LLMs reveal an important truth that we were already deeply aware of. With this cognitive offloading, the interests that drive us lose their meaning. If friction disappears, there is no longer any desire, pleasure, longing, obstacle, or demand. It is indolence, and it goes by the name of apathy.
All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished?
The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it.
I doubt that after having experienced deprivation, shame, and death; as well as their positive counterparts, we will ever fail to overcome entropy.
We will adapt, for that is all we know and can do by default.
What is given without effort does not transform.
That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate.
I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.
I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim.
Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.
> Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value.
Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet?
All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read further.
AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow. It doesn't prevent creativity, it just makes it easier and more accessible.
> The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.
Good. If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting. Perhaps a more interesting problem to fix is having the people working on something getting told about the automation.
I recently at around 42yo learned how to darn/mend my socks. My mom taught me how to do it.
I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.
Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.
Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.
>Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.
>AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.
A compression algorithm finds and removes redundancy. Simple automation is like simple compression algorithms (RLE like). AI (which even internally - at least the encoding to the representation parts - looks like compression) just like a much more sophisticated compression algorithm which finds and removes redundancy where we thought the creativity and originality were.
It does look like our civilization has accumulated a lot of cruft masquerading as creative/original/intellectual activities ("Bullshit jobs" comes to mind, also all that talk about stagnation in science, and all those huge collective collaborations - where collective there is a stagnation - and now with AI individual scientists will again be able to wield all the bleeding edge across the wide fields while digging deep in desired target research direction), and the AI is the vacuum cleaner for that cruft.
I feel the same as you. But at the same time: do you not think your CEO will be proven wrong? Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm just rationalizing, but surely code quality, and code understanding, does matter?
And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?
I’m in a similar line of thinking and actually some customers are making their own version of our tool. It’s nowhere near feature complete but it suits their needs.
Code quality does matter it’s just marketing people being shortsighted because their job is to react to the market. LLM gives a sense of « it’s kind of easy to build stuff, why bother loosing time with quality when I’m there at 80% in 20% of the time ? ».
There is compounding effects where given any big enough system this won’t scale, even Google did talks this week on this topic. So I guess you’re right, time will prove who’s right or wrong and what bet was the best with which consequence
They matter, but you can't argue that human written quality code that strokes the developer's ego is so much better than AI written code of slightly less quality. Understanding also matters, but now you're trying to familiarize yourself with the AI's code, not your colleagues' code and never the code you've written yourself.
These things are biologically/neurologically caused. They're adaptations that worked well in our ancestral environment (effort -> reward = satisfaction, stress = effort) which are now possibly becoming maladaptations. We won't be the first organism to experience this (likely unfortunate) transition. What's concerning is that it usually precipitates something bad like large genetic alterations through natural selection or the simple elimination of the organism from certain environments (like fireflies near cities).
> All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished?
What ideal?
> The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it.
You mean it would be a good thing?
> I doubt that [..] we will ever fail to overcome entropy
What does this mean?
> What is given without effort does not transform.
Children who have loving parents absolutely are affected by that, even if the love is given unconditionally and was there even before they had a sense of self. We are also very much transformed by living on a planet with sunlight and all that entails, and we never had to turn the sun on for that.
It's true that muscles you don't use atrophy, and that includes the brain and "the heart", but it's also true that the best things in life are free.
What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer.
As for the impoverished ideal, some of the fundamental goals that serve as a pretext for these technologies have not even been achieved and yet we are already, gradually and methodically, being stripped of using them.
> You mean it would be a good thing?
It would be a good thing, yes. Not the most desirable option, to be sure. But proportionally less harmful to all those who would then be forced to do without it and adapt without necessarily conforming. I admit it's a divisive issue and that it's unlikely to happen that way. But we won't be able to reason with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.
> What does this mean?
This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos, because decay and disorganization are fundamental laws.
Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.
> the best things in life are free.
That’s an interesting thought experiment, indeed.
There are indeed things that are given to us, and for which we can be grateful.
Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created; everything is transformed.”
That’s kind of the problem with quotes, they sound nice but don’t always take the complexity of the world into account.
> What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer.
Ah I see, I thought you had a specific ideal in mind, but you rather mean having any ideal at all, right? I agree, I'm dismayed how many view any idealism as "immature" or "unrealistic". It's very tragic IMO because we're not so passive because the world would be so hard to make better, the world is so hard to make better because we're so passive, and think so small.
> with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.
Hey, didn't you just deplore lack of idealism? Of course we can't reason with them, not with that attitude! But knowing that other humans just want the best for themselves and those they love, surely they shall see the good sense of our arguments, if only we bring them forth with the right cheerful spirit! I'm only half-joking, and of course you also have a point.
If "AI" does real work and gets better and better, they'll price us out, stomp us underfoot like ants. A giant blob of consumers saying "go away, batin!" until it bursts and dries out, leaving nothing but some Moloch monolith. The upside of that would be that we don't have to worry about arguments, or beat ourselves up for not having tried hard enough. We'd be like other early humans species that curiously are no longer around.
BUT if we're right, and it's really just putting everything people made into a blender, to produce a brief powder flash and then confusion and regret, we'd do well to hold on to our ideals, whatever they may be, and to caring and thinking things through as best as we can; in short, to being human. There's a new drug, a lot of people got addicted or kinda lost their minds, but a lot of them will come around, too, and should know they're always welcome back.
> This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos
Okay, so you meant we will never overcome entropy, not, as you originally wrote, that we will never fail to overcome it. You can see how that would be confusing.
> decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.
Not that I would call us or anything perfect (gotta keep it around as an ideal :), but that's what life does, struggle against entropy, introduce and proliferate some order, for a little while. The idea that with just enough power and/or knowledge we can somehow make a leap into a different category (one that lasts) is probably just wishful thinking, if there's even any thought involved, so the best we can do is try to be excellent, and excellent to each other.
(At least, that'd be my ideal, someone else might say we must fight as brutally as we can so at the end of time, some super stronk warrior gets to turn out the light, but it's so easy to show such things up as stupid so that's what we should keep doing)
> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted.
I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote.
I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?
I'm thinking of some similarity between the non-technical middle manager using agents to avoid the biggest obstacle of their developers, and a person installing a wall socket at home.
It's not too difficult to install a wall socket, but many things can go wrong, so people would normally call an electrician. In some jurisdictions you are not allowed to install it without a license, or probably you can install it only for yourself but not for anyone else if you don't have a license, and you need to call an inspector and check your work when you're done. Some other jurisdictions truly don't care, you can do whatever, and all the possible damage is on you.
Electricians are somewhat fungible, because you often don't care who will do the job for you, but the profession exists and they can pay their bills.
I wonder how far we are until, at least in some jurisdictions, a person won't be legally allowed to update the website that stores customers' data or processes payments without being a licensed software developer, and how rules, should they be adopted, will change our profession.
> in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability.
Hasn't this been the case since the power loom put hand weavers out of a job?
This time it is different. Ai promised to be the power loom for all things. Knowledge work and all physical work through robotics. And there will be no more jobs to turn to. Why might an AI company allow for humanity to live in this future? They’d have no utility. No economic purpose. They’d have no unique skill. Supporting them over the datacenter amounts to investing in waste heat. And they may even rise up and destabilize the horror you’ve created for planet earth. Game theory suggests keeping humans on earth is increasingly a liability.
I hate the term "democratization". It's putting a respectable face on something that shouldn't be respectable at all. In the age of the internet, coding and other creative skills have always been largely democratized to people that care enough to learn. Nothing is being "democratized" by AI, there's simply (an attempt) at driving the value of actual skill to zero so the skill-less and stupid can purchase their way to mediocrity (without the benefit of transferring that money to someone who has worked to be skilled). There is NOTHING "democratic" about that.
It’s not coding that’s being democratized, it’s the ability to create games, tools, etc, that require coding.
Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?
If that happened, Farrari's would simply lose their value and something more rare would take it's place. The scarcity is the point. Same with art, if you "democratise" it somehow humans will seek out a new form of artistic expression that is not accessible to people with a $10 midjourney subscription. And that is OK, good actually.
Perhaps to some degree, but there is intrinsic value to a Ferrari if you enjoy driving. That doesn’t change with scarcity.
But I agree, and even celebrate, that a hypothetical future with abundance will be bad for speculators and the luxury-obsessed, and great for people who enjoy the first-order benefits of products.
That's a product, not a skill. We're not talking about people getting cheap cars, we're talking about nobody being able to make a living anymore. And no, this isn't like other revolutions, because there's no "upskilling" into it when it threatens all white collar work. (I'm sorry but I don't think prompting AI is going to be some amazing new profession, it'll be at best a transitory phase). Best case is to buy some durable jeans and learn a trade?
Of course, I don't think this is happening any time soon because I don't believe the hype machine. But if you do believe the hype machine, you should be honest about what you're facing.
Also, for what it's worth as a person that's written (and will continue to write) games and tools etc., there were already plenty of forces democratizing that (free engines, asset stores with reusable code and art, etc.) The difference was that there was still skill involved, and at the end of the day you were paying another human being for their effort if you bought or used pre-existing components. There's no skill in AI, not really.
Also, I'm really not that interested in playing a game created by AI, and judging from the reaction gamers and game developers have had to this technology, I don't think many people are. So, yay, you can make a game that has a tiny audience with zero satisfaction from having done something hard and learned something? Also it's likely going to be extremely derivative, because the AI can only really work with what it's been trained on.
Wait a second, you say its not coding thats getting democratized. It is the "ability to create" software... hm i wonder what would be the ability to write software? Maybe something like software engineering?
Also your example with Ferrari is completely flawed, and I dont give a fuck about what investment bankers think or do. What are you even talking about here?
Please explain the first part more than you hand waved away to make a completely unrelated metaphorical case. What is the ability to create software if not software engineering? How are both different?
The whole point of AI coding is (partial) decoupling of software from human coding.
You might as well ask what the ability is to create arbitrary images to any specification, if not painting? But AI image gen is not painting.
It’s painful and confusing to those who’ve mistaken the tool for the product. Why, you ordered that pizza for delivery, that’s not cooking! No, but it is eating.
Same thing with software. Some people just want the outcome, not the process, and it’s pointless to whinge about how it’s somehow less legitimate.
I am against how its being used as well, in fact Authoritarianism is literally "central power to preserve the political status quo" - and that is what you have folks: OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Facebook/etc are all central powers.
Coding was always power that you can have if you just read the freely available info but having access to a computer and internet is not free - if we can change this it would make democratized.
