Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context.
The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works.
> I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring.
For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain products/services.
For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many years and will continue.
Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best to assume the above.
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
then they get angry. very angry.
just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.
edit — these are the hidden requirements.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.
now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
> nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
> then they get angry. very angry.
Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].
Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).
However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.
Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.
I've noticed this is leading to less high quality products being produced in general. If the only real axis people understand is price then products can't compete on quality/durability/maintability/etc, and so they're pushed aside to lower the cost.
A recent example: I've bought many articles of clothing from Eddie Bauer over the years because they have been generally high quality and durable, and even so are only a bit more expensive than other brands. However just last week they filed for bankruptcy. Sure, the company could have been mismanaged, but I'm sure competition from fast fashion brands with rock bottom prices didn't help.
Haven’t followed the recent history of Eddie Bauer, but seems they’ve sullied their brand for a while.
Sam’s Club has been selling Eddie Bauer stuff for years. I don’t think a $37 pair of Eddie Bauer hiking boots are going to be quality.
The more or less inevitable trend of "outdoor stores/brands" is to become increasingly sort of "outdoorsy casual" stores of some sort with--maybe--some camping/hiking gear at some level.
It's been a hugely popular PE play - any time a brand has a reputation for being very well made buy it for life level of stuff, that people pay a high price for, you can buy it and start reducing the quality for a few years, selling cheaper lower quality goods for the same price, hoping no one notices.
For the first few years, there aren't enough product issues for most of the hardcore enthusiasts to notice - maybe your tent ripping was just bad luck, or it may take two years for even a mediocre tent to weaken and fail for all but the people taking their tent to Denali or something.
Eventually the people who know move on and stop paying for the poorly made crap, but it's still seen as an exclusive brand by people who care about showing off they can afford something expensive vs. those for whom the quality was worth paying more for.
There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business.
Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.
Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.
Don't forget the second half of that feedback loop: other manufacturers come out with their poor approximations of those features at lower prices, consumption shifts to that because quality isn't clear from the labels, the quality manufacturers don't move enough volume to hit similar prices, so they end up either killing them or cutting corners.
So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.
Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.
I've never heard of Eddie Bauer, and if I did see that in a store, there's no way to know the clothing is of higher quality, or how much higher. In a market for lemons, lemons win.
> However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
I think people generally do understand that. What they can't do is tell which of the more expensive options is actually of higher quality and which just has higher margins. That requires expert knowledge and we can't each be an expert in everything.
In other cases it can also actually be better to get the cheaper crap option. E.g. if you are not sure if something will actually work for you the best option is no longer just the one with the lowest cost/lifetime.
It’s the externalized costs that bite society in the end.
The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.
However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
> The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for their production/transportation
And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made far away
Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.
Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.
If that was the case then TOTP would be available as an alternative but often enough it isn't even though SMS are less secure and more costly to implement.
While this is true, I believe AI (and other technological advances) erodes the trust embedded in this 'facade'. And that’s how I interpreted the authors’s sentiment.
When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages.
In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore.
I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility.
I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.
I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?
Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a product/service that many/most think desirable.
There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination.
Cars are a great example:
* Reliable cars can also be cheap.
* High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable.
The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits.
Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.
> things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining
This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on.
And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality.
And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.
We've gotten more pixels and bytes and flops, that's it. We haven't got more battery life, or faster computers, which is strange because they have orders of magnitude more flops in them.
Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6 on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here).
Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago.
And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges.
Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
You have to compare the old Nokia phone with the new Nokia dump phone. I doubt that the old phone's battery lasts longer than that of a new Nokia 2720 Flip:
Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking about fixed–layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after that had games and the internet — what's actually new since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?
I got a new phone but didn't set it up immediately. The battery lasted about two weeks. Once I installed my apps and SIM card it dropped to about one day. Once my old phone had no SIM card and was sitting permanently in flight mode with no apps running, its battery life rose from about one day to about two weeks.
Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable.
If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
For calculating price changes over time, there will always be the question: "is this the same product as earlier?"
Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different.
But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.
Well, you can't call your loved ones from anywhere with rotary phone, when you need them, so which one is better? I know which one I'd choose.
SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago?
> Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them.
All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about?
> Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them
Clothing is horrible. Shirts don't last a season. T-shirts (all brands) are kleenex. Like tshirts are basically how old scifi portrayed how UBI issued clothes would be. Outdoor gear companies no longer backup their products the failure rate is insanely high while being more expensive. Sony/Apple hugely expensive earbuds are basically disposable junk after a year or two whereas my old Sony headphones lasted decades. No earbuds are going to last decades. Olive oil mayonnaise number 2 and 3 ingredients are other oils (split to two types so that olive oil is TECHNICALLY the highest percentage oil still). Google broke my phones voice command so I can't use it to set timers and I have less functionality than I did 10 years ago (home automations all broke, etc). Music services broke the algos so they no longer give me the 'best results for me' but for the company. New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.
Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens, where you buy something to spy on you) everything is trash/misleading now.
> New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.
Just a shout out for this one. Possibly the most "irrational" purchases made right now by US consumers are new cars. 5 year old cars are 60% cheaper than new!
My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for inflation, they were way cheaper than those older headphones.
Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you.
New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a ridiculous amount.
Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation when comparing to the older clothing you're talking about.
The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago.
For car repair... what repair do you even need on a modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone up but that's not relevant to this discussion.
All your other complaints are about software which isn't really relevant to this discussion.
Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No offense.
My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way out. Everyone I know is past their first earbuds purchase. Inflation adjustment doesn't apply when the product life is so incredibly different. The fact you even know your pairs life shows the previous effortless use of headphones versus modern use has been enshitified.
I said Olive oil mayonnaise is an enshitified product abusing loopholes. That you can't read is on you (no offense).
$15 gym shirts aren't tshirts (you know like 3 pack Hannes, Jockey). Again why are you trying so hard to reply t something I didn't write?
If new vehicles are just as affordable why are average loan lengths going up? The average car loan in the 1970s was 30 months. Long-maturity auto loans carry substantially higher interest so it isn't gaming the system reasons.
That decade ago TV didn't spy on you, and I conceded TVs are an outlier if you ignore the whole 1984 aspect.
What car repairs does insurance cover? Where did I talk about maintenance? I talked about the cost to insure modern vehicles being higher especially later on. Context is important for comprehension.
You can leave off the passive aggressive 'no offense' snark.
> My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way out.
same
i'll never buy those apple earbuds ever again; hundreds of dollars down the drain and more e-waste cause those batteries cant be replaced... and sony: charging 70 bucks for wired earbuds and the cover falls off after a couple months usage what the f...
(ok rant finished)
I have had a set of like 15 t-shirts that I wash and tumble dry after one day of wear. After a decade of service some of them are showing signs of wear, but the majority are still in good condition.
My over ear 3.5mm headphones are still going doing well after 7 years.
After watching some up and coming band live, I can find their music on spotify available for listening without ads included in my existing subscription.
It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex.
Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products.
It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
This is a fun "boots theory" bit from Terry Pratchets discworld. I don't know where it started but discworld is where I first read it described this way.
This might be true once in the past but even the "quality" brands are garbage today. It's all being made from the same factories with the same materials, with the same business magnates forcing worse quality at higher costs.
Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it’s definitely not “same factories with the same materials”. If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the latter ones will last years longer.
>But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend towards cheaper items because
1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen
2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years
3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do
i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it.
i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.
> Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport
People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and required daily maintenance.
> lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements
This is what produced our high standard of living.
For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned:
If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff.
(I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
> For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
For many reasons.
It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant.
It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out.
It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past.
It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care.
The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off.
and so on… … …
Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
> > Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
> That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts).
Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use.
> It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ...
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps.
> Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry.
I don't see any reason to expect significant change.
All true, except I think you've conflated software and software product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can justifiably feel melancholy about it all.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?
Exactly: is the local max or min for (hiking boots) currently the global max or min. And does the way LLMs work limit future exploration because it increases the activation cost of getting out of the local min/max due to the effects on society/workforce/corporate direction caused by LLMs?
I have custom hiking boots but they're very heavy. I have plastics for winter that are both very heavy and not very comfortable relatively. I rarely wear either.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware.
Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
> Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies.
> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.
This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?
> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because they gradually lost performance over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.
>> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
This is a common myth that was debunked a while back. Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day.
> Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias
It's still a thing today though? It's not survivorship bias. Take the Microwave example. In a lot of countries it is very hard to buy just a traditional (convection) Microwave now. They force these 4-in-1 or an inverter Microwave.
> leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day
It says nothing about "quality". So continuing, yes the inverter Microwaves are "quality", offer more control and costs more but due to all the complexity dies way faster. A lot of them die in <3 years when the traditional 1s last way longer. Back in the day we only had convection Microwaves. The end.
> This is a common myth that was debunked a while back.
By who? By you? Another example - SSDs have been made to not last as long. We went from SLC -> MLC -> TLC -> QLC etc. The writes were reduced. Did the consumers want this? No. There just wasn't much "choice". Top of line Samsung consumer SSDs just changed. During COVID some vendors sneakily adjusted it too. So, yes quality went worse. Deliberately.
I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.
It only took 70 years (1880s to 1950s) and two world wars for the world to digest the industrial revolution and reach the 'capitalism lifts everyone' modern Capitalist(ish) era. Just think of the new kinds of jobs AI will enable our grandchildren to have after we inbetween sacrifice. Space yacht polisher. Space yacht teak refinisher. Space yacht eye candy.
There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.
Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.
The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.
The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.
On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.
We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
"This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to comment. This is a developing story"
That is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people. But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates you from the resentful poor.
That notion is based on the misconception that for there to be very rich people, other people would need to be poor — that would resent you.
Economic science has pretty much proven that when the average income in a society is higher and fewer are poor, the economy moves more money and the rich benefit more as well.
Misconception is not really the right word here along with the word 'need'.
It comes down to if the people in power think they are playing a zero sum game and are driven by greed. We see plenty of dictatorships that are very resource wealthy and yet their society suffers in abject poverty. Said leaders have zero care about making their peoples life better and will gladly kill them wholesale if they become problematic.
Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people live, and control over one's own life.
Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge parts of the economy.
And as long as they need workers, they will want them to live not too well - that would raise the price of labor, if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives not working for the billionaires.
Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less control over how you live, not that you live on the streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g. by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.
How does a billionaire have to associate with poor people? They can live in a complete bubble: house in the hills, driven by a chauffeur, private jets, private islands for holidays etc...?
The people who cook for them, the people who clean for them, the ones who take care of their kids, the one who sell them stuff or serve them in restaurants...
They have separate kitchens for the prep, the cleaners work while they’re out on the yacht, they have people to do the buying, and the restaurants they visit have very well trained staff who stay out of the way.
First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
Also, they're not building the house or the jet, they're not growing the food, ... people close enough can be chosen for willingness to be sycophants and happiness to be servants. Unless you're feeding yourself from your own farm, or manufacturing your own electronics, there are limits to even a billionaires ability to control personnel.
nah, if slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could reorient their entire lives around not seeing the "ick" of chattel slavery I think modern billionaires can do the same thing even easier now if they wanted.
The fact that people see that basically the singularity is happening but can't imagine that humanoid robots get good rapidly is why most people here are bad futurists.
That fact that people see "the singularity happening" based on LLM results, is why most people are the kind of ignorant cheerleaders of tech that predicted robot servants, flying cars, and space colonies by 2000 in 1950.
This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological progress had been driven by the pressures of the second world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be solved with software which expanded the problem set rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to the problem of software, we don't know that there are other barriers that would slow progress so much.
Tomy made the Dustbot robot vacuum in 1985, Electrolux made the Trilobite robot vacuum in 1996, and then washing machines, dishwashers, tumble-dryers, microwaves, microwave meals, disposable diapers, fast fashion, and plug-in vacuums, floor steamers, carpet washers, home automation for lights and curtains, central heating instead of coal/wood fires and ash buckets, fridge-freezers and supermarkets (removing the need for canning, pickling, jamming, preserving), takeaways and food delivery, people having 1-2 children instead of 6-12 children. The amount of human labour in housework has plummetted since 1900.
LLMs aren't AGI and maybe aren't a path to AGI, but step back and look at the way the world is changing. Hard disks were invented by IBM in 1953 and now less than a hundred years later there's an estimated million terabytes a year of hard disks made and sold, and a total sold of Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta ... 1.36 Zettabytes.
In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often recorded to dictaphone tapes, and now you can find a recorded photo or video of roughly anyone and anything on Earth. Maybe a tenth of all humans, almost any place, animal, insect, or natural event, almost any machine, mechanism, invention, painting, and a large sampling of "indoors" both public and private, almost any festival or event or tradition, and a very large sampling of "people doing things" and people teaching things for all kinds of skills. And tons of measurements of locations, temperatures, movements, weather, experiment results, and so on.
The ability of computers to process information jumped with punched card readers, with electronic computers in the 1950s, again with transistors in the 1970s, semiconductors in the 1980s, commodity computer clusters (Google) in the 1990s, maybe again with multi-core desktops for everyone in the 2000s, with general purpose GPUs in the 2010s, and with faster commodity networking from 10Mbit to 100Gbit and more, and with SATA, then SAS, then RAID, then SSDs.
It's now completely normal to check Google Maps to look at road traffic and how busy stores are (picked up in near realtime from the movement of smartphones around the planet), to do face and object recognition and search in photos, to do realtime face editing/enhancement while recording on a smartphone, to track increasing amounts of exercise and health data from increasing numbers of people, to call and speak to people across the planet and have your voice transcribed automatically to text, to realtime face-swap or face-enhance on a mobile chip, to download gigabytes of compressed Wikipedia onto a laptop and play with it in a weekend in Python just for fun.
"AI" stuff (LLMs, neural networks and other techniques, PyTorch, TensorFlow, cloud GPUs and TPUs), the increase in research money, in companies competing to hire the best researchers, the increase in tutorials and numbers of people around the world wanting to play with it and being able to do that ... do you predict that by 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050 ... 2100, we'll have manufactured more compute power and storage than has ever been made, several times over, and made it more and more accessible to more people, and nothing will change, nothing interesting or new will have been found deliberately or stumbled upon accidentally, nothing new will have been understood about human brains, biology, or cognition, no new insights or products or modelling or AI techniques developed or become normal, no once-in-a-lifetime geniuses having any flashes of insight?
I mean, what you're describing is technological advancement. It's great! I'm fully in favor of it, and I fully believe in it.
It's not the singularity.
The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI, and the AGI will then self-improve at an exponential rate allowing it to become infinitely more advanced and powerful (much moreso than we could ever have made it), and it will then also invent loads of new technologies and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
> "The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI
That is one version of it, but not the only one. "John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress.[14][15] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue""[1]. A time when people before it, would be unable to predict what came after it because it was so different. (And which I argue in another comment[2] is not a specific cutoff time, but a trend over history of the future being increasingly hard to predict over shorter and shorter timeframes).
Apart from AGI, or Von Neuman accelerationism, I also understand it as augmenting human intelligence: "once we become cyborgs and enhance our abilities, nobody can predict what comes next"; or artificial 'life' - "if we make self-replicating nano-machines (that can have Darwinian natural selection?), all bets about the future are off"; or "once we can simulate human brains in a machine, even if we can't understand how they work, we can run tons of them at high speeds".
> and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
Arguably, we have built weakly-superhuman entities, in the form of companies. Collectively they can solve problems that individual humans can't, live longer than humans, deploy and exploit more resources over larger areas and longer timelines than humans, and have shown a tendency to burn through workers and ruin the environment that keeps us alive even while supposedly guided by human intelligence. I don't have very much hope that a non-human AGI would be more aligned with our interests than companies made up of us are.
The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.
Just because you can find someone referring to something else as a "technological singularity" doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using.
...And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to agree with you that "we founded companies" somehow satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, unless they're deeply invested in the idea that The Singularity Is Happening Now, and have entirely forgotten just what that's actually supposed to mean, or why they wanted it to be happening.
I wouldn't say that founding companies satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, the relevance there is that companies are superhuman and sociopathic, therefore the dream of superintelligences to be empathic, cooperative, and aligned with human interests doesn't seem likely.
> The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.
In 2008 the IEEE magazine Spectrum did a series on the Singularity and one article [0] says "Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting." Another article had this "Who's Who"[1] cheat-sheet of famous Singularity discussers for and against; one of the columns is "Kind of Singularity", and there's more than one kind. Kevin Kelly has "singularities are pervasive changes in the state of the world that are often recognizable only in retrospect. As a result, the singularity is always near". Bill Joy was a more general "computer science, biotech and nanotechnology event horizon". Marvin Minsky had mind uploading as well as machine intelligence.
Vernor Vinge named 'The Singularity' in 1983 and popularised the ida, and here are talk slides from him in 2005 after he had twenty years of thinking about it[2]:
Why call this transition the "Technological Singularity"?
By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Math
A place where some regularity property is lost
Not necessarily a place where anything becomes infinite
By analogy with the use of "singularity" in Physics
A place where the rules profoundly change
What comes beyond is intrinsically less knowable/predictable than before
The apocalyptic endpoint of radical optimism :-)
and
Singularity futures
Possible paths to the Singularity
What if: AI (Artificial intelligence) research succeeds?
I.J. Good, "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine"
Hannes Alfv�n, The End of Man?
What if: The internet itself attains unquestioned life and intelligence?
Gregory Stock, Metaman
Bruce Sterling, "Maneki Neko"
What if: Fine-grained distributed systems are aggressively successful?
Karl Schroeder, Ventus
Vernor Vinge, "Fast Times at Fairmont High"
What if: IA (Intelligence Amplification) occurs
As the radical endpoint of Human/computer interface research?
