey after years of pulling the vote lever every day. I’m not much less vulnerable to this than everyone else, but I still want to see it happen someday. I remain reasonably confident that our social media site’s quality would skyrocket after a couple days of our posts and comments being disinfected of make-integer-go-up jackpots.
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The content being untrustworthy doesn't matter when it comes to social media, as most of what is enticing about social media nowadays isn't the content of the content. It's the fact that there is a never-ending stream of content specifically catered to maximize your dopamine to keep you scrolling.
So much of social media nowadays is just low quality clips of TV shows/movies with an AI-generated song over them. Or the same Minecraft parkour map as an AI voice recites an r/AmITheAsshole post. Or AI-generated funny videos. The quality of the content doesn't matter at all.
Anyone I've talked to about how it was all just AI just responds with something akin to "I don't care if it's AI, it's funny! Let people enjoy things!"
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I have this hope too but social media is junk food now, and junk food is a very lucrative product. People don't seem to care as long as it's engaging.
That creates a market for lemons. This is not a good thing. People who create good, valuable things cannot distinguish themselves in such a market, so they exit it. The good creators hurt the most.
Like it or not, there is a lot of value in public discourse, and we lose all that value if we drown it in noise.
Twitter arguably did that a while ago.
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Doubt that. Meta got the right idea, ai influencers to your taste.
So, now people are in groups and chats full of bots posting exactly what they want to hear.
Instead of meta b it's states, companies, or individuals hoping to make money from their followers
If that happens, AI will have been worth the hassle.
That describes social media for the last 10 years, at least. Not dead yet.
you'll be happy to learn that has already happened.
When the leading CEOs are saying the next generation will be unemployed due to AI... uh yeah, you're gonna lose them!
Isn't it bad now that Sam Altman and the others are backpedaling on this and going "jobs are going to still exist you just can't imagine them!" because the PR problem was getting so big? [1]
Like don't we want people running these companies to be honest to the public rather than misdirection?
[1]. https://www.platformer.news/sam-altman-ai-backlash/
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IMHO shrugging it off as “superficially plausible text” is the extreme to the other side.
We’re past plausible text since GPT-2 and it’s undeniable that the technology is making waves right now and is having an impact.
As you can’t judge the impact of the Industrial Revolution by the first steam engines, you can’t dismiss the impact the technology is having right now.
In writing code, yes. But has there been an actual positive impact in other fields?
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> comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees
I'm going to say up front that I'm not as familiar with this period of history as I should be, but -- would it be totally unfair to say the same of the "Industrial Revolution"?
I'm not gonna say they're equivalent by any means, but my understanding is the "Industrial Revolution" was hellish for many people. Maybe the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?
> the mistake is the framing that "the revolution" or "the next big thing" is always a good thing?
They are good things. If you were an adult, male aristocrat, yes, your untouched meadows and streams got tainted. If you were a woman you stopped dying in childbirth. If you think of infants as people, they stopped massively dying.
The Industrial Revolution was good. But it also required erecting the modern administrative state to manage. People had to soberly measure the problems, weigh the benefits and risks, and then invent new institutions and ways of thinking to accommodate the new world.
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The public can't see any trains, electricity, concrete or glass windows, they see employment going away as workers and zero benefit as consumers.
Maybe AI enables great inventions in a decade, but for now the only appeal is that multinational corporations get to fire workers and everything's filled with slop. Of course they're not happy.
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They have to frame it this way, because the market has invested in it being "the next internet" kind of event.
It's much more than that, it will solve the deepest mysteries of the universe, not now, but in a decade, very likely.
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> There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults.
The college-age students I interact with hate AI content from other people, but they love using AI for their own work.
They'll pump AI generated memes and AI altered images all day long. Then they'll use ChatGPT to do their homework and write their resume, then look for an AI tool that will spam apply to jobs for them. Then when they get the job they plan to use ChatGPT to level the playing field with more experienced, older peers.
That's not even getting into the AI entrepreneurs who think they're going to use AI to start a company or find a winning strategy to trade memecoins or bet on PolyMarket so they don't have to get a job at all.
I think the next generation is all-in on AI for their own use. They see it as their advantage over the boomers occupying all the good jobs. They think ChatGPT is their cheat code for getting into these companies and taking those jobs.
We are about to experience the commoditization of intellectual work, in much the same way the Industrial Revolution commoditized manual production. I don’t expect a Musk-esque abundance utopia this decade, but the impact will exceed anything we’ve seen in centuries. There is not an industry on earth that won’t change in the next few decades.
