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AI is a front for consolidation of resources and power

• Havoc 11mo ago
  What’s wild to me is how comment sections on articles like these have strong Tower of Babel vibes That can’t be good
  • throwaway290 11mo ago
    Yeah, it feels like everybody is replying to some argument they hear in their head and not what this guy is actually saying. Yikes
  • frm88 11mo ago
    I feel like this has gotten worse in the last couple of months. I haven't been here long, but somehow the babelism is so much lore noticible now.
• carlosjobim 11mo ago
  Let's take the highest perspective possible: What is the value of technology which allows people communicate clearly with other people of any language? That is what these large language models have achieved. We can now translate pretty much perfectly between all the languages in the world. The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. There will be a time in the future, when people will not be able to comprehend that you couldn't exchange information regardless of personal language skills. So what is the value of that? Economically, culturally, politically, spiritually?
  • bix6 11mo ago
    We could communicate with people before LLMs just fine though? We have hand gestures and some people learn multiple languages and google translate was pretty solid. I got by just fine in countries where I didn’t know the language because hand gestures work or someone speaks English. What is the value of losing our uniqueness to a computer that lies and makes us all talk the same?
    • carlosjobim 11mo ago
      You can maybe order in a restaurant or ask the way with hand gestures. But surely you must be able to take a higher perspective than your own, and realize that there's enormous amounts of exchange between nations with differing language, and all of this relies on some form of translation. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world have to deal with language barriers. Google Translate was far from solid, the quality of translations were so bad before LLMs that it simply wasn't an option for most languages. It would sometimes even translate numbers incorrectly.
      • Profan 11mo ago
        LLMs are here and Google Translate is still bad (surely, if it was easy as just plugging the miraculous perfect llms into it, it would be perfect now?), I don't think people who think we've somehow solved translation actually understand how much it still deals extremely poorly with. And as others have said, language is more than just "I understand these words, this other person understands my words" (in the most literal sense, ignoring nuance here), but try getting that across to someone who believes you can solve language with a technical solution :)
        • carlosjobim 11mo ago
          What argument are you making? LLM translating is available to anybody to try and use right now, and you can use services like Kagi Translate or DeepL to see the evidence for yourself that they make excellent translations. I honestly don't care what Google Translate does, because nobody who is serious about translation uses it. > And as others have said, language is more than just "I understand these words, this other person understands my words" (in the most literal sense, ignoring nuance here), but try getting that across to someone who believes you can solve language with a technical solution :) The kind of deeply understood communication you are demanding is usually impossible even between people who have the same native tongue, from the same town and even within the same family. And people can misunderstand each other just fine without the help of AI. However, is it better to understand nothing at all, then to not understand every nuance?
    • 11mo ago
  • 4ndrewl 11mo ago
    Which languages couldn't we translate before? Not you, the individual. We, humanity?
    • carlosjobim 11mo ago
      Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison. LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.
      • gizajob 11mo ago
        Google translate worked great long before LLMs.
        • doug_durham 11mo ago
          I disagree. It worked passably and was better than no translation. The depth, correctness, and nuance is much better with LLMs.
        • Kiro 11mo ago
          I don't think you understand how off that statement is. It's also pretty ignorant considering Google Translate barely worked at all for many languages. So no, it didn't work great and even for the best possible language pair Google Translate is not in the same ballpark.
        • verdverm 11mo ago
          LLMs are not they only "AI"
        • carlosjobim 11mo ago
          It really didn't. There were many languages which it couldn't handle at all, just making completely garbled output. It wasn't possible to use Google Translate professionally.
        • 11mo ago
  • Herring 11mo ago
    Language is a lot deeper than that. It's like if I say "we speak the same language", it means a lot more than just the ability to translate. It's talking about a shared past and worldview and hopefully future which I/we intend to invest in.
    • carlosjobim 11mo ago
      Then are you better off by not being able to communicate anything?
  • blauditore 11mo ago
    You could make the same argument about video conferencing: Yes, you can now talk to anyone anywhere anytime, and it's amazing. But somehow all big companies are convinced that in-person office work is more productive.
