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Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory.
In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.
I am hoping for the best, but life has taught me hard not to bet against humanity's worst instincts.
edit: add whether
I have a friend in a position of some influence, and am currently trying to persuade them to stop being so comfortable trusting in humanity to come to the right decisions for exactly that reason.
In the logic of Idiocracy, the way that an AI would "allow" the future society portrayed in the movie is by letting dumb people systematically have more kids than smart people, and "not allowing" this would entail some kind of coercive eugenics policy aimed at getting smart people to have more kids than they would otherwise be inclined to.
I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.
https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...
The printing press had sooo much state violence over that everywhere.
Oral contraceptives are a fight the USA is losing to the extremist christian republicans. Right now the line is right on Misoprostol. And shithole states like Texas even criminalize day-after pills and 'suspect' miscarriages.
And horrible tech like "weatherproof camera + AI + battery + solar + cell" (FLOCK) are easy to implement and already have been used in tracking women with miscarriages in Texas and across the country.
It seems for every new tech, theres 1 really cool good thing for the public, a few neutral things, and 1-3 absolutely terrible things.
And those terrible things make money. Lots of money.
Other technologies like surveillance (and, perhaps, AI) are more clearly centralizing and enabling of power.
The difference matters a lot if you're having mixed feelings about working in technology.
I'll go further and say that it accelerated getting us into this mess we're in today.
The OSI is owned and controlled by the tech titan hyperscalers who benefit from free labor.
Useful "open source software" always gets encrusted by the big titans that then build means to control the tech, and then the means to control us. And just to rub salt in the wounds, they rarely compensate the original authors.
Android is Linux, right? Then why can't we install our own software? Why does it spy on us? Open source is so great, right?
95% of humans will never own a phone that gives them freedom. And we enabled that.
Everything we as tech people own is also getting locked down. We're going to have to start providing our state ID to access the internet soon.
But OMG, Year of Linux on the Desktop 2012!!12
Pretty soon you won't even be able to use your Linux. Everything will be attested.
Open source hasn't stopped power from accruing to the titans. It's accelerated their domination.
People rush to defend Google and Amazon when you criticize how they profit off of Redis, Elasticsearch, etc. The teams that build the tech aren't becoming wealthy, and most of the bytes flowing through those systems are doing so behind closed source AWS/GCP/Azure offerings.
These companies then use their insane reach to tax everything that moves. Google owns 92% (yes, 92%!) of URL bars and they tax every search, especially searches for other companies' trademarks. They do even better - they turn it into a bidding war. Almost nothing that exists in the world today can make it to you without being taxed by them.
If they don't like your content, you just disappear.
Mobile platforms have never been ours. We can't install what we want. We're soon going to be locked at the firmware level to just Google and Apple and forced to use their adblocking-free, tracker-enabled "browsers" (1984 telescreens). Any competition can't get started due to the massive scale required, meanwhile Apple and Google tax everything at 30% and start correlating everything you do, everyone you talk to, everywhere you go in their panopticon.
"Open source" was wool pulled over our eyes so that we happily built, supported, and enabled this.
Open source should be replaced with "our proletariat users and small businesses can have this for free, but businesses listed on any stock exchange cannot commercialize this ever unless they pay out the nose for it".
"Source available" / shareware is peak. Give your users the thing, and the means to maintain it after you're gone, but tell Google et al. to go away.
"Fuck you, pay me" as the artists frequently say.
But also, let's stop giving the Death Star free labor.
LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.
Temporarily embarrassed millionaires; I cannot get around that issue toward collective action, toward myself contributing to an answer. I'm stuck. I can't unsee its truth =/. The individual will choose enrichment. We all will.
I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.
As a Gen Xer, I grew up with a strong belief in the "goodness" of technology, of its power to make people's lives better and to ameliorate suffering. So after 25 years of seeing so much invested into technology that actively makes people's lives worse (e.g. ad-tech, social media algorithms), and even conservatively just results in the huge accumulation of wealth and power to the very few, I can't help but feel extremely disillusioned.
Yes, I like showers and soap and running water, but I rarely see the type of economic investment into tech these days that will have as broad of a beneficial impact as running water did.
My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains.
In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.
I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder
We could have fun defining what's good usage but we're so far from it, it would just make me sad.
True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.
Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth.
IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.
So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy.
Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality.
Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build.
You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?
How would your country function, if all medical staff, construction, rail, sewage, police and firefighters suddenly worked half as long or not at all, starting tomorrow?
Because my home country tried this whole "if we seize the means of production from the wealthy elites, we won't have to work as hard anymore" ~80 years ago, and guess what happened to the workers? Were they working less hours for more money, OR, were they working just as much while also starving and being plagued by shortages?