To conceptualize AI as merely “superficially plausible text” would be like writing off a Watt steam engine in 1776. The current AI bubble might be early, but it won’t be wrong. The fervor with which corporations are exploring the space stems not from misplaced optimism but an existential threat. Right now every industry is vulnerable to disruption on a massive scale.
And we’re still in the early stages. Frontier models like Claude or GPT-5.5 are still just tuning 2017’s “Attention is All You Need” with MoE, RLHF, and more compute. We are roughly where online services were in the early 90s, when Prodigy and CompuServe were battling it out for market share before the open web swept them aside.
We are still waiting for the modern equivalents of Yahoo, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, never mind the lessers. As Tim Berners-Lee said of the web: “we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.”
as is tradition. an AI boom is always followed by an AI winter haha
It has been in the past. I think this time is different though.
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> a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults
I doubt it. AI seems fundamentally useful. If the guys at the top can’t get their shit together with messaging and strategy, and it increasingly looks like they can’t, they’ll be replaced before an entire generation is potentially rendered permanently uncompetitive. (And to be clear, there is no rush to adopt.)
> We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context
We need the public debate to stop being set by Altman, Musk et al. We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.
What are the ways potential futures with AI, on the spectrum from the familiar sci-fi AGI to more-subtle forms, could work? What are the novel ways it might not? How does capitalism need to evolve? Electoral democracy? Labour organization? If I think to the last few years of television and movies, Westworld is the only one to have contributed anything original to the discourse since Isaac Asimov’s era of science fiction.
> We need our generation’s Dickens, Tolstoys, Sinclairs and Whitmans.
They're out there, but the artists are roundly anti-AI; if you want their input, you have to listen to what they're saying, rather than pretending that dissenting voices are uninformed.
That will happen inevitably, we are throwing spaghetti at the wall right now, and cleaning up the mess, lessons will be learned. The question is whether that phase will lead to real lasting damage and to what. For myself I no longer read cold emails, I believe they are all AI generated, and that communication method may legitimately die culturally. What else will be destroyed?
Many things will change, because many things are currently useless in the world right now, literally most jobs in a way shouldn't even exist. You think a guy behind the mcdo counter should exist? It shouldn't, that just an engineering "mistake" as it can already be solved, the world is just slow to catch-up, but it's not only AI, that's just automation. We banked for decades on jobs that virtually shouldn't exist except for the sole purpose of creating jobs, it's like a giant ponzi scheme literally and it will all catch-up at some point.
I think Society will completely reshape itself over the next decades, likely with UBI and other form of social help and the ones that don't want to partake into the whole "AI orchestration" will just not have any opportunity imo, sad, but this is the way I see it. I truly believe it because myself and ALL the people I know have pseudo-replaced their work with solely orchestrating AI, including very complex jobs and lately because some of my friends asked me, I've also built "agents" that replaced entirely their work, and their employer don't even know about it (customer management, remote) which proves that those jobs shouldn't even exist as they are ALREADY replaceable, all Zoom meetings are immediately recorded, agents do basic loop adversarial with all common models, then proceed with doing tasks and so-on, that last for about 30min and the whole week of work is done, all chats are directly sent to a triage agent as well then the whole rag thing and so on.
My work went from managing/developing 1 repo to 70 repo at once, evening to morning answering questions like a bot 10h a day with 8 monitors in front of my face, and I'm realistic, I know at some point I can literally replace my own self with an AI as well to answer for me, it's just a matter of time.
We need to rethink everything and the whole AI hate from the youth will not change anything about it.
I have multiple friends also running pretty large businesses with 30 or more staff, and right now they are literally at a point where they argue about why they shouldn't fire most of them, it's fuckin sad, but it's the reality.
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> The people who rely on it are not cool.
That's the only statement that's true. Admiting to AI use is unfashionable in the western world at this time.
But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.
Technology doesn't make anything banal or a hellscape, or fire people. Technology is a lever.
If humans use AI to produce worse output because they are too lazy to bother reviewing and iterating on it, that is a human problem. If humans are going to use AI to help them exploit other humans more efficiently, that is also caused by the human rather than the technology.
Also, the ChatGPT moment for humanoid robots is coming this year or next. It will become very obvious that AI use in these robots is not just superficially plausible text.
> But how much would you like to bet that 90% of those students who were booing also used AI to do their homework for them quite often? So your take away would be "the AI stole their education". No, they were dishonest and the AI helped them cheat themselves out of learning.