>You just had to put in the effort of learning and understanding.
Yeah it's always so weird when people anthropomorphize the harsh physical reality of learning a skill that is accessible to everyone as some sort of secret boys club, where the existing club members do not let you in, when the only difference between the members and outsiders is whether they've paid the entry fee or not.
A 10'000 hour entry fee does rule out a fair bunch of people though, in practice. While there are few artificial barriers to learning to code, there still are some natural ones, like time.
is time a barrier or a requirement? its a bit like saying time is a natural barrier to solving hashes. like yeah, its an inherent part of the process that cannot be skipped. You cannot learn without time, but thats just the laws of the universe not a barrier to learning.
Thinking that "individual bargaining capability" capability is an especially useful thing for society as a whole is one of the things that has got us into the current Hobbesian mess
I have a more depressing theory. I think class is part of it, but I'm starting to suspect that a shockingly large number of people lack the critical thinking skills needed to think out the implications of this stuff. I say that because I've met so many people of the managerial class that seem to think it's going to replace the annoying people they have to pay, but somehow they don't think it's going to come for them. It's like we have some sort of society-wide main-character syndrome where a bunch of people just think that somehow the machine can replace every other job, and yet after ingesting all of human knowledge it somehow won't be able to compete with someone with "domain expertise"? Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe? I don't think this doomsday scenario is going to happen, but I think the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
I don't think its entirely class. I've met many people who have convinced themselves they have some special sauce--even in software! And even those who are insulated like doctors and plumbers don't realize they're still at risk from second order effects. What happens when half of their customers are broke? That possibility is not an exaggeration. Even if everyone re-skills over night, people will default on their mortgages at a scale greater than the '08 financial crisis.
And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.
Even if you are a plumber and we don’t automate plumbing, you’ll have half the population displaced and switching to plumbing. Everything that isn’t automated will be over saturated.
I don't think the reason that most people don't DIY plumbing is a lack of accessible information. Any physical craft like that requires practice, so I think there's a real moat there.
There is a lot less information online about the physical trades compared to software development. Plumbers don’t post on ToiletOverflow.com all day helping each other with their little tricks and sharing tribal knowledge. Pick a random brass fitting at the hardware store and try to google its purpose; you’d be surprised by the scant detail even when yielding plenty of shopping links
Where I live, just the call out fee for a plumber would cover the cost of tools and materials with enough left over for beers afterwards. If you’re relatively handy and willing to thing things through, the main obstacle to doing all your own plumbing (again, at least where I live) is regulatory capture.
When we continue this line of thought far enough, we get to ask who's going to pay for the hardware and the electricity to run the AI that's taking all the jobs.
This is exactly the missing long-term perspective. All AI creators are focused either on the projected wins or the shiny technology, ignoring societal effects. Not that they should, they are engineers or MBAs after all, but somebody should. Somebody like us, or better somebody with better reach and better knowledge, should figure out a way to offer a future also to former clerks.
These days I find Gemini often recommends me a youtube video that's just an AI voice reading out a reddit post that was chat gpt generated full of emoji.
Will so many people switch to plumbing though ? Really depends on how old you are when you get canned (I don't think its realistic for most 40 year olds to start a plumbing career), how good you are with your hands and physical things and whether you can survive the switch psychologically; I don't see many investment bankers or software devs survive such a switch.
I'm 42, even if I was very good with my hands (which I'm not) I don't think it would have been a realistic transition; by realistic I mean survivable psychologically.
So people will not all switch to plumbing, indeed. But then to what? There's only so much need for tattoo artists and geriatric care - which your customers must also afford to pay.
Perhaps the feeling is that in a competitive society (which most of us live in) as long as things aren't collapsing I don't see why a plumber/doctor should care if a bunch of lawyers and software devs will be out of a job. They will become relatively wealthier even if their income is taking a hit. Their purchasing power should rise if most of white collar work is collapsing.
They would become wealthier in a real sense, since the services that used to be provided by the scarce labor of lawyers and software devs would now be far cheaper. In fact due to Jevons' paradox, even lawyers and software devs would enjoy far higher living standards due to AI. The boost in efficiency just creates a spike in demand for the remaining human component of the job, no matter how tiny.
How would cheaper software development or lawyers massively raise standard of living for other people? Most people that need their standard of living improved don't even own computers, they generally don't have access to the capital needed to start a businesses, and they have no use for a lawyer outside of criminal matters.
That kind of thinking might work if 1, or 5, or 10% lose their income. If 50% do, there's revolution. And that's not great for anyone, including plumbers and doctors.
We will never see 50% of people lose their income, they'll just gradually transition into newer AI-powered roles. Their income will grow rather than shrink. The people who are at risk of losing their income will be those who reject working with AI entirely, but that's because they will be gradually made uncompetitive.
What are these newer AI-powered roles? Let's get to the specifics, please. I'm open to transition, or learn new, give me please a few starting points. I know AI and agents and skills.md already, so let's skip the basics, indicate me a few new jobs I could take.
The specifics is that AI just isn't good enough and there's a huge amount of viable human white-collar work. We're just speculating about what might happen in a future where AI gets good enough to perform most current white-collar jobs.
Yes, widespread automation of knowledge work is unlikely to decrease total production, so all the goods and services people currently demand will still be provided, but the power dynamic of who is consuming and who is providing might flip around. So a bunch of formerly upwardly-mobile people could end up at the bottom of the social hierarchy while others whom they used to look down upon will be able to afford servants for the first time in their lives.
I see little evidence that any social role reversal is going to occur. This technology is soon going to price out average to poor people when they have to pay true token costs. It might be the case that only the rich and powerful have access to the powerful models.
Poor people with hard-to-automate occupations don't necessarily need to be able to afford token costs for social role reversal to occur. They only need to be able to hire an even poorer person who used to earn a salary that exceeded even those token costs and who was laid off as a result.
After going without food for a few days, even a software dev is going to have to swallow their pride and consider alternative employment options. You might think they could just take a poor person's existing job, but why would for example a meatpacking plant hire a software dev with zero meatpacking experience when they already have lots of experienced meatpackers and meat demand hasn't gone up? Meanwhile, the meatpackers might like it if they could have someone babysit their children, cook for them and clean their now much larger house (which used to belong to a software dev who fell on hard times and had to move out). And a steady supply of desolate characters holding up cardboard signs saying "I used to be a software dev, but now I would do literally anything for a meal" could put such luxury into their affordable range.
Agree on the knock-on effects. My prediction is deflation. Money will be worth more and more. As a consequence governments will have to step in to ensure inflation(with e.g. universal income), otherwise the economy stops.
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
> What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.
Yeah that also sounds realistic, and actually there's evidence of this dulling effect from even before llms. The attention economy has been literally streamlining.. well, the road to death. And nobody is angry.
I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.
AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones
On the flip side, people think AI is magic: too much magic.
Even with large advances in reasoning and actionability, it still makes insane mistakes and it's wildly prone to prompt attacks. That is a fundamental flaw in the technology.
Even an AGI will lack the millennia of self-preservation evolution that will cause it to do crazy shit. So much of what humans do is governed by a desire to be alive and to be liked.
So, I'm not particularly worried about these changes happening rapid fire. I'm more concerned about the ladder pulling effect and misinformation.
So I am expecting the AI bubble to burst (or at least deflate) some time soon. Perhaps this puts me I an specific camp, I am not sure. But this whole "AI will replace X jobs" does not phase me, not because I think AI is useless. On the contrary I am a daily user, but in my mind, people fail to see that the economy is not built around jobs and capital, but wants (or needs) and trades. Even in a world where everything can be done better by a machine than a human, there will always be the "want" for an item that is handcrafted. AI is yet another tool that accelerates us to satisfy more "wants" and that's great. I'm looking at a whole lot of things that will be available in the future (especially software but not limited to) which are not available today, AI generated or not.
Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first.
I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.
> Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen.
I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.
Realistically, I've only seen evidence about AI taking people's jobs, as is the case with LLMs, and in the case of robotics, killing people. Augmentation has always been something that gets talked about in research labs but I've never seen an actual product; and curing disease and old age is the domain of more traditional ML methods.
I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.
I meant augmentation in an abstract way, like making you more productive and freeing up your time from drudgery. This is the sales pitch that AI labs have started to pivot towards in their communication with the public after realizing the public don't want the creation of Skynet. There's a tension there because they want to sell the other vision (full replacement of labor) to investors so they can raise capital for DC builds at reasonable financing costs.
> society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?
I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"
I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.
> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.
Correct me if I wrong, up to 40% of Roman citizens were on "welfare". This, at least, shows that it's not impossible to have a functioning society with a large percentage of people who only contribute political activity.
Perhaps this is a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia (but kinda inverted) where everyone views AI as too inaccurate for their own niche, but perfectly fine for every other field that they know comparably little about.
I’ve been thinking about this, or a variant of it.
Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).
Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?
I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.
As of today, "minor expert" is the wrong way to phrase it. The flagship LLMs today are at best at an initiate or apprentice level in every field.[1] This is not meant as a derisive remark – having something at hand that is initiate level in every field is remarkable and useful. But it's nowhere near expertise anywhere.
You seriously think current LLM is just at apprentice level in programming? It can write stuff one shot that I’d expected even some experts to struggle to do even with ample more time allowed.
They will one shot with bunch of duplicated code, somehow they will just omit basic things, like security middleware. It will all kind of work. But then you make additional passes to do review and clean up, suddenly there is a lot more work to make it half decent.
You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective? I’m never going to be in some kind of space colony but do I want to see them happen? You betcha.
> You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective?
Yes, the vast majority of people care about their jobs first rather than a theoretical future where mostly rich people colonize space. It's much easier to imagine yourself becoming poor than living in Mars.
What I was 9, I lay awake thinking about how humanity will one day explore space and discover all sorts of new species, make new friends.. I imagined music concerts with humans and animals and all sorts of creatures.. and then it hit me, I won't be alive by then. I basically realized I'm mortal, and cried for hours.
I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.
> I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.
This is normal I think. You grew up. Not wanting to live forever is totally sensible.
I didn't think about "forever", then or now. It's more about seeing the next few hundred years as an exciting time of progress and adventures, of ideas -- rather than just a snuff movie I'd rather pass on.
And "growing up" kind of can mean everything and nothing. I noticed that humans prey on humans, destroy and poison animal species and each other for nothing, for entertainment or to compensate for psychological issues. It is normal for a child to reject that, and a moral imperative for an adult to act on that, not to "get over it".