Poul Anderson, "Kings Who Die"
Vernor Vinge, "Bookworm, Run!"
As the outcome of bioscience research?
Vernor Vinge, "Fast Times at Fairmont High"
Vernor Vinge, "Win a Nobel Prize!"
A place where the rules profoundly change because of bioscience research, human/computer cyborging, or distributed systems emergent complexity, is compatible with Vingean Singularity ideas, or at least used to be before the current LLM/AGI hype cycle.
The 'attractor at the end of history' is from Terence McKenna: "[he] saw the universe, in relation to novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time, which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. ... The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal ... our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."[3]
> "doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using."
Okay, but your "LLMs are not a path to AGI and tech bros are dumb" doesn't lead to anything interesting, it's just a mic-drop end of discussion.
"The singularity is happening" is one of those things.
"LLMs are AGI" is yet another.
They've already been discussed to death. The only reason to discuss them now is if you are one of the people who is absolutely rejecting reality because you are bound and determined to believe something that is not true.
If you think AGI is at hand why are you trying to sway a bunch of internet randos who don’t get it? :) Use those god-like powers to make the life you want while it’s still under the radar.
how do you take over the world if you have access to 1000 normal people? if AGI is by the original definition (long forgotten by now) of surpassing MEDIAN human at almost all tasks. How the rebranding of ASI into AGI happened without anyone noticing is kind of insane
> If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress
I don’t understand this perspective. There are numerous examples of technical progress that then stalls out. Just look at batteries for example. Or ones where advancements are too expensive for widespread use (e.g. why no one flies Concorde any more)
Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
If AGI doesn't happen, then good. You get to keep working and playing and generally screwing off in the way that humans have for generations.
On the other hand if AGI happens, especially any time soon, you are exceptionally fucked along with me. The world changes very rapidly and there is no getting off Mr Bones wild ride.
>Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
In this case, because nature already did it. We're not just inventing and testing something whole cloth. And we know there are still massive efficiencies to be gained.
For me the Concorde is an example of how people look at stuff incorrectly. In the past we had to send people places very quickly to do things. This was very expensive and inefficient. I don't need to get on a plane to have an effect just about anywhere else in the world now. The internet and digital mediums give me a presence at other locations that is very close to being there. We didn't need planes that fly at the speed of sound, we needed strings that communicate at the speed of light.
>If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way
There's no "rapid acceleration of progress". If anything there's a decline, and even an economic decline.
Take away the financial bubbles based on deregulation and huge explosion of debt, and the last 40 years of "economic progress" are just a mirage filling a huge bubble with air in actual advancement terms - unlike the previous millenia.
The GDP per capita of the world has been slowly increasing for several millenia. Same for the advancements in core technology.
The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age, vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece, and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).
Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
If you got a random cancer in 1970, your chances of survival would be only somewhat better than during the Roman Empire, so slightly better than zero, but not very much so. Even Hodgkin's lymphoma, nowadays a very manageable disease, was reliably deadly.
In 2026, unless you are really lucky your chances of being treated into remission are much better. That is a meaningful improvement.
Medical science made a HUGE progress in the last 50 years alone. The oldest IVF baby is not even fifty yet.
The world can produce more things cheaper and faster than ever and this is an economic decline? I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
>I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive improvements in your quality of life" if you start from merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or colonial India.
Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.
And yet in the US I can currently survive and illness by the means of technology where I would have died in the 70s. It can be really hard to see the forest from the trees when everything around us is rapidly changing technology.
Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop us from increased housing density in a lot of places too. Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and made expensive because of it.
The bell curve of IQ and being stupid probably don't have much to do with each other.
Think of stupidity as the consequences of interacting with ones environment with negative outcomes. If you have a simple environment with few negative outcomes, then even someone with a 80 IQ may not be considered stupid. But if your environment rapidly grows more complex and the amount of thinking you have to do for positive outcomes increases then even someone with a 110 IQ may find themselves quickly in trouble.
I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns.
The improvements in the first few generations came fast, and they were impressive. Then subsequent generations took longer, improved less over the previous generation, and required more and more (and more and more) resources to achieve.
I'm not interested in one guy's take that LLMs are AGI, regardless of his computer science bonafides. I can look at what they do myself, and see that they aren't, by most very reasonable definitions of AGI.
If you really believe that the singularity is happening now...well, then, shouldn't it take a very short time for the effects of that to be painfully obvious? Like, massive improvements in all kinds of technology coming in a matter of months? Come back in a few months and tell me what amazing new technologies this supposed AGI has created...or maybe the one in denial isn't me.
" We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly."
> I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns
It seems even more true if you look at OpenAI funding thru 2022 initial public release to how spending has exponentially increased to deliver improvements since. We’re now talking upwards of $600B/yr of spending on LLM based AI infrastructure across the industry in 2026.
In my opinion, LLMs provide one piece of AGI. The only intelligence I’ve directly experienced is my own. I don’t consciously plan what I’m saying (or writing right now).
Instead, a subconscious process assembles the words to support my stream of consciousness. I think that LLMs are very similar, if not identical.
Stream of thought is accomplishing something superficially similar to consciousness, but without the ability to be innovative.
At any rate, until there’s an artificial human level stream of consciousness in the mix for each AI, I doubt we’ll see a group of AIs collaborating to produce a significantly improved new generation of AI hardware and software minus human involvement.
Once that does happen, the Singularity is at hand.
That's like saying "you're delusional if you think we're affected by The Sun's gravity when it's a hundred million miles away".
A hundred million years ago, every day on Earth was much like every other day and you could count on that. As you sweep forwards in time you cross things like language, cooperation, villages, control of fire, and the before/after effects are distinctly different. The nearer you get to the present, the more of those changes happen and the closer they happen, like ripples on a pond getting closer to the splash point, or like the whispers of gravity turning into a pull and then a crunch. "Singularity" as an area closer to the splash point where models from outside can't make good predictions keeps happening - a million years ago, who would have predicted nations and empires and currency stamped with a human face? Fifty thousand years ago, who could have predicted skyscrapers with human-made train tunnels underground beneath them, or even washing bleached white bedsheets made from cotton grown overseas? Ten thousand years ago, who could have predicted container shipping through the human-made Panama canal? A thousand years ago who could have predicted Bitcoin? Five hundred years ago, who could have predicted electric motors? Three hundred years ago who could have predicted satellite weather mapping of the entire planet or trans-Atlantic undersea dark fibre bundles? Two hundred years ago, who could have predicted genetic engineering? A hundred and fifty years ago, who could have predicted MRI scanners? A hundred years ago, who could have predicted a DoorDash rider following GPS from a satellite using a map downloaded over a cellular data link to a wirelessly charging smartphone the size of a large matchbox bringing a pizza to your house coordinated by an internet-wide app?
In 2000 with Blackberry and Palm Treo and HP Journada and PalmPilot and Windows Phone and TomTom navigation, who was expecting YouTube, Google Maps with satellite photos, Google StreetView, Twitch, Discord, Vine, TikTok, Electron, Amazon Kindle with worldwide free internet book delivery, or the dominance of Python or the ubiquity of bluetooth headphones?
Fifty years ago is 1975, batteries were heavy and weak, cameras were film based, bulbs were incandescent, betamax and VHS and semiconductors were barely a thing - who was predicting micro-electromechanical timing devices, computer controlled LED Christmas lights playing tunes in greetings cards, DJI camera drones affordable to the population, Network Time Protocol synchronising the planet, the normality of video calling from every laptop or smartphone, or online shopping with encrypted credit card transactions hollowing out the highstreets and town centers?
The strange attractor at the end of history might be a long way away, but it's pulling us towards it nonetheless and its ripples go back millions of years in time. It's not like there's (all of history) and then at one point (the singularity where things get weird). Things have been getting weird for thousands and thousands of years in ways that the people before that wouldn't or couldn't have predicted.
If your every other animal on the planet other than humans, the singularity already happened.
Your species would have watched humans go from hairless mammals that basically did the same set of actions and need that your species had to an alien that might as well have landed from another planet (other than you don't even know other planets even exist). Now forests disappear in an instant. Lakes appear and disappear. Weird objects cover the ground and fill the sky. The paradigms that worked for eons are suddenly broken.
But you, you're a human, you're smart. The same thing couldn't possibly happen to you, right?
There is no master plan, there's a hype cycle, environment and the market.
Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to be first to market assuming that might be a giant market (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge - the microcomputer was).
Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:
"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic system does not function without the motivations of the people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
They're saying capital is power. Not analogous — the same thing. Until now power always had to be wielded by a human, but it's really the power who is wielding the human as an instrument to channel itself, like Majora's Mask. Once we have power that doesn't need a human, it won't need that and we'll all be subservient.
I agree with it. Consider financial markets, for example. There are individual humans whose account balances are changing, but the system as a whole is not an instrument of any human, not the buyers, not the sellers, and not the exchange operators, and yet it dictates the large scale structure of society in ways unimaginable a century ago.
Companies are already like this. Boss fires his friend and puts him out of work with a family to feed. Why? It was ‘good for the company.’ So many inhuman decisions hide behind that fig leaf. It is a way to mentally remove responsibilities from these decisions. After all, it was for the good of the company. Stock buybacks while mailroom is on food stamps? For the good of the company. Dumping the waste into the river instead of safely disposing it? For the good of the company. Making money off vice and the mentally vulnerable? For the good of the company. Overfishing the ocean such that there won’t even be a commercial fishing industry in our lifetimes? For the good of the company. Polluting the earth and ushering in a new age of extinction? For the good of the company.
We are already enslaved to capitalism. Working against our own interest. In service towards the company and the company alone. This meta organism we value above all else on earth.
Capitalism is the ultimate 'Norman lord in his castle on conquered land', removed from the consequences of his choices/rent extraction on the serfs he shares no culture, no understanding with just what value can he extract from them.
From the Landian perspective, initially, sure, the system needs humans. But once you have autonomous and sovereign capital, things could look very different.
In Land's own words:
"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/
The motivations of the people running the capitalistic system is making more money. Remember the entire mantra of greed is good? Group interest can be a super-human entity that you can get caught in a loop of serving even though serving said entity is not in your best interest. Humans have only been 'mostly' in control of this because there was no other entities capable of said control themselves.
Populism can be a non-violent way out, not is the non-violent way out.
As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
> violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
And you don't even have to go back 100 years for an example. About a year will do it.
Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once elected. Disregarding current politics, Adolf Hitler was a populist and that didn't go very well, did it? As I see it now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth, charisma instead of competency, and running the country into the ground because those things you don't have are actually important.
What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of financial and power-grabbing motivation.
I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
Employing servants only recently fell out of favor in the years between WWI and WWII. Prior to WWI having servants was still in fashion for the wealthy. Naturally I meant paid servants. Enslaved and to some extent indentured servants obviously have little to no choice.
That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "voluntary" in modern capitalism.
Aside: seeing myself refer to the 1940s as "recent" is really highlighting my age. Soon I'll be relegated to a "grampa yelling at clouds" meme (but just the computer cloud variety)
They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.
If you are rich "outsourcing" is easy because you have people to handle that for you. You have senior servants like butlers and housekeepers who manage the rest of the staff, for example, so you are not directly hiring cleaners.
This is the difference between the affluent and the truly rich.
It's fair that's probably the difference. You don't have a full-time personal assistant/butler/whatever you want to call it. But you personally outsource a lot of individual tasks that you don't really want to do.
In this day and age, how often do you actually need to have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of places that will do it for you in a few hours.
Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a driveable condition, you might want to have a full time mechanic.
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
> Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organization. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization
Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.
UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
"People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they also protected from immigration?
Not OP, but assuming I am following the argument correctly, I think parent is referring to something else. Advanced economies have participants, who function well in that environment and are shaped by it to a large degree. As a result, if one was to ask them to get food in an environment, where it is not as easily accessible as it is today, they might stumble. On the other hand, in the old country, a lot of people I knew had a tendency to have a little garden, hunt every so often, forage for mushrooms and so on. In other words, more individuals may be able to survive in less developed economies precisely, because they are less developed and less reliant on convenience today brings.
>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.
>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Nobody. They will try to channel it.
I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.
If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.
> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy
Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?
A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt the government, and exactly this has been happening.
>That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case,
It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
At the end of the day Capitalism and Communism have nothing to do with authoritarianism and liberalism/democracy. An authoritarian capitalist country is a perfectly valid type of government as there has never existed a 'pure' capitalistic governed country.
We have a lot of people, capitalism values them as approaching zero, anything that alters that valuation (without reducing population) is contrary to capitalism. Capitalism means the rich must get richer, they own the resources and means of production, they take the reward.
It comes to a point where they need an underclass to insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that eventually there is massive starvation (possibly water/fuel poverty first).
Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change and start to do something about it.
It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his crimes.
Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of
production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
>anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
You realise that a large swathe of society earn less than their costs?
Everyone will get richer perpetually, there will never be any impact on climate, we'll never suffer water shortages, we'll all ride unicorns and eat rainbows...
The important thing to note here is people have been propagandized into thinking that capitalist = democratic. In fact the US would gladly punish you with 'un-American activities' investigation if you said anything to the contrary.
The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise in authoritarian activities all over the world, especially in the US our democratic system is at very high risk of collapsing.
> very many will struggle without work or prospects.
People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.
Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
> And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because there's no demand for what we're doing".
Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
> As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
Yes, fuck the 90% of those working in that space, and let's hope the 10% gets an "upmarket" gig there.
All this grand-visioning sounds devoid of empathy and real understanding of millions of real people's situations and needs.
> Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
Which happens all the time anyway. There just aren't that many people for whom being a call center worker is their long-term career, they'll just switch to some other job.
What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as a viable path. In a world with ever increasing wealth inequality there is lower velocity of money (lower available cash flow) to enable the creation of jobs. And just pointing to the industrial revolution is not the panacea that you think it is. Past economic/tech revolutions creating new jobs, I have yet to see anyone point to a vast creation of jobs (or at least the starting trend of job creation)... Instead all the news, all the discussions, everything has been about (directly or indirectly) the decreased need for as many workers or the increased production of workers with the tools (which indirectly implies a decrease in workforce)
There are millions upon millions of people where there is no "long-term career" period, just regular shitty and more shitty gig jobs and low end work like this, from factories and workcenters to burger flipping, to deliveries, loading, to cleaning, and everything in between. And they are getting increasingly squeezed and out of options.
me neither, but that's because I used to be a bookkeeper. There's accountants though who have data entry people under them who they market as "bookkeepers," and they are now being replaced by AI. Most small business owners in particular dont care.
If your corp is large enough to use a full-sized ERP system it will no longer be your choice to make. The whole software industry is desperately trying to fit AI functions into every pore of their software, ERP vendors being no exception.
It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there
I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption.
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
EDIT: it has been rightfully pointed out that my above comment can easily be read as a racially charged overgeneralization of overseas workers of indo-asian descent. The "cheap spaghetti code" was meant as shorthand for "wildly variable code output with respect to quality and consistency, with no overarching architecture or plan", and was intended to target offshoring _agency_ output along with cheap labor systems that US companies created. These systems attempt to exploit workers at these agencies to avoid paying US salaries and are NOT a reflection on the actual individuals working in the aforementioned cube farms themselves. These workers are already subjected to a number of dehumanizing labor issues entirely outside of their control and I did not intend to further dehumanize. I apologize for my terse, careless wording.
I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.
Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow, money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth. That's a big difference.
Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making
I'm specifically speaking of the "race to the bottom" offshore consultancies that exploit cheap labor in foreign, largely asian countries, for export to the US to bypass paying US wages. The preexisting meme I referenced is around corporate lies where their "AI" is largely backed by offshore labor. Think the latest Waymo news, etc. Regardless of those controversies, within the US at least, we've been offshoring technical labor overseas for decades.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.
To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.
I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.
Cost of offshoring to ai isn’t zero. Chatgpt and such are businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost you’d pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.
I agree it's greater than zero, however, like a good drug dealer you get the first few hits for free (or at cost in the most charitable interpretation of current subscriptions.)
I get the feeling that we're not even close to paying for the _actual_ costs of our frontier GenAI models at current usage levels, with or without subscriptions in the picture. AFAICT we're all using a highly subsidized product, made possible by private capital on the promise of future returns that may or may not materialize.
Outside of a few vertically integrated companies (Google with their custom TPUs, possibly AWS with theirs) LLM companies like OpenAI have to rely on massive data centers via MSFT, Oracle and Nvidia deals to train their frontier models to stay competitive. Theres a lot to pay for when wielding 20 Gigawatts of compute on other folks' machines. For OpenAI we're talking 4+ trillion USD so far with no signs of slowing. That's a hell of a lot of subscriptions to make up for that spend and they have a long climb ahead of them to get there. Maybe their "killer app" will be their new "erotica" models, who knows (porn has lead several tech initiatives in the past.) But I wouldnt bet money on it working out for them.
It's estimated that OpenAI spends 3 USD for every 1 it makes. Obviously that will have to change to make them an actually viable company in the long term. In the end, I see the most likely scenario is we're left with the few large players like Google. They're the ones that have any hope on "winning" the GenAI race, as they're in the best position to not rely on someone else's shovels.
All that said offshoring started out with similar promises to GenAI and some things panned out with offshoring and others didn't. Only time will tell what shakes out of all this mess. I just hope we get a sane readjustment of expectations for GenAI before our next economic collapse (the massive GenAI investment has helped prop up our economy to an extent, at least in the US)
In short, a business exists to turn a profit and OpenAI has yet to do so. Perhaps they eventually will and be the new "offshore" solution going forward as you imply, but just like actually moving your technical talent overseas it comes with a significant amount of tradeoffs to consider (tradeoffs already outlined in parent and other posts on this thread.)
LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumption.
This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
The data center buildout feels obscene when framed this way. Not because computation is evil, but because we're burning planetary-scale resources to accelerate a culture that already struggles to articulate why quality matters at all
Unless you successfully make ai subscription an obligatory cost to pay for every employee in an org. Which they seem to be doing quite successfully considering enterprise sales activity.
Successfull b2b salesmanship does not require a working and useful product. It just requires you to get these meetings with purchasers and show that other comparable orgs are buying your product. For example, at my last job I wasn’t sure if we were a microsoft shop or a google shop because we bought both of their products that did the same thing. Because that is just what you do when you are an org with 5 figure employee counts, you spend budget.
Very well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for yet.
Quality. Matters.
It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately, 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time, or never, because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]
As I said in my edit, "because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else."
Marginal improvements in quality which result in a marginal increase of cost/price often provide much better overall returns than just using a series of cheap substitutes that fail quickly. In some areas, this doesn't work, but I think shortsightedness is blocking truly better solutions in a great many cases. Particularly when true costs are being externalized.
Hopefully this does not count as being uncivil, I just want to cut through what feels like insanity to put my (and at least a few others’) feelings plainly:
If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to review or “build off of”… we hate you. We don’t want to be your voluntold slop jannies. LLM over use and vibe coding is taking a fairly enjoyable job and making it insufferable. Now I have to sift through 3-10x more lines of code that are written in a non-human thought process using terrible naming schemes and try to find the bug… just to realize that the code isn’t even solving for the correct or underlying problem. Every time I have to interact with a co-workers LLM code, my tasks take weeks longer than they would have. This is including the ones who claim to be exerts in prompting and harnessing and whatever skibidi buzzword is out this week.
You are not saving time, you only think you are because you don’t look closely at the output and send it off to your lowley janitors to deal with. And the people who claim to be running 20 or 30 AI tasks at once what are you even building? If you aren’t literally shipping the next Amazon that’s just embarrassing.
I can not wait for people to wake from this bizarre mass psychosis. I already see co-workers context window getting smaller than free version ChatGPT in an incognito window.
I think it's beneficial to hear this, as I've definitely been on the other side of this before now. So, thanks for sharing.
As much as we can fault the technology and the hype around it, this as much a people problem as anything else. Before AI, this same problem happened with architecture/PoC to implementation hand-offs.
AI is a new tool that a lot of us are still figuring out, but that doesn't excuse poor communication.
That this person has a .jp address may be relevant. In my experience Americans are much more tolerant of “good enough” than, say, Japanese people. An American might even ship a high end final product with four figure price tag that literally was made with hot glue. (cough Grado)
Whereas a Japanese business would rather just not ship in such a case. Look at the Nintendo, such as the 3d Mario games. Those things are polished to an insane degree that no American studio would bother with.
Apple is exceptional in many ways and this is one of them. Microsoft, with “no taste”, is the standard American fare.
Generative AI is completely in line with the rest of the industrial milieu; pumping out product as quickly and as cheaply as possible. "Good enough" is often the standard, even before the industrial mode, but the industrial mode allows "good enough" to compound exponentially until you've got an edifice of trash that continues tumbling downhill on sheer momentum and we all scramble to fix the thing in situ.
This is how our world works and until it hits the proverbial wall, this is how it will continue to work because it's too big to be detoured or course-adjusted
Tools exists so we can spend our time focusing on more important matter. AI is not any exception of that.
Till this day even there exists IDEs with proper auto-complete suggestions (or editors with LSP support), there are still a lot of people prefer doing it in the old way (vim/emac/nano) and none of them get fired for that.
Z3 exists but we still like to solve algorithms by hand. High level languages exists but C/C++ codes are still written every day, even asm is still used.
On the brighter side of the issue, we now have ton of legacy projects written in obscure languages (COBOL, FORTRAN) that only some dozen people can maintain effectively, and those people are mostly at retirement age now. GenAI can solve that.
> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.
If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
Every successful software project reaches an equilibrium between utility for its operators and bugs, and that point very rarely settles at 0% bugs [1].
When software operators tolerate bugs they’re signaling that they’re willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts of the feature that work and that they need.
The idea that consumers will somehow not need the features that they rely on anymore is completely wrong.
That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of the negotiation: Coding agents doesn’t change that one bit. Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because it’s cheaper to do so.
I don't think LLMs are the root cause or even a dramatic inflection point. They just tilt an already-skewed system a little further toward motion over judgment
I think that unlike physical art, there aren't actually enough people who recognize or even care about your craft. Sure the codebase is super maintainable and that half-pixel line ties things up beautifully, but nobody cares other than your peers. Your peers won't give you a salary.
As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.
As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.
Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
If only it was plywood, at least it'd be solid and sturdy. These days it's particleboard, which is much worse than plywood. Similar concept, but now made out of sawdust and glue instead of woodchips and glue that are alternately laid down in different orientations layer by layer for increased strength.
Particleboard chips much easier, breaks down much faster with moisture, and can't hold screws in. But it's very cheap, can be made very smooth, and is light.
Commercial ventures already had to care exactly to the extent that they are financially motivated by competition forces and by regulation.
In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time pressure to ship would skip.
I was watching a youtube video the other day where the guy was complaining his website was dropping off the google search results. Long story short, he reworded it according to advice from Gemini, the more he did it, the better it performed, but he was reflecting on how the website no longer represented him.
Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
"terrified".... overused word. As a man I literally can't relate. I get terrified when I see a shark next to me in the ocean. I get impatient when code is hard to debug.
We're pretty good at naming fear when it has a physical trigger. We're much worse at naming the unease that comes from watching something you care about get quietly hollowed out over time. That doesn't make it melodrama, just a different category of discomfort.
I hear you, especially as a man, because we're attuned at looking for trouble in the horizon. AI is not some transition from horses to cars, which just meant selling the horse, buying a car, and continue your transport business. It's intelligence that may be able to take over all aspects of our current professional training, thus potentially threatening our livelihoods.
The base capitalist premise is if you work, you'll have resources to survive and thrive. The flip-side is that if you cannot or refuse to work, you will starve, be destitute, homeless, without medical care, live under a bridge, and die hopeless.
And societal failings in a capitalist system are always reflected towards the individual no matter what.
Bad monetary policy? Should have saved. Businesses buy state laws to worsen worker laws? Get a better job. Got sick and medical lost your job? Too bad, go die, I guess?
Its never a systemic thing we can identify and fix. But its always always reflected as a personal failing.
Theres a top comment on this article that LLMs are a perfect parieto machine. 80% good, 20% utter shit and lies. That seems to track pretty well with what I'm seeing. If thats generally being accepted, I have to ask if my (and all others professional labor) if we're worth our wages for that 20%. And the question isnt being asked of us, but about us in HR and C levels.
I'm already seeing "make do with what less labor you already have and hope AI helps". I support a national level thing (all 50 states). Used to be 3 engineers for backend. Now its just me. I'm already seeing the stark negative effects, overworking, sloperating as a necessity (no DBA), and hope and prayer stuff doesnt go down.
And combined with the fact we're seeing worse hiring and layoffs since the Great Recession... Something's gotta change.
"People like (me)".. And what are me and people like me like?
How's about you say what you're comparing me and people like me to.
In my experience, people who use terms like "You people" are just using that as a placeholder for racism, sexism, or ableism. Which is it in your case?
And 100 years ago, when industry took over something, the new thing still needed people. But thats not a hard economic law - thats just what happened before. There is no guarantee of that observation to still hold true.
The terrifying part isn't obsolescence. It's mediocrity becoming the ceiling.
AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over quality.
What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never debugged without a copilot.
The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted.
Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because mediocrity is profitable.
For real I’m starting to get a feel for the slop and the first sentance gave me pause. Never mind green username. Classic its not just that. Its this. LLM pattern.
What terrifies me is the total and utter potential disruption to our economies in a very rapid order.
Software is just a proxy for the thing that we want which is data. The same way an electric drill is a proxy to a hole. Since it's impossible to sell holes there's a market for selling electric drills to make holes.
A lot of economic activity is based on these proxies. Same in the software digital world. Even though it's data that were after many successful software businesses have been started to sell the tools, i.e. software products for people to make their digital "holes".
Now imagine if you could just suddenly 3D print your electric drill. Or your frying pan. Or your garden shears. What would happen to the economiies based on selling these tools?
Once you can prompt your way to any digital creation what happens to the economies based on making the digital tools?
It's not there yet, but if/when it does it's going to be a complete economic restructuring that will affect many. Careers will be wiped out, livelihoods will be lost.
AI slop is similar to the cheap tools at harbor freight. Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.
80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
I’m glad cheap stuff exists. Sometimes I really do need something quickly, and borderline-disposable quality is good enough. But I also want the option to buy better than that.
I installed some drywall a few years ago. I plan to install a room of drywall exactly never again. Not worth it for me to buy the best drywall tools.
But I have installed multiple wood floors, replacing old carpet, and would do so again if needed. I’d rather get higher quality tools there so I can keep them and reuse them for years.
And then you have to buy it again next time because it broke. I've never killed a power tool. I don't use them that much but neither do you. And when you have a library of power tools in your shed and don't have to go out and buy one, you can do more things more quickly.
Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.
This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash versions of better quality tools have always existed.
Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality, consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of quality around the mid- to late-2000s.
If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera, Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.
Using tools broadly but things like torque wrenches, AC vacuum pumps, and other specialized tools have mostly been too expensive to buy. Now I can buy a cheap version and it works good enough for most cases. It is not cheaper even with buying the tools to do the work yourself.
This is happening in other areas as well. The Chinese mini excavators and mini skid steers are changing what smaller landscape companies can do. They are not as good as a Kubota but they are 1/2 the price and 80% as good.
> You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between).
Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).
The bear case for Workday is not that it gets replicated as slop, but that its “user base” becomes dominated by agents.
Agents don’t care about any of Workday’s value-adds: Customizable workflows, “intuitive” experiences, a decent mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring databases.
Why is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can do, now fund the creators.
Good luck, there are too many forces working against that.
Only big creative companies like Disney can play the game of making licensing agreements. And they are ok with it because it gives them an edge over smaller, less organized creators without a legal department.
In a 1995 interview with Inc. magazine, author Kurt Vonnegut was asked what he thought about living in an increasingly digitized world. His response is so perfect that it’s worth reprinting in full:
I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.”
Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something
If slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter, maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation though.
The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
I find working with LLMs much more fun and frictionless comprated to the drudgery of boring glue code or tracking down nongeneralizable version-specific workarounds in github issues etc. Coding LLMs let you focus on the domain of you actual problem instead of the low level stumbling blocks that just create annoyance without real learning.
I’m a systems person too, and I don’t see mediocrity as inevitable.
The slop problem isn’t just model quality. It’s incentives and decision making at inference time. That’s why I’m working on an open source tool for governance and validation during inference, rather than trying to solve everything in pre training.
Better systems can produce better outcomes, even with the same models.
The open source system I’m working on lets multiple agents propose, critique, and stake on decisions before a single action is taken.
It runs at inference time rather than training time and is model agnostic. The goal is to make disagreement explicit and costly instead of implicit and ignored, especially in high stakes or autonomous workflows.
> I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.
Mourn it? Overall, people seem to hate tech workers in general (of all kinds). The death of the craft will not be mourned as a tragedy, it's already being celebrated as a triumph (whether it's true or not, doesn't matter).
I must admit there's a part of me that wants it to die. I want people to remember what was good about it in retrospect, then realize there is no chance of ever getting it back. Permanent losses are important lessons.
One of the biggest problems with AI slop (the biggest problem) is that we aren't discerning or critical enough to ignore the bad stuff. It should be fine for people to use AI to generate tons of crap so long as people curate the good stuff to the top.
>What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is good enough for most people?
Sounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art.
And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change order needed)
The future you describe seems closer to the "Carol from Accounting" future I am hoping for in the blog post. My worry is that cost of everything goes down just enough to price out of existence all of the artists the 0.1% used to commission, without actually letting all of humanity do the same.
I deeply hate the people that use AI to poison the music, video or articles that I consume. However I really feel that it can possibly make software cheaper.
A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps.
Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
>Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store.
I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the extra will be decent remains to be seen.
ai is trained on the stuff already written. Software has been taking a nosedive for ages (ex, committing to shipping something in 6 months before one even figures out what to put in it). If anything shit will get worse due to the deskilling being caused by ai.
It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
Some of us have a perfectly good game plan for that. It's called Universal Basic Income.
It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
I wouldn't call UBI a "game plan" so much as a thing people can point to so justify their actions to themselves. It helps you pretend you're not ruining people's lives, because you can point to UBI as the escape hatch that will let them continue to have an existence. It's not surprising that so many in the tech industry are proponents of UBI. Because it helps them sleep at night.
Never mind that UBI has never actually existed, it probably never will exist, and it's very, very likely that it won't even work.
People need to face the possibility that we will destroy people's way of life the way we're headed, and to not just wave their hands and pretend that UBI will solve everything.
(Edited to tone back the certainty in the language: I'm not actually sure whether AI will be a net positive or negative on most people's lives, but I just think it's dishonest to say "it's ok, UBI will save them.")
I'm only "in the tech industry" in the literal sense, not in the cultural sense. I work in academia, making programs for professors and students, and I think the stuff "the tech industry" is doing is as rotten as you appear to.
UBI has never existed because the level of production required to support it has only just started to exist. (It's possible that we're actually not quite there, but that's something we can only determine by trying it out—and if we're not, then I'm 100% confident we can get there with further refinement of existing processes.) If we have the political will to actually, genuinely do UBI—enough to support people's basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, and a little bit of buffer, without any kind of means testing or similar requirements—then it's very, very likely that it will work. All the pilot programs give very positive data.
I'm not pushing UBI because I think it's a fix to the problem of automation. I'm pushing UBI because I think it's the fulfillment of the promise of automation.
I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?
We can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do something in order to recieve money, even if the something is begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the answer.
if you oversimplify things, you lose the point. I moved houses. I took all of my stuff from my old house, moved it into a new house. Later, I moved all of that stuff back out of that house when I moved out of that one. Was moving my stuff into that house pointless, then? I could have just skipped a step and put it all in storage and then just not had any furniture for the entire time and saved money. In fact, if you don't eat anything, you'll save tons of money!
I agree with you about magic money. Frequently downvoted when I put it forward but by and large I think that the human psyche needs to have a daily sense of having "accomplished something".
Otherwise I suspect many of us will (reluctantly) drift off into lives that center around drinking alcohol, playing video games…
That describes much of my career as well. Curiously (or not) the job I had that felt the most satisfying was when I was paid to mow lawns as a youth. Beginning with a ragged lawn and leaving it looking clean and evenly cut was satisfying.
The creme rises to the top. If someone's shit-coded program hangs and crashes frequently, in this day and age, we don't have to put up. with it any longer. That lazy half-assed feature that everyone knows sucks but we're forced to use it anyway? The competition just vibe coded up a hyper-specific version of that app that doesn't suck for everyone involved. We start looking at who's requiring what. What's an interface and what's required to use it. If there's an endpoint that I can hit, but someone has a better, more polished UI, that users prefer, let the markets decide.
My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency app that came thru here a couple of months ago.
Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount.
API access is another place where things hinge on.
Right. If the "slop" is truly "90% as good" and that 10% actually matters to people, then they won't use the slop. If the 10% doesn't matter, there's probably a reason for that.
Meh. Slop is not danger. Because in software lines of code quantity does not have quality on its own. Or if it has it is not a good quality. And bad software costs money. The problem with temu for the west is not that the things sold there are bad. The real problem rose in the last 2-3 years when they become good.
They allow me to do work I could never have done before.
But there’s no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that I aim to build.
Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have in mind.
The people who are panicking aren’t using this stuff in depth. If they were, then they would have no anxiety at all.
If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it could. It can’t, nor even close.
As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some of the surface appearance of a web browser.
This has been my experience. I tend to use chats, in a synchronous, single-threaded manner, as opposed to agents, in an asynchronous way. That’s because I think of the LLM as a “know-it-all smartass personal assistant”; not an “employee replacement.”
I just enjoy writing my own software. If I have a tool that will help me to lubricate the tight bits, I’ll use it.
Same. I hit Tab a lot because even though the system doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's really good at following patterns. Takes off the mental load of checking syntax.
Occasionally of course it's way off, in which case I have to tell it to stfu ("snooze").
Also it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge, as it doesn't actually know facts - just what token should come after a sequence of others. The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it - brilliant, just what I wanted.
> The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it
That’s probably the single most valuable aspect, for me.
Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
I was disappointed that your paper devoted less than a sentence in the introduction to qualifying "slop" before spending many pages quantifying it.
The definitions you're operating under are mentioned thus:
> characteristic repetitive phraseology, termed “slop,” which degrades output quality and makes AI-generated text immediately recognizable. (abstract)
> ... some patterns occur over 1000× more frequently in LLM text than in human writing, leading to the perception of repetition and over-use – i.e. "slop". (introduction)
And that's ... it, I think. No further effort is visible towards a definition of the term, nor do the background citations propose one that I could see (I'll admit to skimming them, though I did read most of your paper--if I missed something, let me know).
That might be suitable as an operating definition of "slop" to explain the techniques in your paper, but neither your paper nor any of your citations defend it as the common definition of an established term. Your paper's not making an incorrect claim per se, rather, it's taking your definition of "slop" for granted without evidence.
That doesn't bode well for the rigor of the rest of the paper.
Like, look: I get that this is an extremely fraught and important/popular area of research, and that your approach has "antislop" in the name. That's all great; I hope your approach is beneficial--truly. But you aren't claiming a definition of slop in your paper; you're just assuming one. Then you're coming here and asserting a definition citing "the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023" and asserting redefinition-after-the-fact, both of which are extraordinary claims that require evidence.