The problem with your logic, is that it only applies to bullshit Western office corporate jobs who are anyway not actually doing much useful work for 40h. All those office jobs that don't need to be working 40h, were just subsidized by endless money printing, that's why you see so many layoffs happening, once the ZIRP era ended when they were hiring people just to raise headcounts to boost stock valuations to gullible investors they could rug-pull, but now the bubble popped and the jig is up.
And it only works in a world where globalisation, free trade and international competition does not exist, because the countries who will work harder than you, will outcompete you and subjugate you in the long run.
You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem.
The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.
no no, we're not doing that.
Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.”
We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be.
Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations?
I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.
Clearly, powers that be learned all too well from internet rollout.
> Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees’ consumption of “tokens,” a unit of A.I. use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many A.I. agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
Maybe the first to be laid off should be the ones that thought it made sense to track token consumption. Goodhart's Law doesn't even apply in this scenario because that's a dumb metric whether or not you're using it to evaluate employees.
https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
Only if you assume in good faith that the point is to evaluate employees for productivity on some stated goal for the company or role. If you try to view the metric from other possible positions, the one I think fits best is the promotion of token consumption by all means. This is useful for signaling to the broader market that AI is profitable and merits more investment, and may be part of a deal between them and whoever they're buying tokens from. It makes more sense to me that Meta would be more interested in leveraging its control over people to manipulate the state of the world, market, and general sentiment than having them work on stable, well-established and market-dominant software services that really only need to be kept chugging along. Isn't mass-manipulation their whole business? Why wouldn't they use their employees and internal structure to contribute?
It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.
Edit: and if you question that, you are a troublemaker to add to the list
I say this as someone self employed that burned almost $1000 on tokens last month. And had. A lot of fun doing it.
Ford style assembly lines made the work of the factory workers more miserable. Partially automated cashier did the same thing.
I don't think there is any point in trying to resist automation, as the efficiency benefits are too important.
In those cases, that led to a transition period, nowadays only a small fraction of the human population is working to produce food, and their job is more about planning, finance and orchestration of machine work, but many specialised jobs were lost or made miserable in the process.
IMHO any job that can be done by a machine should not be done by a human, the tricky part is going there with as little undesirable effects as possible.
The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable.
> Partially automated cashier did the same thing.
I've not once heard anyone in the service industry make this complaint.
> as the efficiency benefits are too important.
You can squeeze every last drop of productivity from your employees. In the short term this may even evidence profits. In the long term it only works if you hold a monopoly position.
The whole innovation was about making the jobs as simple and repetitive as possible so humans would basically work like robots.
Once you're there, having removed any agency and freedom, pushing the hours to the limits of human exhaustion is just one logical step.
Someone forwarded an enormous amount of text over teams the other day at work. From someone (bless her) that always means well but usually averages about one spelling mistake per word and rarely goes over 20 words per message. Clearly copy paste chatgpt.
For say hn gang that thinks in terms of context shifts, information load and things on THAT wave length the problem with that situation is obvious but I realised then that is not at all obvious to the average public. She genuinely seemed to think she's helping me by spending 15 seconds typing in a prompt and having me spend the next 30 minutes untangling the AI slop.
There is zero understanding or consensus of acceptable practices around that sort of thing baked into societal norms right now.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/nbc-5-responds/meta-users-contin...
Whereas if you're half-competent and at a startup, the AI is an incredible opportunity to try to leap ahead while the prices are subsidized (by the big tech behemoths fighting wth each other)
The reason is a complete inversion of Ownership and Agency.
For a decade of ZIRP, big tech convinced its employees that they're "changing the world", and what we did mattered. Sure the exhorbitant salaries and constantly rising stock value didn't hurt, but honestly other than the FIRE cultists, for most of us the difference between 200k/year and 800k/year didn't feel much day to day (other than the ability to buy a house or something, and feel safe with a retirement nest egg). No, most people were missionaries not mercanaries.
2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.
Then came the yearly layoffs, chipping away further, and reminding every employee that they're at the mercy of a spreadsheet and the whims of people 3 levels above them in the org chart, in spite of the economic reality of their product, or their personal productivity.
And now we're here, and it's clear that all of the above is still relevant. The old-timers that hung around see that their personal output doesn't matter, their product's PnL doesn't matter. All that matters is 1) the company's AI strategy (and if they're not part of it, they're secondary), and 2) tokenmaxing.
How can anyone find joy in this environment unless they're purely in it for the comp?
I couldn't. I left my big tech job in December after 15 years, and have not been this happy at work since pre-COVID.
I can’t believe I read this sentence, lol.
800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Do you see so many people lamenting the days when this was possible? So many memes about the lifestyle Homer Simpson could provide, and may modern families can’t? 800k makes it possible.
It’s a huge lifestyle upgrade, especially if your partner wants to do something artistic, academic, or otherwise less profitable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_...
But yeah, "no difference between 200 and 800", while spelling out some MASSIVE differences is quite a statement.
>2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.
Also SVB collapsed in late 2022, notice that AI hype started right after.