Come to think of it, kids aren't "naive" that they don't know these things. Adults are correctly ashamed of them, so they only discuss them with people who will accept shrugs, i.e. other adults. If we were honest to children about the world, the things in it we accept, they would freak the fuck out and probably be traumatized. We tell them to not kick a dog, but oh by the way, Abu Ghraib. If they say "shit" they get scolded, if a strange man scares them you should tell their parents and they'll be mad at that man, but if people murder thousands of little children, just evaporate them, that's just how it is, nothing can be done. Some people are insane and rule over us, starve us out, and that's why mommy and daddy have to work 5 jobs to have nothing compared to what the grandparents had, but here's that cartoon you like.
I'd say what is called "rational" and "grown up" is often just diminished and broken, barely surviving via constant distraction from one's own state.
I think it’s this but also that we all see the value in our own niche because it’s ours, and have more trouble seeing the values in other niches. So it becomes a self perpetuating positive reinforcement thing.
I don't see why that should be the case. The only reason software is getting focused on first is:
1. Software devs are obviously going to have a better idea how to apply AI to software development compared to other fields. So of course the coding tools are going to be the first things made.
2. Formal verification makes the problem easier by allowing for iterative feedback (compilers, proofs, etc.)
The second argument is, I think, somewhat valid, but ignores that a lot of other professions also have similar verification systems even if they're a bit less rigorous. The first argument just explains why things are the way they are now, it's not indicative of the future. I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that other jobs than mine require less cognitive horsepower or whatever, but I don't see what's particularly special about other jobs if it can do hard STEM stuff.
I thought the same but i dont think so anymore. My wife is a senior manager at a big 4 consultancy gig and she says copilot became freaking good at understanding tax, multinational company structure etc etc. Even if you need a few partners and experts at the top to validate things you can cut huge amounts of workers.
Exactly. Regarding software, it is trained on a massive corpus of code and the feedback loop can be very fast (playing well into LLM's upsides) and results are ... mediocre.
Recently I had to go through some building regulations and Claude's advices were catastrophic.
The real trouble isn't that it can replace us. Instead, consider that when there have been two comparable technologies in the market, the market has invariably chosen the lowest-quality/worst one. Why? That's easy to understand... while the chosen option is objectively the worst, it's always the cheapest. And cheapest wins. It's not "can AI do his job?" so much as "is the AI cheaper than a human?". And I think we all know the answer to that... even if the silicon's expensive now, volume pricing, data center buildouts, and other economic forces will soon make it cheaper.
The thing that is truly mysterious to the managerial and ruling classes though... when everyone is unemployed, who will be able to afford to buy your junk? Whatever industry you're in, whatever it is you're selling, the people buying that have the money to buy it because they still have jobs. If you're cutting jobs at your company, that helps the bottom line, but every other company is doing the same thing. And they're laying off your customers.
Wealth is largely distributed by luck, though it has become more concentrated over the last 30 years or so. Most wealthy people aren't particularly smart in the intellectual sense but they tend to think they are, because what other explanation do they have?
Admitting you were just lucky, rather than exceptionally hardworking or talented, is something very few people are willing to do. In all my years, I've met almost no one who genuinely attributes what they have to luck rather than their own effort.
> Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?
Most people can't see two steps ahead. Most people believe the mainstream narrative and think they are outsmarting everyone else in the process. See how Trump tweets still work despite proving time and again that he's full of s**. These people will keep doing what they were doing until they are completely emptied out.
I believe you're simply (correctly) identifying the lack of class consciousness that is rotting our civilization. If everyone believes they are smarter than everyone else, and will be able to come up ahead in the rat race, then there's no one left to organize and take the collective actions needed to smoothen the AI transition.
"want to see where it goes". Ok, what if it goes somewhere awful? A "paradigm shift" could easily just mean "corporate feudalism". It's not "small minded" to consider that not all change is good, and skepticism isn't a bad personality trait.
People acting as if statistical text generation is thought is very bad, and very widespread. Imagine everybody, adults, pundits, people who get paid to have smart opinions, pretended HTML was some alien technology, the voice of God, just because they never bother to click "view source". That is the quality of the discourse right now, and a regression so bad no material benefits, none of which will materialize for the people who are already getting squeezed as hard as is possible anyway, could make up for it.
> I think it’s small minded people like you, only preoccupied with your small little niche that can’t see why more open minded people see so much potential in the technology, whether it directly benefits them or not.
Ah yes the small minded people worrying about their mortgages, purchasing power, and basically identity and social status. You know those small things we all work towards all of our lives.
No one would respect a parent who offers up their children to be eaten up by Progress. Here Timmy, step into the meat grinder. No, don’t be afraid, don’t be selfish; mommy wants to see what happens once we step through.
The same holds for the individual without any dependants. It’s just less immediately apparent. Small-minded self-preservation is more respect worthy and rational than big-minded foolishness.
This doesn’t even get into how this is not about being against Progress but about being under the thumb of Capital. The entity that is holding the Progress mask.
One would hope progress directly benefits more than the tech CEOs and investors. They're the ones going around heralding fully automated societies and god-level AIs. Open minded people also recognize the dangers of technological disruption. Let us not forget how social media went from being viewed as utopian to dystopian in a decade.
Social media offered no value. If LLMs get about 5x better at what they do they offer a lot in terms of medical discoveries, governance, dirt cheap labor, fully automated raw material to end product pipelines, automated farming and the list goes on and on.
You should read a book on how LLMs actually work on a technical level. Saying they just need to get "5x better" and suddenly they're performing miracles is just nonsense hyperbole
Dirt cheap labor doesn't sound good for the working class. At best they get a livable UBI, while the capital class becomes even richer and more powerful.
I don't know where you're getting governance and manufacturing stuff that sounds like advanced robotics out of LLMs.
The title is a little misleading as it sounds like it might hint at the end state of next token prediction - i.e. will we reach AGI with it and so on. Instead, this is entirely about "means of production" and "class war" stuff. While that may be coming, it isn't clear that this is the most likely outcome, its just the most pessimistic one. The author might as well have included that it will "be the end of the human race" as well, since once you get to the future state described, there is no alternative outcome that I can see.
I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing.
Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.
All of history is the history of class war. The post-WWII social-democratic years were a kind of truce, but truces in the class war are always unstable.
The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. Was working in an office and being in countless standups that bad?
> The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head.
You could also say what it is you think you already know that others are about to find out, and what it has to do with class war.
It requires a nascent analogous architecture to biology (neural nets) and a discovery (next token prediction) to exactly match evolution. I think that is unlikely. Instead it will be a tool that is capable of doing certain things that machines were not capable of previously.
People have bargaining power through their military services. If even that job is taken by AI, there is truly no recourse for the people left at all. These are the sentiments of Yuval Noah Harari.
The first person videos of drones hunting terrified soldiers coming out of Ukraine seem relevant.
Apparently the last moments of the hunt are pretty much automated now, which increased the kill-rate considerably.
>But lately I’ve been thinking if it is just a class issue? This cohort of people likely have a cushion that softens the concussive blows they are doling out right now. They perhaps have the luxury of a somewhat functioning government and a social safety net that they are witness to in all walks of life. Over half the world does not. Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight the people at the bottom rungs.
In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI?
One large part of this is that all the heads of AI companies and business leaders in the US and Europe keep talking about how AI is going to take jobs away and displace "lower-value human capital", while we see power shortages and higher energy rates in areas where AI datacenters are built. Meanwhile, China's 15th 5 year plan involves integrating AI across the whole economy while expanding vocational retraining programs, and building out new renewable infrastructure to power datacenters. The Chinese Human Resources Ministry expects AI to create 6-10 million new jobs in the short term, and the Chinese government plans to use it in the long term to fill in gaps in the labor force caused by its demographic shortages.
I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.
Seems to me that it is downstream from the fact that China's economy is growing strongly and strong state power means that they see infrastructural improvements. US and European governments reflect the views of their people which are generally retrogressive and aimed at a fictional view of the 1970s as described in The Simpsons. Consequently, the Chinese are enthusiastic about Nuclear Power, and Solar Power, and Wind Energy, and AI, and ship building, and space programs, and trains, and electric vehicles, and so on ad infinitum to the degree that they don't mind smoggy cities to get these. Meanwhile Western nations mostly want to live in whatever they already have and would prefer nothing change or if it does that this change moves them closer to a past world, while nonetheless enjoying clean air and water.
I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.
The classic progression of an economy is resource -> manufacturing -> knowledge.
AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.
> In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries.
I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.
Maybe it has to do with % of blue collar vs. white collar jobs in those countries? I also wonder if they have stronger safety nets for displaced workers? It is curious. My anecdata has shown that people who feel "safe" job wise are either neutral or pro. Otherwise negative.
The attitudes aren’t 1-1 comparable. China is on a winning streak in terms of socioeconomic development, and AI is likely seen as merely a new technology in the context of the social contract. The US is going the opposite way, and people here view AI through the lens of oligarchy more often than not. I wouldn’t say that a lot of people feel as optimistic, even if they are actually more economically secure.
Do you have direct experience with this? From what I understand China has huge youth employment issues right now, and the 35 and out (at even non tech companies) meme has some basis in reality.
China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).
China is still riding the high of its economic miracle, that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is why the population is so complacent toward their authoritarian government. For now, at least.
That's a pretty generic answer that would have been correct 10 or 20 years ago as well. But where are the recent trends in youth employment? Is automation reducing the need for workers going to cause (or is causing) social instability?
I saw a tiktok a few days ago about the proliferation of autonomous food delivery taking away jobs from delivery bike riders (the ones pretty ubiquitous in China today), and this kind of job was sort of considered a safety net if you lost your normal job (in that you can can always deliver food). It was Chinese authored and I doubt anyone who has never been to China would have understood it anyways.
The idea of the social contract impacting perceptions of AI is interesting to me. I hate to use the words “permanent underclass”, but perhaps the main difference is a fear of that permanent underclass actually materializing. In the US, it seems that that would be the logical endpoint of the capitalist system and many people predict AI simply replacing them permanently. Of course, China is not completely communist, but since their social contract is much less individualistic and more collectivist, maybe that makes people see AI as much more likely to uplift society as a whole or at least “trickle down”.
I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.
One of the billionaires on the All In Podcast, (which I listen to sometimes to get that kind of perspective), mentioned that one thing the U.S. and China could work on as far as regulating AI, is Know Your Customer controls. At first after one of the hosts said this I didn't think much of it but then started thinking through the second order effects later on. Why would that be such a main concern? He gave the example of dangerous people using AI to do bad things, but I think the subtext is much more complicated. At least from the ownership class point of view. Which also ties into the original idea behind OpenAI. Which is that the public should have access to the full abilities of any model equally. But the ownership class can't have this. In another post someone made a good point about licenses and this can be extended to stuff like the legal system, where at the end of the day the personal human connections decide things far more than what a model would compute the result of a case to be...