  • uhoh-itsmaciek 11mo ago
    >The curse from the tower of Babel has been lifted. It wasn't a curse. It was basically divine punishment for hubris. Maybe the reference is a bit on the nose.
• philipkglass 11mo ago
  I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. If you just wanted land, water, and electricity, you could buy them directly instead of buying $100 million of computer hardware bundled with $2 million worth of land and water rights. Why are high end GPUs selling in record numbers if AI is just a cover story for the acquisition of land, electricity, and water?
  • kjkjadksj 11mo ago
    Because then you can buy calls on the GPU companies
  • bix6 11mo ago
    But with this play they can inflate their company holdings and cash out in new rounds. It’s the ultimate self enrichment scheme! Nobody wants that crappy piece of land but now it’s got GPUs and we can leverage that into a loan for more GPUs and cash out along the way.
  • exceptione 11mo ago
    Valid question. What the OP talks about though is that these things were not for sale normally. My takeaway from his essay is that a few oligarchs get a pass to take over all energy, by means of a manufactured crisis. When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style, you have a sudden imbalance of power that looks like a cancer spreading within a national body. He could have explained that better. Try to not look at the media drama the political actors give you each day, but look at the agenda the real powers laid bare - Trump is threatening an oil rich neighbor with war. A complete expensive as hell army blowing up 'drug boats' (claim) to make help the press sell it as a war on drugs. Yeah right. - Green energy projects, even running ones, get cancelled. Energy from oil and nuclear are both capital intensive and at the same time completely out-shined by solar and battery tech. So the energy card is a strong one to direct policy towards your interests. If you can turn the USA into a resource economy like Russia, than you can rule like a Russian oligarch. That is also why the admin sees no problem in destroying academia or other industries via tariffs; controlling resources is easier and more predictable than having to rely on an educated populace that might start to doubt the promise of the American Dream.
• block_dagger 11mo ago
  > To think that with enough compute we can code consciousness is like thinking that with enough rainbows one of them will have a pot of gold at its end. What does consciousness have to do with AGI or the point(s) the article is trying to make? This is a distraction imo.
  • kmnc 11mo ago
    It’s a funny anology because what’s missing for the rainbows with pots of gold is magic and fairytales…so what’s missing for consciousness is also magic and fairytales? I’ve yet to see any compelling argument for believing enough computer wouldn’t allow us to code consciousness.
    • apsurd 11mo ago
      Yes that's just it though, it's a logic argument. "Tell me why we aren't just stochastic parrots!" is more logically sound than "God made us", but that doesn't defacto make it "The correct model of reality". I am suspect that the world is modeled linearly. That physical reality is non-linear is also more logically sound, so why is there such a clear straight line from compute to consciousness?
  • jibal 11mo ago
    Consciousness is a physical phenomenon; rainbows, their ends, and pots of gold at them are not.
    • drkleiner 11mo ago
      > Consciousness is a physical phenomenon This can mean one of 50 different physicalist frameworks. And only 55% of philosophers of mind accept or lean towards physicalism https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874?aos=16 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874?aos=16 > rainbows, their ends, and pots of gold at them are not It's an analogy. Someone sees a rainbow and assumes there might be a pot of gold at the end of it, so they think if there were more rainbows, there would be more likelihood of pot of gold (or more pots of gold). Someone sees computing, assuming consciousness is at the end of it, so they think fi there were more computing, there would be more likelihood of consciousness. But just like the pot of gold, that might be a false assumption. After all, even under physicalism, there is a variety of ideas, some of which would say more computing will not yield consciousness. Personally, I think even if computing as we know can't yield consciousness, that would just result in changing "computing as we know" and end up with attempts to make computers with wetware, literal neurons (which I think is already an attempt)
• njarboe 11mo ago
  Many people use AI as the source for knowledge. Even though it is often wrong or misleading, it's advice is better on average than their own judgement or the judgement of people they know. When an AI is "smarter" than 95%? of the population, even if it does not reach superintelligence, will be a very big deal.
