My take is "simonw and his retiree friends" spend a lot of their time exploring this disruptive new technology and sharing their learnings (for free!) so that everybody can leverage it too... and yet so many people see that as something bad rather than an opportunity to learn.
Radical changes bring radical opportunities too, so "having the time of their lives" is not necessarily incompatible with "adapting to profound disruption."
Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.
> Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.
Consider that they're closer to death than birth and are unlikely to survive into the shit-hole world they're creating. Not passing on those traits to the next generation is a massive failure. These assholes aren't disrupting their own lives, just the poor slobs who haven't made it yet.
The technique of feeding money into the slot-machine that generates tokens so that it can maybe generate what you want and you get the results at scale if you have enough money paradigm just isn't accessible to many people. In this context Simonw and Karpathy are starting to look more and more like degenerate gamblers who admonish everyone else for not joining in, while telling us all that the perks the casino gives them are just fabulous and we're all missing out.
And maybe you'll say "Yeah but things will get cheaper in the future, they're just early adapters who can afford it..." well, will it? And will those people make it to that shining beacon on the hill future? Or will they find themselves out of a job because of the current economic calamity that is unfolding as a result of election of an American Nero who is supported by the ultrawealthy tech oligarchs who are brining this technology into existance?
Do these people actually want to improve the lives of the common people -- or are they more concerned with getting a high score in the form of the amount in their bank account and clout on social media?
My personal take, which seems to be consistent with what these folks are saying, is "OMG there's this huge radioactive asteroid that's going to flatten our world, but its gamma rays also give us weird superpowers, here are some ways to harness those..."
I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs.
> I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs
Point me to something real that happens rights now that would support such optimistic vision.
I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.
The power of AI is that it amplifies individual capabilities. So the same aspect that lets employers reduce their headcount also lets individuals start ambitious projects that would have previously required an entire team... and hence, a significant amount of funding. The moment you need money, the people who provide that capital hold a lot of power and influence.
But now you don't need their money, and so the capital class lose their power over you.
As an example, I'm iterating on a niche product based on computer vision -- something I had no background in when I started -- that in the past would have taken a team of 2 - 3 and at least a semester or two of an advanced course in computer vision. Instead, I'm solo bootstrapping this project.
There are multiple accounts like mine, and you can find many comments on HN or other forums to this effect. Now, I know this is a very tough path for most people because, well, now everybody needs to be an entrepreneur, but a path exists.
AI is a double-edged sword, and more people need to become aware of the edge that is available to us.
Again, I want concrete evidence on positive impact among general population, not speculation on how AI could be used or your amazing experience as bootstrapping entrepreneur.
> I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.
Not really "much power" but more like a viable alternative: in a world where everybody needs LLMs to do their white-collar work, you can't force me to use your paid LLM subscription as my local-running model is close enough.
It's classic ladder-kicking behavior, reveling in the mild conveniences of "genai" while comfortably impervious to the externalities. Shameful that the moderators of so many online communities turn a blind eye to- or even offer explicit support for- their endless shilling for hideously unethical web-destroying for-profit companies simply because they express their native advertising in a superficially polite register.
Is that an actual quote from simonw? He seems an unbiased observer and reporter of progress, I'd be sad to see him cheering this stuff on so callously.
Well, people who are not above a threshold of experience yet are not in a position to self-assess and course-correct if their long term learning is being affected. And even less so if there is pressure to be hyper-productive with the help of AI.
Speculating here but I think even seniors who rely on AI all the time and enjoy the enhanced output are going to end up with impostor syndrome over the things they suspect they can no longer do without AI, and FOMO about all the projects they haven't yet attempted with AI despite working as hard as they can.
It’s particularly interesting that Anthropic came out yesterday and basically said, yeah, this stuff cannot be held right.
One can argue, convincingly perhaps, that Anthropic isn’t right and/or is marketing, but what they’re saying could be complete BS but the fact that there is doubt suggests that most people believe that no one can hold it right exists.
I’m quite pro AI, but given the radical asymmetry between the upside vs the downsides (the upside is at best maximum bliss for all existing humans, which has a finite limit, while the downside is the end of humanity which is essentially infinitely bad), our march forward in this area needs to be at least slightly more responsible than what we are doing now.
No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future.
In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.
I honestly think that we'll start to see a movement where people diagnosed with terminal illnesses like a brain tumour that leave them functional for a few weeks or months before dying within a year will start kamikazing against the ultra wealthy.
People with nothing to lose will feel empowered by taking everything from the people who they feel are responsible for taking everything from them.
There's a chance this kind of thing becomes a social contagion that spreads, much like suicide or school shootings.
I'm not sure what the solution is to it once it starts. I guess people like Thiel won't be able to do antichrist talks at the Vatican anymore.
This is why totalitarian surveillance and increased police power is also part of the billionaires' agenda: When 99.99% of us are economically irrelevant, they'll need to more and more insulate themselves from the "Nothing To Lose" people.
That's a pretty extreme take on the current situation IMO, I don't think we're anywhere near things being that bad. But I certainly want to avoid that.
As an outsider looking in I'm pretty sure that these were the kinds of conversations that took place in social media companies after that Health CEO got Luigi'd.
I think that's why you saw the extreme moderation on even the word 'Luigi' or pictures of the character on Reddit -- They were trying to prevent a social contagion scenario.
With that said I'm curious what you think would have to happen in Westernsociety for this kind of thing to take off? The person above paints a pretty bleak picture of AMerica where healthcare is tied to employment and people are facing the prospect of mass unemployment.
Are people just going to sit there and die? Or sit there and watch their family members die while they see the ultra wealthy flaunt their wealth on social media?
A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.
“Who cares about the immense harm AI is wrecking on our economy and society, it helps me create worthless throwaway software for myself and lets me be lazier at work.” - people on this forum
Crazy thing is before AI the same people spamming Show HN with stupid worthless SaaS products that went no where beyond the submitters GitHub account. “Hey check out my shitty CRUD app because I have minor annoyances with some other shitty SaaS that everyone hates yet remains the market leader”. “Now rewritten in foo.js and Rust”.
It wasn’t impressive when you wrote it by hand, it’s still not impressive when an AI does all the work for you.
Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
> Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
I have the opposite impression. In the past, I'd very often react "WTF who'd ever want to use it?" in my mind, whereas the comments were very kind and supportive.
Now, whenever someone submits their AI slop, they mostly hear some comments about this. The very fact that this whole thread is about bashing Simon speaks for itself. The HN community is split between those aggressively promoting it, those hating it, and the rest of us using it in one way or another, not yet sure about full-scale consequences for the future, and quite frankly powerless about it.
Industrial loom cloth is far inferior to artisan made cloth. And yet you'd be dooming all future generations to poverty if you stuck with artisanal cloth production.
Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
And there should be a daily reminder that as long as we live in a Capitalist society, what befell the Luddites will also befall those that try to resist an economic force of this magnitude.
Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.
Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
> Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.
Where the commenter is right is that luddites didn't have (or had they?) a global competitor more than happy to push their entire system aside. Not that they personally thought about this argument, just that the context and possible consequences were different.
No, no we are not. The average case scenario is that this time is not actually different to any of the other times new automation technologies were invented, and that the youngest will master the tech then find uses for it far better than their parents generation. The best case scenario is something like a new gold age of prosperity, and the worst case is an economic bubble and temporary recession as it bursts.
Computers have been automating things for decades. My father had a private secretary at work, something considered normal for a mid-career executive back then (he was an engineer!). I've done very well in my career but a private secretary is quite out of reach. That doesn't mean that we had a "lost generation" on our hands.
And yesterday a friend showed me what his 11 year old was vibing up with Claude Code. A whole web app he can use to help organize some stuff with his friends related to Roblox (I dunno what it was meant to be, you had to log in for most of it). The kid is amazed that his father understands all the mysterious symbols Claude generates. And he probably always will, the same way I listen to stories about how my father could fix car engines with mild amazement as well.
There's a huge market for doom stories out there and the NYT is a rag that was just yesterday reporting that Adam Back was Satoshi based on nothing deeper than the journalists gut feeling. "Studies" in social science can show whatever the author wants, and the authors want clicks from their AI-hating left wing readership. Stay skeptical!
Doubt it. Companies have already begun moving away from AI and back to hiring humans. LLM capabilities were vastly oversold (moreso than the DeepBlue or machine learning memes of prior economic cycles).
After several hundred billions dollars spent on LLMs, they can almost reproduce the capabilities of a partially deaf visually impaired secretary with severe brain damage.
Humans are cheaper, and they can actually learn things. Even the brain-damaged secretary can learn better than an LLM can, and it doesn't cost of hundreds of millions to train one.
Young people were already struggling to build lives and families before the AI recession. It’s hard to fathom having any hope for raising a family or finding meaningful work in the PE slop driven economy.
Thats just the experience of any young person born outside the western bubble, thinking about their future in their poor ass over exploited countries for hundreds of years now. If they didnt see sources of hope around them they moved to where they did see a better future.
"Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills."
-----------------
Perhaps schools need to adapt to AI use and recenter the goals of education in the minds of students. If AI use impairs your development, you are only being efficient in your evasion of education.
i.e. Students need to be taught that learning to efficiently pump out AI written essays isn't the same thing as learning to reason and express themselves. AI tools will evolve and become easier and easier to pick up and use. Using your own mind is a slower and more difficult skill to develop, but it makes the difference between going through life as a human being or a mere meat-puppet for AI. It will always be far easier for a human to pick up AI tools and learn them from scratch than it will for a meat-puppet to remedy their lack of human development.
This is incredibly out of touch. No teacher or even school administrator needs to have that said to them. Students refuse to hear it (despite the bleating of the article). Who are you talking to then? Parents? That's rich
Underresouced instructors just need to come up with new pedagogies to handle revolutionary new tools that change extremely rapidly and which also provide an extremely effective way for students to cheat.
Probably but how do you adapt to something that changes faster than semesters. Revising your theory of learning, implementing, evaluating results, etc. takes years, not weeks.
The current situation is that many students don't perceive that using AI to produce, for example, essays is harmful to themselves, and students who do things honestly may feel pressure to use AI in order to stay competitive with students who do.
The answer may be to focus less on output and more on the process. e.g. Instead of sending students off to do essays at home and then merely grading what gets handed in, perhaps teachers should run workshops where students work on their essays while receiving guidance. i.e. Everybody works in the classroom on their essay and talks to each other and the teacher about what they're doing. Grades would be at least partly based on participation, and teachers would get a better sense of what students are actually able to write themselves. If Johnny sits back and picks his nose in the workshop and then hands in a paper that's suspiciously good, it's probably slop even if it isn't obviously so.
Of course, doing this sort of thing would mean taking time away from lectures and wrote learning. Finding the right balance is no easy task and it's going to take good teachers to blaze the way. That can only happen if they're backed with resources and the freedom to alter curriculum.
Reminds me of the quote: No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to. I'm sure most teachers and schools would prefer them not to.
Why do they have to use it? Have standards gotten higher in schools such that they will be left behind if they don't? Is there peer pressure to use it? Is there some social aspect I'm unaware of?
Of course not. People find the technology useful. Social media I understand as it's harder to break away because friends use it to communicate. But that's not true for AI.
And then they have some doomer media telling them they should be concerned and scapegoat the technology. Gen AI will prevent you from being an artist or poet?
Your conception of revealed preferences is highly mistaken.
People don’t do things only because they want to.
Do you think the existence of millions of trash pickers getting cancer combing through mounds of toxic waste across the world reveal a preference for getting cancer by combing through hazardous waste?
It's a race to the bottom. In SV we're seeing this perception (delusion?) of a Brave New World in which there are two peoples: the permeant underclass of serfs, and the elite.
Everyone is clawing and crab-bucketing to escape, what they believe to be, the inevitable suffering of laborers in a post-labor economy.
So, if this guy I hate is using AI and AI is making the world worse then guess what - I'm using AI too. Because I'm not gonna be left behind, right?
In fact, I'm going use AI more. I'm the most AI-ist out of all the AI-believers. I'm practically and AI apostle.
Because, when our new overlords come, I intend to be spared. Not like you losers. I, for one, welcome our new overlords.
> These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to.
When you're constantly being force fed the narrative that you must use AI or be left behind, using it is no longer a revealed preference it is a survival mechanism
Not to mention jobs that require or heavily push using it both in and outside the tech sector. Plus, even in a competitive academic environment it’s naive to think college students won’t feel pressure to keep up with their peers if they’re all using AI and pushing up the curve.
Literally no one says this to young kids. Teachers are begging them not to use AI. And if you read the article young people are using it for things like deciding what school to go to or dating advice.
> These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to. I'm sure most teachers and schools would prefer them not to.
> Why do they have to use it? Have standards gotten higher in schools such that they will be left behind if they don't? Is there peer pressure to use it? Is there some social aspect I'm unaware of?
Did you not read the article or not read it carefully? Try again, your comment shows a massive lack of understanding and little else.
Yes I did read it. Here are the relevant sections:
> Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills.
So it's hurting their creativity and critical thinking skills. I wonder if they the existence of cars are hurting their ability to stay in shape.
Revealed preferences from here:
> In the study, about half of young people reported using A.I. on either a daily or weekly basis, similar to the previous year. Just under 20 percent said they did not use A.I.
The rest of the article is mostly anecdotes or vague notions about social skills.
