Who Asked for This?

iingve about 6 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on calnewport.com

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75% Positive

Analyzed from 1003 words in the discussion.

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

eleventen•about 3 hours ago

The chorus of people been calling for a pause has gotten louder. I'm ready to join them. Until recently, generative AI was more of a promising novelty than a useful tool. Work theater rather than work. Sometime over the last 6 months this changed. LLMs can do real work, enough that workers and companies and governments need time to catch up to the present state of things.

classified•about 4 hours ago

The rare voice of reason. Which means it will be drowned here in minutes, and probably get flagged.

> They are built to make VCs and companies rich.

That, and the concomitant terror of incessant breathless shilling and astroturfing. These wankers make so much noise, I can't hear myself think. Which of course is on purpose. Once I get to thinking, I might not buy what they want me to.

> This isn’t sustainable.

I so hope this is true. But the market can stay drowned in propaganda longer than my patience lasts.

simianwords•about 4 hours ago

Wishful thinking and you sound flat out scared.

Making companies rich is how society functions. It’s not zero sum. LLMs aren’t going anywhere.

In 5 years LLMs are here to stay and their usage will increase and not decrease. You aren’t able to face this fact and instead hide behind slurs like shills and astrotrufers.

0rbiter•about 4 hours ago

> Wishful thinking and you sound flat out scared.

The spin doctor's favorite move: Make your opponents look like they're irrational.

aspenmartin•about 3 hours ago

People who point out the immaturity of arguments like this and the simplicity of the worldview that espouses them aren’t “spin doctors”. The author has very clearly not thought deeply about what the real issues are: authoritarian governments w/surveillance (in 3-5 years a powerful LLM literally watching every single camera and signal feed on earth will be cheap enough that it will be done), alignment (the technical and non technical aspects of this), etc. you can choose from a huge list of real problems and do what adults do which is: see the writing on the wall, remember that the world doesn’t operate with the naïveté of an undergrad who has just stumbled upon a new topic and forms all of their opinions from poorly written newspaper headlines, roll up their sleeves, and contribute real solutions.

Anyone who thinks any force on earth can stop this train is just really out of touch. It’s coming so make the best of it and contribute to making this ship land as softly as we can.

> As Lopatto points out: “Normal people aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to automate every single part of their lives.“ Their biggest exposure to AI is using a tool like ChatGPT as a more verbose Google, or perhaps occasionally formatting an event itinerary. This is cool, and even useful, but at the moment it is probably less positively impactful in their lives than, say, the arrival of the iPod in the early 2000s.

If this was written in 2022 it would be half coherent. To write that paragraph with a straight face today requires an impressive amount of ignorance

simianwords•about 4 hours ago

If you think so: let’s have a bet. Do you think LLMs will increase or decrease in 5 years? You can make me look stupid in 5 years

dzonga•about 3 hours ago

the tragedy in this is the people who control the money - VCs etc - and people who ask for money are all from the same backgrounds - typically white & Ivy educated. Groupthink.

hence it's a vicious self-deluding bubble that has massive reinforcement. likewise the talent/capital that could be going to useful impactful opportunities in society doesn't.

hence we get money & labor being pumped into non-problems and solutions seeking problems like LLMs and the massive propaganda going into it as if the propaganda is going to cause behavior change.

which is why diversity of thought, experiences, culture is very important.

eleventen•about 3 hours ago

This critique reads to me like "capitalists should have asked anti-capitalists about whether or not to do capitalism". This is either going to get resolved through the political process as is proper and good, or else our politics is broken and it will be resolved through older and less peaceful means.

hellojesus•about 3 hours ago

This is quite solvable through the normal market process.

mindslight•about 2 hours ago

I think this and Lopatto's article are insightful and worth repeating... But they're missing the mark on genAI. GenAI is most certainly something wanted by the heavily-moneyed customers of the surveillance-spam-slop industry (aka Silicon Valley). It's not just governments who have the money to pay for it, rather businesses do as well. And this gets right back to the concept of "what normal people want" - not as a static thing, but rather as something that can be shaped and molded.

iainctduncan•about 1 hour ago

And of course anyone involved in fraud, whether legal or illegal - and by that token anyone selling services to help fight fraud. Infosec companies are loving this period.

simianwords•about 4 hours ago

> Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to crash the economy .

I don’t want to be snarky or dismiss without giving it though but this line of thinking is childish and shows lack of understanding of how products enter market. Companies that invent product generally can not predict all the uses. That’s what the free market exists for - push your product and see how people use them, get feedback and improve. I find that beautiful.

Does the author want planned RCTs to understand how they might be useful and slowly release them only every dimension of utility is confirmed? This reeks of euopilled mindset - a perverse parental kind of mindset where the state decides how products may be used.

The Silicon Valley doesn’t work like this. They release products and the second or third order effects can not be predicted. Who knew NVIDIA might be used for LLMs when they first started producing chips for gaming?

The author (I assume) is feeling some latent anxiety over the extreme speed in which things are progressing. They are grieving by finding reasons to stall this progress by falsely claiming that people don’t care about LLMs until there is confirmed proof that LLMs can help them improve their lives.

But this is fundamentally a childish mindset, and flat out wrong. People do care - there are always enthusiasts who are top of the game and who the broader public follow.

aspenmartin•about 3 hours ago

Yes. As if there is some dichotomy where the evil out of touch Silicon Valley are making a terrible misjudgement of what society “wants”. They have built a powerful technology with enormous economic and geopolitical implications and the author thinks they shouldn’t have because “people didn’t ask for this”. People don’t ask for anything they don’t understand: electricity, the internet, the steam engine — all of them were strange and new and scary and “no one” (in terms of people on the street) asked for them.