Again, not only do I think that mis-definition is untrue, I also think that you're not actually defining "slop" (the irony of my emphasizing that in a not-just-x-but-y sentence is not lost on me).
I don't know which of the authors you are, but Ravid, at least, should know better: this is not how you establish terminology in academic writing, nor how you defend it.
Slop is food scraps fed to pigs. Folks trying to redefine it in 2022–2023 as "repetitive characteristic language from LLMs" should have chosen a different word.
You don't want a global authoritarian jewish utopia run by a digital sanhedran? How else will the elite people get robot blowjobs in their flying cars on their way to their transhuman surgery appointments? Won't somebody please think of the juden?!
It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology.
I think software development has gone through a similar change. At one point software companies cared about software quality, but this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed, bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
Now that generative AI products are becoming more widely used, it's a little depressing how folks don't seem to view the world with a broad historical context.
The "AI effect" on the world has many similarities to previous events and in many ways changes very little about how the world works.
> I'm terrified of the good enough to ship—and I'm terrified of nobody else caring.
For almost every product/service ever offered, it was possible to scale the "quality" of the offering while largely keeping the function or outcome static. In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements. This leads to folks (including me!!) to lament the quality of certain products/services.
For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things. For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
There is nothing surprising here, it's been this way for many years and will continue.
Obviously there are exceptions, but for the most part it's best to assume the above.
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
then they get angry. very angry.
just because people don’t care about it now doesn’t mean they won’t care about it in the future.
edit — these are the hidden requirements.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
until requirements change, or the hidden requirements come out to play … most software engineers can probably recall multiple times when the requirements changed half way through. hell, i’ve done it on solo projects.
now we’re stuck with boots that can only last 20 miles, but we need to go 35.
> nitpick: most users don’t care about these things until something goes significantly wrong and it impacts them, e.g. a massive data breach or persistent global downtime.
> then they get angry. very angry.
Yes, this has a lot of overlap with how humans differ from "Homo Economicus" [0].
Humans generally can't find out, don't know, care to know, have the time to research, or are expert enough to understand the ramifications of decisions perfectly (or adequately to some definition of adequate).
However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
This, also, has been true for a long long time. Humans are far more likely to choose the cheap option if they don't believe or understand the expensive one.
Incidentally, this is somewhat rational given that marketing half-truths are rampant.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
I've noticed this is leading to less high quality products being produced in general. If the only real axis people understand is price then products can't compete on quality/durability/maintability/etc, and so they're pushed aside to lower the cost.
A recent example: I've bought many articles of clothing from Eddie Bauer over the years because they have been generally high quality and durable, and even so are only a bit more expensive than other brands. However just last week they filed for bankruptcy. Sure, the company could have been mismanaged, but I'm sure competition from fast fashion brands with rock bottom prices didn't help.
Haven’t followed the recent history of Eddie Bauer, but seems they’ve sullied their brand for a while. Sam’s Club has been selling Eddie Bauer stuff for years. I don’t think a $37 pair of Eddie Bauer hiking boots are going to be quality.
The more or less inevitable trend of "outdoor stores/brands" is to become increasingly sort of "outdoorsy casual" stores of some sort with--maybe--some camping/hiking gear at some level.
It's been a hugely popular PE play - any time a brand has a reputation for being very well made buy it for life level of stuff, that people pay a high price for, you can buy it and start reducing the quality for a few years, selling cheaper lower quality goods for the same price, hoping no one notices.
For the first few years, there aren't enough product issues for most of the hardcore enthusiasts to notice - maybe your tent ripping was just bad luck, or it may take two years for even a mediocre tent to weaken and fail for all but the people taking their tent to Denali or something.
Eventually the people who know move on and stop paying for the poorly made crap, but it's still seen as an exclusive brand by people who care about showing off they can afford something expensive vs. those for whom the quality was worth paying more for.
There is an interesting counter balance to this consumer tendency: the business.
Businesses/organizations in a lot of ways act much more "rationally" than the individual consumer. So you'll see generally better car/truck maintenance in fleets than by consumers.
Then there is a cool feedback/blowoff valve where more expensive + higher quality "pro" tools get discovered by consumers, drive up demand, the price falls, and then the features become common.
Don't forget the second half of that feedback loop: other manufacturers come out with their poor approximations of those features at lower prices, consumption shifts to that because quality isn't clear from the labels, the quality manufacturers don't move enough volume to hit similar prices, so they end up either killing them or cutting corners.
:( Yes, I think this is definitely the case.
So then it becomes a cycle. It's risky to make a high quality initial product that's expensive because it requires the buyer to understand and trust why they should pay more.
Eventually the market demands the higher quality and the pro series gains adoption, only for the the cheap stuff to come in again.
I've never heard of Eddie Bauer, and if I did see that in a store, there's no way to know the clothing is of higher quality, or how much higher. In a market for lemons, lemons win.
> However, they do understand price!!! So you end up getting cheap stuff that everyone chooses because they don't understand how they lower their future risk or save money over the long run with a more immediately expensive option.
I think people generally do understand that. What they can't do is tell which of the more expensive options is actually of higher quality and which just has higher margins. That requires expert knowledge and we can't each be an expert in everything.
In other cases it can also actually be better to get the cheaper crap option. E.g. if you are not sure if something will actually work for you the best option is no longer just the one with the lowest cost/lifetime.
It’s the externalized costs that bite society in the end.
The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
A slightly higher quality boot could reduce their expenditure (monetary and time) and collectively allow society to devote the time and resources saved to higher goals.
However the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
> The short life boots are great for everyone (boot makers, suppliers) except the end user.
And the environment, which now gets polluted with discarded short life boots, and all the waste byproducts required for their production/transportation
And the social fabric inevitably changes for one reflecting the priorities of a world of cheap disposable boots made far away
Also good for the environmental cleanup companies and waste management ones (/s)
>until something goes significantly wrong
Data breaches are so common they don't even register any more, and people share far more personal information now (willingly or not) than they used to. Remember when the common advice was "don't use your real name online"? Now every service demands your phone number to register, and those temporary email services (like 10minutemail) rarely work any more, in my experience. Downtime makes the news if it's bad enough, but Cloudflare, Microsoft and Amazon still control most of the internet. They fuck up badly all the time, and nothing ever happens. Windows 11 is literal adware, and Linux desktop usage is still a rounding error.
Remember that Tea "dating" app that leaked pretty much everything last year? As far as I can tell, it's still in business.
Many such cases.
> Now every service demands your phone number to register
That appeared as a defense against people impersonating you, i.e. two factor authentication.
If that was the case then TOTP would be available as an alternative but often enough it isn't even though SMS are less secure and more costly to implement.
Weird that those same services don't send a login token to the registered number.
Equifax arguably shouldn’t still be in business…
And yet not long ago its stock was nearly triple that of the time of the 2017 breach…
While this is true, I believe AI (and other technological advances) erodes the trust embedded in this 'facade'. And that’s how I interpreted the authors’s sentiment.
When you watch a video or use a service that requires significant effort and value to create, you inherently trust that the creators have invested diligence and care to protect their investment. Creators risk losing customers through bad reviews or, worse, being sued for damages.
In an age where it's reasonably straightforward to create something that appears to match the quality and effort of what was previously difficult to accomplish, it becomes harder for users to distinguish high quality anymore.
I think we'll go through a period where many users will get burned by poor services (lost data, security breaches, etc.) and will need to find new ways of verifying product and service credibility.
I suspect the market for simple consumer apps charging $5+ monthly for basic functions (like todo lists) will disappear, and possibly the same for low-to-moderate complexity enterprise apps (like Jira). This is probably better for consumers. Many of these apps and tech businesses can charge so much for fairly basic functionality because the barrier to building alternatives is too great. There was simply no option if you wanted a particular set of features. It's 'value-based pricing' that extracts benefits from consumers unable to negotiate the price.
I feel like there's a false dichotomy here where there's an inverse relationship between quality and cost. I know seen plenty of cheap goods that do what they're supposed to and last forever, and I know plenty of expensive projects, both in purchasing price and development cost that are just steaming piles. So you get all this sloppy jank and say "well but at least it's fast and cheap". I'm not sure that's the argument you should be making, why can't we have high quality cheap things in the first place?
Agreed. "Quality" is a shortcut word to mean an aspect of a product/service that many/most think desirable.
There are examples of seemingly contradictory high/low cost, high/low durability, high/low reliability, high/low status symbol, etc. and seemingly every combination.
Cars are a great example:
* Reliable cars can also be cheap.
* High status symbol cars can be incredibly expensive but also unreliable.
* Expensive cars can be dangerous.
* etc.
The overall trend is that things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining. It's inevitable when companies insist on endlessly increasing profits.
Even the things that are "good enough" and cheap tend to come with massive hidden costs. For example, good looking clothing can be inexpensive enough for a person to wear everything once and throw it away, but behind the scenes there are child slaves, microplastics/PFAS contamination, and a textile waste crisis.
> things are getting much more expensive while the quality is declining
This is totally untrue, material things have gotten way cheaper over time. TVs, cars, phones, technology, appliances, the list goes on and on.
And quality has improved on many of these, a $500 TV today is way bigger and better than a $5k TV from a few decades ago. Same for cars & phones when you adjust for inflation. Home gadgets / IOT are much more accessible & affordable. Appliances have gotten cheaper and even the higher end products are quite affordable. Ikea furniture is cheap and many of their products are quite durable and solid quality.
And old things weren't always better or more reliable than the modern cheaper products.
We've gotten more pixels and bytes and flops, that's it. We haven't got more battery life, or faster computers, which is strange because they have orders of magnitude more flops in them.
Casey Muratori showing off the speed of visual studio 6 on a Pentium something after ranting about it: Jump to 36:08 in https://youtu.be/GC-0tCy4P1U
> We haven't got more battery life
15 years ago even the high end smartphones could barely make it half the day before dying. Now all-day battery life is the norm, and the Chinese phones with the latest battery tech can easily last 2 days (Samsung, Google, Apple are very behind here).
Laptop battery life isn't even comparable to what it was 20 years ago.
And software getting slower doesn't change the fact that our material goods (pixels, bytes, flops) have improved orders of magnitude while getting cheaper.
Back in the Nokia brick days you could easily go a full week between charges.
Of course it's an apples to oranges comparison since a modern smartphone has infinitely more functionality, but in this one thing modern phones remain objectively worse.
You have to compare the old Nokia phone with the new Nokia dump phone. I doubt that the old phone's battery lasts longer than that of a new Nokia 2720 Flip:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2720_Flip
The new dump phone likely has more functionality and uses a much more robust wireless network.
Does it, though? Unless you go back so far you're talking about fixed–layout b&w LCD screens, the next era after that had games and the internet — what's actually new since that time? Multitasking yes, what else?
You can still go a week on a modern phone if you restrict your usage to what you would do on a Nokia brick phone.
I got a new phone but didn't set it up immediately. The battery lasted about two weeks. Once I installed my apps and SIM card it dropped to about one day. Once my old phone had no SIM card and was sitting permanently in flight mode with no apps running, its battery life rose from about one day to about two weeks.
Every time we get faster computers we get much much slower software. We get larger hard drives, so software bloats until it takes GBs
Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable.
If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
For calculating price changes over time, there will always be the question: "is this the same product as earlier?"
Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different.
But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.
Well, you can't call your loved ones from anywhere with rotary phone, when you need them, so which one is better? I know which one I'd choose.
SSD is not only faster but also quieter and more efficient. See how much power a modern laptop consumes vs 20 years ago?
> Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.
You said everything is trade off but choose to believe the future will get worse. Seems contradictory? I believe life will go on, and in 2046 people will complain about modern life and talk about how good things were 20 years earlier.
Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them.
All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about?
> All things unquestionably better than the past. What's there to complain about?
Taste and nutritional value a worse then in the past. Arguably the two most important things when it comes to food.
> Yes, and you can get fresh tomatoes any time of year for cheap and they're so firm they won't get damaged in transit and with a blast of ethylene they're a perfect shade of red when you buy them
My family calls those "water balloons".
Clothing is horrible. Shirts don't last a season. T-shirts (all brands) are kleenex. Like tshirts are basically how old scifi portrayed how UBI issued clothes would be. Outdoor gear companies no longer backup their products the failure rate is insanely high while being more expensive. Sony/Apple hugely expensive earbuds are basically disposable junk after a year or two whereas my old Sony headphones lasted decades. No earbuds are going to last decades. Olive oil mayonnaise number 2 and 3 ingredients are other oils (split to two types so that olive oil is TECHNICALLY the highest percentage oil still). Google broke my phones voice command so I can't use it to set timers and I have less functionality than I did 10 years ago (home automations all broke, etc). Music services broke the algos so they no longer give me the 'best results for me' but for the company. New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.
Other than TVs (which are literally the 1984 screens, where you buy something to spy on you) everything is trash/misleading now.
> New vehicle prices are higher than they have ever been for vehicles with repair costs so high they are going to be an insurance rate nightmare later in their lifecycle.
Just a shout out for this one. Possibly the most "irrational" purchases made right now by US consumers are new cars. 5 year old cars are 60% cheaper than new!
https://www.carfax.com/buying/car-depreciation
My Bose headphones are at 8 years and in perfect condition with 90% of original battery life. Adjusted for inflation, they were way cheaper than those older headphones.
Excellent quality olive oil is incredibly easy to find, if you're buying bottom barrel junk then that's on you.
New vehicle prices when adjusted for inflation have not risen at all; when adjusted for features/comfort/reliability/luxury they've fallen a ridiculous amount.
Same for clothing. My $14.88 Walmart jeans lasted for years before I sized out of them. My $15 t-shirts from Target are going strong. I recently got $15 gym shirts from Target which seem to be excellent quality, thick material and good stitching. The cheap gym shorts I bought literally 10 years ago are still in perfect condition. And again you need to adjust for inflation when comparing to the older clothing you're talking about.
The OLED TV I got for $2700 a few years ago is now closer to $2k and has superior specs. And again, way superior to more expensive TVs from a decade or two ago.
For car repair... what repair do you even need on a modern Japanese car? They just work forever if you do even the bare minimum maintenance. And honestly even if you neglect that maintenance. Yes labor costs have gone up but that's not relevant to this discussion.
All your other complaints are about software which isn't really relevant to this discussion.
Honestly all of this sounds like a "you problem." No offense.
My Sony died very quickly. My Apple's are on their way out. Everyone I know is past their first earbuds purchase. Inflation adjustment doesn't apply when the product life is so incredibly different. The fact you even know your pairs life shows the previous effortless use of headphones versus modern use has been enshitified.
I said Olive oil mayonnaise is an enshitified product abusing loopholes. That you can't read is on you (no offense).
$15 gym shirts aren't tshirts (you know like 3 pack Hannes, Jockey). Again why are you trying so hard to reply t something I didn't write?
If new vehicles are just as affordable why are average loan lengths going up? The average car loan in the 1970s was 30 months. Long-maturity auto loans carry substantially higher interest so it isn't gaming the system reasons.
"Over 20% of new car purchases in Q4 2025 were 84-month financing deals." https://www.usatoday.com/story/cars/research/car-loans-finan...
That decade ago TV didn't spy on you, and I conceded TVs are an outlier if you ignore the whole 1984 aspect.
What car repairs does insurance cover? Where did I talk about maintenance? I talked about the cost to insure modern vehicles being higher especially later on. Context is important for comprehension.
You can leave off the passive aggressive 'no offense' snark.
i'll never buy those apple earbuds ever again; hundreds of dollars down the drain and more e-waste cause those batteries cant be replaced... and sony: charging 70 bucks for wired earbuds and the cover falls off after a couple months usage what the f... (ok rant finished)
I have had a set of like 15 t-shirts that I wash and tumble dry after one day of wear. After a decade of service some of them are showing signs of wear, but the majority are still in good condition.
My over ear 3.5mm headphones are still going doing well after 7 years.
After watching some up and coming band live, I can find their music on spotify available for listening without ads included in my existing subscription.
It should also be noted that most companies that make high quality (last decades) low volume goods go out of business; people vote with their dollars and dont want the capex.
Put another way, who here wants a car that costs more than their house? Or shoes that cost 2000$?
Or, wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products.
It's the age old paradigm of buying a pair of shoes/boots, the poor man keeps buying $20 shoes/boots that wear out in a year or two. The wealthy man looks perplexed and states, "this is why they are poor, they don't understand investing in a quality pair of shoes/boots... For a measly $100 they could buy a pair of shoes/boots that would last them 10+ years". But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
I would argue that this is one contributing factor, outside of companies just chasing the lowest quality/cost, that contributes to crappier stuff.
This is a fun "boots theory" bit from Terry Pratchets discworld. I don't know where it started but discworld is where I first read it described this way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
This might be true once in the past but even the "quality" brands are garbage today. It's all being made from the same factories with the same materials, with the same business magnates forcing worse quality at higher costs.
Some brands have definitely devalued themselves but it’s definitely not “same factories with the same materials”. If I buy a pair of jeans at Walmart and Costco, the latter ones will last years longer.
> wealth inequality has gotten so out of hand that people are forced to buy the cheaper products.
Other people having more money does not result in higher prices for the rest, i.e. it does not cause inflation.
For example, when I was a boy steak was a rare luxury. Today, a steak dinner costs less than a TV dinner or a bag of Doritos.
You don't think what other market participants can afford to pay matters when you are competing for the same finite source of labour?
That can't be a very good steak.
You're right, it's not a top cut. Still far better than a TV dinner.
>But what is always overlooked, is that the poor man doesn't have the flexibility of spending to afford to invest better quality purchases, because the money needs to be applied to other problems in their lives.