Why don't you contribute to the conversation instead of just telling me I don't understand the issue
I don't think you understood it, because you seemed to read past the key findings to make some tired, tired points about "revealed preferences."
> The percentage of respondents ages 14 to 29 who said they felt hopeful about A.I. declined sharply since last year, down to 18 percent from 27. Young adults’ excitement about artificial intelligence dropped, too, and nearly a third of respondents indicated that the technology made them feel angry. [emphasis mine]
> ...
> In interviews, young adults cited a variety of reasons for their reservations about artificial intelligence, including the threat to entry-level jobs, the replacement of human interaction and the spread of A.I.-fueled misinformation on social media.
> Sydney Gill, 19, a freshman at Rice University in Houston, said she had been optimistic about artificial intelligence as a learning tool when she was in high school. Now, as she tries to select her college major, her outlook has become less rosy.
> “I feel like anything that I’m interested in has the potential of maybe getting replaced, even in the next few years,” she said.
A young adult can totally abstain from AI and be negatively affected by all of that. And those are the kinds of things that could make people angry at the technology.
Why did AI make them feel angry? Or was that beyond the scope of reporting? Seems like a pretty basic thing to ask.
> A young adult can totally abstain from AI and be negatively affected by all of that. And those are the kinds of things that could make people angry at the technology.
How would a young be negatively affected by abstinence from AI? Why is this implied? Give me a probable explanation for this. The article does not, and neither do any comments here.
There's asking a question, and then's (possibly bad-faith) demands for hand-holding.
The answer to question "Why did AI make them feel angry?" should have been obvious before it was asked (given what I quoted), to anyone with two brain cells and a basic amount of empathy. The other question was little more than evidence of a failure of reading comprehension.
I love using AI tools and they are changing my work and life in amazing ways. I cannot imagine going back.
And yet, I am more concerned about the social damage due to their widespread use and the amounts of slop they generate.
Just this week:
- There was an article about a news company faking polls by asking LLMs for answers.
- My wife told me that she stopped watching any funny pet videos because 99% now is AI slop - start normal, but then turn into someone's slop idea.
- A friend told me their big tech company uses AI-generated metrics as part of performance evaluation. Nobody checks them.
- Another friend told me their big tech company requires engineers to use AI-generated commit messages with terrible signal-to-noise ratio and making version control and history useless for engineers. But directors and PMs love them, they are so descriptive!
- My neighbor uses LLMs to create some neighbor meeting plans/agendas, plausibly looking PDFs citing contractors etc. It's impossible to read through it, mixed hallucinations and real information, all wrapped in thousands of slop words. What is real and what made up? I'll spend 10x more time double guessing.
- Encountering more and more articles and general "content" that is AI generated and looks ok at the first glance, but slop upon inspections. Why would I read LLMs output on a webpage with ads, if I can ask it myself and get better, personal answers and style?
And I am not even talking here about other ethical issues, training data, less junior job positions, job replacement of journalists with LLM-equipeed contractors, etc.
LLMs make my personal and work life so much better, but social life unbearable. Is it worth the trade-off? I guess it doesn't matter at this point.
I think it remains to be seen whether the various AI tools we have today are a net-negative or net-positive for society.
Most inventions are a net positive: The steam engine, vaccines, chimneys.
A few are net-negative: grenades, leaded gasoline, asbestos insulation.
If we can no longer trust that a potential job candidate in a video call actually exists, they will have to be flown in. That's a cost. If we can no longer trust that an employee who wrote a document actually thought about it at all and must be questioned to make sure, that's a cost. Those costs will add up.
A written document or a video essay used to be proof-of-thought and now it's not. If we can't find new proofs of thought, and if AI doesn't get vastly better to the point where we can trust it blindly, then I think this will all be a net-negative.
One of the motivations to build data centers as fast as possible and improve tools as fast as possible may be to get to net-positive before it all gets banned. This article exists. The clock is ticking.
It's okay to have two conflicting thoughts about something and both be true at the same time. AI is awesome but at the same time is promising to do evil in the future. Why? Facebook has done a lot of good for the world, like React for instance, but also done a lot of evil as well. Billionaires have initiated the development of some amazing products and services, but at the same time they're spending their money building bunkers so they can survive an end of the world scenario that they're largely responsible for, rather than using it to mitigate some of the evil that they unleashed. Why are they doing that? I don't know. It doesn't seem necessary to me.
Yeah. A think there are a lot of tech enthusiasts like myself that find it amazing from a tinkering and curiosity standpoint, but terrifying from a power and those-who-wield-it standpoint.
"Nothing" is a stretch. Major capital being now being allocated towards building AI data centres, away from what it was doing previously, is absolutely a contributing factor. Of course not the only one, but there is never just one reason for anything.
I believe someday we will wake up and find out our children are setting sail for the new America. Wherever that may be. The capital holders have consolidated their power intertwined with government and are pulling up the ladders. This is why many Europeans set sail for America in the first place, and the cycle has completed itself, and we have become what we escaped. I do not think you can vote your way out of that.
Maybe there is some place left that needs young people badly enough that they are willing to open up opportunities, or someplace left ripe and weak enough that the youth will take it over by force.
I’m not sure we’re in agreement. I don’t think AI is the equivalent of the loom. And I think all of this data center spend is a massive waste of money (unless you’re the NSA, planning to buy them all up for cheap and run 24/7 AI surveillance on everyone).
Tangential to the worries of those surveyed: I noticed a drop in my critical thinking and skills very quickly. It makes sense, the easiest thing to do is just ask AI for the answer or ideas and then tell it to implement them.
I’m deliberately trying to understand things more deeply now to combat that. We’ll see how it goes.
I think there are a lot of people who (naively) believe AI is going to lead to abundance for everyone. I think there are very rich people trying to sell that vision.
I think most of us know that even if AI could do all of our jobs, it won't be to give us free products and services.
Any rando might be able to push out their cute tool (hi mom!), this is what they (will) sell, but true leverage will happen for those that can allocate their vast resources to further dominate; The big players just appropriated the collective corpus of mankind’s knowledge.
Everybody should be horrified by the idea of a gerntocracy/beurocracy/cleptocratic military industrial complex that is hidden behind an algorythim of exploitation, in a never ending techno feudalistic hell world.
Hopefully, they'll see the modern media is the same overhype under deliver and lockin emotional facade that is as empty as the current American farce. It's all such a bullshit storm that it's hard to imagine anyone believes there's a solid foundation and super reliance of the american dream create a dirth of benefits.
> I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable.
How often are your peers experiencing these crimes? Assuming you're in the US based on your comments, crime rates are much lower now than when in the early 2010s when I was a young adult and quite hopeful despite thinking my job prospects were bleak and that I'd never be able to afford a home.
> I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable
Yes people of all ages tend to be unhappy when crime happens to them. Not sure where you live but lowering taxes and government oversight is actually a bad way to improve taxpayer funded and government run law enforcement agencies. None of this has anything to do with AI though and young people can be angry about multiple things.
Hah, I wish I had your optimism. I’m in the same boat re. the media and the pressing issues, but I just think AI is going to make things even more unaffordable for us, harder to find work, and used against us by governments who can afford the top models that might not even get released to the rest of us.
I saw the moon launch the other day, and in the past I would have been following and celebrating. These days I’m more preoccupied by the corruption in our government, including recent anti-democratic events (I’m not American).
This is something I never see mentioned so I'm curious what brought it up. Are you personally paying a lot of taxes or so much that you can't afford other things or is this a thing peers talk about? Is this a state or federal thing?
Taxes are pretty significant at the lower incomes. Not only are they paying 15-25% taxes after considering local, federal, state, and property taxes (even though federal are low) but whenever they want services from anyone in the upper quintiles they are also effectively paying the regulatory and tax burden of those enterprises since the customer ultimately assumes all the costs of the business.
Think for a second, if someone wants child care -- they must pay enough not only to satisfy the worker's basic needs but also the worker's income tax, business taxes, property taxes of the daycare, government mandated licensing and bonding, etc. None of those get recorded as 'taxes' the person contracting that service has paid, but really they are also paying those.
Given how little most of the lower pay workers have extra to work with, and how little they get in government services for what they pay, I don't think it's much a stretch for them to think taxes are holding them back. Being able open up saving even couple percent of income massively improves your financial safety and cushion at those brackets.
I totally am paying a massive amount of capital gains taxes! I’m also saving up for a house which means every dollar I don’t contribute to a down payment becomes principal and interest on a mortgage which equals even more money out of my pocket. For instance if I pay $37k in capital gains one year (which I did) and if my principal on a $500k house is $200k at 6% and $1500 monthly payments I’ll have to pay $33k in interest on just the $37k I didn’t pay up front!
Some cursory googling shows you have to make capital gains of between $185,000 and $250,000 to have to pay $37,000 in capital gains tax. This is between three and six times as much as someone in their 20s will earn in a year. I think you need a bit more perspective of what it's like to be a young person outside the extremely well compensated tech sector.
Ironically, capital gains tax rates are essentially regressive as they are lower than the typical marginal tax rate for someone earning at those levels. They are a big handout to the capital class, not some special punishment.
So to whine about them shows a baseline belief that income should not be taxed at all, I guess?
I wouldn’t call it “well compensated”, I work really hard for my money and it’s not like my company is just giving it away to me out of the kindness of their hearts. I also worked in food service while in college and know what it’s like to make ~$15 an hour which is one of the reasons why I went to college and learned the skills needed to create value for my employer. A big point of mine is that my grandfather went to a community college for $3 (the price of his ID card) and got a job as a machinist to pay for his multi-lot house in Southern California in 2 years. He was the sole earner so his wife could raise three children. Nowadays that house is $2M, AI didn’t exist the way it did in the 1970s when he bought the house and AI didn’t cause the increase in the ratio of home costs to wages, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time and is not hypothetical.
I think you are understanding my point here. America has and has had plenty of problems. I don’t think AI is one of them. In the same vein, reporters and journalists are a very small subset of American population that are very vocal about AI because it probably threatens their hegemony.
Don't the vast majority of young people entering the workforce have no capital gains to deal with at all? That tends to be more of a problem for people who are already well off. Are you talking about a narrower demographic or something?
The amounts you paid in capital gains are about 50% higher than I've ever paid. That was the second year I worked at a big tech company and suddenly had stock, which was about a decade into an my extremely lucrative career as a software developer. Most of my friends don't have to deal with capital gains at all because they're not part of the investor class. On average the rates of trading must be much lower for people in their 20s, no?
I hate to be uncharitable but the comment seems to simply be parroting conservative talking points, rather than being an accurate (or sincere) representation of young people's pessimism about the future.
> high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages
Anyone I talk to under 40 despairs at low wages, rising prices, and a political class that is incapable of going after blatant corruption, especially those identified in the Epstein files.
There is more anger at capitalism and billionaires (capitalists in the Marxist sense) than in any time in living memory. The notion that young people are generally upset about regulation, entitlement and H1B visas is laughably out of touch. It might be true for a tiny number of spoiled techies in the Bay Area! But outside SF, Seattle and NYC, young people are angry about a lot of things, and strong regulation and generous benefits are about the last of them.
> At the same time I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable. My take on this is that legacy media refuses to address these issues or plays them down and at the same time they amplify concerns about AI probably because AI is supplanting the reach and their rhetoric and reducing their ad share.
Maybe it’s just the legacy media I consume, but petty crime is rarely if ever reported (television, newspaper, radio, etc) in my experience.
And I’m not sure how you would expect media institutions to address petty crime. I guess they could ask local leaders and local law enforcement about it.?
This “gotcha” just leads to the conclusion that reporting on car break-ins and such just isn’t that interesting. “Car window smashed in Pasadena” yawn, talk about a waste of airtime imo. Might as well talk about all the people not using their blinker every day.
> And I’m not sure how you would expect media institutions to address petty crime. I guess they could ask local leaders and local law enforcement about it.?
Uh... yes? Journalists used to report on crimes and then ask police and town leaders questions on how they're addressing it. And then do follow-up stories weeks or months later, to report on (lack of) progress and again ask police and town leaders questions.
Maybe many moons ago, when newspapers had an abundance of reporters, and relatively low crime / competing issues otherwise?
But I'm not sure I can recall, even in a local paper or a local TV news broadcast, seeing articles / segments about a random individual having their car broken in to or being robbed.
Edit: I take that back, I have seen reports of robberies (specifically armed robberies) in local news, but not so much car break ins.
Older U.S. taxpayers approaching retirement will bristle at word combinations such as "entitlements to retirees" as they have put enormous capital, which can clearly be summed from their large stack of W2s, into Social Security. Also, there are large segments of "retirement age" people who simply can't afford to retire.
It's quite interesting that your (presumably very representative) survey of young people has unanimously reported 'arbitrary amalgamation of bog-standard right-wing grievances' as the primary issue of our time
Their recent comment history also consists of complaining about vaccine mandates, gun control, and climate science research at NASA while praising funding cuts to higher education…
Among my sample of friends, who are mostly right wing and successful, crime is literally the primary issue of their time. That's practically the sole problem in their lives. Not sure why their political leanings are relevant. This is what a vast swathe of people actually care about.
You should be careful saying things like "high housing costs which driven up by overregulation". It sounds like you're trying to frame bad economic news like it's the fault of a more liberal political party in the US.