So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S.
In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.
From what I've seen, The Chinese are more likely to believe the government has their back and the benefits of AI will be spread across the population. While Americans believe it will go towards billionaire mega yachts while they starve on the street.
Education systems and cultures that value "sounding" correct, repeating patterns and information, and immediate practical gain appear to like AI more that the cultures with a strong tradition of critical thinking. The cultures that love AI are the same cultures that will tend to build something cheap and quickly so that it can sell. The cultures that are less favorable are the ones that invest in building things correctly and solidly and value long term thinking. People with the immediate-gain-over-truth mindset love AI.
A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth.
In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.
AI has already replaced a lot of workers, but there is still no AI-managed business out there, regardless of doomsday PR.
I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing.
Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident.
In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.
It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to.
The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means?
My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."
I did not have a voice to inventions created before I was an adult. I have one now. And in fact, we have lessons from very similar technologies on how this would play out (internet + social media), so we can't say "how could we have known?!".
What are these complaints really other than "I had a nice position in the previous system and I'm afraid of losing it"? Many felt disposable and not valued already, maybe it was a good system for you but not for many. You have a valued skill and you enjoy working in a field using that skill, well for 90+% of people that isn't what work is, you're lamenting the loss of something that the vast majority never had access to in the first place. What exactly is so great about our current predicament that it needs to be protected from new technology?
> So, where does next token prediction leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.
The question is what classes of jobs will replace the ones made obsolete by a particular innovation, and how many vacancies there will be. With electricity we had managerial, creative, high dexterity, etc. jobs. If a sufficient amount of human capabilities are replaced then that may be different to electricity. Also it's about how many top-tier "power plants" (AI, robotics) there are, who owns them, and once "everything is solved" (which it isn't yet) how much of that will trickle down to everyone else's life quality.
So, where does electricity leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.
What? People made electricity manually for centuries, collectively? And who were the electricity rent-seekers? Electricity has almost always been a public service.
People also don't make data centers, GPU, or do AI research collectively. The part that is made, collectively, are the layers of knowledge required to provide either.
> Electricity has almost always been a public service.
I have no clue where that would be true, if anywhere. Not where I live. I am paying a private company, and the electricity that they are selling me is generated by other private companies.
> The compartmentalisation that must be required by the scientists and engineers to reconcile with the fact that their work being used to bomb and kill people must be crazy.
I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring?
I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...
If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence.
If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay?
Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise.
That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.
> If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed?
I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.
> If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed?
I would be very conflicted, because the inherent purpose of a gun is its ability to harm people, regardless of whether any given concrete case constitutes a crime or not.
Honestly, I'm baffled that a software engineer would want to work at those companies. Like, you think they're going to keep you around once their AI is good enough to improve itself? Or are they just holding out hope that they can get their bag before billionaires create a permanent underclass, and they can be a step above the untouchables?
This author fundamentally doesn't understand the mental model of the people they are describing and makes huge sweeping claims in what they think is a in a savvy manner but they are completely wrong.
Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about.
1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes
2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this?
3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should.
The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.
> If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been)
This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume.
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question?
Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.
On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution are you assuming for the displaced workers? A scary number of Americans live pay check to pay check. How many will be forced to default on their mortgage or withdraw from their retirement savings? How many can afford to go back to school to retrain to be a plumber or nurse?
Breaking eggs to make omelette sounds good unless you're the egg. There's an excellent quote from Thomas Friedman: "when you get laid off, the unemployment rate is not 3.4%, it's a 100%". It's great to fantasize about future utopian abundance, but most people live in the present and most will be presently ground to powder. All technologies have a barbelling effect. Redistribution of surplus does not happen by default. The tumult and disruption may last a decade or more. And the fruits, if we make it to the other side, will not be for this generation to enjoy. The textile workers did not cheer for the loom, because they were not the ones that enjoyed the joy of cheap Uniqlo or H&M t-shirts.
On point 2: Many people derive meaning and identity from their work. Acquiring expertise, feeling useful, contributing to society, honing your craft are all things that leads to a good life. It could be that after AI we will all write poetry in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon, and paint in the evenings, but I don't think most people are like this, it's certainly not the way I am wired.
On point 3: "utopian AI is so good that words can't describe it so it can't and shouldn't be stopped". I do not think utopian abundance is guaranteed just by copy-pasting data centers across the globe. There is a non-negligible chance that things go really badly.
Lastly, I think the usage of the word "class" shouldn't automatically be linked to "Marxist ideology". This is cheap rhetoric: "class" --> associated with Marx --> communist loonies of the 20th century --> therefore disregard all argument presented.
> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted.
Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI.
Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.
Calling this a straw man would be attributing an unnecessarily sturdy construction.
Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc.
The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal"
The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative.
Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature.
I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you.
I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.
> Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase.
We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.
Perhaps you should check your books again, reasoning and reinforcement learning are different things.
Some reasoning is trained by reinforecement you could just finetune reasoning, people have had better results than you would expect by brute forcing inserting tokens to periodically say "wait, let me think."
Reinforcement trains things to produce better results, not move towards a specific correct result. There is no future answer to predict.
Every time someone invokes the "playing God" / "the hubris of creation" card, it makes me think they're the proud ones, and this case is none the different.
I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all.
I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either.
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.
Especially basic scientific research is so far removed from actually useful applications that there is no direct cause and effect relationship between single items of research and any eventual effect on society.
Were the vaccines accessible because of the sympathy towards the people at the bottom, or so that they can go back to work as soon as possible? Medicine is subsidised when there is a global pandemic, but not when individual lives are at stake.
I don’t really find it fruitful to speculate about motives in complex systems. The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances, which seems clearly untrue.
Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available, sure, there are lots of plausible theories that may or may be true, in whole or part, and which we’ll never prove one way or the other. Believe what makes you happy, or angry, or whatever mood you prefer.
> Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available
But it's not me who is shifting, right? The claim was:
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
not
> The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances
My point is to reject the claim that the high availability of vaccines is a counter-example. It's a political decision, not a science/technology related one.
You’re still getting at motives rather than facts, which means it’s unfalsibisble.
If you’re going to say that fact X is not a counter/example because [subjective, speculative reasons] then I’m confident you’ll never find a fact that contradicts your beliefs. There will always be some “oh, well the bridge collapsed, but it wasn’t bad engineering it was political reasons, so it doesn’t count as a collapse.”
What I said is not subjective/speculative. It is not even unfalsifiable.
To restate, COVID vaccine can't be used as an example of "science/technology's sympathy towards the bottom rungs". They were only accessible because governments purchased those vaccines from science/technology companies and gave away for free. Companies developed it to make profit.
If the governments didn't purchase billions of doses at a subsidised price, most people wouldn't be able to afford it [1]. I don't see how this conclusion is subjective, speculative, or unfalsifiable?
> The promise of capitalism has always been - you will have a spin at the roulette table.
This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.
The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.
LLMs reveal an important truth that we were already deeply aware of. With this cognitive offloading, the interests that drive us lose their meaning. If friction disappears, there is no longer any desire, pleasure, longing, obstacle, or demand. It is indolence, and it goes by the name of apathy. All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished? The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it. I doubt that after having experienced deprivation, shame, and death; as well as their positive counterparts, we will ever fail to overcome entropy. We will adapt, for that is all we know and can do by default. What is given without effort does not transform.
That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate.
I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.
I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim.
Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.
Completely, we even added Claude and Cubic in our ci that drop comments on their own. It’s laziness and/or « I don’t care » on his part
> Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value.
Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet?
All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read further.
AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow. It doesn't prevent creativity, it just makes it easier and more accessible.
> AI is just a tool
You are forgetting that AI can also use tools.
And those AIs can be used as tools as well by other AIs.
The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.
> The moment you start working on something, someone else is already automating the exact thing you are doing now.
Good. If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting. Perhaps a more interesting problem to fix is having the people working on something getting told about the automation.
> If a machine can do my job then I can work on something more interesting
Oh my god, you don't get it.
The more interesting thing? Someone else is already automating doing that exact interesting thing you are doing now.
All the way down.
I recently at around 42yo learned how to darn/mend my socks. My mom taught me how to do it.
I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.
Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.
Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.
I too enjoy mending my socks! I wear mostly cotton athletic socks, so sewing them up is enough. I can't darn worth a darn.
Patches I tried didn't last and I haven't found a machine that works. And it feels bad to buy a new pair of socks only b/c of a hole in the heel.
Do you use a washing machine or do you manually wash your clothes in a stream?
Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.
AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.
>Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.
>AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.
A compression algorithm finds and removes redundancy. Simple automation is like simple compression algorithms (RLE like). AI (which even internally - at least the encoding to the representation parts - looks like compression) just like a much more sophisticated compression algorithm which finds and removes redundancy where we thought the creativity and originality were.
It does look like our civilization has accumulated a lot of cruft masquerading as creative/original/intellectual activities ("Bullshit jobs" comes to mind, also all that talk about stagnation in science, and all those huge collective collaborations - where collective there is a stagnation - and now with AI individual scientists will again be able to wield all the bleeding edge across the wide fields while digging deep in desired target research direction), and the AI is the vacuum cleaner for that cruft.
I feel the same as you. But at the same time: do you not think your CEO will be proven wrong? Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm just rationalizing, but surely code quality, and code understanding, does matter?
And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?
How is anyone happy with this trajectory?!
I’m in a similar line of thinking and actually some customers are making their own version of our tool. It’s nowhere near feature complete but it suits their needs.
Code quality does matter it’s just marketing people being shortsighted because their job is to react to the market. LLM gives a sense of « it’s kind of easy to build stuff, why bother loosing time with quality when I’m there at 80% in 20% of the time ? ».
There is compounding effects where given any big enough system this won’t scale, even Google did talks this week on this topic. So I guess you’re right, time will prove who’s right or wrong and what bet was the best with which consequence
They matter, but you can't argue that human written quality code that strokes the developer's ego is so much better than AI written code of slightly less quality. Understanding also matters, but now you're trying to familiarize yourself with the AI's code, not your colleagues' code and never the code you've written yourself.
i guess it really depends... look at claude code itself, terrible code but rakes in the money dunnit
> i guess it really depends... look at claude code itself, terrible code but rakes in the money dunnit
I don't know. Does it?