You are overlooking debt / credit.
idk if this is useful info but at least in my case i tend towards cheaper items because
1. i dont want to worry about them getting damaged or lost or stolen
2. my preferences will likely change in a couple years
3. i may not want the item as much as i think i do
i've owned a very expensive watch (many thousands of dollars) and i find myself almost never wearing it, both bc the style isnt exactly what im into these days, but i also worry about banging it on anything or the smallest scratches. it's nice to wear a cheaper watch (only a few hundred dollars in value) and just sort of not care about it.
i've had my handful of "buy it for life" purchases and i'm struggling to think of literally any item like that i've purchased that i still use
Yep, and...
4. the quality gap has closed considerably
e.g., the function and durability of your $8k watch and a $300 watch are effectively imperceptible
The gap is closing from both ends (cheap manufacturing, access to tech, etc.)
"It's expensive af to be poor" - unknown source
Historically, every major general-purpose technology followed the same trajectory. Printing reduced the quality of manuscripts while massively increasing access. Industrialization replaced craftsmanship with standardization. Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport, yet they won because they were sufficient and scalable. The internet degraded editorial standards while enabling unprecedented distribution. None of these shifts reversed. They stabilized at a new equilibrium where high quality persisted only in niches where it was economically justified.
> The internet degraded editorial standards
I'm not so sure about those editorial standards. The internet has revealed that there's a lot of propaganda in the newspaper editorials.
> Early automobiles were unreliable and dangerous compared to horse-drawn transport
People have forgotten that a lot of people were killed by horses. Cities had to deal with vast quantities of manure and horse corpses. Horses knew they were slaves and you always had to be careful around them. Horses are expensive and required daily maintenance.
> lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements
This is what produced our high standard of living.
For example, Ford and the Model T. Before the Model T, only the rich could afford to buy a car. Ford was relentless with the T in finding ways to cut the manufacturing cost. And the result was America got wheels.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Excellent point which leads to one related but less commonly mentioned:
If you build a product that lasts 25 years and that's what people want, you need to price it in such a way that if the entire market buys your product, you will run out of customers (for roughly 25 years or until new customers are born). Otherwise, you have a big rush of revenue early and then it drops off a cliff.
(I'm oversimplifying here but this is partly why there is a trend to make things more disposable or have a limited lifespan).
> Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
> For some reason this is continually terrifying and shocking to many.
For many reasons.
It means that a good product can be outcompeted by a substandard one because it releases faster, despite the fact it will cause problems later, so good products are going to become much more rare at the same time as slop becoming much more abundant.
It means that those of us trying to produce good output will be squeezed more and more to the point where we can't do that without burning out.
It means that we can trust any given product or service even less than we were able to in the past.
It means that because we are all on the same network, any flaw could potentially affect us all not just the people who don't care.
The people who don't care when caring means things release with lower cadence, are often the same people who will cry loudest and longest about how much everyone else should have cared when a serious bug bites their face off.
and so on… … …
Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
> > Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
> That is a problem that needs to be fixed in those users, not something we should take advantage of as an excuse for releasing shoddy work.
Ok. Tech folks have been trying to educate users and get them to make better decisions (in the viewpoint of those tech folks) for a long time. And the current state points to how successful that's been: not very. This isn't exclusive to software... many industries have consumers who make unsound long-term choices (in the viewpoint of experts).
Taking advantage? Besides cases where folks are actually breaking the law and committing fraud, this isn't some kind of illicit activity, it's just building what the users choose to buy/use.
> It means ... It means ... It means ... It means ...
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, and perhaps.
> Are you suggesting we should just sit back and let then entire software industry go the way of AAA games or worse?
I'm not sure what "the way of AAA games" means. I'm just laying out how I view the last 30 years of the software industry.
I don't see any reason to expect significant change.
All true, except I think you've conflated software and software product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can justifiably feel melancholy about it all.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
Sure, but the OP's concern is whether this chokes off innovation. Is there some better kind of hiking boot, longer-lasting and cheaper and maybe more comfortable, that we've never found because the shoemakers who'd be able to invent it are too busy optimizing Nike production lines?
Exactly: is the local max or min for (hiking boots) currently the global max or min. And does the way LLMs work limit future exploration because it increases the activation cost of getting out of the local min/max due to the effects on society/workforce/corporate direction caused by LLMs?
I have custom hiking boots but they're very heavy. I have plastics for winter that are both very heavy and not very comfortable relatively. I rarely wear either.
Possibly.
But that question is impossible to answer and therefore can justify no recommended changes to the current state.
Which is why the source article did not recommend any changes to the current state.
> For example, it's possible to make hiking boots that last a lot longer than others. But if the requirement is to have it last for just 20 miles, it's better to pay less for one that won't last as long.
That's rewriting history especially in terms of software and hardware.
Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
> Software is the same way. Most users just absolutely do not know about, care about, or worry about security, privacy, maintainability, robustness, or a host of other things.
They don't want to know. They assume it is there. Most people have inherit trust with for example big companies.
> In fact, lots of capitalistic activity is basically a search for the cheapest and fastest way to accomplish a minimum set of requirements.
This is a rewrite of history to. In search? No. More like self create. Was Uber for example searching for the cheapest way? Well, yes, by throwing so much money to have a monopoly. We're currently throwing trillions at AI to find the "cheapest" way. Just like with the dot com era, we might not even recover 1% wasted. Are you sure it is the cheapest?
> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
I'm curious if the inflation-adjusted prices of those long-lasting early microwaves were less than the cost of 3 current microwaves that last 7 years. Also, this isn't an apples to apples comparison because they gradually lost performance over time and it took longer to heat up food as they aged.
>> Appliances like Microwaves, etc were revolutionary for its time. Only problem: they lasted forever (>20 years). No 1 needed to buy it again = no business. It was deliberately not made to last as long and possibly not exactly cheaper both in cost and retail price.
This is a common myth that was debunked a while back. Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias: they only see the few old appliances that somehow survived, and that leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day.
> Essentially people get fooled by survivorship bias
It's still a thing today though? It's not survivorship bias. Take the Microwave example. In a lot of countries it is very hard to buy just a traditional (convection) Microwave now. They force these 4-in-1 or an inverter Microwave.
> leads them to conclude that things were higher quality back in the day
It says nothing about "quality". So continuing, yes the inverter Microwaves are "quality", offer more control and costs more but due to all the complexity dies way faster. A lot of them die in <3 years when the traditional 1s last way longer. Back in the day we only had convection Microwaves. The end.
> This is a common myth that was debunked a while back.
By who? By you? Another example - SSDs have been made to not last as long. We went from SLC -> MLC -> TLC -> QLC etc. The writes were reduced. Did the consumers want this? No. There just wasn't much "choice". Top of line Samsung consumer SSDs just changed. During COVID some vendors sneakily adjusted it too. So, yes quality went worse. Deliberately.
I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Absolutely no one.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0
I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold Niebuhr.
Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.
Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc
Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.
It only took 70 years (1880s to 1950s) and two world wars for the world to digest the industrial revolution and reach the 'capitalism lifts everyone' modern Capitalist(ish) era. Just think of the new kinds of jobs AI will enable our grandchildren to have after we inbetween sacrifice. Space yacht polisher. Space yacht teak refinisher. Space yacht eye candy.
There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.
Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.
The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.
The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.
On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.
We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
>To prevent the violence towards them.
"This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to comment. This is a developing story"
That is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people. But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates you from the resentful poor.
That notion is based on the misconception that for there to be very rich people, other people would need to be poor — that would resent you.
Economic science has pretty much proven that when the average income in a society is higher and fewer are poor, the economy moves more money and the rich benefit more as well.
Misconception is not really the right word here along with the word 'need'.
It comes down to if the people in power think they are playing a zero sum game and are driven by greed. We see plenty of dictatorships that are very resource wealthy and yet their society suffers in abject poverty. Said leaders have zero care about making their peoples life better and will gladly kill them wholesale if they become problematic.
> other people would need to be poor
Just like billions are not about "being rich", this is about CONTROL. Control of the economy, and how people live, and control over one's own life.
Abstraction is a beast, putting everything regardless of what it actually is as some $$ number is terrible for understanding. The billionaires don't have Scrooge McDuck money at home where they swim in coins, they control huge parts of the economy.
And as long as they need workers, they will want them to live not too well - that would raise the price of labor, if people wanted to do work in places like Amazon warehouses to begin with, if they had better alternatives not working for the billionaires.
Being "poor" in this context means having a lot less control over how you live, not that you live on the streets. Although, as soon as you lose your value, e.g. by getting too sick, that is always on the table too.
Relative wealth disparity is what drives lower-class resentment, not absolute poverty.
Income inequality is very bad in its own right.
Watch, or read "altered carbon" for a taste of that future.
Or the Epstein files, for that matter
How does a billionaire have to associate with poor people? They can live in a complete bubble: house in the hills, driven by a chauffeur, private jets, private islands for holidays etc...?
The people who cook for them, the people who clean for them, the ones who take care of their kids, the one who sell them stuff or serve them in restaurants...
They have separate kitchens for the prep, the cleaners work while they’re out on the yacht, they have people to do the buying, and the restaurants they visit have very well trained staff who stay out of the way.
All that is irrelevant to the point: they still need to have those poor people around them, trust them, and even trust their security to them.
And this is all very easy to control.
First is you get a particular group of people to work for you. You tell them they are better than all the other poor people out there, that is get them to be nationalistic/racist, etc. You also give them a little bit more than the abjectly poor so they have something they fear to lose. You also let them know if they upset the situation they are in retribution will be swift and brutal and affect anyone they know and love.
And this is how every societal hierarchy is structured.
So easy to control that most rich people throughout history were murdered by their guards and close helper circle.
"Most rich people that were murdered" is a different statement from "most rich people"
Epstein had a staff of 70 on that island kept mum
Also, they're not building the house or the jet, they're not growing the food, ... people close enough can be chosen for willingness to be sycophants and happiness to be servants. Unless you're feeding yourself from your own farm, or manufacturing your own electronics, there are limits to even a billionaires ability to control personnel.
nah, if slave owners like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could reorient their entire lives around not seeing the "ick" of chattel slavery I think modern billionaires can do the same thing even easier now if they wanted.
The poor maids and servants, the poor chauffeur, the poor chef, etc.
Unless they’re living entirely by themselves, they will always be dependent on poor people.
The fact that people see that basically the singularity is happening but can't imagine that humanoid robots get good rapidly is why most people here are bad futurists.
That fact that people see "the singularity happening" based on LLM results, is why most people are the kind of ignorant cheerleaders of tech that predicted robot servants, flying cars, and space colonies by 2000 in 1950.
This feels different. In the 1950s rapid technological progress had been driven by the pressures of the second world war and produced amazing things that held a lot of promise, but few appreciated the depth of complexity of what lay before them. A lot of that complexity had to be solved with software which expanded the problem set rather than solving it. If we have a general solution to the problem of software, we don't know that there are other barriers that would slow progress so much.
Tomy made the Dustbot robot vacuum in 1985, Electrolux made the Trilobite robot vacuum in 1996, and then washing machines, dishwashers, tumble-dryers, microwaves, microwave meals, disposable diapers, fast fashion, and plug-in vacuums, floor steamers, carpet washers, home automation for lights and curtains, central heating instead of coal/wood fires and ash buckets, fridge-freezers and supermarkets (removing the need for canning, pickling, jamming, preserving), takeaways and food delivery, people having 1-2 children instead of 6-12 children. The amount of human labour in housework has plummetted since 1900.
Plenty of flying cars existed through the 1900s, including commercial ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_car
The International Space Station was launched in 1998.
> the singularity is happening
[Citation needed]
No LLM is yet being used effectively to improve LLM output in exponential ways. Personally, I'm skeptical that such a thing is possible.
LLMs aren't AGI, and aren't a path to AGI.
The Singularity is the Rapture for techbros.
You are right about "LLM improving themselves" is impossible. In fact, LLM make themselves worse, it is called knowledge collapse [1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03502
LLMs aren't AGI and maybe aren't a path to AGI, but step back and look at the way the world is changing. Hard disks were invented by IBM in 1953 and now less than a hundred years later there's an estimated million terabytes a year of hard disks made and sold, and a total sold of Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta ... 1.36 Zettabytes.
In 2000, webcams were barely a thing, audio was often recorded to dictaphone tapes, and now you can find a recorded photo or video of roughly anyone and anything on Earth. Maybe a tenth of all humans, almost any place, animal, insect, or natural event, almost any machine, mechanism, invention, painting, and a large sampling of "indoors" both public and private, almost any festival or event or tradition, and a very large sampling of "people doing things" and people teaching things for all kinds of skills. And tons of measurements of locations, temperatures, movements, weather, experiment results, and so on.
The ability of computers to process information jumped with punched card readers, with electronic computers in the 1950s, again with transistors in the 1970s, semiconductors in the 1980s, commodity computer clusters (Google) in the 1990s, maybe again with multi-core desktops for everyone in the 2000s, with general purpose GPUs in the 2010s, and with faster commodity networking from 10Mbit to 100Gbit and more, and with SATA, then SAS, then RAID, then SSDs.
It's now completely normal to check Google Maps to look at road traffic and how busy stores are (picked up in near realtime from the movement of smartphones around the planet), to do face and object recognition and search in photos, to do realtime face editing/enhancement while recording on a smartphone, to track increasing amounts of exercise and health data from increasing numbers of people, to call and speak to people across the planet and have your voice transcribed automatically to text, to realtime face-swap or face-enhance on a mobile chip, to download gigabytes of compressed Wikipedia onto a laptop and play with it in a weekend in Python just for fun.
"AI" stuff (LLMs, neural networks and other techniques, PyTorch, TensorFlow, cloud GPUs and TPUs), the increase in research money, in companies competing to hire the best researchers, the increase in tutorials and numbers of people around the world wanting to play with it and being able to do that ... do you predict that by 2030, 2035, 2040, 2045, 2050 ... 2100, we'll have manufactured more compute power and storage than has ever been made, several times over, and made it more and more accessible to more people, and nothing will change, nothing interesting or new will have been found deliberately or stumbled upon accidentally, nothing new will have been understood about human brains, biology, or cognition, no new insights or products or modelling or AI techniques developed or become normal, no once-in-a-lifetime geniuses having any flashes of insight?
I mean, what you're describing is technological advancement. It's great! I'm fully in favor of it, and I fully believe in it.
It's not the singularity.
The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI, and the AGI will then self-improve at an exponential rate allowing it to become infinitely more advanced and powerful (much moreso than we could ever have made it), and it will then also invent loads of new technologies and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
> "The singularity is a specific belief that we will achieve AGI
That is one version of it, but not the only one. "John von Neumann is the first person known to have discussed a "singularity" in technological progress.[14][15] Stanislaw Ulam reported in 1958 that an earlier discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue""[1]. A time when people before it, would be unable to predict what came after it because it was so different. (And which I argue in another comment[2] is not a specific cutoff time, but a trend over history of the future being increasingly hard to predict over shorter and shorter timeframes).
Apart from AGI, or Von Neuman accelerationism, I also understand it as augmenting human intelligence: "once we become cyborgs and enhance our abilities, nobody can predict what comes next"; or artificial 'life' - "if we make self-replicating nano-machines (that can have Darwinian natural selection?), all bets about the future are off"; or "once we can simulate human brains in a machine, even if we can't understand how they work, we can run tons of them at high speeds".
> and usher in a golden age. (Either for itself or us. That part's a bit under contention, from my understanding.)
Arguably, we have built weakly-superhuman entities, in the form of companies. Collectively they can solve problems that individual humans can't, live longer than humans, deploy and exploit more resources over larger areas and longer timelines than humans, and have shown a tendency to burn through workers and ruin the environment that keeps us alive even while supposedly guided by human intelligence. I don't have very much hope that a non-human AGI would be more aligned with our interests than companies made up of us are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935546
The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.
Just because you can find someone referring to something else as a "technological singularity" doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using.
...And I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone to agree with you that "we founded companies" somehow satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, unless they're deeply invested in the idea that The Singularity Is Happening Now, and have entirely forgotten just what that's actually supposed to mean, or why they wanted it to be happening.
I wouldn't say that founding companies satisfies the conditions of the Singularity, the relevance there is that companies are superhuman and sociopathic, therefore the dream of superintelligences to be empathic, cooperative, and aligned with human interests doesn't seem likely.
> The version I described is the only one I've ever heard anyone else referring to.
In 2008 the IEEE magazine Spectrum did a series on the Singularity and one article [0] says "Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting." Another article had this "Who's Who"[1] cheat-sheet of famous Singularity discussers for and against; one of the columns is "Kind of Singularity", and there's more than one kind. Kevin Kelly has "singularities are pervasive changes in the state of the world that are often recognizable only in retrospect. As a result, the singularity is always near". Bill Joy was a more general "computer science, biotech and nanotechnology event horizon". Marvin Minsky had mind uploading as well as machine intelligence.
Vernor Vinge named 'The Singularity' in 1983 and popularised the ida, and here are talk slides from him in 2005 after he had twenty years of thinking about it[2]:
and A place where the rules profoundly change because of bioscience research, human/computer cyborging, or distributed systems emergent complexity, is compatible with Vingean Singularity ideas, or at least used to be before the current LLM/AGI hype cycle.The 'attractor at the end of history' is from Terence McKenna: "[he] saw the universe, in relation to novelty theory, as having a teleological attractor at the end of time, which increases interconnectedness and would eventually reach a singularity of infinite complexity. ... The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal ... our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor."[3]
> "doesn't mean it's reasonable to say that must, or even could, have been the definition the person I was replying to was using."