High housing costs are just an effect of capitalism. It's supply and demand - as simple as that. If they were grass huts in downtown San Fransisco, they'd be just as expensive. "Overregulation" is a fallacy.
Zoning costs money everywhere. That's work that needs to be done by a person. That person gets paid. It's capitalism again.
Prop 13 actually limits property taxes and the assessments that can happen. You're actually hurting your argument with this point.
Regulations don't reduce supply because regulations don't purchase properties. People purchase properties and then that property is off the market.
The Bay Area is proof that limited supply (because there is only so much land in the area) + steady (or increasing) demand (because people need to live close to where they work for some baffling reason) will cause property values to raise steadily over time.
Again: It's supply and demand. Regulations have very little to do with price increases.
To be clear: I'm not anti-capitalist ... I'm just anti "wrong context"
> Zoning costs money everywhere. That's work that needs to be done by a person.
I'm not talking about the salary for a city planner who draws lines on a map. I'm talking about banning building denser housing via zoning.
> The Bay Area is proof that limited supply... will cause property values to raise steadily over time
The Bay Area has limited housing supply for a long time through single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes and other regulatory means.
> Prop 13 actually limits property taxes and the assessments that can happen.
Unaffordable property tax increases are a signal that the land is under-utilized. High property taxes due to land scarcity incentivize building more housing on the same land. Prop 13 takes away that signal. Or at least, it insulates existing and long-term homeowners from the effects of insufficient housing supply in their area. Their taxes don't go up so they have no reason to sell their house to someone who will build condos and apartments on that land.
> You're actually hurting your argument with this point.
I don't think you've taken the time to understand my points.
> Again: It's supply and demand. Regulations have very little to do with price increases.
I live in an unregulated county and I just built a house for $60,000.
I've found a few plots of land in San Francisco where you could put my house on where the land itself is under $200,000. So $260,000. So why doesn't anyone do this? It's $200,000 in profit easy since you could sell it for $460,000+ easy. Capitalists just hate making money? Clearly there is regulation stopping it, otherwise developers would be buying $50k boxables or the cheapest manufactured house they could drop down off a trailer and making an absolute mint on all the slivers of cheaper land you can find for sale in these upper priced cities.
When I was in the planning phase of building my house I quickly identified only a few counties in my state where it was even possible to build a house all myself without regulatory inspections. The only reason why I have a house is because I found a place with no regulatory inspections for owner-builder housing which allowed me to bypass codes, engineering, building plans, and licensing.
People in New York City don't talk as often about how difficult building is because of NIMBYism. Generally it's a combination of red tape that's meant to act as a protection from things like fires and bad construction, which is good, environmental regulations which is so-so (some of them drive up housing costs), because of progressive policies (demanding a certain percentage of units be for lower income people), a scarcity of land, high wages, and a political class tied to unions (the latest tax breaks are tied to 50 dollar min wage for new construction of 99 units or more).
It's very very complicated. And new construction makes rents go up here because it's all luxury - it has to be, or developers won't bother to build.
It's so complicated that I'm sick of reading the West Coasters hot take on housing problems - that it's 100 percent due to single family homes and zoning and other very very California problems.
I’m hopeful for driver assist so I don’t have to pay attention while driving, also this helps disabled people get around (particularly in rural areas with less/no public transit). I’m also hopeful for humanoid robots so they can do all my chores like sweeping, laundry and cooking. In general the idea that me, my family/friends and my country is progressing makes me hopeful.
It's fair to hope for what was promised, but you cannot discount what is being delivered.
Self driving cars were a huge deal 10 years ago and we were all going to be using them immenitly. Now the future is here and they are no greater than a curiosity for the average person. 99.99% are driving manually and will be 30 years from now.
Similarly, AI promises to solve every problem, but the average persons' experience is that of increasing irrelevant spam and junk mail rather than being freed from laundry duty.
Yeah, no kidding, the tech bros have utterly botched the rollout of this technology. It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research. Instead, they opted for regulatory capture in lieu of addressing people's concerns, using robber-baron techniques to force data center construction in at-risk communities, made it clear they want to replace human workers, and then shoved its art slop capabilities in front of everybody's faces.
> It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research.
How so? Colloquially, AI currently means LLMs. Why would we revere LLMs as our greatest achievement?
Because we've built something that's (functionally) intelligent, comparable to humans in terms of its ability to exhibit (functional) understanding of complex topics, and produce novel correct output. There's nothing even remotely close to this in human history. This was all science fiction 10 years ago.
Maybe the comparison is imperfect, but: we also built a wonderful, novel and excellent bomb, the atom one, not remotely close to whatever humans did before, yet I'm not totally thrilled by it.
Because you can already fill a datacenter with hyper-productive PhD level autodidactic polymaths and we're still on the ground floor of the technology? These frontier models are like alpha builds and they're already ridiculous. AGI is marketing slop and machine learning doesn't need that promise to be the most impressive achievement in human history in my opinion.
AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane. It will take time to adjust and some industries will go away and others will pop up.
I think a lot of people are conflating two ongoing things: the emergence of AI and stagnant (if not recessionary) economies across the globe. It appears as if AI is resulting in so much more negative externalities but in reality if not for AI, we'd 100% be in a recession.
The loom, the steam engine, or the airplane did not cause "captains of industry" to publicly salivate over anticipating being able to fire their knowledge workers who invested time, money, and effort into becoming qualified for the jobs they're now constantly in fear of losing.
The social contract is being broken. Being broken just on paper, just on the hopes that it can be broken for good.
> The loom (...) did not cause "captains of industry" to publicly salivate over anticipating being able to fire their knowledge workers who invested time, money, and effort into becoming qualified for the jobs they're now constantly in fear of losing.
It absolutely did. Factory owners used their clout to put workers out of the job and then lobbied for military aid and capital punishment instead of negotiating with the workers. IMO, the only tactic for worker that has EVER had lasting success is solidarity through some form of unionization.
Read "Blood in the Machine" if you want to see what happened to the losers of the industrial revolution. The book does contain some fictional embellishments but that is explained up front, and noted when it comes up.
Those captains of industry almost certainly salivated over the idea of not needing weavers etc. any more. Is the difference you're seeing just that they're doing that publicly now?
The weavers had a rough go of it for sure, but at least they did not have to spend 4 years of their early adulthood being intellectually challenged in a higher education institution, often going into debt, in order to become qualified weavers.
Actually it was 7 years of physical training that deformed their bodies:
"But the work left the body callused, bent, and molded. You could
tell a cropper by his enormous forearms and by the “hoof” of callused
skin that built up on his wrist. In the spring of 1811, George was in his
early twenties, and he’d spent his post-adolescent life learning the trade.
Seven years of hard, exacting labor; seven years of paying his dues. That
led to pride and attachment to the work, to a brotherhood, to an
identity."
Merchant, Brian. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech. Little Brown & Co. (ADS), 2024.
Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding! Let me pivot then-- I still argue that it is a fundamentally different case when it comes to LLMs.
1. Threatening young and educated people with not being able to realize the potential that they believed they were building for themselves is toying with social uprising.
2. Weaving is an apt example of redundancy on account of technological innovation but it's a poor comparison to LLMs where the narrative is that they will continue to get better until they approach a general intelligence level which would put a much much higher percentage of the population at risk of losing their jobs. Again, the segment of the population that has invested most into their skills, and will be the most angry and capable of organizing should that come to pass.
Weaving doesn't as aptly represent the core of what we as a species are good at and excel at, as knowledge work does.
1. This is not enough on it's own for social uprising, but it may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I feel a lot of the general vibe in the US is summed up in this excerpt from "All Hail" by The Devil Makes Three:
"Laugh if you want to, really is kinda funny
'Cause the world is a car and you're the crash test dummy
Herd's stampeding now, fences gone
Television is always on and it says "Save the children, but drop the bomb
Replace the word 'right' now with the word 'wrong'
Hey, there's a big sale on Tuesday, get it before it's gone
Get a picture with the four horsemen for a nominal sum
Now that they got everything, they'd like to sell you some!
All hail, all hail, to the greatest of sales
Everything in sight's got to be sold
All hail, all hail, 'cause it's to work or to jail
Man, they're closing them doors on the world"
Closing them doors on the world aka pulling the ladder up behind them is exactly what is happening, and has been happening, to young white Americans for decades now, and young Americans of color since forever.
2. Weaving is an ancestor of programming so I feel it's an apt comparison to discussions of modern technology, as much as any historic profession can be. But to more specifically address your point about continuing to get better and putting more of the population at risk of job loss, there were multiple innovations within the textile industry that worked together to automate different portions of the industry. The point is similar to the poem "First They Came" by Martin Niemöller, where it starts somewhere but it will come for all of us. So focusing on whether or not weaving specifically is a good comparison to LLMs misses the point that if we don't band together as workers, we will eventually be overpowered by capital, foregoing any discussion about the morality of capitalism but just looking at eternal struggle of profit incentives vs wages.
A little confused as to how exactly a handful of unprofitable companies are keeping us out of a recession? GDP is not the economy. We have been in a "recession" for a while now, not that that word even really means anything anymore.
How old are you? I hate to pull rank on people, but if you're an American who wasn't yet on the job market in 2008, you've never experienced a sustained recession and don't understand the comparison you're drawing. A recession feels much worse than "things cost too much and the world kind of sucks", and workers are affected as much as businesses and CEOs are.
Just because it isn't as bad as 2008 yet doesn't mean we aren't in a recession. I would argue that we were also in a recession before the housing collapse actually hit. Economists will also tell you that the great recession ended in 2009 which I think we both know is bs. My point is that it's a nebulous term and the economy sucks right now despite a few companies keeping GDP artificially inflated.
I guess I'm not terribly interested in debating what exactly the term "recession" means or what the line is where it's fair to say the economy "sucks". If you think that the current state of the economy is as bad as we should expect, and it won't get worse if GDP stops rising, I'm confident you're wrong. But I don't know how to convince you of that unless you've experienced a recession in your working life.
I'm an American who was on the job market in both 2008 and during the dotcom implosion and I'm still working in software development.
IMO we effectively are in a recession already (and have been for a while) as far as the real job market goes, the AI boom is only stopping it from showing up in stock market valuations, which is great if you're heavily invested in the stock market, but pretty meaningless if you're a laborer without assets, with debt, and trying to find a job.
Things can certainly get worse overall than they are now (and due to bad leadership, this seems inevitable), but when they do the delta between now and when we are in an official recession will be far greater felt by people who are currently being propped up by stock and home values than it will for the many people who are already struggling.
> AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane. It will take time to adjust and some industries will go away and others will pop up.
That's fallacious thinking. Technological developments aren't instances of some kind of repeating phenomena; they're distinct, unique events with their own characteristics. You need to consider those characteristics instead of gesticulating at the past for a prediction of the future.
And even if you're correct, you're missing a lot. I'll explain by analogy: at the beginning of a genocide, as someone's community in the process of being murdered, you could totally say "genocides have happened before, some people will go away, others will survive." But that's cold comfort for someone who's about to be killed with their family. AI likely means economic death (or at least hardship) for a lot of people who don't have the needed combination of psychopathy, luck, and wealth to succeed in the new order.
> you could totally go up to someone in the middle of a genocide, as their community in the process of being murdered, and say "genocides have happened before, some people will go away, others will survive."
Yeah. How many times I saw people here say oh yeah it's just the same as job loss during automaton-industrialization. How is that making things better? "Yeah just more mass poverty and more wealth inequality, what are you worried about!"
Also during automation there was a lot of work you could switch to and what about options now? start another vibeslop startup so that you can pay openai for tokens?
the only explanation for people saying this is that they don't understand they will be on the line later just like the people displaced now. but the dream of being the .1% who get to be on top and monetize everybody else is too tempting I guess.
> the only explanation for people saying this is that they don't understand they will be on the line later just like the people displaced now. but the dream of being the .1% who get to be on top and monetize everybody else is too tempting I guess.
I doubt most people who say things like that "dream of being the .1%". I think it's more typical they're just someone who thoughtlessly repeata propaganda memes, without considering the implications. I think that's something that software engineers are particularly prone to do, despite frequently having a self-image of being "intelligent."
> I doubt most people who say things like that "dream of being the .1%".
I doubt people who just address one style choice and carefully not make any actual objections. Their comment adds no value and there is no way we can know if they even really understood what they are replying to.
This is an underappreciated point. The economy would likely be in freefall without AI.
Yes, things look bleak for current college grads. The bitter pill to swallow is that they began college in the boom times of 2021-22, and they saw the college grads of those years walking straight off campus into high-paying jobs which don’t exist anymore. They only existed because of the obscene gobs of money whizzing around the economy post-COVID. Whether the shrinkage is due in part or in whole to AI is in the eye of the beholder. But if we had fallen into a broad-based recession, the numbers would look a lot bleaker. Plenty of companies that could automate away entry level positions with current tech haven’t done so, whether due to organizational inertia or ignorance or whatever. That organizational inertia would’ve been much more easily overcome by a market collapse.
If I'm Gen Z, especially someone who is graduating or just graduated, I'd be very angry at AI too.
Even in our own organization, we've almost stopped hiring juniors and interns completely. We just leverage AI more and more.
So I can understand how most Gen Zs feel threatened by AI.