Also: Maintainability is a property for which the associated costs don't show up right away.
These things are biologically/neurologically caused. They're adaptations that worked well in our ancestral environment (effort -> reward = satisfaction, stress = effort) which are now possibly becoming maladaptations. We won't be the first organism to experience this (likely unfortunate) transition. What's concerning is that it usually precipitates something bad like large genetic alterations through natural selection or the simple elimination of the organism from certain environments (like fireflies near cities).
Like the lion in the zoo that gets food thrown to him.
Who do you think is going to throw food at you?
> All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished?
What ideal?
> The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it.
You mean it would be a good thing?
> I doubt that [..] we will ever fail to overcome entropy
What does this mean?
> What is given without effort does not transform.
Children who have loving parents absolutely are affected by that, even if the love is given unconditionally and was there even before they had a sense of self. We are also very much transformed by living on a planet with sunlight and all that entails, and we never had to turn the sun on for that.
It's true that muscles you don't use atrophy, and that includes the brain and "the heart", but it's also true that the best things in life are free.
> What ideal?
What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer. As for the impoverished ideal, some of the fundamental goals that serve as a pretext for these technologies have not even been achieved and yet we are already, gradually and methodically, being stripped of using them.
> You mean it would be a good thing?
It would be a good thing, yes. Not the most desirable option, to be sure. But proportionally less harmful to all those who would then be forced to do without it and adapt without necessarily conforming. I admit it's a divisive issue and that it's unlikely to happen that way. But we won't be able to reason with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.
> What does this mean?
This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos, because decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.
> the best things in life are free.
That’s an interesting thought experiment, indeed. There are indeed things that are given to us, and for which we can be grateful. Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created; everything is transformed.” That’s kind of the problem with quotes, they sound nice but don’t always take the complexity of the world into account.
It was a pleasure exchanging with you.
> What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer.
Ah I see, I thought you had a specific ideal in mind, but you rather mean having any ideal at all, right? I agree, I'm dismayed how many view any idealism as "immature" or "unrealistic". It's very tragic IMO because we're not so passive because the world would be so hard to make better, the world is so hard to make better because we're so passive, and think so small.
> with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.
Hey, didn't you just deplore lack of idealism? Of course we can't reason with them, not with that attitude! But knowing that other humans just want the best for themselves and those they love, surely they shall see the good sense of our arguments, if only we bring them forth with the right cheerful spirit! I'm only half-joking, and of course you also have a point.
If "AI" does real work and gets better and better, they'll price us out, stomp us underfoot like ants. A giant blob of consumers saying "go away, batin!" until it bursts and dries out, leaving nothing but some Moloch monolith. The upside of that would be that we don't have to worry about arguments, or beat ourselves up for not having tried hard enough. We'd be like other early humans species that curiously are no longer around.
BUT if we're right, and it's really just putting everything people made into a blender, to produce a brief powder flash and then confusion and regret, we'd do well to hold on to our ideals, whatever they may be, and to caring and thinking things through as best as we can; in short, to being human. There's a new drug, a lot of people got addicted or kinda lost their minds, but a lot of them will come around, too, and should know they're always welcome back.
> This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos
Okay, so you meant we will never overcome entropy, not, as you originally wrote, that we will never fail to overcome it. You can see how that would be confusing.
> decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.
Not that I would call us or anything perfect (gotta keep it around as an ideal :), but that's what life does, struggle against entropy, introduce and proliferate some order, for a little while. The idea that with just enough power and/or knowledge we can somehow make a leap into a different category (one that lasts) is probably just wishful thinking, if there's even any thought involved, so the best we can do is try to be excellent, and excellent to each other.
(At least, that'd be my ideal, someone else might say we must fight as brutally as we can so at the end of time, some super stronk warrior gets to turn out the light, but it's so easy to show such things up as stupid so that's what we should keep doing)
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> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted.
I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote.
I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?
I'm thinking of some similarity between the non-technical middle manager using agents to avoid the biggest obstacle of their developers, and a person installing a wall socket at home.
It's not too difficult to install a wall socket, but many things can go wrong, so people would normally call an electrician. In some jurisdictions you are not allowed to install it without a license, or probably you can install it only for yourself but not for anyone else if you don't have a license, and you need to call an inspector and check your work when you're done. Some other jurisdictions truly don't care, you can do whatever, and all the possible damage is on you.
Electricians are somewhat fungible, because you often don't care who will do the job for you, but the profession exists and they can pay their bills.
I wonder how far we are until, at least in some jurisdictions, a person won't be legally allowed to update the website that stores customers' data or processes payments without being a licensed software developer, and how rules, should they be adopted, will change our profession.
> in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability.
Hasn't this been the case since the power loom put hand weavers out of a job?
This time it is different. Ai promised to be the power loom for all things. Knowledge work and all physical work through robotics. And there will be no more jobs to turn to. Why might an AI company allow for humanity to live in this future? They’d have no utility. No economic purpose. They’d have no unique skill. Supporting them over the datacenter amounts to investing in waste heat. And they may even rise up and destabilize the horror you’ve created for planet earth. Game theory suggests keeping humans on earth is increasingly a liability.
I hate the term "democratization". It's putting a respectable face on something that shouldn't be respectable at all. In the age of the internet, coding and other creative skills have always been largely democratized to people that care enough to learn. Nothing is being "democratized" by AI, there's simply (an attempt) at driving the value of actual skill to zero so the skill-less and stupid can purchase their way to mediocrity (without the benefit of transferring that money to someone who has worked to be skilled). There is NOTHING "democratic" about that.
It’s not coding that’s being democratized, it’s the ability to create games, tools, etc, that require coding.
Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?
If that happened, Farrari's would simply lose their value and something more rare would take it's place. The scarcity is the point. Same with art, if you "democratise" it somehow humans will seek out a new form of artistic expression that is not accessible to people with a $10 midjourney subscription. And that is OK, good actually.
Perhaps to some degree, but there is intrinsic value to a Ferrari if you enjoy driving. That doesn’t change with scarcity.
But I agree, and even celebrate, that a hypothetical future with abundance will be bad for speculators and the luxury-obsessed, and great for people who enjoy the first-order benefits of products.
They’re letting us test drive the Ferrari while they extract our data.
Then they’ll raise the price.
That's a product, not a skill. We're not talking about people getting cheap cars, we're talking about nobody being able to make a living anymore. And no, this isn't like other revolutions, because there's no "upskilling" into it when it threatens all white collar work. (I'm sorry but I don't think prompting AI is going to be some amazing new profession, it'll be at best a transitory phase). Best case is to buy some durable jeans and learn a trade?
Of course, I don't think this is happening any time soon because I don't believe the hype machine. But if you do believe the hype machine, you should be honest about what you're facing.
Also, for what it's worth as a person that's written (and will continue to write) games and tools etc., there were already plenty of forces democratizing that (free engines, asset stores with reusable code and art, etc.) The difference was that there was still skill involved, and at the end of the day you were paying another human being for their effort if you bought or used pre-existing components. There's no skill in AI, not really.
Also, I'm really not that interested in playing a game created by AI, and judging from the reaction gamers and game developers have had to this technology, I don't think many people are. So, yay, you can make a game that has a tiny audience with zero satisfaction from having done something hard and learned something? Also it's likely going to be extremely derivative, because the AI can only really work with what it's been trained on.
Wait a second, you say its not coding thats getting democratized. It is the "ability to create" software... hm i wonder what would be the ability to write software? Maybe something like software engineering?
Also your example with Ferrari is completely flawed, and I dont give a fuck about what investment bankers think or do. What are you even talking about here?
Please explain the first part more than you hand waved away to make a completely unrelated metaphorical case. What is the ability to create software if not software engineering? How are both different?
The whole point of AI coding is (partial) decoupling of software from human coding.
You might as well ask what the ability is to create arbitrary images to any specification, if not painting? But AI image gen is not painting.
It’s painful and confusing to those who’ve mistaken the tool for the product. Why, you ordered that pizza for delivery, that’s not cooking! No, but it is eating.
Same thing with software. Some people just want the outcome, not the process, and it’s pointless to whinge about how it’s somehow less legitimate.
You can make coffee by brewing it or by using Nespresso.
I am against how its being used as well, in fact Authoritarianism is literally "central power to preserve the political status quo" - and that is what you have folks: OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Facebook/etc are all central powers.
Coding was always power that you can have if you just read the freely available info but having access to a computer and internet is not free - if we can change this it would make democratized.
Coding was always "democratized". You just had to put in the effort of learning and understanding. Finding free resources is very easy.
AI doesn't make that learning and understanding easy but just allows people to skip it.
That doesn't mean democratization at all.
>You just had to put in the effort of learning and understanding.
Yeah it's always so weird when people anthropomorphize the harsh physical reality of learning a skill that is accessible to everyone as some sort of secret boys club, where the existing club members do not let you in, when the only difference between the members and outsiders is whether they've paid the entry fee or not.
A 10'000 hour entry fee does rule out a fair bunch of people though, in practice. While there are few artificial barriers to learning to code, there still are some natural ones, like time.
is time a barrier or a requirement? its a bit like saying time is a natural barrier to solving hashes. like yeah, its an inherent part of the process that cannot be skipped. You cannot learn without time, but thats just the laws of the universe not a barrier to learning.
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> individual bargaining capability
Thinking that "individual bargaining capability" capability is an especially useful thing for society as a whole is one of the things that has got us into the current Hobbesian mess
> democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager
Works the other way too. Now a junior engineer can use AI to do much of what a middle manager had been doing in the past.
Frankly I think the middle manager ought to be WAY more worried than most.
I have a more depressing theory. I think class is part of it, but I'm starting to suspect that a shockingly large number of people lack the critical thinking skills needed to think out the implications of this stuff. I say that because I've met so many people of the managerial class that seem to think it's going to replace the annoying people they have to pay, but somehow they don't think it's going to come for them. It's like we have some sort of society-wide main-character syndrome where a bunch of people just think that somehow the machine can replace every other job, and yet after ingesting all of human knowledge it somehow won't be able to compete with someone with "domain expertise"? Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe? I don't think this doomsday scenario is going to happen, but I think the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
I don't think its entirely class. I've met many people who have convinced themselves they have some special sauce--even in software! And even those who are insulated like doctors and plumbers don't realize they're still at risk from second order effects. What happens when half of their customers are broke? That possibility is not an exaggeration. Even if everyone re-skills over night, people will default on their mortgages at a scale greater than the '08 financial crisis.
And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.