Okay, but your "LLMs are not a path to AGI and tech bros are dumb" doesn't lead to anything interesting, it's just a mic-drop end of discussion.
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-consciousness-conundrum
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/who-is-who-in-the-singularity
[2] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/ac2005/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Novelty_theory...
Not everything is worthy of discussion.
"The earth is flat" is one of those things.
"The singularity is happening" is one of those things.
"LLMs are AGI" is yet another.
They've already been discussed to death. The only reason to discuss them now is if you are one of the people who is absolutely rejecting reality because you are bound and determined to believe something that is not true.
If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way, well, de nile ain't just a river in egypt.
Also yes LLMs are indeed AGI: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...
This was Peter Norvig's take. AGI is a low bar because most humans are really stupid.
If you think AGI is at hand why are you trying to sway a bunch of internet randos who don’t get it? :) Use those god-like powers to make the life you want while it’s still under the radar.
how do you take over the world if you have access to 1000 normal people? if AGI is by the original definition (long forgotten by now) of surpassing MEDIAN human at almost all tasks. How the rebranding of ASI into AGI happened without anyone noticing is kind of insane
> If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress
I don’t understand this perspective. There are numerous examples of technical progress that then stalls out. Just look at batteries for example. Or ones where advancements are too expensive for widespread use (e.g. why no one flies Concorde any more)
Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
Just think of this as risk management.
If AGI doesn't happen, then good. You get to keep working and playing and generally screwing off in the way that humans have for generations.
On the other hand if AGI happens, especially any time soon, you are exceptionally fucked along with me. The world changes very rapidly and there is no getting off Mr Bones wild ride.
>Why is previous progress a guaranteed indicator of future progress?
In this case, because nature already did it. We're not just inventing and testing something whole cloth. And we know there are still massive efficiencies to be gained.
For me the Concorde is an example of how people look at stuff incorrectly. In the past we had to send people places very quickly to do things. This was very expensive and inefficient. I don't need to get on a plane to have an effect just about anywhere else in the world now. The internet and digital mediums give me a presence at other locations that is very close to being there. We didn't need planes that fly at the speed of sound, we needed strings that communicate at the speed of light.
>If you look at the rapid acceleration of progress and conclude this way
There's no "rapid acceleration of progress". If anything there's a decline, and even an economic decline.
Take away the financial bubbles based on deregulation and huge explosion of debt, and the last 40 years of "economic progress" are just a mirage filling a huge bubble with air in actual advancement terms - unlike the previous millenia.
That’s completely wrong. There was barely any progress in previous millennia. There was even economic Nobel prize for showing why!
The GDP per capita of the world has been slowly increasing for several millenia. Same for the advancements in core technology.
The industrial revolution increased the pace, but it was already there, not flat or randomly flunctuating (think ancient hominids versus early agriculture vs bronge age, vs ancient Babylon and Assyrian empires, vs later Greece, and Persia, later Rome, later Renaissance and so on).
Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
> Post 1970s most of the further increase has been based on mirages due to financialization, and doesn't reflect actual improvement.
Of course it does. It would be good if you would try to actually support such controversial claims with data.
If you got a random cancer in 1970, your chances of survival would be only somewhat better than during the Roman Empire, so slightly better than zero, but not very much so. Even Hodgkin's lymphoma, nowadays a very manageable disease, was reliably deadly.
In 2026, unless you are really lucky your chances of being treated into remission are much better. That is a meaningful improvement.
Medical science made a HUGE progress in the last 50 years alone. The oldest IVF baby is not even fifty yet.
Lol, wut?
The world can produce more things cheaper and faster than ever and this is an economic decline? I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
>I think you may have missed the other 6 billion people on the planet getting massive improvements in their quality of life.
I think you have missed that it's easy to get "massive improvements in your quality of life" if you start from merely-post-revolution-era China or 1950s Africa or colonial India.
Much less so if you plateaud as US and Europe, and live off of increased debt ever since the 1970s.
And yet in the US I can currently survive and illness by the means of technology where I would have died in the 70s. It can be really hard to see the forest from the trees when everything around us is rapidly changing technology.
Increased debt is mostly on the good that technology cannot at least yet reproduce. For example they aren't making new land. Taste, NIMBYism and currently laws stop us from increased housing density in a lot of places too. Healthcare is still quite limited by laws in the US and made expensive because of it.
> rapid acceleration
Who was it who stated that every exponential was just a sigmoid in disguise?
> most humans are really stupid.
Statistically, don't we all sort of fit somewhere along a bell curve?
The bell curve of IQ and being stupid probably don't have much to do with each other.
Think of stupidity as the consequences of interacting with ones environment with negative outcomes. If you have a simple environment with few negative outcomes, then even someone with a 80 IQ may not be considered stupid. But if your environment rapidly grows more complex and the amount of thinking you have to do for positive outcomes increases then even someone with a 110 IQ may find themselves quickly in trouble.
What rapid acceleration?
I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns.
The improvements in the first few generations came fast, and they were impressive. Then subsequent generations took longer, improved less over the previous generation, and required more and more (and more and more) resources to achieve.
I'm not interested in one guy's take that LLMs are AGI, regardless of his computer science bonafides. I can look at what they do myself, and see that they aren't, by most very reasonable definitions of AGI.
If you really believe that the singularity is happening now...well, then, shouldn't it take a very short time for the effects of that to be painfully obvious? Like, massive improvements in all kinds of technology coming in a matter of months? Come back in a few months and tell me what amazing new technologies this supposed AGI has created...or maybe the one in denial isn't me.
These diminishing returns are exponentially diminishing returns [1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125
" We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly."
> I look at the trajectory of LLMs, and the shape I see is one of diminishing returns
It seems even more true if you look at OpenAI funding thru 2022 initial public release to how spending has exponentially increased to deliver improvements since. We’re now talking upwards of $600B/yr of spending on LLM based AI infrastructure across the industry in 2026.
Yes, and that's why surpassing it doesn't lead to a singularity except over an infinite timeframe. This whole thing was stupid in the first place.
In my opinion, LLMs provide one piece of AGI. The only intelligence I’ve directly experienced is my own. I don’t consciously plan what I’m saying (or writing right now).
Instead, a subconscious process assembles the words to support my stream of consciousness. I think that LLMs are very similar, if not identical.
Stream of thought is accomplishing something superficially similar to consciousness, but without the ability to be innovative.
At any rate, until there’s an artificial human level stream of consciousness in the mix for each AI, I doubt we’ll see a group of AIs collaborating to produce a significantly improved new generation of AI hardware and software minus human involvement.
Once that does happen, the Singularity is at hand.
So, I was downvoted twice, yet neither of you doubtless brilliant individuals bothered to refute my points.
I’ll emphasize my main point further, LLMs have no ability to innovate much beyond the vast data they’ve scraped. They’re almost entirely derivative.
They are a definite improvement over traditional search engines though!
You’re delusional if you think singularity is happening.
That's like saying "you're delusional if you think we're affected by The Sun's gravity when it's a hundred million miles away".
A hundred million years ago, every day on Earth was much like every other day and you could count on that. As you sweep forwards in time you cross things like language, cooperation, villages, control of fire, and the before/after effects are distinctly different. The nearer you get to the present, the more of those changes happen and the closer they happen, like ripples on a pond getting closer to the splash point, or like the whispers of gravity turning into a pull and then a crunch. "Singularity" as an area closer to the splash point where models from outside can't make good predictions keeps happening - a million years ago, who would have predicted nations and empires and currency stamped with a human face? Fifty thousand years ago, who could have predicted skyscrapers with human-made train tunnels underground beneath them, or even washing bleached white bedsheets made from cotton grown overseas? Ten thousand years ago, who could have predicted container shipping through the human-made Panama canal? A thousand years ago who could have predicted Bitcoin? Five hundred years ago, who could have predicted electric motors? Three hundred years ago who could have predicted satellite weather mapping of the entire planet or trans-Atlantic undersea dark fibre bundles? Two hundred years ago, who could have predicted genetic engineering? A hundred and fifty years ago, who could have predicted MRI scanners? A hundred years ago, who could have predicted a DoorDash rider following GPS from a satellite using a map downloaded over a cellular data link to a wirelessly charging smartphone the size of a large matchbox bringing a pizza to your house coordinated by an internet-wide app?
In 2000 with Blackberry and Palm Treo and HP Journada and PalmPilot and Windows Phone and TomTom navigation, who was expecting YouTube, Google Maps with satellite photos, Google StreetView, Twitch, Discord, Vine, TikTok, Electron, Amazon Kindle with worldwide free internet book delivery, or the dominance of Python or the ubiquity of bluetooth headphones?
Fifty years ago is 1975, batteries were heavy and weak, cameras were film based, bulbs were incandescent, betamax and VHS and semiconductors were barely a thing - who was predicting micro-electromechanical timing devices, computer controlled LED Christmas lights playing tunes in greetings cards, DJI camera drones affordable to the population, Network Time Protocol synchronising the planet, the normality of video calling from every laptop or smartphone, or online shopping with encrypted credit card transactions hollowing out the highstreets and town centers?
The strange attractor at the end of history might be a long way away, but it's pulling us towards it nonetheless and its ripples go back millions of years in time. It's not like there's (all of history) and then at one point (the singularity where things get weird). Things have been getting weird for thousands and thousands of years in ways that the people before that wouldn't or couldn't have predicted.
If your every other animal on the planet other than humans, the singularity already happened.
Your species would have watched humans go from hairless mammals that basically did the same set of actions and need that your species had to an alien that might as well have landed from another planet (other than you don't even know other planets even exist). Now forests disappear in an instant. Lakes appear and disappear. Weird objects cover the ground and fill the sky. The paradigms that worked for eons are suddenly broken.
But you, you're a human, you're smart. The same thing couldn't possibly happen to you, right?
You still have to find the kids to rape.
There is no master plan, there's a hype cycle, environment and the market.
Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to be first to market assuming that might be a giant market (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge - the microcomputer was).
Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
The bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to six Hiroshimas - I think we can safely say that Gaza has been destroyed.
https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...
There are still living people in it
> Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now.
About that…
Isn’t Gaza a mess in ruins already? I’d count that as destroyed aleeady
Not completely. I mean there would be zero living people left. They've been downscaling it.
Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:
"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic system does not function without the motivations of the people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
They're saying capital is power. Not analogous — the same thing. Until now power always had to be wielded by a human, but it's really the power who is wielding the human as an instrument to channel itself, like Majora's Mask. Once we have power that doesn't need a human, it won't need that and we'll all be subservient.
I agree with it. Consider financial markets, for example. There are individual humans whose account balances are changing, but the system as a whole is not an instrument of any human, not the buyers, not the sellers, and not the exchange operators, and yet it dictates the large scale structure of society in ways unimaginable a century ago.
Companies are already like this. Boss fires his friend and puts him out of work with a family to feed. Why? It was ‘good for the company.’ So many inhuman decisions hide behind that fig leaf. It is a way to mentally remove responsibilities from these decisions. After all, it was for the good of the company. Stock buybacks while mailroom is on food stamps? For the good of the company. Dumping the waste into the river instead of safely disposing it? For the good of the company. Making money off vice and the mentally vulnerable? For the good of the company. Overfishing the ocean such that there won’t even be a commercial fishing industry in our lifetimes? For the good of the company. Polluting the earth and ushering in a new age of extinction? For the good of the company.
We are already enslaved to capitalism. Working against our own interest. In service towards the company and the company alone. This meta organism we value above all else on earth.
Capitalism is the ultimate 'Norman lord in his castle on conquered land', removed from the consequences of his choices/rent extraction on the serfs he shares no culture, no understanding with just what value can he extract from them.
He is forced to do that, or he'll be replaced by someone who will. All hail Moloch[2+√7i]!
[2+√7i] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
From the Landian perspective, initially, sure, the system needs humans. But once you have autonomous and sovereign capital, things could look very different.
In Land's own words:
"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]
[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/
The motivations of the people running the capitalistic system is making more money. Remember the entire mantra of greed is good? Group interest can be a super-human entity that you can get caught in a loop of serving even though serving said entity is not in your best interest. Humans have only been 'mostly' in control of this because there was no other entities capable of said control themselves.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.
Populism can be a non-violent way out, not is the non-violent way out.
As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
> violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
And you don't even have to go back 100 years for an example. About a year will do it.
Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once elected. Disregarding current politics, Adolf Hitler was a populist and that didn't go very well, did it? As I see it now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth, charisma instead of competency, and running the country into the ground because those things you don't have are actually important.
History shows that populism often leads to fascism, we should tread carefully.
People in power won't act out of foresight or ethics. They'll act when the cost of not acting exceeds the cost of doing something messy and imperfect
They'll act when it profits them.
What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of financial and power-grabbing motivation.
Even that’s giving them too much credit. They’ll burn it all down preserve their fragile egos.
I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of forced makes a significant difference.
Employing servants only recently fell out of favor in the years between WWI and WWII. Prior to WWI having servants was still in fashion for the wealthy. Naturally I meant paid servants. Enslaved and to some extent indentured servants obviously have little to no choice.
That said many of those employered in service industries and to some extent the gig economy have limited options and their participation is barely "voluntary" in modern capitalism.
Aside: seeing myself refer to the 1940s as "recent" is really highlighting my age. Soon I'll be relegated to a "grampa yelling at clouds" meme (but just the computer cloud variety)
They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of their power trips.
They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.
If you are rich "outsourcing" is easy because you have people to handle that for you. You have senior servants like butlers and housekeepers who manage the rest of the staff, for example, so you are not directly hiring cleaners.
This is the difference between the affluent and the truly rich.
It's fair that's probably the difference. You don't have a full-time personal assistant/butler/whatever you want to call it. But you personally outsource a lot of individual tasks that you don't really want to do.
I pay to have my car serviced... but I don't employ a full-time mechanic.
In this day and age, how often do you actually need to have your car serviced? And there is no shortage of places that will do it for you in a few hours.
Similarly, if money were no real object within reason, I'm not sure what I would really need done on a day-to-basis that I couldn't just order or contract for pretty easily.
You clearly don't have enough cars. Once you get enough cars, especially if any of them are classic cars you actually want to drive occasionally and want to be in a driveable condition, you might want to have a full time mechanic.
I expect that's almost vanishingly rare. But, yes, that probably puts you in the very rich category.
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
> Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organization. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization
Not true in the UK. Studies in many countries (the UK, US, Australia) and others have shown that home educated kids have better outcomes than school going kids after correcting for parental education, wealth etc.
Yes, there are exceptions, but there are also bad schools and some terrible schools.
UK law also requires children to receive a "suitable and efficient" full time education and there are legal mechanisms for sending children to school if they do not.
> They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
Stats in the UK show home ed kids are MUCH less likely to be abused, to self harm, or commit suicide.
Of course there are bad home educating communities, but there are also some horrific schools and the latter are a lot more common. Does that mean we should shut down schools?
Who do you think is building the machines for the rich? All of these tech companies are nothing without the employees that build the tech.
This is what the service economy in the imperial core already is.
"People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they also protected from immigration?
Not OP, but assuming I am following the argument correctly, I think parent is referring to something else. Advanced economies have participants, who function well in that environment and are shaped by it to a large degree. As a result, if one was to ask them to get food in an environment, where it is not as easily accessible as it is today, they might stumble. On the other hand, in the old country, a lot of people I knew had a tendency to have a little garden, hunt every so often, forage for mushrooms and so on. In other words, more individuals may be able to survive in less developed economies precisely, because they are less developed and less reliant on convenience today brings.
ah makes a lot of sense! thanks!
>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.
>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Nobody. They will try to channel it.
I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.
If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.
> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy
Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?
A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
Welcome to capitalism!
Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt the government, and exactly this has been happening.
>That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case,
It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
Versus what exactly? Communism? Where the rich got richer faster and people got fucked faster?
At the end of the day Capitalism and Communism have nothing to do with authoritarianism and liberalism/democracy. An authoritarian capitalist country is a perfectly valid type of government as there has never existed a 'pure' capitalistic governed country.
They taught you the only two altenatives are 1917 style communism or 2026 style capitalism?
Talk about a crap educational system.
What is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
So then what has been happening in non-capitalist countries since the 1970s, so we can compare?
We have a lot of people, capitalism values them as approaching zero, anything that alters that valuation (without reducing population) is contrary to capitalism. Capitalism means the rich must get richer, they own the resources and means of production, they take the reward.
It comes to a point where they need an underclass to insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that eventually there is massive starvation (possibly water/fuel poverty first).
Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change and start to do something about it.
It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his crimes.
Capitalism just means private citizens can own the means of production (e.g. start a business, buy stock) and earn a return on investment. It doesn’t mean only the rich must get richer. It means anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
However capitalism is perfectly compatible with a progressives taxation system such that the rich get richer at a lesser rate than the poor get richer.
>anyone who saves and invests their money instead of spending it gets richer.
You realise that a large swathe of society earn less than their costs?
Everyone will get richer perpetually, there will never be any impact on climate, we'll never suffer water shortages, we'll all ride unicorns and eat rainbows...
The important thing to note here is people have been propagandized into thinking that capitalist = democratic. In fact the US would gladly punish you with 'un-American activities' investigation if you said anything to the contrary.
The thing is a capitalistic country will gladly turn itself into an authoritarian one if both wealth becomes concentrated and wealth buys votes. With the massive rise in authoritarian activities all over the world, especially in the US our democratic system is at very high risk of collapsing.
Isn't that what Americans call socialism?
> very many will struggle without work or prospects.
People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.
Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
> And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because there's no demand for what we're doing".
>Replacing this with AI is a welcome development.
Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
> As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
Yes, fuck the 90% of those working in that space, and let's hope the 10% gets an "upmarket" gig there.