There are basically 2 groups who are loving AI:
* Seniors who have deep knowledge so AI is just there to help make them accomplish their goals cheaper and faster
* Gen Zs who are starting their own businesses and have embraced AI
My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can. Learn to be extremely productive with it. Learn to use it to create businesses. Burying your head in the sand hoping AI will collapse is not going to work in their favor.
PS. You can get a pretty good idea of how young people view AI on Reddit. Reddit users tend to be younger, less affluent. Save for a few subs, most of Reddit is very anti-AI. I'd guess most of them wish AI will collapse soon so they can go back to a world where human intelligence matter more.
Look at the last 3 years of AI startups, and it’s crazy how the big guys are folding use cases into their platforms - I cannot be the only one wondering what’s the point of developing a tool only for OpenAI et all to just incorporate the same eventually. There is no clear boundary as to what the business of the big ones is.
Not only that, but also they have deep monitoring of any little good idea that might get traction within their platforms.
It’s trivial for them to see what’s picking up and bring in-house.
Yup, pretty much all quality of life upgrades in ios came from shamelessly copying popular jailbreak tweaks on cydia. Which they could do without credit since the tweaks were frowned upon in the first place.
This is a classic example of people misapplying the logic of the SaaS world to the AI world. If you're building software to sell, you're in trouble. The people that are finding success in this space are using AI to allow them to solve the problems they used to have to pay for software and hire people to solve.
All of the most promising companies I know today are very small and are leveraging AI to solve physical problems in the real world that just wouldn't be possible with so few people even a few years back.
Yeah "start a business with AI" is the new "learn to code". Like what does that even mean, do you just go to Claude "hey what business should I start?"
If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it. This advice is like, if your local football club gets shut down, just work hard enough to make into Manchester United
> If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it.
Would we? Starting a business is easy. Building a profitable business isn't even that hard. Wanting pleasure in our work is what stops us. Running a business generally isn't much fun. We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.
This is completely wrong - Good for you if you think its so easy. I would do almost anything to get out of salary but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit. Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
> Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
Then I dare say you've found your market fit. Tomorrow, your task is to start looking for a contractor position doing the exact same thing you are doing now. There's your business.
> but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit.
Not even a single penny? What did these attempts look like? Were you out there knocking on doors offering to weed every flowerbed in the city? Or were you sticking to fun tasks, like programming, that made it feel like you were busy building a business but in actuality were hiding from it?
Starting and running a business is an entirely different skillset from "doing the work" - even someone who could easily "be on their own" (think: plumbers, doctors, etc) really often prefer the salaried position where they don't have to think about "the business".
It's an older book, but The E-Myth Revisited is worth a read for everyone, a business is not a job. It's related, but it's not the same.
When you get right down to it, collecting a salary is running a business with a client of one. So virtually everyone will start a business. I acknowledge the false dichotomy I submitted earlier.
But what you don't often see is one being willing to scale that client base to two. That is what I was trying to get at. Having two clients actually provides greater security than just one, as even if one client relieves you of your services you still have the other to help support you during the downtime. However, there is no free lunch. Two clients wanting your attention is orders of magnitude less enjoyable than just one client, and it only gets worse as you scale even bigger. There is good reason why most prefer to never scale beyond a single client.
Only a small sliver of the world has to worry about health insurance. Job security, maybe.
I think the biggest component is all the crap that comes with running a business.. accounting, sales, budgets and planning, regulatory concerns, office/site management, the list goes on forever. I'm an engineer, I want to do this and leave the other jobs to people who specialize at those, not run around trying to spin a dozen plates at once. I'm sure there's a tidbit more money to be made but it's just not worth it for me.
Now, if someone can make a vibe-business platform where AI handles all the drudgery and I can stick to the tech.. that might be worth talking about.
How could your "business" ever make money if any idiot with a $20 CC subscription can recreate it in a weekend? And no, "I can prompt better than them" is not a differentiator.
The idea is the opposite - "nobody" can make money selling software anymore, because software can be cheaply created by an LLM, so you want to start a business that previously would have had to buy software/software engineers in order to support some other product.
However, even if that holds true (which is a big if - right now I wouldn't want to run a business backed by vibe software), and even if there are enough such business ideas to go around, there's going to be quite a lot of turmoil in the meantime.
I don't think that's true. SW that works is still expensive to produce. SW that kind of works is super easy to do. The money is in making SW that works. You still need expertise for that.
There's a fallacy here around how software is fungible. WordPress hasn't made web developers obsolete, despite everybody having access to a $5/mo WYSIWYG-and-domains-and-hosting-bundle environment; quite the opposite, in fact.
I'm seeing the parent's point along these lines: "me and all my friends are starting businesses being the middlemen between WordPress and (people who want websites)". It's not that it won't work, it's just a shit business model.
It's the gym, the trainer, the social environment, and a million other things you wouldn't think of until you have boots on the ground, eg a language model can't sign a vendor liability contract. People thought the rise of the internet would kill gyms because anyone can download the routine for an Olympic athlete for free. Turns out access to information is not the same as execution. It happened multiple times with websites/apps/Peloton. Every time fitness culture skyrocketed and gyms have benefited.
How could your "business" ever make money if any idiot with a $20 CC subscription can recreate it in a weekend? And no, "I can prompt better than them" is not a differentiator.
If you truly believe this, you'd invest every cent you have into Nvidia, TSMC, and energy companies.
Local models are going to be pretty useful by the time the current companies have to face their finances. The cost of entry will be higher end hardware though.
> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can
How will this help them? If LLMs are going to replace workers and reduce the number of available jobs, how will fully embracing an LLM help an individual? To it seems the most it could do is put them ahead of people who won't embrace LLMs ... but if everyone took this advice then the advice would certainly do nothing.
Conversely, it's possible that honing your actual skills by minimizing reliance on LLMs could become a very valuable trait in the coming future. But in that case, you'd be burning fewer tokens and you wouldn't be contributing to LLM company userbase growth which is a bad thing to do.
Meh, there are still fields AI can't touch, going into those is a much better idea than trying (in vain) to use the Job Replacer 5000 in such a manner that won't eventually leave you without a job.
We've always had offshoring too, and the same concerns exist there. The more corporate companies use it, and either eventually get burned and revert back, or just hold on for dear life as they circle the toilet.
Curious how these companies will fare when there are no senior-level candidates left to replace the ones that are retiring in a few years. I guess everyone's hoping AI will be good enough to just replace the entire field, as one final "fuck you" to the generations that follow, from the generations that had everything and pulled up the ladder.
Well I post a lot of articles about grippers and agricultural robots that almost never get upvoted so if you don't know about these things I blame y'all.
I think if you want to change the world robots that can pick strawberries and change bedpans are it. People like to gush about "more Nobel prize research" an such but Nobel prizes are valuable because a limited number are given out, not because the research is valuable in and of itself. (e.g. Kuhn would tell you normal science is "apply for grant - write paper - repeat")
The fields that "AI can't touch" are shit fields that have already been decimated by globalism and immigration. Like cool, farmers, cooks, baristas, plumbers and manual labourers are safe from AI for now. But most paths to a middle class lifestyle are being closed off...
You're right and it's actually even worse than that. If X% of the white collar jobs get replaced by ai that means there are X% more people competing for the "safe" jobs. Over time the "safe" jobs will pay less and less adjusted for inflation because the job displacement is increasing the labor supply making your labor less valuable.
Like you said there will be more people trying to do those jobs causing devaluation on the supply side, but at the same time overall demand will drop because there will be less people with comfortable white-collar jobs that make up a lot of the demand for the work those jobs perform.
Exactly. I've been thinking about the demand issue for a while now too. It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor. If you permanently remove a massive chunk of labor from the white collar sector that will cause a massive drop in consumer spending, which will impact company revenue, which will in turn put pressure on their ability to spend on the ai causing the displacement in the first place. Unless they monopolize all labor and cause a paradigm shift in how economies fundamentally work I don't see how they're not just shooting themselves in the foot.
> It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor
Either one of these shows they are anti social, anti human sociopaths that only care about enriching themselves at the cost of anything else
> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can
It's game theory. If you betray ASAP you get to monetize others who hold out.
It works until you yourself get ousted the same way. So the most enthusiastic people are old enough that they leverage their status and won't face the consequences in their lifetime OR young enough that they don't understand the proposition, have nothing to lose and when they look around and see everybody doing it they have no other choice except to do the same
If everybody took a stance against corps stealing our work and reselling it to us then we would 100% prevail but what are principles against personal profit...
"we need to work more and help train the llms of superrich to make the same money" became the new "we will have more free time and more money thanks to AI" but everybody is too busy trying to outrace the next guy so no one noticed.
As someone who sees value in generational contracts like older people investing heavily in younger people, with the assumption that they will also take care of us in our older age, I long to improve the lives of subsequent generations. I don't know how we do that when we keep mortgaging their futures with gov't debt and spending that extends beyond the length of the administration.
If I had a genie of many wishes I'd wish for
1. No more deficit spending
2. Budgets cannot exceed prior year's intakes
3. An end to progressive taxation, but an increase in a flat tax rate to pay off all public debt. As the debt is paid a negative tax rate will replace it.
4. All politicians' pay tied to a fixed/capped multiple of the median income in the country
5. The building of a public wealth fund which is built from any benefit granted to a company through the governemnt -- want a tax break or a publicly funded stadium? Give us 50% share in the team. Want a bailout for your bank/automaker? Sell us preferred shares at high rates (to reflect the risk). Want publicly funded power plants for your GPUs? Then we want a share of your AI Company in exchange in our public wealth fund.
6. Forced public liquidity of large companies (say $1B) to ensure the public is able to participate in the overall economy, rather than just private networks of back scratchers
7. Politicians who want to invest must invest in an equal weight russell 3000 (or an even wider spread of US stocks) to ensure vested interest in the country, but divested interest in any specific company/sector.
8. Capped political spend.
9. A concerted effort to move towards known maxima rather than stepping towards local maxima with fear of going through local minima too.
10. A publicly funded opt-in national service program for building houses. If you give 4 years of your life to building houses we'll give you a 2 bed 1 bath and a salary along the way. (Obviously, details tbd, but something along that idea)
We are, in the best case scenario, minting a lost generation in real time. This will become increasingly clear over the next 2 years.
Meanwhile, simonw and his retiree friends are having the "time of their lives", so that's good I guess :)
My take is "simonw and his retiree friends" spend a lot of their time exploring this disruptive new technology and sharing their learnings (for free!) so that everybody can leverage it too... and yet so many people see that as something bad rather than an opportunity to learn.
Radical changes bring radical opportunities too, so "having the time of their lives" is not necessarily incompatible with "adapting to profound disruption."
Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.
> Consider that the traits that make them optimistic about this technology are exactly the traits required to navigate this Brave New World.
Consider that they're closer to death than birth and are unlikely to survive into the shit-hole world they're creating. Not passing on those traits to the next generation is a massive failure. These assholes aren't disrupting their own lives, just the poor slobs who haven't made it yet.
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But everyone can't leverage it too.
The technique of feeding money into the slot-machine that generates tokens so that it can maybe generate what you want and you get the results at scale if you have enough money paradigm just isn't accessible to many people. In this context Simonw and Karpathy are starting to look more and more like degenerate gamblers who admonish everyone else for not joining in, while telling us all that the perks the casino gives them are just fabulous and we're all missing out.
And maybe you'll say "Yeah but things will get cheaper in the future, they're just early adapters who can afford it..." well, will it? And will those people make it to that shining beacon on the hill future? Or will they find themselves out of a job because of the current economic calamity that is unfolding as a result of election of an American Nero who is supported by the ultrawealthy tech oligarchs who are brining this technology into existance?
Do these people actually want to improve the lives of the common people -- or are they more concerned with getting a high score in the form of the amount in their bank account and clout on social media?
My personal take, which seems to be consistent with what these folks are saying, is "OMG there's this huge radioactive asteroid that's going to flatten our world, but its gamma rays also give us weird superpowers, here are some ways to harness those..."
I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs.
> I'm a bit more optimistic about democratized access to AI. Even today's weaker open source/weight models are plenty powerful enough to supercharge our individual capabilities, and based on current trends, they won't be more than 3 - 6 months behind the frontier models. This may not bode well for the AI labs because their moat is always evaporating, but it's a huge boon to us plebs
Point me to something real that happens rights now that would support such optimistic vision.
I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.
The power of AI is that it amplifies individual capabilities. So the same aspect that lets employers reduce their headcount also lets individuals start ambitious projects that would have previously required an entire team... and hence, a significant amount of funding. The moment you need money, the people who provide that capital hold a lot of power and influence.
But now you don't need their money, and so the capital class lose their power over you.
As an example, I'm iterating on a niche product based on computer vision -- something I had no background in when I started -- that in the past would have taken a team of 2 - 3 and at least a semester or two of an advanced course in computer vision. Instead, I'm solo bootstrapping this project.
There are multiple accounts like mine, and you can find many comments on HN or other forums to this effect. Now, I know this is a very tough path for most people because, well, now everybody needs to be an entrepreneur, but a path exists.
AI is a double-edged sword, and more people need to become aware of the edge that is available to us.
Again, I want concrete evidence on positive impact among general population, not speculation on how AI could be used or your amazing experience as bootstrapping entrepreneur.
> I always read on how much power AI can bring to common people, and it it always without any evidence whatsoever.
Not really "much power" but more like a viable alternative: in a world where everybody needs LLMs to do their white-collar work, you can't force me to use your paid LLM subscription as my local-running model is close enough.