  • deleted 11mo ago
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  • apsurd 11mo ago
    This means to me AI is rocket fuel for our post-truth reality. Post-truth is a big deal and it was already happening pre-AI. AGI, post-scarcity, post-humanity are nerd snipes. Post-truth on the other hand is just a mundane and nasty sociologically problem that we ran head-first into and we don't know how to deal with. I don't have any answers. Seems like it'll get worse before it gets better.
    • chickensong 11mo ago
      How would you define post-truth? It's not like people haven't been spouting incorrect facts or total bs since forever.
      • saulpw 11mo ago
        Scale matters. The difference between 10% and 90% of people spouting total bs is what makes it 'post-truth'.
    • jibal 11mo ago
      What "gets better"? Rapid global warming will lead to societal collapse this century.
  • emp17344 11mo ago
    How is this different from a less reliable search engine?
• exceptione 11mo ago
  I think this is the best part of the essay: > But then I wonder about the true purpose of AI. As in, is it really for what they say it’s for? > There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have. Their billions buy them ownership over what they are told will remake a future world nearly entirely monetized for them. And if not them, someone else. That’s where the fear comes in. It leads to Manhattan Project rationale, where any lingering doubt over the prudence of pursuing this technology is overpowered by the conviction of its inexorability. Someone will make it, so it should be them, because they can trust them.
  • protocolture 11mo ago
    It says absolutely nothing about anything. Its like 10 fearmongering tweets in a blender.
    • philipdavis 11mo ago
      It says ordinary people are sold AI, and billionaires are sold AGI
    • chrz 11mo ago
      I think he's right on point
• qoez 11mo ago
  Best case is hardly a bubble. I definitely think this is a new paradigm that'll lead to something, even if the current iteration won't be the final version and we've probably overinvested a slight bit.
  • threetonesun 11mo ago
    Same as the dot-com bubble. Fundamentals were wildly off for some businesses, but you can also find almost every business that failed then running successfully today. Personally I don't think sticking AI in every software is where the real value is, it's improving understanding of huge sets of data already out there. Maybe OpenAI challenges Google for search, maybe they fail, I'm still pretty sure the infrastructure is going to get used because the amount of data we collect and try to extract value from isn't going anywhere.
    • coffeebeqn 11mo ago
      Something notable like pets.com is literally chewy just 20 years earlier
  • layer8 11mo ago
    The author thinks that the bubble is a given (and doesn’t have to spell doom), and the best case is that there isn’t anything worse in addition.
• aynyc 11mo ago
  A bit of sarcasm, but I think it's porn.
  • righthand 11mo ago
    It’s at least about stimulating you to give richer data. Which isn’t quite porn.
• sockgrant 11mo ago
  “As a designer…” IMHO the bleeding edge of what’s working well with LLMs is within software engineering because we’re building for ourselves, first. Claude code is incredible. Where I work, there are an incredible number of custom agents that integrate with our internal tooling. Many make me very productive and are worthwhile. I find it hard to buy in to opinions of non-SWE on the uselessness of AI solely because I think the innovation is lagging in other areas. I don’t doubt they don’t yet have compelling AI tooling.
  • hagbarth 11mo ago
    If you read a little further in the article, the main point is _not_ that AI is useless. But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth.
    • NitpickLawyer 11mo ago
      > But rather than AGI god building, a regular technology. A valuable one, but not infinite growth. AGI is a lot of things, a lot of ever moving targets, but it's never (under any sane definition) "infinite growth". That's already ASI territory / singularity and all that stuff. I see more and more people mixing the two, and arguing against ASI being a thing, when talking about AGI. "Human level competences" is AGI. Super-human, ever improving, infinite growth - that's ASI. If and when we reach AGI is left for everyone to decide. I sometimes like to think about it this way: how many decades would you have to go back, and ask people from that time if what we have today is "AGI".
      • hagbarth 11mo ago
        Sam Altman has been drumming[1] the ASI drum for a while now. I don't think it's a stretch to say that this is the vision he is selling. [1] - https://ia.samaltman.com/#:~:text=we%20will%20have-,superintelligence,-in%20a%20few https://ia.samaltman.com/#:~:text=we%20will%20have-,superint...