Even if you are a plumber and we don’t automate plumbing, you’ll have half the population displaced and switching to plumbing. Everything that isn’t automated will be over saturated.
Or average joe becomes DIY plumber with help of chatGPT and there is a lot less demand for plumbers then.
I don't think the reason that most people don't DIY plumbing is a lack of accessible information. Any physical craft like that requires practice, so I think there's a real moat there.
There is a lot less information online about the physical trades compared to software development. Plumbers don’t post on ToiletOverflow.com all day helping each other with their little tricks and sharing tribal knowledge. Pick a random brass fitting at the hardware store and try to google its purpose; you’d be surprised by the scant detail even when yielding plenty of shopping links
Fair point. Also:
> ToiletOverflow.com
Applause!
How does average joe afford the tools and parts they need with no job employing them?
Where I live, just the call out fee for a plumber would cover the cost of tools and materials with enough left over for beers afterwards. If you’re relatively handy and willing to thing things through, the main obstacle to doing all your own plumbing (again, at least where I live) is regulatory capture.
How does he afford a plumber then ...?
That's the point. Plumbers will be broke, too, because people who are supposed to hire them will not have jobs.
When we continue this line of thought far enough, we get to ask who's going to pay for the hardware and the electricity to run the AI that's taking all the jobs.
This is exactly the missing long-term perspective. All AI creators are focused either on the projected wins or the shiny technology, ignoring societal effects. Not that they should, they are engineers or MBAs after all, but somebody should. Somebody like us, or better somebody with better reach and better knowledge, should figure out a way to offer a future also to former clerks.
I don't get how this didn't become yet a major election topic in most democracies. It's business as usual mostly.
Because humans are bad at reacting to things that might happen; we’re far better once there is a literal crisis.
ChatGPT is probably less useful than youtube for this kind of stuff.
Might help to find the right video though
These days I find Gemini often recommends me a youtube video that's just an AI voice reading out a reddit post that was chat gpt generated full of emoji.
Will so many people switch to plumbing though ? Really depends on how old you are when you get canned (I don't think its realistic for most 40 year olds to start a plumbing career), how good you are with your hands and physical things and whether you can survive the switch psychologically; I don't see many investment bankers or software devs survive such a switch. I'm 42, even if I was very good with my hands (which I'm not) I don't think it would have been a realistic transition; by realistic I mean survivable psychologically.
So people will not all switch to plumbing, indeed. But then to what? There's only so much need for tattoo artists and geriatric care - which your customers must also afford to pay.
Yep. I don't have good answers and neither do our politicians. Things will have to change rather radically.
Our sinks will never clog again, at least.
Perhaps the feeling is that in a competitive society (which most of us live in) as long as things aren't collapsing I don't see why a plumber/doctor should care if a bunch of lawyers and software devs will be out of a job. They will become relatively wealthier even if their income is taking a hit. Their purchasing power should rise if most of white collar work is collapsing.
They would become wealthier in a real sense, since the services that used to be provided by the scarce labor of lawyers and software devs would now be far cheaper. In fact due to Jevons' paradox, even lawyers and software devs would enjoy far higher living standards due to AI. The boost in efficiency just creates a spike in demand for the remaining human component of the job, no matter how tiny.
How would cheaper software development or lawyers massively raise standard of living for other people? Most people that need their standard of living improved don't even own computers, they generally don't have access to the capital needed to start a businesses, and they have no use for a lawyer outside of criminal matters.
That kind of thinking might work if 1, or 5, or 10% lose their income. If 50% do, there's revolution. And that's not great for anyone, including plumbers and doctors.
We will never see 50% of people lose their income, they'll just gradually transition into newer AI-powered roles. Their income will grow rather than shrink. The people who are at risk of losing their income will be those who reject working with AI entirely, but that's because they will be gradually made uncompetitive.
What are these newer AI-powered roles? Let's get to the specifics, please. I'm open to transition, or learn new, give me please a few starting points. I know AI and agents and skills.md already, so let's skip the basics, indicate me a few new jobs I could take.
The specifics is that AI just isn't good enough and there's a huge amount of viable human white-collar work. We're just speculating about what might happen in a future where AI gets good enough to perform most current white-collar jobs.
Yes, widespread automation of knowledge work is unlikely to decrease total production, so all the goods and services people currently demand will still be provided, but the power dynamic of who is consuming and who is providing might flip around. So a bunch of formerly upwardly-mobile people could end up at the bottom of the social hierarchy while others whom they used to look down upon will be able to afford servants for the first time in their lives.
I see little evidence that any social role reversal is going to occur. This technology is soon going to price out average to poor people when they have to pay true token costs. It might be the case that only the rich and powerful have access to the powerful models.
Poor people with hard-to-automate occupations don't necessarily need to be able to afford token costs for social role reversal to occur. They only need to be able to hire an even poorer person who used to earn a salary that exceeded even those token costs and who was laid off as a result.
Um, what poor person is hiring ANYONE? If you're able to hire a software dev, even a laid off one, you are not poor.
After going without food for a few days, even a software dev is going to have to swallow their pride and consider alternative employment options. You might think they could just take a poor person's existing job, but why would for example a meatpacking plant hire a software dev with zero meatpacking experience when they already have lots of experienced meatpackers and meat demand hasn't gone up? Meanwhile, the meatpackers might like it if they could have someone babysit their children, cook for them and clean their now much larger house (which used to belong to a software dev who fell on hard times and had to move out). And a steady supply of desolate characters holding up cardboard signs saying "I used to be a software dev, but now I would do literally anything for a meal" could put such luxury into their affordable range.
Agree on the knock-on effects. My prediction is deflation. Money will be worth more and more. As a consequence governments will have to step in to ensure inflation(with e.g. universal income), otherwise the economy stops.
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
> What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.
Yeah that also sounds realistic, and actually there's evidence of this dulling effect from even before llms. The attention economy has been literally streamlining.. well, the road to death. And nobody is angry.
I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.
AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones
> Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
See Brave new world.
The powerful people in our society are mostly idiots. The more they're in front of a microphone the more damage they do for themselves.
On the flip side, people think AI is magic: too much magic.
Even with large advances in reasoning and actionability, it still makes insane mistakes and it's wildly prone to prompt attacks. That is a fundamental flaw in the technology.
Even an AGI will lack the millennia of self-preservation evolution that will cause it to do crazy shit. So much of what humans do is governed by a desire to be alive and to be liked.
So, I'm not particularly worried about these changes happening rapid fire. I'm more concerned about the ladder pulling effect and misinformation.
So I am expecting the AI bubble to burst (or at least deflate) some time soon. Perhaps this puts me I an specific camp, I am not sure. But this whole "AI will replace X jobs" does not phase me, not because I think AI is useless. On the contrary I am a daily user, but in my mind, people fail to see that the economy is not built around jobs and capital, but wants (or needs) and trades. Even in a world where everything can be done better by a machine than a human, there will always be the "want" for an item that is handcrafted. AI is yet another tool that accelerates us to satisfy more "wants" and that's great. I'm looking at a whole lot of things that will be available in the future (especially software but not limited to) which are not available today, AI generated or not.
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Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first.
I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.
> Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen.
I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.
Realistically, I've only seen evidence about AI taking people's jobs, as is the case with LLMs, and in the case of robotics, killing people. Augmentation has always been something that gets talked about in research labs but I've never seen an actual product; and curing disease and old age is the domain of more traditional ML methods.
I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.
I meant augmentation in an abstract way, like making you more productive and freeing up your time from drudgery. This is the sales pitch that AI labs have started to pivot towards in their communication with the public after realizing the public don't want the creation of Skynet. There's a tension there because they want to sell the other vision (full replacement of labor) to investors so they can raise capital for DC builds at reasonable financing costs.
"Ingenuity" is what I think is missing. The sheer _want_ of solving a problem that is distinctly a living creature's concern.
The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.
The billionaires building doomsday bunkers get it.
No they do not - sheltering make sense only if there is anything worth waiting for on the other side.
Yeah, seems like a big downgrade to go from being a billionaire in society to a nobody in a bunker with no society waiting for you outside the bunker.
Oh imagine some society will be outside the bunker, waiting.
”We drop the bomb ourselves.”
> society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?
I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"
I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.
> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.
Correct me if I wrong, up to 40% of Roman citizens were on "welfare". This, at least, shows that it's not impossible to have a functioning society with a large percentage of people who only contribute political activity.
You mean they were slaves right
Nah. It was welfare for Roman citizens: cura annonae.
These people weren't completely idle for one, and Rome was subsidized by the rest of the Empire, from which it extracted wealth and resources.
Perhaps this is a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia (but kinda inverted) where everyone views AI as too inaccurate for their own niche, but perfectly fine for every other field that they know comparably little about.
I’ve been thinking about this, or a variant of it.
Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).
Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?
I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.
As of today, "minor expert" is the wrong way to phrase it. The flagship LLMs today are at best at an initiate or apprentice level in every field.[1] This is not meant as a derisive remark – having something at hand that is initiate level in every field is remarkable and useful. But it's nowhere near expertise anywhere.
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/stop-using-junior-and-senior
You seriously think current LLM is just at apprentice level in programming? It can write stuff one shot that I’d expected even some experts to struggle to do even with ample more time allowed.
Kind of, yeah. LLMs are hyperoptimized for one-shotting. But all of their code is like that. It's poison for the long term health of the codebase.
Yes. The definition of the apprentice/journeyman boundary is that a journeyman can do a day's job unsupervised. LLMs cannot do that.
They will one shot with bunch of duplicated code, somehow they will just omit basic things, like security middleware. It will all kind of work. But then you make additional passes to do review and clean up, suddenly there is a lot more work to make it half decent.
You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective? I’m never going to be in some kind of space colony but do I want to see them happen? You betcha.
> You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective?
Yes, the vast majority of people care about their jobs first rather than a theoretical future where mostly rich people colonize space. It's much easier to imagine yourself becoming poor than living in Mars.
What I was 9, I lay awake thinking about how humanity will one day explore space and discover all sorts of new species, make new friends.. I imagined music concerts with humans and animals and all sorts of creatures.. and then it hit me, I won't be alive by then. I basically realized I'm mortal, and cried for hours.
I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.
> I want that type of sadness back, please. Right now I'm relieved if anything to know I won't see 2126 and beyond, but that's not because I'm inherently pessimistic, I came to this world optimistic as can be.
This is normal I think. You grew up. Not wanting to live forever is totally sensible.