It's classic ladder-kicking behavior, reveling in the mild conveniences of "genai" while comfortably impervious to the externalities. Shameful that the moderators of so many online communities turn a blind eye to- or even offer explicit support for- their endless shilling for hideously unethical web-destroying for-profit companies simply because they express their native advertising in a superficially polite register.
Is that an actual quote from simonw? He seems an unbiased observer and reporter of progress, I'd be sad to see him cheering this stuff on so callously.
Not just that but "you're holding it wrong" on many occasions.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44483567 is pretty much (paraphrasing) sucks to be you if you can't make it work.
Well, people who are not above a threshold of experience yet are not in a position to self-assess and course-correct if their long term learning is being affected. And even less so if there is pressure to be hyper-productive with the help of AI.
Speculating here but I think even seniors who rely on AI all the time and enjoy the enhanced output are going to end up with impostor syndrome over the things they suspect they can no longer do without AI, and FOMO about all the projects they haven't yet attempted with AI despite working as hard as they can.
It’s particularly interesting that Anthropic came out yesterday and basically said, yeah, this stuff cannot be held right.
One can argue, convincingly perhaps, that Anthropic isn’t right and/or is marketing, but what they’re saying could be complete BS but the fact that there is doubt suggests that most people believe that no one can hold it right exists.
I’m quite pro AI, but given the radical asymmetry between the upside vs the downsides (the upside is at best maximum bliss for all existing humans, which has a finite limit, while the downside is the end of humanity which is essentially infinitely bad), our march forward in this area needs to be at least slightly more responsible than what we are doing now.
Eh it's not very charitable; he's an enthusiast but that's not the same as believing there are no downsides.
At most I've seen him overhype some stuff, but probably less than most in the the tech-influencer sphere.
Sure. But what's the solution?
Ban AI development?
No, we come up with a serious plan for a post-labor future.
In the USA you can't even get healthcare without a job. Meanwhile tech companies are dumping billions into the race to make humans unemployable. So yeah, until people feel like their leaders can be trusted to have their back, they're going to be anxious.
This is absolutely the ideal. We need more people talking about a post-labor future.
It's fast approaching, and the sooner it gets here the sooner the masses turn to a Butlerian Jihad.
I honestly think that we'll start to see a movement where people diagnosed with terminal illnesses like a brain tumour that leave them functional for a few weeks or months before dying within a year will start kamikazing against the ultra wealthy.
People with nothing to lose will feel empowered by taking everything from the people who they feel are responsible for taking everything from them.
There's a chance this kind of thing becomes a social contagion that spreads, much like suicide or school shootings.
I'm not sure what the solution is to it once it starts. I guess people like Thiel won't be able to do antichrist talks at the Vatican anymore.
This is why totalitarian surveillance and increased police power is also part of the billionaires' agenda: When 99.99% of us are economically irrelevant, they'll need to more and more insulate themselves from the "Nothing To Lose" people.
That's a pretty extreme take on the current situation IMO, I don't think we're anywhere near things being that bad. But I certainly want to avoid that.
As an outsider looking in I'm pretty sure that these were the kinds of conversations that took place in social media companies after that Health CEO got Luigi'd.
I think that's why you saw the extreme moderation on even the word 'Luigi' or pictures of the character on Reddit -- They were trying to prevent a social contagion scenario.
With that said I'm curious what you think would have to happen in Westernsociety for this kind of thing to take off? The person above paints a pretty bleak picture of AMerica where healthcare is tied to employment and people are facing the prospect of mass unemployment.
Are people just going to sit there and die? Or sit there and watch their family members die while they see the ultra wealthy flaunt their wealth on social media?
Someone just filmed themselves setting fire to a warehouse because they were underpaid.
Post-labor? There’s a huge gap between slop and Star Trek that we have to bridge first.
That "huge gap" is probably 3-10 years.
A relatively tiny percent of mortgages not getting paid in 2007 & 2008 caused a global financial crisis. If even just 10% of current office workers lose their jobs and quit paying their mortgages, their car loans, their car insurance, etc things will go bad fast. And realistically, it's going to be more like 80% of office jobs gone in the next 10 years.
> a huge gap between slop and Star Trek that we have to bridge first
Fixing politics is first otherwise you'll never get to anything like Star Trek, not even close, not even externally resembling it.
> first
Priorities in the wrong order.
> Sure. But what's the solution?
> Ban AI development?
The Bulterian Jihad will never be less appealing than it is today.
“Who cares about the immense harm AI is wrecking on our economy and society, it helps me create worthless throwaway software for myself and lets me be lazier at work.” - people on this forum
Crazy thing is before AI the same people spamming Show HN with stupid worthless SaaS products that went no where beyond the submitters GitHub account. “Hey check out my shitty CRUD app because I have minor annoyances with some other shitty SaaS that everyone hates yet remains the market leader”. “Now rewritten in foo.js and Rust”.
It wasn’t impressive when you wrote it by hand, it’s still not impressive when an AI does all the work for you.
Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
> Mocking the former is now culturally acceptable on HN, the latter not so much.
I have the opposite impression. In the past, I'd very often react "WTF who'd ever want to use it?" in my mind, whereas the comments were very kind and supportive.
Now, whenever someone submits their AI slop, they mostly hear some comments about this. The very fact that this whole thread is about bashing Simon speaks for itself. The HN community is split between those aggressively promoting it, those hating it, and the rest of us using it in one way or another, not yet sure about full-scale consequences for the future, and quite frankly powerless about it.
Industrial loom cloth is far inferior to artisan made cloth. And yet you'd be dooming all future generations to poverty if you stuck with artisanal cloth production.
Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
>It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.
I think we can agree with this. The system that determines the fair distribution of productivity gains today will have to change entirely.
And there should be a daily reminder that as long as we live in a Capitalist society, what befell the Luddites will also befall those that try to resist an economic force of this magnitude.
Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
How would you even resist? Say the entire US population pushes back and gets protectionist regulations passed; there will always be hungry people just a few 100ms ping away willing to outcompete you using AI.
Really, at this point there are only two choices: change society to move beyond Capitalism, or adapt to the new economic reality. Either choice is valid, and I suspect eventually one will lead to the other, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.
> Would you rather feel justified in the knowledge that the Luddites were principally right and resist, or would you rather learn the lesson of their fate and adapt?
Keep your poison. If everyone adapted this way, we would not have worker rights, and our children would still work in mines and factories for pennies.
Where the commenter is right is that luddites didn't have (or had they?) a global competitor more than happy to push their entire system aside. Not that they personally thought about this argument, just that the context and possible consequences were different.
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No, no we are not. The average case scenario is that this time is not actually different to any of the other times new automation technologies were invented, and that the youngest will master the tech then find uses for it far better than their parents generation. The best case scenario is something like a new gold age of prosperity, and the worst case is an economic bubble and temporary recession as it bursts.
Computers have been automating things for decades. My father had a private secretary at work, something considered normal for a mid-career executive back then (he was an engineer!). I've done very well in my career but a private secretary is quite out of reach. That doesn't mean that we had a "lost generation" on our hands.
And yesterday a friend showed me what his 11 year old was vibing up with Claude Code. A whole web app he can use to help organize some stuff with his friends related to Roblox (I dunno what it was meant to be, you had to log in for most of it). The kid is amazed that his father understands all the mysterious symbols Claude generates. And he probably always will, the same way I listen to stories about how my father could fix car engines with mild amazement as well.
There's a huge market for doom stories out there and the NYT is a rag that was just yesterday reporting that Adam Back was Satoshi based on nothing deeper than the journalists gut feeling. "Studies" in social science can show whatever the author wants, and the authors want clicks from their AI-hating left wing readership. Stay skeptical!
> I've done very well in my career but a private secretary is quite out of reach.
This says more about how companies have chosen to allocate pay in the current era than anything about technology though, no?
Doubt it. Companies have already begun moving away from AI and back to hiring humans. LLM capabilities were vastly oversold (moreso than the DeepBlue or machine learning memes of prior economic cycles).
After several hundred billions dollars spent on LLMs, they can almost reproduce the capabilities of a partially deaf visually impaired secretary with severe brain damage.
Humans are cheaper, and they can actually learn things. Even the brain-damaged secretary can learn better than an LLM can, and it doesn't cost of hundreds of millions to train one.
Damn this hits.
Young people were already struggling to build lives and families before the AI recession. It’s hard to fathom having any hope for raising a family or finding meaningful work in the PE slop driven economy.
Thats just the experience of any young person born outside the western bubble, thinking about their future in their poor ass over exploited countries for hundreds of years now. If they didnt see sources of hope around them they moved to where they did see a better future.
"Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills."
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Perhaps schools need to adapt to AI use and recenter the goals of education in the minds of students. If AI use impairs your development, you are only being efficient in your evasion of education.
i.e. Students need to be taught that learning to efficiently pump out AI written essays isn't the same thing as learning to reason and express themselves. AI tools will evolve and become easier and easier to pick up and use. Using your own mind is a slower and more difficult skill to develop, but it makes the difference between going through life as a human being or a mere meat-puppet for AI. It will always be far easier for a human to pick up AI tools and learn them from scratch than it will for a meat-puppet to remedy their lack of human development.
This is incredibly out of touch. No teacher or even school administrator needs to have that said to them. Students refuse to hear it (despite the bleating of the article). Who are you talking to then? Parents? That's rich
Underresouced instructors just need to come up with new pedagogies to handle revolutionary new tools that change extremely rapidly and which also provide an extremely effective way for students to cheat.
They'll get right on it.
Probably but how do you adapt to something that changes faster than semesters. Revising your theory of learning, implementing, evaluating results, etc. takes years, not weeks.
The current situation is that many students don't perceive that using AI to produce, for example, essays is harmful to themselves, and students who do things honestly may feel pressure to use AI in order to stay competitive with students who do.
The answer may be to focus less on output and more on the process. e.g. Instead of sending students off to do essays at home and then merely grading what gets handed in, perhaps teachers should run workshops where students work on their essays while receiving guidance. i.e. Everybody works in the classroom on their essay and talks to each other and the teacher about what they're doing. Grades would be at least partly based on participation, and teachers would get a better sense of what students are actually able to write themselves. If Johnny sits back and picks his nose in the workshop and then hands in a paper that's suspiciously good, it's probably slop even if it isn't obviously so.
Of course, doing this sort of thing would mean taking time away from lectures and wrote learning. Finding the right balance is no easy task and it's going to take good teachers to blaze the way. That can only happen if they're backed with resources and the freedom to alter curriculum.
Reminds me of the quote: No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded.
These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to. I'm sure most teachers and schools would prefer them not to.
Why do they have to use it? Have standards gotten higher in schools such that they will be left behind if they don't? Is there peer pressure to use it? Is there some social aspect I'm unaware of?
Of course not. People find the technology useful. Social media I understand as it's harder to break away because friends use it to communicate. But that's not true for AI.
And then they have some doomer media telling them they should be concerned and scapegoat the technology. Gen AI will prevent you from being an artist or poet?
Yeah, I just don't buy it.
Your conception of revealed preferences is highly mistaken.
People don’t do things only because they want to.
Do you think the existence of millions of trash pickers getting cancer combing through mounds of toxic waste across the world reveal a preference for getting cancer by combing through hazardous waste?
Enlighten me, why do young people use AI?
Because of laziness
It's a race to the bottom. In SV we're seeing this perception (delusion?) of a Brave New World in which there are two peoples: the permeant underclass of serfs, and the elite.
Everyone is clawing and crab-bucketing to escape, what they believe to be, the inevitable suffering of laborers in a post-labor economy.
So, if this guy I hate is using AI and AI is making the world worse then guess what - I'm using AI too. Because I'm not gonna be left behind, right?
In fact, I'm going use AI more. I'm the most AI-ist out of all the AI-believers. I'm practically and AI apostle.
Because, when our new overlords come, I intend to be spared. Not like you losers. I, for one, welcome our new overlords.
That's what they're thinking.
> These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to.
When you're constantly being force fed the narrative that you must use AI or be left behind, using it is no longer a revealed preference it is a survival mechanism
Not to mention jobs that require or heavily push using it both in and outside the tech sector. Plus, even in a competitive academic environment it’s naive to think college students won’t feel pressure to keep up with their peers if they’re all using AI and pushing up the curve.
Literally no one says this to young kids. Teachers are begging them not to use AI. And if you read the article young people are using it for things like deciding what school to go to or dating advice.
> These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to. I'm sure most teachers and schools would prefer them not to.
> Why do they have to use it? Have standards gotten higher in schools such that they will be left behind if they don't? Is there peer pressure to use it? Is there some social aspect I'm unaware of?
Did you not read the article or not read it carefully? Try again, your comment shows a massive lack of understanding and little else.
Yes I did read it. Here are the relevant sections:
> Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills.
So it's hurting their creativity and critical thinking skills. I wonder if they the existence of cars are hurting their ability to stay in shape.
Revealed preferences from here:
> In the study, about half of young people reported using A.I. on either a daily or weekly basis, similar to the previous year. Just under 20 percent said they did not use A.I.
The rest of the article is mostly anecdotes or vague notions about social skills.
Why don't you contribute to the conversation instead of just telling me I don't understand the issue
I don't think you understood it, because you seemed to read past the key findings to make some tired, tired points about "revealed preferences."