All this grand-visioning sounds devoid of empathy and real understanding of millions of real people's situations and needs.
> Not if you fed your kid doing it, and now you can't.
Which happens all the time anyway. There just aren't that many people for whom being a call center worker is their long-term career, they'll just switch to some other job.
What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as a viable path. In a world with ever increasing wealth inequality there is lower velocity of money (lower available cash flow) to enable the creation of jobs. And just pointing to the industrial revolution is not the panacea that you think it is. Past economic/tech revolutions creating new jobs, I have yet to see anyone point to a vast creation of jobs (or at least the starting trend of job creation)... Instead all the news, all the discussions, everything has been about (directly or indirectly) the decreased need for as many workers or the increased production of workers with the tools (which indirectly implies a decrease in workforce)
> What other jobs? I hate how people just throw that out as a viable path.
People on HN are extremely privileged and massively out of touch with the average normal person, what's new?
There are millions upon millions of people where there is no "long-term career" period, just regular shitty and more shitty gig jobs and low end work like this, from factories and workcenters to burger flipping, to deliveries, loading, to cleaning, and everything in between. And they are getting increasingly squeezed and out of options.
This works until we run out of sensible jobs, which may have already happened.
book keepers, graphic artists
I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10 foot pole.
me neither, but that's because I used to be a bookkeeper. There's accountants though who have data entry people under them who they market as "bookkeepers," and they are now being replaced by AI. Most small business owners in particular dont care.
If your corp is large enough to use a full-sized ERP system it will no longer be your choice to make. The whole software industry is desperately trying to fit AI functions into every pore of their software, ERP vendors being no exception.
It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there
It's not oligarchy, it's feudalism.
I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.
I have deep concerns surrounding LLM-based systems in general, which you can see discussed in my other threads and comments. However in this particular article's case, I feel the same fears outlined largely predate mass LLM adoption.
If you substitute "artificial intelligence" with offshored labor ("actually indo-asians" meme moniker) you have some parallels: cheap spaghetti code that "mostly works", just written by farms of humans instead of farms of GPUs. The result is largely the same. The primary difference is that we've now subsidized (through massive, unsustainable private investment) the cost of "offshoring" to basically zero. Obviously that has its own set of problems, but the piper will need to be paid eventually...
EDIT: it has been rightfully pointed out that my above comment can easily be read as a racially charged overgeneralization of overseas workers of indo-asian descent. The "cheap spaghetti code" was meant as shorthand for "wildly variable code output with respect to quality and consistency, with no overarching architecture or plan", and was intended to target offshoring _agency_ output along with cheap labor systems that US companies created. These systems attempt to exploit workers at these agencies to avoid paying US salaries and are NOT a reflection on the actual individuals working in the aforementioned cube farms themselves. These workers are already subjected to a number of dehumanizing labor issues entirely outside of their control and I did not intend to further dehumanize. I apologize for my terse, careless wording.
I've worked with, trained and lived alongside workers overseas for months at a time and can say that there's no meaningful difference across racial divides, save for some variation on cultural norms. I would have assumed a more charitable interpretation of my words, but we live in uncharitable times. I'll do better going forward.
Cheers
Instead of money flowing to lower income countries (by virtue of their cheaper labour), which helped those countries grow, money is now flowing to the already richest economy on earth. That's a big difference.
Interesting how your "structural critique of AI" requires you to characterize an entire workforce of engineers as producing "cheap spaghetti code" from "farms of humans" with a racial meme thrown in for flavor. Code quality tracks with investment and management, not ethnicity. You're not making the sophisticated point you think you're making
I'm specifically speaking of the "race to the bottom" offshore consultancies that exploit cheap labor in foreign, largely asian countries, for export to the US to bypass paying US wages. The preexisting meme I referenced is around corporate lies where their "AI" is largely backed by offshore labor. Think the latest Waymo news, etc. Regardless of those controversies, within the US at least, we've been offshoring technical labor overseas for decades.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone of asian descent is inherently generating "spaghetti code". If that's how it read, I apologize, that was not my intention.
To further clarity, I've dealt with a number of these offshoring agencies (the really inexpensive ones specifically), and their output is very similar to what AI produces today. They have extreme turnover rates, and team assignments change at random so lost context and variable output is common. They do operate cube farms just like US workers, though I'm not sure why that's pertinent to call out though.
I agree, however, that I'm not saying anything sophisticated or complex, merely stating an observation.
Cost of offshoring to ai isn’t zero. Chatgpt and such are businesses. They charge subscriptions. In fact whatever cost you’d pay offshoring to india is probably where chatgpt is hoping to price its subscriptions eventually. Anything less is just leaving money on the table for chatgpt.
I agree it's greater than zero, however, like a good drug dealer you get the first few hits for free (or at cost in the most charitable interpretation of current subscriptions.)
I get the feeling that we're not even close to paying for the _actual_ costs of our frontier GenAI models at current usage levels, with or without subscriptions in the picture. AFAICT we're all using a highly subsidized product, made possible by private capital on the promise of future returns that may or may not materialize.
Outside of a few vertically integrated companies (Google with their custom TPUs, possibly AWS with theirs) LLM companies like OpenAI have to rely on massive data centers via MSFT, Oracle and Nvidia deals to train their frontier models to stay competitive. Theres a lot to pay for when wielding 20 Gigawatts of compute on other folks' machines. For OpenAI we're talking 4+ trillion USD so far with no signs of slowing. That's a hell of a lot of subscriptions to make up for that spend and they have a long climb ahead of them to get there. Maybe their "killer app" will be their new "erotica" models, who knows (porn has lead several tech initiatives in the past.) But I wouldnt bet money on it working out for them.
It's estimated that OpenAI spends 3 USD for every 1 it makes. Obviously that will have to change to make them an actually viable company in the long term. In the end, I see the most likely scenario is we're left with the few large players like Google. They're the ones that have any hope on "winning" the GenAI race, as they're in the best position to not rely on someone else's shovels.
All that said offshoring started out with similar promises to GenAI and some things panned out with offshoring and others didn't. Only time will tell what shakes out of all this mess. I just hope we get a sane readjustment of expectations for GenAI before our next economic collapse (the massive GenAI investment has helped prop up our economy to an extent, at least in the US)
In short, a business exists to turn a profit and OpenAI has yet to do so. Perhaps they eventually will and be the new "offshore" solution going forward as you imply, but just like actually moving your technical talent overseas it comes with a significant amount of tradeoffs to consider (tradeoffs already outlined in parent and other posts on this thread.)
LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumption.
This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
The data center buildout feels obscene when framed this way. Not because computation is evil, but because we're burning planetary-scale resources to accelerate a culture that already struggles to articulate why quality matters at all
There isn't nearly enough AI demand to make all of these projects turn a profit.
Unless you successfully make ai subscription an obligatory cost to pay for every employee in an org. Which they seem to be doing quite successfully considering enterprise sales activity.
Successfull b2b salesmanship does not require a working and useful product. It just requires you to get these meetings with purchasers and show that other comparable orgs are buying your product. For example, at my last job I wasn’t sure if we were a microsoft shop or a google shop because we bought both of their products that did the same thing. Because that is just what you do when you are an org with 5 figure employee counts, you spend budget.
Very well put, one of the more compelling insights I've seen about this whole situation. I feel like it gets at something I've been trying to say but couldn't find the right words for yet.
Quality. Matters.
It always has, and it always will. If you're telling yourself otherwise, you are part of a doomed way of thinking and will eventually be outcompeted by those who understand the implications of thinking further ahead. [ETA: Unfortunately, 'eventually' in this context could be an impossibly long time, or never, because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else.]
If quality matters then why is everything crap? Price has a quality of its own.
As I said in my edit, "because people are irrational animals who too often prioritize our current feelings over everything else."
Marginal improvements in quality which result in a marginal increase of cost/price often provide much better overall returns than just using a series of cheap substitutes that fail quickly. In some areas, this doesn't work, but I think shortsightedness is blocking truly better solutions in a great many cases. Particularly when true costs are being externalized.
> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
I would argue most never did.
If you spend time in the startup world you quickly realize how little the average developer cares about craftsmanship or quality.
The startup world is full of mantras like move fast and break things, or if you are not embarrassed by your mvp it’s not an mvp.
Hopefully this does not count as being uncivil, I just want to cut through what feels like insanity to put my (and at least a few others’) feelings plainly:
If you are one of those devs who heavily uses LLMs at work and you are in a position of relative authority, either as senior+ or something else, and you hand off your LLM code to others to review or “build off of”… we hate you. We don’t want to be your voluntold slop jannies. LLM over use and vibe coding is taking a fairly enjoyable job and making it insufferable. Now I have to sift through 3-10x more lines of code that are written in a non-human thought process using terrible naming schemes and try to find the bug… just to realize that the code isn’t even solving for the correct or underlying problem. Every time I have to interact with a co-workers LLM code, my tasks take weeks longer than they would have. This is including the ones who claim to be exerts in prompting and harnessing and whatever skibidi buzzword is out this week.
You are not saving time, you only think you are because you don’t look closely at the output and send it off to your lowley janitors to deal with. And the people who claim to be running 20 or 30 AI tasks at once what are you even building? If you aren’t literally shipping the next Amazon that’s just embarrassing.
I can not wait for people to wake from this bizarre mass psychosis. I already see co-workers context window getting smaller than free version ChatGPT in an incognito window.
I think it's beneficial to hear this, as I've definitely been on the other side of this before now. So, thanks for sharing.
As much as we can fault the technology and the hype around it, this as much a people problem as anything else. Before AI, this same problem happened with architecture/PoC to implementation hand-offs.
AI is a new tool that a lot of us are still figuring out, but that doesn't excuse poor communication.
That this person has a .jp address may be relevant. In my experience Americans are much more tolerant of “good enough” than, say, Japanese people. An American might even ship a high end final product with four figure price tag that literally was made with hot glue. (cough Grado)
Whereas a Japanese business would rather just not ship in such a case. Look at the Nintendo, such as the 3d Mario games. Those things are polished to an insane degree that no American studio would bother with.
Apple is exceptional in many ways and this is one of them. Microsoft, with “no taste”, is the standard American fare.
Generative AI is completely in line with the rest of the industrial milieu; pumping out product as quickly and as cheaply as possible. "Good enough" is often the standard, even before the industrial mode, but the industrial mode allows "good enough" to compound exponentially until you've got an edifice of trash that continues tumbling downhill on sheer momentum and we all scramble to fix the thing in situ.
This is how our world works and until it hits the proverbial wall, this is how it will continue to work because it's too big to be detoured or course-adjusted
Tools exists so we can spend our time focusing on more important matter. AI is not any exception of that.
Till this day even there exists IDEs with proper auto-complete suggestions (or editors with LSP support), there are still a lot of people prefer doing it in the old way (vim/emac/nano) and none of them get fired for that.
Z3 exists but we still like to solve algorithms by hand. High level languages exists but C/C++ codes are still written every day, even asm is still used.
On the brighter side of the issue, we now have ton of legacy projects written in obscure languages (COBOL, FORTRAN) that only some dozen people can maintain effectively, and those people are mostly at retirement age now. GenAI can solve that.
> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.
If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
Every successful software project reaches an equilibrium between utility for its operators and bugs, and that point very rarely settles at 0% bugs [1].
When software operators tolerate bugs they’re signaling that they’re willing to forego the fix in exchange for other parts of the feature that work and that they need.
The idea that consumers will somehow not need the features that they rely on anymore is completely wrong.
That leaves the tolerable bugs, but those were always part of the negotiation: Coding agents doesn’t change that one bit. Perhaps all it does it allow more competitors to peel away those minority groups of users who are blocked by certain unaddressed bugs. Or maybe it gets those bugs fixed because it’s cheaper to do so.
I don't think LLMs are the root cause or even a dramatic inflection point. They just tilt an already-skewed system a little further toward motion over judgment
If it can enable very small teams to deliver big apps, I do think the quality will increase.
> I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.
"Terrified" is a strong word for the death of any craft. And as long as there are thousands that love the craft, then it will not have died.
I think that unlike physical art, there aren't actually enough people who recognize or even care about your craft. Sure the codebase is super maintainable and that half-pixel line ties things up beautifully, but nobody cares other than your peers. Your peers won't give you a salary.
As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.
As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.
Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
> brittle plywood furniture
If only it was plywood, at least it'd be solid and sturdy. These days it's particleboard, which is much worse than plywood. Similar concept, but now made out of sawdust and glue instead of woodchips and glue that are alternately laid down in different orientations layer by layer for increased strength.
Particleboard chips much easier, breaks down much faster with moisture, and can't hold screws in. But it's very cheap, can be made very smooth, and is light.
Agree with the general sentiment though.
Commercial ventures already had to care exactly to the extent that they are financially motivated by competition forces and by regulation.
In my experience coding agents are actually better at doing the final polish and plugging in gaps that a developer under time pressure to ship would skip.
I was watching a youtube video the other day where the guy was complaining his website was dropping off the google search results. Long story short, he reworded it according to advice from Gemini, the more he did it, the better it performed, but he was reflecting on how the website no longer represented him.
Soon, we'll all just be meatpuppets, guided by AI to suit AI.
Actually Louis Rossmann finding himself forced to convert his genuine advocacy for repair into textual convenience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II2QF9JwtLc
That’s the one
"terrified".... overused word. As a man I literally can't relate. I get terrified when I see a shark next to me in the ocean. I get impatient when code is hard to debug.
We're pretty good at naming fear when it has a physical trigger. We're much worse at naming the unease that comes from watching something you care about get quietly hollowed out over time. That doesn't make it melodrama, just a different category of discomfort.
Step 1: Start looking beyond your code, as the stuff beyond your code is looking at you.
Its existential dread, of being useless and of not being able to thrive.
Its being compared to that of a slop machine, and billionaires claiming that its better than you are in all ways.
Its having integrity in your work, but the LLM slop-machines can lie and go "You're actually right (tells more lies)".
It all comes down to that LLMs serve to 'fix' the trillion dollar problem: peoples wages. Especially those engineers, developers, medical, and more.
I hear you, especially as a man, because we're attuned at looking for trouble in the horizon. AI is not some transition from horses to cars, which just meant selling the horse, buying a car, and continue your transport business. It's intelligence that may be able to take over all aspects of our current professional training, thus potentially threatening our livelihoods.
Thats the underlying dread.
The base capitalist premise is if you work, you'll have resources to survive and thrive. The flip-side is that if you cannot or refuse to work, you will starve, be destitute, homeless, without medical care, live under a bridge, and die hopeless.
And societal failings in a capitalist system are always reflected towards the individual no matter what.
Bad monetary policy? Should have saved. Businesses buy state laws to worsen worker laws? Get a better job. Got sick and medical lost your job? Too bad, go die, I guess?
Its never a systemic thing we can identify and fix. But its always always reflected as a personal failing.
Theres a top comment on this article that LLMs are a perfect parieto machine. 80% good, 20% utter shit and lies. That seems to track pretty well with what I'm seeing. If thats generally being accepted, I have to ask if my (and all others professional labor) if we're worth our wages for that 20%. And the question isnt being asked of us, but about us in HR and C levels.
I'm already seeing "make do with what less labor you already have and hope AI helps". I support a national level thing (all 50 states). Used to be 3 engineers for backend. Now its just me. I'm already seeing the stark negative effects, overworking, sloperating as a necessity (no DBA), and hope and prayer stuff doesnt go down.
And combined with the fact we're seeing worse hiring and layoffs since the Great Recession... Something's gotta change.
I wonder how people like you would have fared even just 100y ago, if typing on a keyboard with your own fingers is so foundational to your identity.
My job, a place I spend 1/3 of my days is a core part of my identity. It's also how I manage to feed myself.
Ask a horse buggy driver and find out.
"People like (me)".. And what are me and people like me like?
How's about you say what you're comparing me and people like me to.
In my experience, people who use terms like "You people" are just using that as a placeholder for racism, sexism, or ableism. Which is it in your case?
And 100 years ago, when industry took over something, the new thing still needed people. But thats not a hard economic law - thats just what happened before. There is no guarantee of that observation to still hold true.
The terrifying part isn't obsolescence. It's mediocrity becoming the ceiling.
AI produces code that technically runs but lacks the thoughtfulness that makes software maintainable or elegant. The "90% solution" ships because economic pressure rewards speed over quality.
What haunts me: compilers don't make design decisions. IDEs don't choose architecture. AI does both, and most users accept those choices uncritically. We're already seeing juniors who've never debugged without a copilot.
The author's real question: what if most people genuinely don't care about the last 10%? Not from laziness, but because "good enough" is cheaper and we're all exhausted.
Dismissing this as "just another moral panic" feels too easy. The handcraft isn't dying because AI is too good. It's dying because mediocrity is profitable.
Speaking of slop..
For real I’m starting to get a feel for the slop and the first sentance gave me pause. Never mind green username. Classic its not just that. Its this. LLM pattern.
What terrifies me is the total and utter potential disruption to our economies in a very rapid order.
Software is just a proxy for the thing that we want which is data. The same way an electric drill is a proxy to a hole. Since it's impossible to sell holes there's a market for selling electric drills to make holes.
A lot of economic activity is based on these proxies. Same in the software digital world. Even though it's data that were after many successful software businesses have been started to sell the tools, i.e. software products for people to make their digital "holes".
Now imagine if you could just suddenly 3D print your electric drill. Or your frying pan. Or your garden shears. What would happen to the economiies based on selling these tools?
Once you can prompt your way to any digital creation what happens to the economies based on making the digital tools?
It's not there yet, but if/when it does it's going to be a complete economic restructuring that will affect many. Careers will be wiped out, livelihoods will be lost.