This is like saying a smoker can't criticize the tobacco industry. It's entirely possible to recognize that AI in school is a huge problem while (hypothetically, in this case) still using it. Indeed, if enough of your peers are using it and you do not, you are effectively being punished for being virtuous. It's a lot like being the one cyclist in the Tour de France who isn't doping.
Similarly, if your peers aren't able to keep a conversation going in a seminar because they had AI do their reading and assignments for them, then you, as a student, are having your education stolen from you in a very real way. Education is something that happens in community. When enough of your community is using AI, your education will suffer.
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> The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.
The AI output you are referring to mostly seems to refer to “AI slop”. It’s not hard to argue that AI slop sucks.
There is a lot that AI does that has created joy for me or people around me:
- whimsical profile pics for online profiles for me, family, and friends
- writing e-mails for community groups — good for a family member who doesn’t have the most sociable writing style
- automating data capture and organization
- automating scheduling with multiple and variable constraints
- catching obvious errors that somehow still happen (e.g., off by one errors)
- filling in gaps in analysis either due to gaps in knowledge or simply an oversight
These are sample of things that I have done or helped people do in the past week, and the results have been well-received.
Maybe I’m part of that solution that you propose, but I have used words similar to “biggest change since…” (I usually say spreadsheets, but I don’t think “Industrial Revolution” is wrong).
Fwiw, I don’t think the result will be dystopian the way most people seem to think that it will. I firmly believe that meat space interactions will gain much more traction, and that will change the way we live and work.
maybe what we really need is a butlerian jihad
They were thinking machines at least. Here’s we’ve got a good guesser that fools 50% of the population at anytime that it’s anything but guessing.
Perhaps next generation isn't necessary anymore. At least majority that can't adjust.
Euthanasia for the young might be the best we can offer to the next generation.
Rapidly depopulating Earth below 1 bilion people or less seems in our reach.
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I don't really think we should talk about it with "use cases" anymore when it can virtually replace/enhance literally almost any form of white collar work and soon physical labor as well (people will act surprised the moment it comes of course, the same as with LLMs despite all the researchs made prior, if theory supports it = it will be), of course humanoids will be in every homes and they'll cost the same as a phone, soon enough, and we will also not be able to live without.
We don't talk about human intelligence with "use cases", I think we need to be realistic about what AI will be in our lives, most people already can't do without, and this will without doubt expand further.
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If you want people to like AI, show them a future that doesn't leave them in abject poverty.
If AI works you'll be able to make more stuff with fewer people. While that could lead to unemployment historically it's not gone that way. You get more stuff.
Like agricultural employment has gone from ~70% to ~2% but the people who would have dug potatoes make cars, houses, aircraft and the like.
The problem isn't AI, the problem is a generation addicted to social media that sells their attention to the highest bidder.
How expensive do you think it would be to convince 30 million people of something that wasn't true?
Who might benefit from a generation of Americans being pessimistic about their future?
More specifically, who might benefit from a generation of Americans being anti-AI?
How would the cost compare to the potential benefits?
That's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.
It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.
Doom is popular right now. People want to feel terrible and pessimistic and their media diets only reinforce this.
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Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
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The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.
Then it should easy to show a world where we are all not in abject poverty. We’re waiting.
Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.
That being said we already have relative superabundance and we're more miserable than ever, so it's not clear that more of it will cheer us up.
Unemployment rampant. All production remains in the hands of a few. All power (tokens) remains in the hands of a few. Goods are cheaper but no one can buy them. Path to the upper class now guarded closely by tokens, potential avenues for entrepreneurs diminish rapidly. Own an AI or compute, get someone to give you tokens, or live in poverty.
Distribution of abundance in current time is close to evil, America reducing entitlements and support (not expanding). Rampant waste. No reason to think any of this will change.
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This is the kind of commentary that is completely detached from reality: people want housing, people want food, people want gas.
It's not great that we can buy iphones (and AI is going to cause all electronics to be scarce, so much for abundance there)
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> Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.
That sounds great, but how are LLMs supposed to achieve this? You can't just say "AI will make a utopia". You have to present a vision for how it will get us there.
I'm tired of hearing about how AI will solve all the worlds problems. I want to see actual progress towards achieving these goals. And for the most part that hasn't manifested. Most people would consider AI to have had a net negative impact on their lives.
How? The biggest cost of most products comes down to energy cost and the profit margins of each proccess and middleman. Actual labor costs are already a pretty small portion of most products and even if you mine and smelt twice as much material per worker with AI somehow, that is at best a few percentage off the final price. And adding in AI processing isn't going to reduce energy costs or increases wages.