> The percentage of respondents ages 14 to 29 who said they felt hopeful about A.I. declined sharply since last year, down to 18 percent from 27. Young adults’ excitement about artificial intelligence dropped, too, and nearly a third of respondents indicated that the technology made them feel angry. [emphasis mine]
> ...
> In interviews, young adults cited a variety of reasons for their reservations about artificial intelligence, including the threat to entry-level jobs, the replacement of human interaction and the spread of A.I.-fueled misinformation on social media.
> Sydney Gill, 19, a freshman at Rice University in Houston, said she had been optimistic about artificial intelligence as a learning tool when she was in high school. Now, as she tries to select her college major, her outlook has become less rosy.
> “I feel like anything that I’m interested in has the potential of maybe getting replaced, even in the next few years,” she said.
A young adult can totally abstain from AI and be negatively affected by all of that. And those are the kinds of things that could make people angry at the technology.
Why did AI make them feel angry? Or was that beyond the scope of reporting? Seems like a pretty basic thing to ask.
> A young adult can totally abstain from AI and be negatively affected by all of that. And those are the kinds of things that could make people angry at the technology.
How would a young be negatively affected by abstinence from AI? Why is this implied? Give me a probable explanation for this. The article does not, and neither do any comments here.
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You’re being ridiculously rude instead of just answering the question.
There's asking a question, and then's (possibly bad-faith) demands for hand-holding.
The answer to question "Why did AI make them feel angry?" should have been obvious before it was asked (given what I quoted), to anyone with two brain cells and a basic amount of empathy. The other question was little more than evidence of a failure of reading comprehension.
I love using AI tools and they are changing my work and life in amazing ways. I cannot imagine going back. And yet, I am more concerned about the social damage due to their widespread use and the amounts of slop they generate. Just this week: - There was an article about a news company faking polls by asking LLMs for answers. - My wife told me that she stopped watching any funny pet videos because 99% now is AI slop - start normal, but then turn into someone's slop idea. - A friend told me their big tech company uses AI-generated metrics as part of performance evaluation. Nobody checks them. - Another friend told me their big tech company requires engineers to use AI-generated commit messages with terrible signal-to-noise ratio and making version control and history useless for engineers. But directors and PMs love them, they are so descriptive! - My neighbor uses LLMs to create some neighbor meeting plans/agendas, plausibly looking PDFs citing contractors etc. It's impossible to read through it, mixed hallucinations and real information, all wrapped in thousands of slop words. What is real and what made up? I'll spend 10x more time double guessing. - Encountering more and more articles and general "content" that is AI generated and looks ok at the first glance, but slop upon inspections. Why would I read LLMs output on a webpage with ads, if I can ask it myself and get better, personal answers and style?
And I am not even talking here about other ethical issues, training data, less junior job positions, job replacement of journalists with LLM-equipeed contractors, etc.
LLMs make my personal and work life so much better, but social life unbearable. Is it worth the trade-off? I guess it doesn't matter at this point.
I think it remains to be seen whether the various AI tools we have today are a net-negative or net-positive for society.
Most inventions are a net positive: The steam engine, vaccines, chimneys.
A few are net-negative: grenades, leaded gasoline, asbestos insulation.
If we can no longer trust that a potential job candidate in a video call actually exists, they will have to be flown in. That's a cost. If we can no longer trust that an employee who wrote a document actually thought about it at all and must be questioned to make sure, that's a cost. Those costs will add up.
A written document or a video essay used to be proof-of-thought and now it's not. If we can't find new proofs of thought, and if AI doesn't get vastly better to the point where we can trust it blindly, then I think this will all be a net-negative.
One of the motivations to build data centers as fast as possible and improve tools as fast as possible may be to get to net-positive before it all gets banned. This article exists. The clock is ticking.
It's okay to have two conflicting thoughts about something and both be true at the same time. AI is awesome but at the same time is promising to do evil in the future. Why? Facebook has done a lot of good for the world, like React for instance, but also done a lot of evil as well. Billionaires have initiated the development of some amazing products and services, but at the same time they're spending their money building bunkers so they can survive an end of the world scenario that they're largely responsible for, rather than using it to mitigate some of the evil that they unleashed. Why are they doing that? I don't know. It doesn't seem necessary to me.
Yeah. A think there are a lot of tech enthusiasts like myself that find it amazing from a tinkering and curiosity standpoint, but terrifying from a power and those-who-wield-it standpoint.
https://archive.ph/9ySwG
Yeah well maybe that has something to do with entry level jobs drying up, ostensibly due to AI.
I don’t even think that’s actually the case - we’re in a soft recession. AI has nothing to do with it. But that’s not what kids are being told.
Great marketing campaign guys. Just wait. If you think sentiment around AI is negative now you haven’t seen shit.
> AI has nothing to do with it.
"Nothing" is a stretch. Major capital being now being allocated towards building AI data centres, away from what it was doing previously, is absolutely a contributing factor. Of course not the only one, but there is never just one reason for anything.
Totally fair point and a big oversight on my part.
> what kids are being told
"kids" you mean people under 30 taking jobs to have their own financial life?
I believe someday we will wake up and find out our children are setting sail for the new America. Wherever that may be. The capital holders have consolidated their power intertwined with government and are pulling up the ladders. This is why many Europeans set sail for America in the first place, and the cycle has completed itself, and we have become what we escaped. I do not think you can vote your way out of that.
Maybe there is some place left that needs young people badly enough that they are willing to open up opportunities, or someplace left ripe and weak enough that the youth will take it over by force.
Ha, we simultaneously posted the same thesis!
I’m not sure we’re in agreement. I don’t think AI is the equivalent of the loom. And I think all of this data center spend is a massive waste of money (unless you’re the NSA, planning to buy them all up for cheap and run 24/7 AI surveillance on everyone).
Tangential to the worries of those surveyed: I noticed a drop in my critical thinking and skills very quickly. It makes sense, the easiest thing to do is just ask AI for the answer or ideas and then tell it to implement them.
I’m deliberately trying to understand things more deeply now to combat that. We’ll see how it goes.
It’s possible they do not appreciate how AI will help some rich fucks siphoning all the money out of the economy and into their bank accounts.
What exactly is the bull case for your average Joe to be excited about for AI?
I think there are a lot of people who (naively) believe AI is going to lead to abundance for everyone. I think there are very rich people trying to sell that vision.
I think most of us know that even if AI could do all of our jobs, it won't be to give us free products and services.
Any rando might be able to push out their cute tool (hi mom!), this is what they (will) sell, but true leverage will happen for those that can allocate their vast resources to further dominate; The big players just appropriated the collective corpus of mankind’s knowledge.
“They can stay home and paint all day, for the machine will do their job.”
It’s trickle-down economics 2.0. The bullshit is the same.
Everybody should be horrified by the idea of a gerntocracy/beurocracy/cleptocratic military industrial complex that is hidden behind an algorythim of exploitation, in a never ending techno feudalistic hell world.
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Hopefully, they'll see the modern media is the same overhype under deliver and lockin emotional facade that is as empty as the current American farce. It's all such a bullshit storm that it's hard to imagine anyone believes there's a solid foundation and super reliance of the american dream create a dirth of benefits.
Why would they be angry that companies would rather burn money in AI data centers then hire them? /s
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> I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable.
How often are your peers experiencing these crimes? Assuming you're in the US based on your comments, crime rates are much lower now than when in the early 2010s when I was a young adult and quite hopeful despite thinking my job prospects were bleak and that I'd never be able to afford a home.
> I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable
Yes people of all ages tend to be unhappy when crime happens to them. Not sure where you live but lowering taxes and government oversight is actually a bad way to improve taxpayer funded and government run law enforcement agencies. None of this has anything to do with AI though and young people can be angry about multiple things.
Hah, I wish I had your optimism. I’m in the same boat re. the media and the pressing issues, but I just think AI is going to make things even more unaffordable for us, harder to find work, and used against us by governments who can afford the top models that might not even get released to the rest of us.
I saw the moon launch the other day, and in the past I would have been following and celebrating. These days I’m more preoccupied by the corruption in our government, including recent anti-democratic events (I’m not American).
> pressures of high taxes
This is something I never see mentioned so I'm curious what brought it up. Are you personally paying a lot of taxes or so much that you can't afford other things or is this a thing peers talk about? Is this a state or federal thing?
Taxes are pretty significant at the lower incomes. Not only are they paying 15-25% taxes after considering local, federal, state, and property taxes (even though federal are low) but whenever they want services from anyone in the upper quintiles they are also effectively paying the regulatory and tax burden of those enterprises since the customer ultimately assumes all the costs of the business.
Think for a second, if someone wants child care -- they must pay enough not only to satisfy the worker's basic needs but also the worker's income tax, business taxes, property taxes of the daycare, government mandated licensing and bonding, etc. None of those get recorded as 'taxes' the person contracting that service has paid, but really they are also paying those.
Given how little most of the lower pay workers have extra to work with, and how little they get in government services for what they pay, I don't think it's much a stretch for them to think taxes are holding them back. Being able open up saving even couple percent of income massively improves your financial safety and cushion at those brackets.
I totally am paying a massive amount of capital gains taxes! I’m also saving up for a house which means every dollar I don’t contribute to a down payment becomes principal and interest on a mortgage which equals even more money out of my pocket. For instance if I pay $37k in capital gains one year (which I did) and if my principal on a $500k house is $200k at 6% and $1500 monthly payments I’ll have to pay $33k in interest on just the $37k I didn’t pay up front!
Some cursory googling shows you have to make capital gains of between $185,000 and $250,000 to have to pay $37,000 in capital gains tax. This is between three and six times as much as someone in their 20s will earn in a year. I think you need a bit more perspective of what it's like to be a young person outside the extremely well compensated tech sector.
Ironically, capital gains tax rates are essentially regressive as they are lower than the typical marginal tax rate for someone earning at those levels. They are a big handout to the capital class, not some special punishment.
So to whine about them shows a baseline belief that income should not be taxed at all, I guess?
I wouldn’t call it “well compensated”, I work really hard for my money and it’s not like my company is just giving it away to me out of the kindness of their hearts. I also worked in food service while in college and know what it’s like to make ~$15 an hour which is one of the reasons why I went to college and learned the skills needed to create value for my employer. A big point of mine is that my grandfather went to a community college for $3 (the price of his ID card) and got a job as a machinist to pay for his multi-lot house in Southern California in 2 years. He was the sole earner so his wife could raise three children. Nowadays that house is $2M, AI didn’t exist the way it did in the 1970s when he bought the house and AI didn’t cause the increase in the ratio of home costs to wages, which is arguably the biggest issue of our time and is not hypothetical.
Housing to wages has been going up every year for like the last 20 years, I'm not sure we can blame AI for that?
Regardless of how hard you worked or what you deserve, having 30k in capital gains puts you into a very, very, verrry small minority of americans.
I think you are understanding my point here. America has and has had plenty of problems. I don’t think AI is one of them. In the same vein, reporters and journalists are a very small subset of American population that are very vocal about AI because it probably threatens their hegemony.
Don't the vast majority of young people entering the workforce have no capital gains to deal with at all? That tends to be more of a problem for people who are already well off. Are you talking about a narrower demographic or something?
The amounts you paid in capital gains are about 50% higher than I've ever paid. That was the second year I worked at a big tech company and suddenly had stock, which was about a decade into an my extremely lucrative career as a software developer. Most of my friends don't have to deal with capital gains at all because they're not part of the investor class. On average the rates of trading must be much lower for people in their 20s, no?
Dear lord, what percentage of the Gen Z (the population mentioned in the article) do you think pay capital gain taxes???
Congrats I guess, you are clearly rich enough to pay taxes. Most young people would consider themselves lucky to have $5K to rub together.
I hate to be uncharitable but the comment seems to simply be parroting conservative talking points, rather than being an accurate (or sincere) representation of young people's pessimism about the future.
> high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages
Anyone I talk to under 40 despairs at low wages, rising prices, and a political class that is incapable of going after blatant corruption, especially those identified in the Epstein files.
There is more anger at capitalism and billionaires (capitalists in the Marxist sense) than in any time in living memory. The notion that young people are generally upset about regulation, entitlement and H1B visas is laughably out of touch. It might be true for a tiny number of spoiled techies in the Bay Area! But outside SF, Seattle and NYC, young people are angry about a lot of things, and strong regulation and generous benefits are about the last of them.
> At the same time I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable. My take on this is that legacy media refuses to address these issues or plays them down and at the same time they amplify concerns about AI probably because AI is supplanting the reach and their rhetoric and reducing their ad share.
Maybe it’s just the legacy media I consume, but petty crime is rarely if ever reported (television, newspaper, radio, etc) in my experience.
And I’m not sure how you would expect media institutions to address petty crime. I guess they could ask local leaders and local law enforcement about it.?
This “gotcha” just leads to the conclusion that reporting on car break-ins and such just isn’t that interesting. “Car window smashed in Pasadena” yawn, talk about a waste of airtime imo. Might as well talk about all the people not using their blinker every day.
> And I’m not sure how you would expect media institutions to address petty crime. I guess they could ask local leaders and local law enforcement about it.?
Uh... yes? Journalists used to report on crimes and then ask police and town leaders questions on how they're addressing it. And then do follow-up stories weeks or months later, to report on (lack of) progress and again ask police and town leaders questions.
Maybe many moons ago, when newspapers had an abundance of reporters, and relatively low crime / competing issues otherwise?