AI slop is similar to the cheap tools at harbor freight. Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.
80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
I’m glad cheap stuff exists. Sometimes I really do need something quickly, and borderline-disposable quality is good enough. But I also want the option to buy better than that.
I installed some drywall a few years ago. I plan to install a room of drywall exactly never again. Not worth it for me to buy the best drywall tools.
But I have installed multiple wood floors, replacing old carpet, and would do so again if needed. I’d rather get higher quality tools there so I can keep them and reuse them for years.
And then you have to buy it again next time because it broke. I've never killed a power tool. I don't use them that much but neither do you. And when you have a library of power tools in your shed and don't have to go out and buy one, you can do more things more quickly.
Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.
This just isn't true. First, cheap tools have always been around. I have a few that I've inherited from my grandfather and great-grandfather. They're junk and I keep them specifically to remind myself that consumer-oriented trash versions of better quality tools have always existed.
Second, Harbor Freight is the only consumer-oriented tool retailer that seems to be consistently improving their product lines. Craftsman, which was the benchmark for quality, consumer-oriented hand tools, dropped off a cliff in terms of quality around the mid- to late-2000s.
If you can afford professional-grade tools (Snap-On, Mac, Wera, Knipex, etc.) great. For the rest of us, Harbor Freight is the only retailer looking out for us. Their American- and Taiwanese-made tools are excellent. Their Chinese-made tools are good. Their Indian-made tools will get the job done, but it won't be pleasant. At least they give the consumer a range of options, unlike Snap-On, which gives you a payment plan.
Using tools broadly but things like torque wrenches, AC vacuum pumps, and other specialized tools have mostly been too expensive to buy. Now I can buy a cheap version and it works good enough for most cases. It is not cheaper even with buying the tools to do the work yourself.
This is happening in other areas as well. The Chinese mini excavators and mini skid steers are changing what smaller landscape companies can do. They are not as good as a Kubota but they are 1/2 the price and 80% as good.
> You get AI that can make you like 90% of a thing! 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.
Based on the Adobe stock price the market thinks AI slop software will be good enough for about 20% of Adobe users (or Adobe will need to make its software 20% cheaper, or most likely somewhere between).
Interestingly workday, which is possibly slightly simpler software more easily replicable using coding agents is about the same (down 26%).
The bear case for Workday is not that it gets replicated as slop, but that its “user base” becomes dominated by agents.
Agents don’t care about any of Workday’s value-adds: Customizable workflows, “intuitive” experiences, a decent mobile app. Agents are happy to write SQL against a few boring databases.
I don't think craft dies, but I do think it retreats
Ikea is great, though
Why is slop assumed inevitable? These models are plagiarization and copyright laundering machines. We need a great AI model reset whereby all published works are assumed to opt-out of training and companies pay to train on your data. We've seen what AI can do, now fund the creators.
Good luck, there are too many forces working against that.
Only big creative companies like Disney can play the game of making licensing agreements. And they are ok with it because it gives them an edge over smaller, less organized creators without a legal department.
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-openai-sora-agr...
Who's going to enforce that, exactly?
Y' know there's this thing called a government
Y' know it's owned by big corporate interests.
I mourn for the US :(
From The Free Press article:
In a 1995 interview with Inc. magazine, author Kurt Vonnegut was asked what he thought about living in an increasingly digitized world. His response is so perfect that it’s worth reprinting in full:
I work at home, and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed, and I’d never have to leave it. But I use a typewriter, and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil. Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and say, “Are you still doing typing?” Sure she is, and her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck, and so we chitchat back and forth, and I say, “OK, I’ll send you the pages.”
Then I’m going down the steps, and my wife calls up, “Where are you going?” I say, “Well, I’m going to go buy an envelope.” And she says, “You’re not a poor man. Why don’t you buy a thousand envelopes? They’ll deliver them, and you can put them in a closet.” And I say, “Hush.” So I go down the steps here, and I go out to this newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery. I have to get in line because there are people buying candy and all that sort of thing, and I talk to them. The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes, and when it’s my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately. I get my envelope and seal it up and go to the postal convenience center down the block at the corner of 47th Street and 2nd Avenue, where I’m secretly in love with the woman behind the counter. I keep absolutely poker-faced; I never let her know how I feel about her. One time I had my pocket picked in there and got to meet a cop and tell him about it. Anyway, I address the envelope to Carol in Woodstock. I stamp the envelope and mail it in a mailbox in front of the post office, and I go home. And I’ve had a hell of a good time. And I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.
We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something
If slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter, maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation though.
The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
I find working with LLMs much more fun and frictionless comprated to the drudgery of boring glue code or tracking down nongeneralizable version-specific workarounds in github issues etc. Coding LLMs let you focus on the domain of you actual problem instead of the low level stumbling blocks that just create annoyance without real learning.
Focusing on your problem means focusing on minimizing that stuff.. with LLMs it will fester.
Not in my experience so far. But if it becomes a problem, I'll reconsider.
I’m a systems person too, and I don’t see mediocrity as inevitable.
The slop problem isn’t just model quality. It’s incentives and decision making at inference time. That’s why I’m working on an open source tool for governance and validation during inference, rather than trying to solve everything in pre training.
Better systems can produce better outcomes, even with the same models.
I agree completely, and I’m doing the same thing. Good tools that help produce better outcomes will have a multiplicative impact as models improve.
What are you building?
The open source system I’m working on lets multiple agents propose, critique, and stake on decisions before a single action is taken.
It runs at inference time rather than training time and is model agnostic. The goal is to make disagreement explicit and costly instead of implicit and ignored, especially in high stakes or autonomous workflows.
> I'm terrified that our craft will die, and nobody will even care to mourn it.
Mourn it? Overall, people seem to hate tech workers in general (of all kinds). The death of the craft will not be mourned as a tragedy, it's already being celebrated as a triumph (whether it's true or not, doesn't matter).
I must admit there's a part of me that wants it to die. I want people to remember what was good about it in retrospect, then realize there is no chance of ever getting it back. Permanent losses are important lessons.
One of the biggest problems with AI slop (the biggest problem) is that we aren't discerning or critical enough to ignore the bad stuff. It should be fine for people to use AI to generate tons of crap so long as people curate the good stuff to the top.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Slop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926439
As it should.
>What if the future of computing belongs not to artisan developers or Carol from Accounting, but to whoever can churn out the most software out the fastest? What if good enough really is good enough for most people?
Sounds like the cost of everything goes down. Instead of subscription apps, we have free Fdroid apps. Instead of only the 0.1% commissioning art, all of humanity gets to commission art.
And when we do pay for things, instead of an app doing 1 feature well, we have apps do 10 features well with integration. (I am living this, instead of shipping software with 1 core feature, I can do 1 core feature and 6 different options for free, no change order needed)
The future you describe seems closer to the "Carol from Accounting" future I am hoping for in the blog post. My worry is that cost of everything goes down just enough to price out of existence all of the artists the 0.1% used to commission, without actually letting all of humanity do the same.
We should have also been talking about "devops slop" since 2007! it's good enough we have heard this for how many decades?
I deeply hate the people that use AI to poison the music, video or articles that I consume. However I really feel that it can possibly make software cheaper.
A couple of years ago, I worked for an agency as a dev. I had a chat with one of the sales people, and he said clients asked him why custom apps were so expensive, when the hardware had gotten relatively cheap. He had a much harder time selling mobile apps.
Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
>Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store.
I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the extra will be decent remains to be seen.
ai is trained on the stuff already written. Software has been taking a nosedive for ages (ex, committing to shipping something in 6 months before one even figures out what to put in it). If anything shit will get worse due to the deskilling being caused by ai.
I kinda feel like we're at a point where it would be much more valuable to have higher quality software than more software.
This is just the outsourcing argument all over again. Maybe the degrees of difference matters this time?
The slop is sad but a mild irritation at most.
It's the societal level impact of recent advances that I'd call "terrifying". There is a non-zero chance we end up with a "useless" class that can't compete against AI & machines - like at all, on any metric. And there doesn't seem to be much of a game plan for dealing with that without social fabric tearing
Some of us have a perfectly good game plan for that. It's called Universal Basic Income.
It's just that many powerful people have a vested interest in keeping the rest of us poor, miserable, and desperate, and so do everything they can to fight the idea that anything can ever be done to improve the lot of the poor without destroying the economy. Despite ample empirical evidence to the contrary.
I wouldn't call UBI a "game plan" so much as a thing people can point to so justify their actions to themselves. It helps you pretend you're not ruining people's lives, because you can point to UBI as the escape hatch that will let them continue to have an existence. It's not surprising that so many in the tech industry are proponents of UBI. Because it helps them sleep at night.
Never mind that UBI has never actually existed, it probably never will exist, and it's very, very likely that it won't even work.
People need to face the possibility that we will destroy people's way of life the way we're headed, and to not just wave their hands and pretend that UBI will solve everything.
(Edited to tone back the certainty in the language: I'm not actually sure whether AI will be a net positive or negative on most people's lives, but I just think it's dishonest to say "it's ok, UBI will save them.")
OK, maybe take it down a few notches?
I'm only "in the tech industry" in the literal sense, not in the cultural sense. I work in academia, making programs for professors and students, and I think the stuff "the tech industry" is doing is as rotten as you appear to.
UBI has never existed because the level of production required to support it has only just started to exist. (It's possible that we're actually not quite there, but that's something we can only determine by trying it out—and if we're not, then I'm 100% confident we can get there with further refinement of existing processes.) If we have the political will to actually, genuinely do UBI—enough to support people's basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, and a little bit of buffer, without any kind of means testing or similar requirements—then it's very, very likely that it will work. All the pilot programs give very positive data.
I'm not pushing UBI because I think it's a fix to the problem of automation. I'm pushing UBI because I think it's the fulfillment of the promise of automation.
Not sure I’d count something that is showing little sign of happening as a game plan
Well that sounds less like a plan and more like a pipe dream.
> It's called Universal Basic Income.
I'd rather we democratize ownership [1]. Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, how about becoming the owning class and reaping the rewards directly?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
Honestly, I'm all for something like that. It is, however, a much harder sell for most people.
We can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do something in order to recieve money, even if the something is begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the answer.
What if you have to dig holes and fill them back in to get the money?
And some more people can do the useless work of tracking who filled and dug how many holes.
if you oversimplify things, you lose the point. I moved houses. I took all of my stuff from my old house, moved it into a new house. Later, I moved all of that stuff back out of that house when I moved out of that one. Was moving my stuff into that house pointless, then? I could have just skipped a step and put it all in storage and then just not had any furniture for the entire time and saved money. In fact, if you don't eat anything, you'll save tons of money!
Why is it useless to track who dug which hole?
nobody needs those holes dug and filled
I agree with you about magic money. Frequently downvoted when I put it forward but by and large I think that the human psyche needs to have a daily sense of having "accomplished something".
Otherwise I suspect many of us will (reluctantly) drift off into lives that center around drinking alcohol, playing video games…
I have a decent job, get paid an acceptable amount, and at the end of the day I never get the feeling that I've "accomplished something".
I'm extremely jealous of anyone who feels a sense of reward from their job.
That describes much of my career as well. Curiously (or not) the job I had that felt the most satisfying was when I was paid to mow lawns as a youth. Beginning with a ragged lawn and leaving it looking clean and evenly cut was satisfying.
> People need to do something in order to recieve money
Why?
What purpose does this serve?
Why should people have to prove their worthiness to be allowed to continue living?
Because I ain't giving away my money to freeloaders.
You mean like the billionaires who do nearly no work, yet reap huge percentages of the spoils of all that we do?
The creme rises to the top. If someone's shit-coded program hangs and crashes frequently, in this day and age, we don't have to put up. with it any longer. That lazy half-assed feature that everyone knows sucks but we're forced to use it anyway? The competition just vibe coded up a hyper-specific version of that app that doesn't suck for everyone involved. We start looking at who's requiring what. What's an interface and what's required to use it. If there's an endpoint that I can hit, but someone has a better, more polished UI, that users prefer, let the markets decide.
My favorite pre-LLM thing in this area is Flighty. It's a flight tracking app that takes available data and presents it in the best possible wway. Another one is that EU border visa residency app that came thru here a couple of months ago.
Standards for interchange formats have now become paramount.
API access is another place where things hinge on.
Right. If the "slop" is truly "90% as good" and that 10% actually matters to people, then they won't use the slop. If the 10% doesn't matter, there's probably a reason for that.
Meh. Slop is not danger. Because in software lines of code quantity does not have quality on its own. Or if it has it is not a good quality. And bad software costs money. The problem with temu for the west is not that the things sold there are bad. The real problem rose in the last 2-3 years when they become good.
I use AI/LLMs hard for my programming.
They allow me to do work I could never have done before.
But there’s no chance at all of an LLM one shotting anything that I aim to build.
Every single step in the process is an intensely human grind trying to understand the LLM and coax it to make the thing I have in mind.
The people who are panicking aren’t using this stuff in depth. If they were, then they would have no anxiety at all.
If only the LLM was smart enough to write the software. I wish it could. It can’t, nor even close.
As for web browsers built in a few hours. No. No LLM is coming anywhere new at building a web browser in a few hours. Unless your talking about some super simple super minimal toy with some of the surface appearance of a web browser.
This has been my experience. I tend to use chats, in a synchronous, single-threaded manner, as opposed to agents, in an asynchronous way. That’s because I think of the LLM as a “know-it-all smartass personal assistant”; not an “employee replacement.”
I just enjoy writing my own software. If I have a tool that will help me to lubricate the tight bits, I’ll use it.
Same. I hit Tab a lot because even though the system doesn't actually understand what it's doing, it's really good at following patterns. Takes off the mental load of checking syntax.
Occasionally of course it's way off, in which case I have to tell it to stfu ("snooze").
Also it's great at presenting someone else's knowledge, as it doesn't actually know facts - just what token should come after a sequence of others. The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it - brilliant, just what I wanted.
> The other day I just pasted an error message from a system that I wasn't familiar with and it explained in detail what the problem was and how to solve it
That’s probably the single most valuable aspect, for me.
I'm less afraid of people using LLMs for coding well than I am of people not caring to and just shipping slop.
This is the browser engine I was alluding to in the post: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
Our paper on removing AI slop got accepted to ICLR 2026, and it's under consideration for an IgNobel prize:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
Our definition of slop (repetitive characteristic language from LLMs) is the original one as articulated by the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023. Folks trying to redefine it today to mean "lazy LLM outputs I don't like" should have chosen a different word.
I was disappointed that your paper devoted less than a sentence in the introduction to qualifying "slop" before spending many pages quantifying it.
The definitions you're operating under are mentioned thus:
> characteristic repetitive phraseology, termed “slop,” which degrades output quality and makes AI-generated text immediately recognizable. (abstract)
> ... some patterns occur over 1000× more frequently in LLM text than in human writing, leading to the perception of repetition and over-use – i.e. "slop". (introduction)
And that's ... it, I think. No further effort is visible towards a definition of the term, nor do the background citations propose one that I could see (I'll admit to skimming them, though I did read most of your paper--if I missed something, let me know).
That might be suitable as an operating definition of "slop" to explain the techniques in your paper, but neither your paper nor any of your citations defend it as the common definition of an established term. Your paper's not making an incorrect claim per se, rather, it's taking your definition of "slop" for granted without evidence.
That doesn't bode well for the rigor of the rest of the paper.
Like, look: I get that this is an extremely fraught and important/popular area of research, and that your approach has "antislop" in the name. That's all great; I hope your approach is beneficial--truly. But you aren't claiming a definition of slop in your paper; you're just assuming one. Then you're coming here and asserting a definition citing "the LLM creative writing community circa 2022-2023" and asserting redefinition-after-the-fact, both of which are extraordinary claims that require evidence.
Again, not only do I think that mis-definition is untrue, I also think that you're not actually defining "slop" (the irony of my emphasizing that in a not-just-x-but-y sentence is not lost on me).
I don't know which of the authors you are, but Ravid, at least, should know better: this is not how you establish terminology in academic writing, nor how you defend it.
Slop is food scraps fed to pigs. Folks trying to redefine it in 2022–2023 as "repetitive characteristic language from LLMs" should have chosen a different word.
A computer is a person employed to do arithmetic.
Sloppy joes is either a food item or a slur against the previous democratic president. Checkmate.
Words expand meanings all the time and frankly I don't think your narrow definition of slop was ever a common one.
Butlers jihad has to happen. Destroy the datacenters and give the oligarchs the french treatment!
You don't want a global authoritarian jewish utopia run by a digital sanhedran? How else will the elite people get robot blowjobs in their flying cars on their way to their transhuman surgery appointments? Won't somebody please think of the juden?!
I think you spelled "American" wrong
Slop existed before AI came along.
It's often lamented that the World Wide Web used to be controlled by indie makers, but now belongs to a handful of megacorp websites and ad networks pushing addictive content. But, the indie maker era was just a temporary market inefficiency, from before businesses fully knew how to harness the technology.
I think software development has gone through a similar change. At one point software companies cared about software quality, but this too was just an idealist, engineer-driven market inefficiency. Eventually business leaders realized they can make just as much money (but make it faster) by shoveling out rushed, bloated, garbage software, since even though poor-quality software aggravates people, it doesn't aggravate enough for the average person to switch vendors over it. (Case in point - I'm regularly astounded at how buggy the YouTube app is on Android of all platforms. I have to force-kill it semi-regularly to get it working right. But am I gonna stop watching YouTube because of this? Admittedly, no, probably not.)
You might install PipePipe or YouTube ReVanced, but they'd sooner ban you as a customer than improve their app quality.
>What if AI stops getting better and what if people stop caring?
Seems an unlikely problem. It'll get better, which may cause it's own problems.