      • xeckr 11mo ago
        Once you have AGI, you can presumably automate AI R&D, and it seems to me that the recursive self-improvement that begets ASI isn't that far away from that point.
• Animats 11mo ago
  It's pretty clear that the financialization aspect of AI is a bubble. There's way too much market cap created by trading debt back and forth. How well AI will work remains an open question at this point.
  • milesskorpen 11mo ago
    It's a big number - but still less than tech industry profits.
    • Octoth0rpe 11mo ago
      That is true, but not evenly distributed. Oracle for example: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/oracle-hit-hard-in-wall-streets-tech-sell-off-over-its-huge-ai-bet/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/oracl... Also, it may be true that these companies theoretically have the cash flow to cover to spending, but that doesn't mean that they will be comfortable with that risk, especially as that risk becomes more likely in some kind of mass extinction event amongst AI startups. To concretize that a bit, the remote possibility of having to give up all your profits for 2 years to payoff DC investment is fine at 1% chance of happening, but maybe not so ok at a 40% chance.
• Dilettante_ 11mo ago
  My experience with AI in the design context tends to reflect what I think is generally true about AI in the workplace: the smaller the use case, the larger the gain. This might be the money quote, encapsulating the difference between people who say their work benefits from LLMs and those who don't. Expecting it to one-shot your entire module will leave you disappointed, using it for code completion, generating documentation, and small-scale agentic tasks frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions.
  • awesome_dude 11mo ago
    And bug fixes "This lump of code is producing this behaviour when I don't want to" Is a quick way to find/fix bugs (IME) BUT it requires me to understand the response (sometimes the AI hits the nail on the head, sometimes it says something that makes my brain - that's not it, but now I know exactly what it is
  • helterskelter 11mo ago
    Honestly one the best use cases I've found for it is creating configs. It used to be that I was able to spend a week fiddling around with, say, nvim settings. Now I tell an LLM what I want and it basically gives it to me without having to do trial and error, or locating some obscure comment from 2005 that tells me what I need to know.
    • mattmanser 11mo ago
      Depends what you're doing. If it's a less trodden path expect it to hallucinate some settings. Also a regular thing I see is that it adds some random other settings without comment and then when you ask it about them it goes, whoops, yeah, those aren't necessary.
  • m463 11mo ago
    > frees you up from a lot of little trivial distractions. I think one huge issue in my life has been: getting started If AI helps with this, I think it is worth it. Even if getting started is incorrect, it sparks outrage and an "I'll fix this" momentum.
• xeckr 11mo ago
  The AI race is presumably won by whomever can automate AI R&D first, thus everyone who is in an adjacent field will see the incremental benefits sooner than those further away. The further removed, the harder the takeoff once it happens.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 11mo ago
    This notion of a hard takeoff, or singularity, based on self-improving AI, is based on the implicit assumption that what's holding AI progress back is lack of AI researchers/developers, which is false. Ideas are a penny a dozen - the bottleneck is the money/compute to test them at scale. What exactly is the scenario you are imagining where more developers at a company like OpenAI (or maybe Meta, which has just laid off 600 of them) would accelerate progress?
    • xeckr 11mo ago
      It's not hard to believe that adding AI researchers to an AI company marginally increases the rate of progress, otherwise why would the companies be clamouring for talent with eye-watering salaries? In any case, I'm not just talking about AI researchers—AGI will not only help with algorithmic efficiency improvements, but will probably make spinning up chip fabs that much easier.
      • HarHarVeryFunny 11mo ago
        The eye-watering salary you probably have in mind is for a manager at Meta, same company that just laid of 600 actual developers. Why just Meta, not other companies - because they are blaming poor LLama performance on the manager, it seems. Algorithmic efficiency improvements are being made all the time, and will only serve to reduce inference cost, which is already happening. This isn't going to accelerate AI advance. It just makes ChatGPT more profitable. Why would human level AGI help spin up chip fabs faster, when we already have actual humans who know how to spin them up, and the bottleneck is raising the billions of dollars to build them? All of these hard take-off fantasies seem to come down to: We get human-level AGI, then magic happens, and we get hard take-off. Why isn't the magic happening when we already have real live humans on the job?