I didn't think about "forever", then or now. It's more about seeing the next few hundred years as an exciting time of progress and adventures, of ideas -- rather than just a snuff movie I'd rather pass on.
And "growing up" kind of can mean everything and nothing. I noticed that humans prey on humans, destroy and poison animal species and each other for nothing, for entertainment or to compensate for psychological issues. It is normal for a child to reject that, and a moral imperative for an adult to act on that, not to "get over it".
Come to think of it, kids aren't "naive" that they don't know these things. Adults are correctly ashamed of them, so they only discuss them with people who will accept shrugs, i.e. other adults. If we were honest to children about the world, the things in it we accept, they would freak the fuck out and probably be traumatized. We tell them to not kick a dog, but oh by the way, Abu Ghraib. If they say "shit" they get scolded, if a strange man scares them you should tell their parents and they'll be mad at that man, but if people murder thousands of little children, just evaporate them, that's just how it is, nothing can be done. Some people are insane and rule over us, starve us out, and that's why mommy and daddy have to work 5 jobs to have nothing compared to what the grandparents had, but here's that cartoon you like.
I'd say what is called "rational" and "grown up" is often just diminished and broken, barely surviving via constant distraction from one's own state.
You're not wrong. A bit too bleak perhaps but yeah everything you said is mostly factual. Society is a hypocritical shit show it is what it is.
I think it’s this but also that we all see the value in our own niche because it’s ours, and have more trouble seeing the values in other niches. So it becomes a self perpetuating positive reinforcement thing.
Actually I think AI will largely automate software and math and really not much else in the short to medium term. (speaking as a computer/math person)
I don't see why that should be the case. The only reason software is getting focused on first is:
1. Software devs are obviously going to have a better idea how to apply AI to software development compared to other fields. So of course the coding tools are going to be the first things made.
2. Formal verification makes the problem easier by allowing for iterative feedback (compilers, proofs, etc.)
The second argument is, I think, somewhat valid, but ignores that a lot of other professions also have similar verification systems even if they're a bit less rigorous. The first argument just explains why things are the way they are now, it's not indicative of the future. I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that other jobs than mine require less cognitive horsepower or whatever, but I don't see what's particularly special about other jobs if it can do hard STEM stuff.
I thought the same but i dont think so anymore. My wife is a senior manager at a big 4 consultancy gig and she says copilot became freaking good at understanding tax, multinational company structure etc etc. Even if you need a few partners and experts at the top to validate things you can cut huge amounts of workers.
Exactly. Regarding software, it is trained on a massive corpus of code and the feedback loop can be very fast (playing well into LLM's upsides) and results are ... mediocre.
Recently I had to go through some building regulations and Claude's advices were catastrophic.
It's normal Gell-Mann amnesia and, yeah, it's a really big part of why AI is so accepted.
The real trouble isn't that it can replace us. Instead, consider that when there have been two comparable technologies in the market, the market has invariably chosen the lowest-quality/worst one. Why? That's easy to understand... while the chosen option is objectively the worst, it's always the cheapest. And cheapest wins. It's not "can AI do his job?" so much as "is the AI cheaper than a human?". And I think we all know the answer to that... even if the silicon's expensive now, volume pricing, data center buildouts, and other economic forces will soon make it cheaper.
The thing that is truly mysterious to the managerial and ruling classes though... when everyone is unemployed, who will be able to afford to buy your junk? Whatever industry you're in, whatever it is you're selling, the people buying that have the money to buy it because they still have jobs. If you're cutting jobs at your company, that helps the bottom line, but every other company is doing the same thing. And they're laying off your customers.
If this were true, nobody would be buying iPhones, nobody would be buying Teslas, in fact, nobody would be buying premium class cars.
Wealth is largely distributed by luck, though it has become more concentrated over the last 30 years or so. Most wealthy people aren't particularly smart in the intellectual sense but they tend to think they are, because what other explanation do they have?
Admitting you were just lucky, rather than exceptionally hardworking or talented, is something very few people are willing to do. In all my years, I've met almost no one who genuinely attributes what they have to luck rather than their own effort.
> Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?
Most people can't see two steps ahead. Most people believe the mainstream narrative and think they are outsmarting everyone else in the process. See how Trump tweets still work despite proving time and again that he's full of s**. These people will keep doing what they were doing until they are completely emptied out.
I believe you're simply (correctly) identifying the lack of class consciousness that is rotting our civilization. If everyone believes they are smarter than everyone else, and will be able to come up ahead in the rat race, then there's no one left to organize and take the collective actions needed to smoothen the AI transition.
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"want to see where it goes". Ok, what if it goes somewhere awful? A "paradigm shift" could easily just mean "corporate feudalism". It's not "small minded" to consider that not all change is good, and skepticism isn't a bad personality trait.
“Some of you may die but that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Then the peasant took that as an inspirational speech.
People acting as if statistical text generation is thought is very bad, and very widespread. Imagine everybody, adults, pundits, people who get paid to have smart opinions, pretended HTML was some alien technology, the voice of God, just because they never bother to click "view source". That is the quality of the discourse right now, and a regression so bad no material benefits, none of which will materialize for the people who are already getting squeezed as hard as is possible anyway, could make up for it.
So you expect everyone to be a selfless hero who puts AI progress over lives of their own and their families?
> I think it’s small minded people like you, only preoccupied with your small little niche that can’t see why more open minded people see so much potential in the technology, whether it directly benefits them or not.
Ah yes the small minded people worrying about their mortgages, purchasing power, and basically identity and social status. You know those small things we all work towards all of our lives.
No one would respect a parent who offers up their children to be eaten up by Progress. Here Timmy, step into the meat grinder. No, don’t be afraid, don’t be selfish; mommy wants to see what happens once we step through.
The same holds for the individual without any dependants. It’s just less immediately apparent. Small-minded self-preservation is more respect worthy and rational than big-minded foolishness.
This doesn’t even get into how this is not about being against Progress but about being under the thumb of Capital. The entity that is holding the Progress mask.
One would hope progress directly benefits more than the tech CEOs and investors. They're the ones going around heralding fully automated societies and god-level AIs. Open minded people also recognize the dangers of technological disruption. Let us not forget how social media went from being viewed as utopian to dystopian in a decade.
Social media offered no value. If LLMs get about 5x better at what they do they offer a lot in terms of medical discoveries, governance, dirt cheap labor, fully automated raw material to end product pipelines, automated farming and the list goes on and on.
You should read a book on how LLMs actually work on a technical level. Saying they just need to get "5x better" and suddenly they're performing miracles is just nonsense hyperbole
I’m very aware of how they work and pretty much everything they do is emergent.
Dirt cheap labor doesn't sound good for the working class. At best they get a livable UBI, while the capital class becomes even richer and more powerful.
I don't know where you're getting governance and manufacturing stuff that sounds like advanced robotics out of LLMs.
The title is a little misleading as it sounds like it might hint at the end state of next token prediction - i.e. will we reach AGI with it and so on. Instead, this is entirely about "means of production" and "class war" stuff. While that may be coming, it isn't clear that this is the most likely outcome, its just the most pessimistic one. The author might as well have included that it will "be the end of the human race" as well, since once you get to the future state described, there is no alternative outcome that I can see.
I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing.
Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.
But I might just be overly radicalised.
All of history is the history of class war. The post-WWII social-democratic years were a kind of truce, but truces in the class war are always unstable.
The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. Was working in an office and being in countless standups that bad?
> The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head.
You could also say what it is you think you already know that others are about to find out, and what it has to do with class war.
I apologise. The title was meant to be ironic, but I see how it is misleading, especially to the HN audience.
Would you like to elaborate on why you think the outcome described isn't among the more likely?
It requires a nascent analogous architecture to biology (neural nets) and a discovery (next token prediction) to exactly match evolution. I think that is unlikely. Instead it will be a tool that is capable of doing certain things that machines were not capable of previously.
People have bargaining power through their military services. If even that job is taken by AI, there is truly no recourse for the people left at all. These are the sentiments of Yuval Noah Harari.
The first person videos of drones hunting terrified soldiers coming out of Ukraine seem relevant. Apparently the last moments of the hunt are pretty much automated now, which increased the kill-rate considerably.
>But lately I’ve been thinking if it is just a class issue? This cohort of people likely have a cushion that softens the concussive blows they are doling out right now. They perhaps have the luxury of a somewhat functioning government and a social safety net that they are witness to in all walks of life. Over half the world does not. Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight the people at the bottom rungs.
In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...
https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou...
https://www.mexc.com/news/161986
One large part of this is that all the heads of AI companies and business leaders in the US and Europe keep talking about how AI is going to take jobs away and displace "lower-value human capital", while we see power shortages and higher energy rates in areas where AI datacenters are built. Meanwhile, China's 15th 5 year plan involves integrating AI across the whole economy while expanding vocational retraining programs, and building out new renewable infrastructure to power datacenters. The Chinese Human Resources Ministry expects AI to create 6-10 million new jobs in the short term, and the Chinese government plans to use it in the long term to fill in gaps in the labor force caused by its demographic shortages.
I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.
Seems to me that it is downstream from the fact that China's economy is growing strongly and strong state power means that they see infrastructural improvements. US and European governments reflect the views of their people which are generally retrogressive and aimed at a fictional view of the 1970s as described in The Simpsons. Consequently, the Chinese are enthusiastic about Nuclear Power, and Solar Power, and Wind Energy, and AI, and ship building, and space programs, and trains, and electric vehicles, and so on ad infinitum to the degree that they don't mind smoggy cities to get these. Meanwhile Western nations mostly want to live in whatever they already have and would prefer nothing change or if it does that this change moves them closer to a past world, while nonetheless enjoying clean air and water.
I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.
The classic progression of an economy is resource -> manufacturing -> knowledge.
AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.
> In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries.
I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.
Maybe it has to do with % of blue collar vs. white collar jobs in those countries? I also wonder if they have stronger safety nets for displaced workers? It is curious. My anecdata has shown that people who feel "safe" job wise are either neutral or pro. Otherwise negative.
The attitudes aren’t 1-1 comparable. China is on a winning streak in terms of socioeconomic development, and AI is likely seen as merely a new technology in the context of the social contract. The US is going the opposite way, and people here view AI through the lens of oligarchy more often than not. I wouldn’t say that a lot of people feel as optimistic, even if they are actually more economically secure.
Do you have direct experience with this? From what I understand China has huge youth employment issues right now, and the 35 and out (at even non tech companies) meme has some basis in reality.
China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).
China is still riding the high of its economic miracle, that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, which is why the population is so complacent toward their authoritarian government. For now, at least.