But I'm not sure I can recall, even in a local paper or a local TV news broadcast, seeing articles / segments about a random individual having their car broken in to or being robbed.
Edit: I take that back, I have seen reports of robberies (specifically armed robberies) in local news, but not so much car break ins.
Older U.S. taxpayers approaching retirement will bristle at word combinations such as "entitlements to retirees" as they have put enormous capital, which can clearly be summed from their large stack of W2s, into Social Security. Also, there are large segments of "retirement age" people who simply can't afford to retire.
It's quite interesting that your (presumably very representative) survey of young people has unanimously reported 'arbitrary amalgamation of bog-standard right-wing grievances' as the primary issue of our time
Their recent comment history also consists of complaining about vaccine mandates, gun control, and climate science research at NASA while praising funding cuts to higher education…
Among my sample of friends, who are mostly right wing and successful, crime is literally the primary issue of their time. That's practically the sole problem in their lives. Not sure why their political leanings are relevant. This is what a vast swathe of people actually care about.
I think you're projecting.
- Taxes
- Overregulation
- Housing
- Immigrants
- Legacy media
This is literally a checklist of wealthy conservative old man issues.
Ah -- you showed your hand there.
You should be careful saying things like "high housing costs which driven up by overregulation". It sounds like you're trying to frame bad economic news like it's the fault of a more liberal political party in the US.
High housing costs are just an effect of capitalism. It's supply and demand - as simple as that. If they were grass huts in downtown San Fransisco, they'd be just as expensive. "Overregulation" is a fallacy.
Zoning is regulation. Prop 13 in California is regulation. Regulations can reduce supply and drive up prices. The Bay Area is proof of this.
Zoning costs money everywhere. That's work that needs to be done by a person. That person gets paid. It's capitalism again.
Prop 13 actually limits property taxes and the assessments that can happen. You're actually hurting your argument with this point.
Regulations don't reduce supply because regulations don't purchase properties. People purchase properties and then that property is off the market.
The Bay Area is proof that limited supply (because there is only so much land in the area) + steady (or increasing) demand (because people need to live close to where they work for some baffling reason) will cause property values to raise steadily over time.
Again: It's supply and demand. Regulations have very little to do with price increases.
To be clear: I'm not anti-capitalist ... I'm just anti "wrong context"
> Zoning costs money everywhere. That's work that needs to be done by a person.
I'm not talking about the salary for a city planner who draws lines on a map. I'm talking about banning building denser housing via zoning.
> The Bay Area is proof that limited supply... will cause property values to raise steadily over time
The Bay Area has limited housing supply for a long time through single-family zoning, minimum lot sizes and other regulatory means.
> Prop 13 actually limits property taxes and the assessments that can happen.
Unaffordable property tax increases are a signal that the land is under-utilized. High property taxes due to land scarcity incentivize building more housing on the same land. Prop 13 takes away that signal. Or at least, it insulates existing and long-term homeowners from the effects of insufficient housing supply in their area. Their taxes don't go up so they have no reason to sell their house to someone who will build condos and apartments on that land.
> You're actually hurting your argument with this point.
I don't think you've taken the time to understand my points.
> Again: It's supply and demand. Regulations have very little to do with price increases.
Again: regulations can and do limit supply.
It's not as simple as that. The supply is being kept low to enrich housing investors.
I live in an unregulated county and I just built a house for $60,000.
I've found a few plots of land in San Francisco where you could put my house on where the land itself is under $200,000. So $260,000. So why doesn't anyone do this? It's $200,000 in profit easy since you could sell it for $460,000+ easy. Capitalists just hate making money? Clearly there is regulation stopping it, otherwise developers would be buying $50k boxables or the cheapest manufactured house they could drop down off a trailer and making an absolute mint on all the slivers of cheaper land you can find for sale in these upper priced cities.
When I was in the planning phase of building my house I quickly identified only a few counties in my state where it was even possible to build a house all myself without regulatory inspections. The only reason why I have a house is because I found a place with no regulatory inspections for owner-builder housing which allowed me to bypass codes, engineering, building plans, and licensing.
People in New York City don't talk as often about how difficult building is because of NIMBYism. Generally it's a combination of red tape that's meant to act as a protection from things like fires and bad construction, which is good, environmental regulations which is so-so (some of them drive up housing costs), because of progressive policies (demanding a certain percentage of units be for lower income people), a scarcity of land, high wages, and a political class tied to unions (the latest tax breaks are tied to 50 dollar min wage for new construction of 99 units or more).
It's very very complicated. And new construction makes rents go up here because it's all luxury - it has to be, or developers won't bother to build.
It's so complicated that I'm sick of reading the West Coasters hot take on housing problems - that it's 100 percent due to single family homes and zoning and other very very California problems.
Guys, we're not all in California.
why do things make you hopeful?
I’m hopeful for driver assist so I don’t have to pay attention while driving, also this helps disabled people get around (particularly in rural areas with less/no public transit). I’m also hopeful for humanoid robots so they can do all my chores like sweeping, laundry and cooking. In general the idea that me, my family/friends and my country is progressing makes me hopeful.
It's fair to hope for what was promised, but you cannot discount what is being delivered.
Self driving cars were a huge deal 10 years ago and we were all going to be using them immenitly. Now the future is here and they are no greater than a curiosity for the average person. 99.99% are driving manually and will be 30 years from now.
Similarly, AI promises to solve every problem, but the average persons' experience is that of increasing irrelevant spam and junk mail rather than being freed from laundry duty.
Yeah, no kidding, the tech bros have utterly botched the rollout of this technology. It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research. Instead, they opted for regulatory capture in lieu of addressing people's concerns, using robber-baron techniques to force data center construction in at-risk communities, made it clear they want to replace human workers, and then shoved its art slop capabilities in front of everybody's faces.
> It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research.
How so? Colloquially, AI currently means LLMs. Why would we revere LLMs as our greatest achievement?
Because we've built something that's (functionally) intelligent, comparable to humans in terms of its ability to exhibit (functional) understanding of complex topics, and produce novel correct output. There's nothing even remotely close to this in human history. This was all science fiction 10 years ago.
Maybe the comparison is imperfect, but: we also built a wonderful, novel and excellent bomb, the atom one, not remotely close to whatever humans did before, yet I'm not totally thrilled by it.
People that I speak with often conflate LLMs with AGI (or at least what they thing AGI is).
I'm thinking LLMs lead to an AIG scenario (circa 2008) as opposed to AGI.
Because you can already fill a datacenter with hyper-productive PhD level autodidactic polymaths and we're still on the ground floor of the technology? These frontier models are like alpha builds and they're already ridiculous. AGI is marketing slop and machine learning doesn't need that promise to be the most impressive achievement in human history in my opinion.
AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane. It will take time to adjust and some industries will go away and others will pop up.
I think a lot of people are conflating two ongoing things: the emergence of AI and stagnant (if not recessionary) economies across the globe. It appears as if AI is resulting in so much more negative externalities but in reality if not for AI, we'd 100% be in a recession.
The loom, the steam engine, or the airplane did not cause "captains of industry" to publicly salivate over anticipating being able to fire their knowledge workers who invested time, money, and effort into becoming qualified for the jobs they're now constantly in fear of losing.
The social contract is being broken. Being broken just on paper, just on the hopes that it can be broken for good.
> The loom (...) did not cause "captains of industry" to publicly salivate over anticipating being able to fire their knowledge workers who invested time, money, and effort into becoming qualified for the jobs they're now constantly in fear of losing.
It absolutely did. Factory owners used their clout to put workers out of the job and then lobbied for military aid and capital punishment instead of negotiating with the workers. IMO, the only tactic for worker that has EVER had lasting success is solidarity through some form of unionization.
Read "Blood in the Machine" if you want to see what happened to the losers of the industrial revolution. The book does contain some fictional embellishments but that is explained up front, and noted when it comes up.
Those captains of industry almost certainly salivated over the idea of not needing weavers etc. any more. Is the difference you're seeing just that they're doing that publicly now?
The weavers had a rough go of it for sure, but at least they did not have to spend 4 years of their early adulthood being intellectually challenged in a higher education institution, often going into debt, in order to become qualified weavers.
Actually it was 7 years of physical training that deformed their bodies:
"But the work left the body callused, bent, and molded. You could tell a cropper by his enormous forearms and by the “hoof” of callused skin that built up on his wrist. In the spring of 1811, George was in his early twenties, and he’d spent his post-adolescent life learning the trade. Seven years of hard, exacting labor; seven years of paying his dues. That led to pride and attachment to the work, to a brotherhood, to an identity."
Merchant, Brian. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech. Little Brown & Co. (ADS), 2024.
Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding! Let me pivot then-- I still argue that it is a fundamentally different case when it comes to LLMs.
1. Threatening young and educated people with not being able to realize the potential that they believed they were building for themselves is toying with social uprising.
2. Weaving is an apt example of redundancy on account of technological innovation but it's a poor comparison to LLMs where the narrative is that they will continue to get better until they approach a general intelligence level which would put a much much higher percentage of the population at risk of losing their jobs. Again, the segment of the population that has invested most into their skills, and will be the most angry and capable of organizing should that come to pass.
Weaving doesn't as aptly represent the core of what we as a species are good at and excel at, as knowledge work does.
1. This is not enough on it's own for social uprising, but it may be the straw that breaks the camel's back. I feel a lot of the general vibe in the US is summed up in this excerpt from "All Hail" by The Devil Makes Three:
"Laugh if you want to, really is kinda funny
'Cause the world is a car and you're the crash test dummy
Herd's stampeding now, fences gone
Television is always on and it says "Save the children, but drop the bomb
Replace the word 'right' now with the word 'wrong'
Hey, there's a big sale on Tuesday, get it before it's gone
Get a picture with the four horsemen for a nominal sum
Now that they got everything, they'd like to sell you some!
All hail, all hail, to the greatest of sales
Everything in sight's got to be sold
All hail, all hail, 'cause it's to work or to jail
Man, they're closing them doors on the world"
Closing them doors on the world aka pulling the ladder up behind them is exactly what is happening, and has been happening, to young white Americans for decades now, and young Americans of color since forever.
2. Weaving is an ancestor of programming so I feel it's an apt comparison to discussions of modern technology, as much as any historic profession can be. But to more specifically address your point about continuing to get better and putting more of the population at risk of job loss, there were multiple innovations within the textile industry that worked together to automate different portions of the industry. The point is similar to the poem "First They Came" by Martin Niemöller, where it starts somewhere but it will come for all of us. So focusing on whether or not weaving specifically is a good comparison to LLMs misses the point that if we don't band together as workers, we will eventually be overpowered by capital, foregoing any discussion about the morality of capitalism but just looking at eternal struggle of profit incentives vs wages.
No, the difference is that people used to kick down their doors and boot stomp their heads when they got this greedy about it
TIL I'm a conservative. I yearn to return to the old ways.
OH but they did. Captains of industry always are on the lookout to drive down labor (its their #1 cost).
> we'd 100% be in a recession
A little confused as to how exactly a handful of unprofitable companies are keeping us out of a recession? GDP is not the economy. We have been in a "recession" for a while now, not that that word even really means anything anymore.
How old are you? I hate to pull rank on people, but if you're an American who wasn't yet on the job market in 2008, you've never experienced a sustained recession and don't understand the comparison you're drawing. A recession feels much worse than "things cost too much and the world kind of sucks", and workers are affected as much as businesses and CEOs are.
Just because it isn't as bad as 2008 yet doesn't mean we aren't in a recession. I would argue that we were also in a recession before the housing collapse actually hit. Economists will also tell you that the great recession ended in 2009 which I think we both know is bs. My point is that it's a nebulous term and the economy sucks right now despite a few companies keeping GDP artificially inflated.
I guess I'm not terribly interested in debating what exactly the term "recession" means or what the line is where it's fair to say the economy "sucks". If you think that the current state of the economy is as bad as we should expect, and it won't get worse if GDP stops rising, I'm confident you're wrong. But I don't know how to convince you of that unless you've experienced a recession in your working life.
I'm an American who was on the job market in both 2008 and during the dotcom implosion and I'm still working in software development.
IMO we effectively are in a recession already (and have been for a while) as far as the real job market goes, the AI boom is only stopping it from showing up in stock market valuations, which is great if you're heavily invested in the stock market, but pretty meaningless if you're a laborer without assets, with debt, and trying to find a job.
Things can certainly get worse overall than they are now (and due to bad leadership, this seems inevitable), but when they do the delta between now and when we are in an official recession will be far greater felt by people who are currently being propped up by stock and home values than it will for the many people who are already struggling.
> AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane. It will take time to adjust and some industries will go away and others will pop up.
That's fallacious thinking. Technological developments aren't instances of some kind of repeating phenomena; they're distinct, unique events with their own characteristics. You need to consider those characteristics instead of gesticulating at the past for a prediction of the future.
And even if you're correct, you're missing a lot. I'll explain by analogy: at the beginning of a genocide, as someone's community in the process of being murdered, you could totally say "genocides have happened before, some people will go away, others will survive." But that's cold comfort for someone who's about to be killed with their family. AI likely means economic death (or at least hardship) for a lot of people who don't have the needed combination of psychopathy, luck, and wealth to succeed in the new order.