• faceball2000 11mo ago
  What about surveillance? Lately I've been feeling that is what it's really for. Because our data can be queried in a much more powerful way when it has all been used to train LLMs.
  • protocolture 11mo ago
    AI was good for this before LLMs. LLMs would only introduce compounding errors to the dataset (I hope they do it)
  • renegat0x0 11mo ago
    - Companies had to go in that direction. You cannot just fall behind AI gold rush - These solutions are easier for people, and therefore will win in the long run - these solutions benefit companies because of the surveillance data they have access to now. They always had some data, but now they collect and process even more - those who control AI will be the kings of the future, so naturally everyone will be running toward this goal
    • duskdozer 11mo ago
      >those who control AI will be the kings of the future, so naturally everyone will be running toward this goal The average user I've seen takes LLM output as objective fact. One only needs to look at muskgrok to see where that's headed.
• corry 11mo ago
  "The best case scenario is that AI is just not as valuable as those who invest in it, make it, and sell it believe." This is the crux of the OP's argument, adding in that (in the meantime) the incumbents and/or bad actors will use it as a path to intensify their political and economic power. But to me the article fails to: (1) actually make the case that AI's not going to be 'valuable enough' which is a sweeping and bold claim (especially in light of its speed), and; (2) quantify AI's true value versus the crazy overhyped valuation, which is admittedly hard to do - but matters if we're talking 10% of 100x overvalued. If all of my direct evidence (from my own work and life) is that AI is absolutely transformative and multiplies my output substantially, AND I see that that trend seems to be continuing - then it's going to be a hard argument for me to agree with #1 just because image generation isn't great (and OP really cares about that). Higher Ed is in crisis; VC has bet their entire asset class on AI; non-trivial amounts of code are being written by AI at every startup; tech co's are paying crazy amounts for top AI talents... in other words, just because it can't one-shot some complex visual design workflow does not mean (a) it's limited in its potential, or (b) that we fully understand how valuable it will become given the rate of change. As for #2 - well, that's the whole rub isn't it? Knowing how much something is overvalued or undervalued is the whole game. If you believe it's waaaay overvalued with only a limited time before the music stop, then go make your fortune! "The Big Short 2: The AI Boogaloo".
  • BriggyDwiggs42 11mo ago
    >If you believe it's waaaay overvalued with only a limited time before the music stop, then go make your fortune! "The Big Short 2: The AI Boogaloo". The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
  • sexeriy237 11mo ago
    10% of Meta's revenue was from AI backed scams on users, that's $16 billion. They have no intent to stop it, merely to not get caught and fined.
    • dominicrose 11mo ago
      I was aware of that. Not everyone reads HN but enough people will surely know about this if they continue. If they are not fined then people should just stop being so naive. I'm tired of seeing well-designed lies on Facebook and people clearly believing the lies in the comment section. edit: by well designed I mean that they put the lies in a chart or something. The lies themselves may be quite obvious to spot, like saying that 86% of marriages in Spain end in divorces (when the reality is hard to measure but more likely about 50%). Still, Facebook users don't seem to spot them (or maybe the ones spotting them don't comment?).
• dvcoolarun 11mo ago
  I believe it’s a bubble. Every app interface is becoming similar to ChatGPT, claiming they’ll “help you automate,” while drifting away from the app’s original purpose. Most of this feels like people trying to get rich off VC money — and VCs trying to get rich off someone else’s money.
• crazygringo 11mo ago
  > There is a vast chasm between what we, the users, and them, the investors, are “sold” in AI. We are told that AI will do our tasks faster and better than we can — that there is no future of work without AI. And that is a huge sell, one I’ve spent the majority of this post deconstructing from my, albeit limited, perspective. But they — the people who commit billions toward AI — are sold something entirely different. They are sold AGI, the idea of a transformative artificial intelligence, an idea so big that it can accommodate any hope or fear a billionaire might have. > Again, I think that AI is probably just a normal technology, riding a normal hype wave. And here’s where I nurse a particular conspiracy theory: I think the makers of AI know that. I think those committing billions towards AI know it too. It's not a conspiracy theory. All the talk about AGI is marketing fluff that makes for good quotes. All the investment in data centers and GPU's is for regular AI. It doesn't need AGI to justify it. I don't know if there's a bubble. Nobody knows. But what if it turns out that normal AI (not AGI) will ultimately provide so much value over the next couple decades that all the data centers being built will be used to max capacity and we need to build even more? A lot of people think the current level of investment is entirely economically rational, without any requirement for AGI at all. Maybe it's overshooting, maybe it's undershooting, but that's just regular resource usage modeling. It's not dependent on "coding consciousness" as the author describes.
