Comment by pickleglitch
5 hours ago
>But why so anti AI specifically
I think maybe AI is just the last straw for many people. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely. Whether or not it can achieve that is secondary to the goal itself.
Grads are facing a brutal job market where much of what they just spent several years of their lives learning is going to have little to no value to employers. It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
It's like you just spent 4 years learning to sequence with gels, and now someone is telling you that was a waste of time, and you should just stop complaining and deal with it.
> It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
this. I don't understand why people here are pretending like its not a big deal.
But aren't we all going through this? I'm going through it, sadly I'm lacking the plasticity of a young mind!
I know I'm being privileged, but not by much, I'm self employed and the world is changing like crazy and it scares me as well, how will I gather my income in a year (luckily I do live in a "socialist" country, but not so socialist for entrepreneurs)? No idea, but I set up Open Claw and Claude Code and it's opening my eyes to different ways of doing things. The primitives to do this are the same as always (Linux). Sure, if you're doing medicine you won't know how to do this, but you never did, you relied on people like me/us.
Well, perhaps the only difference between me and the younglings is that over time I've come to trust my intellect. I'll deal with it, as they say.
Btw, if you're really suggesting that "this time it's different" (as in AI is different from electricity, the internet, ubiquitous computing), then you agree with the elites: you're going to have to deal with it, the genie is out of the box and it happened faster than ever.
I'll add again, they the younglings have many reason to boo the tech elites, and I'd join them if I were there, I'm just trying to understand what is exactly going on in the minds of our precious new generation, this is important (Hey, I watched Altered Carbon!).
I think it's simply the fact that there hasn't even been an opportunity for the youth to start, it's just misery right from the start. there's no "it'll get better" in that frame of mind
and I'm in a similar situation, although I'm younger
and I do think in a way this time is different, because AI by nature is very "generic", its not just one domain, rather everything is affected
plus there is a kind of mindset that the youth is entitled and that thank God we don't have to hire them anymore etc etc. it doesn't help.
and even though I believe things will get better, the question is "when" and if there will be a new "lost generation" or whatever.
maybe that makes sense? on one hand I'm able to do way more, but I also know what that means at least in the short term. I don't know where the demand will be to meet this new exponential supply.
You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.
> AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely
Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.
This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"
The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.
Production is only good for me if I get to consume it.