> show them a future that doesn't leave them in abject poverty
To be fair, this isn’t the commencement speaker’s job.
If this is sarcasm, it's amazing. If not, depressing.
I would 100% expect a commencement speaker to be hyping me up for what comes next.
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For someone taking about basic logic, you're making quite the leap in logic by assuming they used LLMs to do every single bit of schoolwork.
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> You can't have it both ways.
Yes you can. They use AI and also despise it because it will turn the world into one big caste system. Ones with access to compute, and ones without.
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The funny thing is that it's not even true. People invested in AI just glee at the thought of common men in abject poverty, so this is the marketing that stuck.
Shows you don't need to have red skin and horns to delight in the suffering of starving people.
> Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media
Well, yeah.
Right, read the room. Tell them that "there are challenges ahead, but their excellent education and optimism will overcome even the most ominous obstacles, technological or otherwise."
> their excellent education and optimism will overcome even the most ominous obstacles, technological or otherwise
Or, alternatively, that we need the humanities today in a fundamental, possibly existential, way. If AI is another Industrial Revolution, rise to be our Sinclairs, Dickens and Tolstoys.
It's interesting that I'm only seeing this kind of anti-ai tendency only in American/Western art circles. Anywhere else in Middle East/Asia, artists are having fun experimenting with it.
> I'm only seeing this kind of anti-ai tendency only in American/Western art circles
Hmm, how would we measure and confirm this hypothesis?
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The US is a massively white-collar and services-based economy. Writing emails and making phonecalls is very susceptible to AI disruption.
https://data.bls.gov/projections/nationalMatrix?queryParams=...
The top 2 by percentage are:
- Office and administrative support occupations
- Sales and related occupations
anecdotally, I have noticed the same thing. The most affluent people are afraid of the moat being bridged methinks.
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Related:
The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443
They are both right, the revolution needs to be oriented for ordinary people and college kids to benefit from it or else their attitude is wholly justified. There's basically no reason for them to cheer on a future of trillion dollar corporations using AI services to battle for knowledge work market share.
was the industrial revolution oriented for ordinary people at the time it occurred? were a lot of workers buying flying shuttles in the 1700s?
I'm confused - you're suggesting that past suffering justifies present suffering?
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I mean the Luddites were mad for a reason, and many may forget the industrial revolution was a rather bloody affair.
Avoiding a repeat of that would be great while also increasing productivity would be good.
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No, that's why unions exist.
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Number of industrial revolutions: generously, two (though the distinction between the first and second Industrial Revolution is more or less only of interest to historians).
Number of things called the next industrial revolution: roughly five billion.
(The offending speaker appears to work for a private equity firm that does mostly property stuff, so probably not a leading authority on what is the next Industrial Revolution.)
Governments and companies are so bad at selling AI to the population.The reason is the elephant in the room. Everyone or at least most understand the consequences. You can't sit and be amazed at the speed an AI does tasks and not be able to extrapolate what that would mean for jobs.
They're selling it to investors. Population isn't their client.
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AI does potentially upend the main developed world model of spend fifteen plus years in education learning skills and then go employ those in work. If AI can do the skilled stuff it changes the economics.
those two lines in the speech with audience boo/applause breaks are perfectly timed.
AI has been the “next industrial revolution” since the 70’s and 80’s. We’ll have a few more RoboCop movies and then things will be as they always are after hype cycles
I wonder how many bright people are choosing not to pursue higher education due to the current message around AI, and what the long-term consequences will be.
> College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media
Somehow I have a feeling that the reaction would have been totally different if it would have been the EECS graduates.
Fear and rejection in certain professions is real and maybe even understandable.
I imagine 25 years ago someone telling music graduates “streaming is the future of music distribution” would have received the same reaction.
I suspect for CS it would have been outright food riots. The humanities are probably the best insulated from AI as the uncanny valley is really obvious in AI literature and art. CS is the final stage in the “programming myself out of a job” meme which is quite depressing if you’re just getting your first job (or, more likely at the moment, not.)
Interesting, it’s not my experience in recent interactions with CS students. There was more positivity around possibilities.
However there was a feeling that “the job” is radically changing right now.
this is a classic of the genre "It's not enjoyable to make music anymore” - Suno AI CEO
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vAn7DsXWQGE
Rightfully so. Unfettered capitalism will only end with a bunch of rich people producing and selling the means of living to the rest of us at just the right markup to keep their feet on our throats. Organized labor needs a resurgence in a big way.