That's a pretty generic answer that would have been correct 10 or 20 years ago as well. But where are the recent trends in youth employment? Is automation reducing the need for workers going to cause (or is causing) social instability?
I saw a tiktok a few days ago about the proliferation of autonomous food delivery taking away jobs from delivery bike riders (the ones pretty ubiquitous in China today), and this kind of job was sort of considered a safety net if you lost your normal job (in that you can can always deliver food). It was Chinese authored and I doubt anyone who has never been to China would have understood it anyways.
The idea of the social contract impacting perceptions of AI is interesting to me. I hate to use the words “permanent underclass”, but perhaps the main difference is a fear of that permanent underclass actually materializing. In the US, it seems that that would be the logical endpoint of the capitalist system and many people predict AI simply replacing them permanently. Of course, China is not completely communist, but since their social contract is much less individualistic and more collectivist, maybe that makes people see AI as much more likely to uplift society as a whole or at least “trickle down”.
I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.
One of the billionaires on the All In Podcast, (which I listen to sometimes to get that kind of perspective), mentioned that one thing the U.S. and China could work on as far as regulating AI, is Know Your Customer controls. At first after one of the hosts said this I didn't think much of it but then started thinking through the second order effects later on. Why would that be such a main concern? He gave the example of dangerous people using AI to do bad things, but I think the subtext is much more complicated. At least from the ownership class point of view. Which also ties into the original idea behind OpenAI. Which is that the public should have access to the full abilities of any model equally. But the ownership class can't have this. In another post someone made a good point about licenses and this can be extended to stuff like the legal system, where at the end of the day the personal human connections decide things far more than what a model would compute the result of a case to be...
So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S.
In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.
Maybe chinese are generally more positive about everything. Many European countries and the US are in a decline for some years now.
From what I've seen, The Chinese are more likely to believe the government has their back and the benefits of AI will be spread across the population. While Americans believe it will go towards billionaire mega yachts while they starve on the street.
Education systems and cultures that value "sounding" correct, repeating patterns and information, and immediate practical gain appear to like AI more that the cultures with a strong tradition of critical thinking. The cultures that love AI are the same cultures that will tend to build something cheap and quickly so that it can sell. The cultures that are less favorable are the ones that invest in building things correctly and solidly and value long term thinking. People with the immediate-gain-over-truth mindset love AI.
> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...
A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth.
In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.
AI has already replaced a lot of workers, but there is still no AI-managed business out there, regardless of doomsday PR.
I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing.
Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident.
In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.
Author seems ill informed. The D.O.W is not exactly a fan of Anthropic…
They're not now, but they went so far as to strong arm them because they wanted their product.
It’s a case of sour grapes though, in reality they’d still want Anthropic’s grapes.
They aren't a fan of Dario, but seem very big fans of Claude!
Thanks for writing this.
It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to.
The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means?
My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."
Do you have the same opinion of labour-saving inventions that were created before you were born, or is it just future ones that are evil?
I did not have a voice to inventions created before I was an adult. I have one now. And in fact, we have lessons from very similar technologies on how this would play out (internet + social media), so we can't say "how could we have known?!".
It’s a cliff we’re all being push to. Don’t know about you, I’m just struggling to put on my parachute !!!
Where did you find a parachute?
On Hugging Face, presumably.
What are these complaints really other than "I had a nice position in the previous system and I'm afraid of losing it"? Many felt disposable and not valued already, maybe it was a good system for you but not for many. You have a valued skill and you enjoy working in a field using that skill, well for 90+% of people that isn't what work is, you're lamenting the loss of something that the vast majority never had access to in the first place. What exactly is so great about our current predicament that it needs to be protected from new technology?
There is nothing new about machines displacing jobs and it will happen the same way as before.
For a more thoughtful and very different analysis:
"Implications Of Predicting The Next Token"
https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...
> So, where does next token prediction leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.
In what way is this different to electricity?
The question is what classes of jobs will replace the ones made obsolete by a particular innovation, and how many vacancies there will be. With electricity we had managerial, creative, high dexterity, etc. jobs. If a sufficient amount of human capabilities are replaced then that may be different to electricity. Also it's about how many top-tier "power plants" (AI, robotics) there are, who owns them, and once "everything is solved" (which it isn't yet) how much of that will trickle down to everyone else's life quality.
In what way is it similar?
So, where does electricity leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.
What? People made electricity manually for centuries, collectively? And who were the electricity rent-seekers? Electricity has almost always been a public service.
People also don't make data centers, GPU, or do AI research collectively. The part that is made, collectively, are the layers of knowledge required to provide either.
> Electricity has almost always been a public service.
I have no clue where that would be true, if anywhere. Not where I live. I am paying a private company, and the electricity that they are selling me is generated by other private companies.
AI is like TV in that old saying: AI makes the smart ones smarter and the dumb ones dumber.
LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).
> The compartmentalisation that must be required by the scientists and engineers to reconcile with the fact that their work being used to bomb and kill people must be crazy.
I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring?
I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...
I’ve wondered about this.
If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence.
If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay?
Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise.
That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.
> If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed?
I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.
> If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed?
I would be very conflicted, because the inherent purpose of a gun is its ability to harm people, regardless of whether any given concrete case constitutes a crime or not.
Honestly, I'm baffled that a software engineer would want to work at those companies. Like, you think they're going to keep you around once their AI is good enough to improve itself? Or are they just holding out hope that they can get their bag before billionaires create a permanent underclass, and they can be a step above the untouchables?
I guess Upton Sinclair applies: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
This author fundamentally doesn't understand the mental model of the people they are describing and makes huge sweeping claims in what they think is a in a savvy manner but they are completely wrong.
Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about.
1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes
2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this?
3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should.
The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.
> good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed
How exactly? Is this a version of trickle down economics I am unfamiliar with?
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question
How are the curious going to eat or have a roof over their heads? Or how are the curious going to pay for the tokens?
> civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe
Maybe, we ought to think real hard and slow about it?
> If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been)
This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume.
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question?
Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.
On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution are you assuming for the displaced workers? A scary number of Americans live pay check to pay check. How many will be forced to default on their mortgage or withdraw from their retirement savings? How many can afford to go back to school to retrain to be a plumber or nurse?
Breaking eggs to make omelette sounds good unless you're the egg. There's an excellent quote from Thomas Friedman: "when you get laid off, the unemployment rate is not 3.4%, it's a 100%". It's great to fantasize about future utopian abundance, but most people live in the present and most will be presently ground to powder. All technologies have a barbelling effect. Redistribution of surplus does not happen by default. The tumult and disruption may last a decade or more. And the fruits, if we make it to the other side, will not be for this generation to enjoy. The textile workers did not cheer for the loom, because they were not the ones that enjoyed the joy of cheap Uniqlo or H&M t-shirts.
On point 2: Many people derive meaning and identity from their work. Acquiring expertise, feeling useful, contributing to society, honing your craft are all things that leads to a good life. It could be that after AI we will all write poetry in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon, and paint in the evenings, but I don't think most people are like this, it's certainly not the way I am wired.
On point 3: "utopian AI is so good that words can't describe it so it can't and shouldn't be stopped". I do not think utopian abundance is guaranteed just by copy-pasting data centers across the globe. There is a non-negligible chance that things go really badly.
Lastly, I think the usage of the word "class" shouldn't automatically be linked to "Marxist ideology". This is cheap rhetoric: "class" --> associated with Marx --> communist loonies of the 20th century --> therefore disregard all argument presented.
> Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted.
Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI.
Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.
> The founding tenet of AI, “saving us” from all sorts of difficult things: climate, disease, poverty, conflict is falling, fast
No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.
Calling this a straw man would be attributing an unnecessarily sturdy construction.
Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc.
The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal"
The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative.
Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature.
I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you.
I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.
> Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase.
We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.
Perhaps you should check your books again, reasoning and reinforcement learning are different things.
Some reasoning is trained by reinforecement you could just finetune reasoning, people have had better results than you would expect by brute forcing inserting tokens to periodically say "wait, let me think."
Reinforcement trains things to produce better results, not move towards a specific correct result. There is no future answer to predict.
Don't worry guys, if the situation gets too bad, the social contract breaks, heads will roll for a while and then it will get better.
"Inevitable"
Every time someone invokes the "playing God" / "the hubris of creation" card, it makes me think they're the proud ones, and this case is none the different.
I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all.
I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either.
One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923
I tuned out when I came across this:
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.
>Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.
I would consider that apathy.
Especially basic scientific research is so far removed from actually useful applications that there is no direct cause and effect relationship between single items of research and any eventual effect on society.
do people at the bottom have access to medical advances or are they in lifelong debt in the unfortunate case when they need those medical advances?
How accessible were covid vaccines?
It costs between 4k and 10k if you break your leg and call an ambulance in the US. Forget medical advances, it costs you a car to get a cast
Not if you're homeless in, say, San Francisco.
Also not if you’re the president.
But generally we’re talking about the life experience of the 330m people who are not outliers in our society.
Were the vaccines accessible because of the sympathy towards the people at the bottom, or so that they can go back to work as soon as possible? Medicine is subsidised when there is a global pandemic, but not when individual lives are at stake.
I don’t really find it fruitful to speculate about motives in complex systems. The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances, which seems clearly untrue.
Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available, sure, there are lots of plausible theories that may or may be true, in whole or part, and which we’ll never prove one way or the other. Believe what makes you happy, or angry, or whatever mood you prefer.
> Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available
But it's not me who is shifting, right? The claim was:
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
not
> The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances
My point is to reject the claim that the high availability of vaccines is a counter-example. It's a political decision, not a science/technology related one.
You’re still getting at motives rather than facts, which means it’s unfalsibisble.
If you’re going to say that fact X is not a counter/example because [subjective, speculative reasons] then I’m confident you’ll never find a fact that contradicts your beliefs. There will always be some “oh, well the bridge collapsed, but it wasn’t bad engineering it was political reasons, so it doesn’t count as a collapse.”
What I said is not subjective/speculative. It is not even unfalsifiable.
To restate, COVID vaccine can't be used as an example of "science/technology's sympathy towards the bottom rungs". They were only accessible because governments purchased those vaccines from science/technology companies and gave away for free. Companies developed it to make profit.
If the governments didn't purchase billions of doses at a subsidised price, most people wouldn't be able to afford it [1]. I don't see how this conclusion is subjective, speculative, or unfalsifiable?
[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/covid-19-vaccines-what-i...
> The promise of capitalism has always been - you will have a spin at the roulette table.
This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.
The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.
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