> you could totally go up to someone in the middle of a genocide, as their community in the process of being murdered, and say "genocides have happened before, some people will go away, others will survive."
Yeah. How many times I saw people here say oh yeah it's just the same as job loss during automaton-industrialization. How is that making things better? "Yeah just more mass poverty and more wealth inequality, what are you worried about!"
Also during automation there was a lot of work you could switch to and what about options now? start another vibeslop startup so that you can pay openai for tokens?
the only explanation for people saying this is that they don't understand they will be on the line later just like the people displaced now. but the dream of being the .1% who get to be on top and monetize everybody else is too tempting I guess.
> the only explanation for people saying this is that they don't understand they will be on the line later just like the people displaced now. but the dream of being the .1% who get to be on top and monetize everybody else is too tempting I guess.
I doubt most people who say things like that "dream of being the .1%". I think it's more typical they're just someone who thoughtlessly repeata propaganda memes, without considering the implications. I think that's something that software engineers are particularly prone to do, despite frequently having a self-image of being "intelligent."
> I doubt most people who say things like that "dream of being the .1%".
I doubt people who just address one style choice and carefully not make any actual objections. Their comment adds no value and there is no way we can know if they even really understood what they are replying to.
> AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane.
Or social media, or targeted advertising, or fast food.
This is an underappreciated point. The economy would likely be in freefall without AI.
Yes, things look bleak for current college grads. The bitter pill to swallow is that they began college in the boom times of 2021-22, and they saw the college grads of those years walking straight off campus into high-paying jobs which don’t exist anymore. They only existed because of the obscene gobs of money whizzing around the economy post-COVID. Whether the shrinkage is due in part or in whole to AI is in the eye of the beholder. But if we had fallen into a broad-based recession, the numbers would look a lot bleaker. Plenty of companies that could automate away entry level positions with current tech haven’t done so, whether due to organizational inertia or ignorance or whatever. That organizational inertia would’ve been much more easily overcome by a market collapse.
You can still milk the react/Vercel andies, they will never get tired of being exploited even if the whole world turns against AI.
If I'm Gen Z, especially someone who is graduating or just graduated, I'd be very angry at AI too.
Even in our own organization, we've almost stopped hiring juniors and interns completely. We just leverage AI more and more.
So I can understand how most Gen Zs feel threatened by AI.
There are basically 2 groups who are loving AI:
* Seniors who have deep knowledge so AI is just there to help make them accomplish their goals cheaper and faster
* Gen Zs who are starting their own businesses and have embraced AI
My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can. Learn to be extremely productive with it. Learn to use it to create businesses. Burying your head in the sand hoping AI will collapse is not going to work in their favor.
PS. You can get a pretty good idea of how young people view AI on Reddit. Reddit users tend to be younger, less affluent. Save for a few subs, most of Reddit is very anti-AI. I'd guess most of them wish AI will collapse soon so they can go back to a world where human intelligence matter more.
The "businesses" created are thin wrappers that will get absorbed by the model companies faster than you can come up with them.
Look at the last 3 years of AI startups, and it’s crazy how the big guys are folding use cases into their platforms - I cannot be the only one wondering what’s the point of developing a tool only for OpenAI et all to just incorporate the same eventually. There is no clear boundary as to what the business of the big ones is.
I feel like people said the same thing about Apple for years.
Apple was selling actual hardware though. Software doesn’t have that logistical moat.
Not only that, but also they have deep monitoring of any little good idea that might get traction within their platforms. It’s trivial for them to see what’s picking up and bring in-house.
Yup, pretty much all quality of life upgrades in ios came from shamelessly copying popular jailbreak tweaks on cydia. Which they could do without credit since the tweaks were frowned upon in the first place.
No that's not what I meant. Plenty of GenZs are starting digital and physical businesses and leveraging AI tools.
I don't mean wrappers around Claude or OpenAI APIs.
This is a classic example of people misapplying the logic of the SaaS world to the AI world. If you're building software to sell, you're in trouble. The people that are finding success in this space are using AI to allow them to solve the problems they used to have to pay for software and hire people to solve.
All of the most promising companies I know today are very small and are leveraging AI to solve physical problems in the real world that just wouldn't be possible with so few people even a few years back.
Yeah "start a business with AI" is the new "learn to code". Like what does that even mean, do you just go to Claude "hey what business should I start?"
If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it. This advice is like, if your local football club gets shut down, just work hard enough to make into Manchester United
> If starting a business was so easy, almost all of us who work salary would go do it.
Would we? Starting a business is easy. Building a profitable business isn't even that hard. Wanting pleasure in our work is what stops us. Running a business generally isn't much fun. We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.
This is completely wrong - Good for you if you think its so easy. I would do almost anything to get out of salary but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit. Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
> Yet I can make 200k as a software engineer on salary.
Then I dare say you've found your market fit. Tomorrow, your task is to start looking for a contractor position doing the exact same thing you are doing now. There's your business.
> but every idea/attempt (and I have made several attempts) I have never even makes revenue let alone profit.
Not even a single penny? What did these attempts look like? Were you out there knocking on doors offering to weed every flowerbed in the city? Or were you sticking to fun tasks, like programming, that made it feel like you were busy building a business but in actuality were hiding from it?
Starting and running a business is an entirely different skillset from "doing the work" - even someone who could easily "be on their own" (think: plumbers, doctors, etc) really often prefer the salaried position where they don't have to think about "the business".
It's an older book, but The E-Myth Revisited is worth a read for everyone, a business is not a job. It's related, but it's not the same.
> We work salary because it means we can focus on the enjoyable parts of the business, letting someone else deal with the crap.
I can understand why a specialist would feel this way.
Personally, I believe that most people who work salary do it because of the job security and the health insurance.
When you get right down to it, collecting a salary is running a business with a client of one. So virtually everyone will start a business. I acknowledge the false dichotomy I submitted earlier.
But what you don't often see is one being willing to scale that client base to two. That is what I was trying to get at. Having two clients actually provides greater security than just one, as even if one client relieves you of your services you still have the other to help support you during the downtime. However, there is no free lunch. Two clients wanting your attention is orders of magnitude less enjoyable than just one client, and it only gets worse as you scale even bigger. There is good reason why most prefer to never scale beyond a single client.
Only a small sliver of the world has to worry about health insurance. Job security, maybe.
I think the biggest component is all the crap that comes with running a business.. accounting, sales, budgets and planning, regulatory concerns, office/site management, the list goes on forever. I'm an engineer, I want to do this and leave the other jobs to people who specialize at those, not run around trying to spin a dozen plates at once. I'm sure there's a tidbit more money to be made but it's just not worth it for me.
Now, if someone can make a vibe-business platform where AI handles all the drudgery and I can stick to the tech.. that might be worth talking about.
How could your "business" ever make money if any idiot with a $20 CC subscription can recreate it in a weekend? And no, "I can prompt better than them" is not a differentiator.
The idea is the opposite - "nobody" can make money selling software anymore, because software can be cheaply created by an LLM, so you want to start a business that previously would have had to buy software/software engineers in order to support some other product.
However, even if that holds true (which is a big if - right now I wouldn't want to run a business backed by vibe software), and even if there are enough such business ideas to go around, there's going to be quite a lot of turmoil in the meantime.
I don't think that's true. SW that works is still expensive to produce. SW that kind of works is super easy to do. The money is in making SW that works. You still need expertise for that.
There's a fallacy here around how software is fungible. WordPress hasn't made web developers obsolete, despite everybody having access to a $5/mo WYSIWYG-and-domains-and-hosting-bundle environment; quite the opposite, in fact.
I'm seeing the parent's point along these lines: "me and all my friends are starting businesses being the middlemen between WordPress and (people who want websites)". It's not that it won't work, it's just a shit business model.
Gyms still make money even though you can stay quite fit with just a good set of adjustable dumbbells, a bench, and a jump rope.
I think a closer analogy is paying for a personal trainer vs working out yourself. Some people find value in that, but not many.
It's the gym, the trainer, the social environment, and a million other things you wouldn't think of until you have boots on the ground, eg a language model can't sign a vendor liability contract. People thought the rise of the internet would kill gyms because anyone can download the routine for an Olympic athlete for free. Turns out access to information is not the same as execution. It happened multiple times with websites/apps/Peloton. Every time fitness culture skyrocketed and gyms have benefited.
Local models are going to be pretty useful by the time the current companies have to face their finances. The cost of entry will be higher end hardware though.
> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can
How will this help them? If LLMs are going to replace workers and reduce the number of available jobs, how will fully embracing an LLM help an individual? To it seems the most it could do is put them ahead of people who won't embrace LLMs ... but if everyone took this advice then the advice would certainly do nothing.
Conversely, it's possible that honing your actual skills by minimizing reliance on LLMs could become a very valuable trait in the coming future. But in that case, you'd be burning fewer tokens and you wouldn't be contributing to LLM company userbase growth which is a bad thing to do.
Meh, there are still fields AI can't touch, going into those is a much better idea than trying (in vain) to use the Job Replacer 5000 in such a manner that won't eventually leave you without a job.
We've always had offshoring too, and the same concerns exist there. The more corporate companies use it, and either eventually get burned and revert back, or just hold on for dear life as they circle the toilet.
Curious how these companies will fare when there are no senior-level candidates left to replace the ones that are retiring in a few years. I guess everyone's hoping AI will be good enough to just replace the entire field, as one final "fuck you" to the generations that follow, from the generations that had everything and pulled up the ladder.
Well I post a lot of articles about grippers and agricultural robots that almost never get upvoted so if you don't know about these things I blame y'all.
I think if you want to change the world robots that can pick strawberries and change bedpans are it. People like to gush about "more Nobel prize research" an such but Nobel prizes are valuable because a limited number are given out, not because the research is valuable in and of itself. (e.g. Kuhn would tell you normal science is "apply for grant - write paper - repeat")
Kuhn wouldn't tell you that because that cycle wasn't yet fully dominant when he wrote SSR, although the framework was in place for it.
The fields that "AI can't touch" are shit fields that have already been decimated by globalism and immigration. Like cool, farmers, cooks, baristas, plumbers and manual labourers are safe from AI for now. But most paths to a middle class lifestyle are being closed off...
You're right and it's actually even worse than that. If X% of the white collar jobs get replaced by ai that means there are X% more people competing for the "safe" jobs. Over time the "safe" jobs will pay less and less adjusted for inflation because the job displacement is increasing the labor supply making your labor less valuable.
The "safe" jobs will get squeezed in two ways.
Like you said there will be more people trying to do those jobs causing devaluation on the supply side, but at the same time overall demand will drop because there will be less people with comfortable white-collar jobs that make up a lot of the demand for the work those jobs perform.
Exactly. I've been thinking about the demand issue for a while now too. It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor. If you permanently remove a massive chunk of labor from the white collar sector that will cause a massive drop in consumer spending, which will impact company revenue, which will in turn put pressure on their ability to spend on the ai causing the displacement in the first place. Unless they monopolize all labor and cause a paradigm shift in how economies fundamentally work I don't see how they're not just shooting themselves in the foot.
> It makes me think either the frontier labs are really "move fast and break things" cultists that truly don't care about any second order effects, or they're 100% convinced "asi" will subsume all forms of labor
Either one of these shows they are anti social, anti human sociopaths that only care about enriching themselves at the cost of anything else
> My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can
It's game theory. If you betray ASAP you get to monetize others who hold out.
It works until you yourself get ousted the same way. So the most enthusiastic people are old enough that they leverage their status and won't face the consequences in their lifetime OR young enough that they don't understand the proposition, have nothing to lose and when they look around and see everybody doing it they have no other choice except to do the same
If everybody took a stance against corps stealing our work and reselling it to us then we would 100% prevail but what are principles against personal profit...
"we need to work more and help train the llms of superrich to make the same money" became the new "we will have more free time and more money thanks to AI" but everybody is too busy trying to outrace the next guy so no one noticed.
As someone who sees value in generational contracts like older people investing heavily in younger people, with the assumption that they will also take care of us in our older age, I long to improve the lives of subsequent generations. I don't know how we do that when we keep mortgaging their futures with gov't debt and spending that extends beyond the length of the administration.
If I had a genie of many wishes I'd wish for
1. No more deficit spending
2. Budgets cannot exceed prior year's intakes
3. An end to progressive taxation, but an increase in a flat tax rate to pay off all public debt. As the debt is paid a negative tax rate will replace it.
4. All politicians' pay tied to a fixed/capped multiple of the median income in the country
5. The building of a public wealth fund which is built from any benefit granted to a company through the governemnt -- want a tax break or a publicly funded stadium? Give us 50% share in the team. Want a bailout for your bank/automaker? Sell us preferred shares at high rates (to reflect the risk). Want publicly funded power plants for your GPUs? Then we want a share of your AI Company in exchange in our public wealth fund.
6. Forced public liquidity of large companies (say $1B) to ensure the public is able to participate in the overall economy, rather than just private networks of back scratchers
7. Politicians who want to invest must invest in an equal weight russell 3000 (or an even wider spread of US stocks) to ensure vested interest in the country, but divested interest in any specific company/sector.
8. Capped political spend.
9. A concerted effort to move towards known maxima rather than stepping towards local maxima with fear of going through local minima too.
10. A publicly funded opt-in national service program for building houses. If you give 4 years of your life to building houses we'll give you a 2 bed 1 bath and a salary along the way. (Obviously, details tbd, but something along that idea)