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That is nauseating to watch, she is an abysmal public speaker, arrogant, extremely uninspiring, and generally very out of touch. I would feel this way if she was reading a review of cat in the hat. Letting this woman speak about AI, what a disaster.
You have to admit though, a very appropriate speaker for new graduates in 2026.
Timestamp 1:20:50 is about where the clown show starts. Totally out of touch. Her nervous giggling and throwing her hands up when she realizes the audience doesn't think AI is the greatest invention since sliced bread.... Wow.
"Passion--let's go!" Lady read the room.
She'd make a good CEO of an AI company.
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Owe is an interesting choice of a word. Don't get me wrong, I personally am of the opinion that, by default, most schools for most programs, the related body of works can be accomplished by a warm body ( some of it based on personal anecdotes -- in US mind you ). There are exceptions and those include some non-humanities and, well, people who are curious ( but that was always true for them ).
Still, just because a technology facilitates something does not make their distaste any less potent. If anything, they recognize how much of world's building blocks are a fancy facade ( mild alliteration intended ).
Perhaps, owe was a poor word to use too. I will admit that, however I did not think that would be a point of focus in my comment at the time.
> in US mind you
That is my only reference.
> Still, just because a technology facilitates something does not make their distaste any less potent.
Sure, I agree once again. I may have not explained my position well initially. I just cannot help but feel it's a little hypocritical. And again, hypocritical might be a poor word to use.
We have kids booing a commencement speaker after her AI comment (which I think was a distasteful comment), but at UCLA's graduation a few days ago, we had this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zSqOPOzrIig
(Student's explanation: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rswUgIfj1YU)
I think why I am having difficulty describing what I am thinking is because there is not one homogeneous group of students. There is clearly a subset of students that oppose AI's current and future costs/benefits. Though, at the same time, there is a different subset of students that heavily rely on AI. Some to even a problematic degree.
I have a few friends that are professors at a prestigious, private university in my city. They have all shared their little tricks in how they are trying to combat AI usage in academics. Some put hidden white text in the margins of their assignments. When citations are submitted with work, they look for the the 'utm?=chatgpt' in the urls. Some of the foreign language professors craft writing prompts with words that they know LLMs often tend to translate incorrectly.
Based on the research I can find via a few quick searches, it appears that in the populations of the studies, AI usage is far more common than AI abstinence. I imagine these students want to use AI to benefit themselves but not harm themselves in the future. I do not fault them for that in the slightest, but I do not think that is how things are going to end up working out. I strongly believe the students that misuse AI to do their work for them -- not help them -- will be in for a rude awaking.
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Most people in uni have compulsory humanities courses, so I imagine it's not too hard for them to attribute actions by moneyed interests to boost AI to the furtherance of capital, surveillance, and a widening of the economic gap. The fact remains, though, most of these degrees (with the obvious exception of those specific to current AI/LLM technologies) could have been attained without AI before.
Sure, I do not disagree in the slightest. However, I think degrees, while optimistically serving as a certification of a certain level of understanding/knowledge, also provide a sort of social signal. However, Goodhart's Law is still in full effect, so that does complicate matters a bit.
Have you also wondered how many of them owe their college degree to the colored worker that prepped their meals?
No, I have not. I am also unaware of college students booing such oddly specific entity during a commencement speech.
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> Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light
The message to a group of graduating artists should have been about the literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits. (And then, after WWII and the Green Revolution, encouraged us to start reckoning with its environmental cost.)
AI is potentially—and with increasing confidence day to day—showing itself to be useful. That deserves neither worship nor demonization. Yet history—told by the humanities!—tell us, it probably hasn’t started in the right leaders’ hands. It is the role of the humanities to show and guide the public through that debate and reconciliation.
> literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits
those all played a part to be sure, but it was workers organizing and striking en masse, bringing factories to a halt, battling with private armies or gov troops (and getting killed), and hard-fought progressive campaigns that achieved it
no one is willing to do that these days, until it gets much much worse; plus workers don't have the leverage that they did back at that time -- factories still relied on them -- sure you could ship in replacements for striking workers but that required considerable effort. the goal here is not to rely on labor at all, effectively eliminating any leverage that labor has over capital.
I mean, duh. Do we really think someone with the title of "vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group" lives in the same universe as the rest of us? In her alternative universe, Zucc and Bezos are heroes to look up to. These people have no actual interaction with the rest of us, and just assume their world view is universally held.
Look how genuinely surprised she was by the audience's reaction. In their world, AI is an unambiguous good.
> I mean, duh
Clearly people don't consider it obvious, considering my comment got flagged.
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Is the practice on this site now to flag anything critical of AI...?