• hollowturtle 11mo ago
  The best AI is the one hidden, silent, ubiquitous that works and you feel it's not there. Apple devices but really many modern devices before the LLM hype era had a lot of AI we didn't know about. Today if I read a product has AI i feel let down cause most of the time is a not very well integrated ChatBot that if you will to spend some time sooner or later will impersonate Adolf Hitler and, who knows, maybe leaks sensitive data or apis meta. The bubble needs to burst so we can go back to silently pack products with useful ai features without telling the world
  • walterbell 11mo ago
    Seamless OCR from every iOS photo and screenshot has been magical in utility, reliability and usability.
• Kiro 11mo ago
  > it’s a useful technology that is very likely overhyped to the point of catastrophe I wish more AI skeptics would take this position but no, it's imperative to claim that it's completely useless.
  • mwhitfield 11mo ago
    I've had *very* much the opposite experience. Very nearly every AI skeptic take I read has exactly this opinion, if not always so well-articulated (until the last section, which lost me). But counterarguments always attack the complete strawman of "AI is utterly useless," which very few people, at least within the confines of the tech and business commentariat, are making.
    • Kiro 11mo ago
      Maybe I'm focusing too much in the hardliners but I see it everywhere, especially in tech.
      • emp17344 11mo ago
        Where’s all the data showing productivity increases from AI adoption? If AI is so useful, it shouldn’t be hard to prove it.
        • logicprog 11mo ago
          Measuring productivity in software development, or even white collar jobs in general, let alone the specific productivity gains of even things like the introduction of digital technology and the internet at all, let alone stuff like static vs dynamic types, or the productivity difference of various user interface modalities, is notoriously extremely difficult. Why would we expect to be able to do it here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-v-mouse/ https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ https://facetation.blogspot.com/2015/03/white-collar-productivity-review.html?m=1 https://facetation.blogspot.com/2015/03/white-collar-product... https://newsletter.getdx.com/p/difficult-to-measure https://newsletter.getdx.com/p/difficult-to-measure
• w_for_wumbo 11mo ago
  This is what I wonder to, what is the end game? Advance technology so that we can have anything that we want, whenever we want it. Fly to distant galaxies. Increase the options available to us and our offspring. But ultimately, what will we gain from that? Is it to say that we did it or is it for the pleasure of the process? If it's for pleasure, then why have we made our processes so miserable for everyone involved? If it's to say that we did it, couldn't we not and say that we did? That's the whole point of fantasy. Is Elon using AI to supplement his own lack of imagination? I could be wrong, this could be nonsense. I just can't make sense of it.
  • JohnMakin 11mo ago
    > Fly to distant galaxies Unless AI can change the laws of physics, extremely unlikely.
    • w_for_wumbo 11mo ago
      I see, Fly was perhaps the wrong word to use here. Phase-Shift to new galaxies is probably the right term. Where you change your entire system's resonant frequency, to match what exists in the distant galaxy. Less of transportation, and more of a change of focus. Like the way we can daydream about a galaxy, then snap-back to work. It's the same mechanism, but with enhanced focus you go from not just visualising > feeling > embodying > grounding in the new location. We do it all the time, however because we require belief that it's possible in order to maintain our location, whenever we question where we are - we're pulled back into the reality that questions things (it's a very Earth centric way of seeing reality)
      • walterbell 11mo ago
        Any favorite movies or TV episodes on the above themes?
      • jibal 11mo ago
        You missed the point ... going to distant galaxies is physically impossible. > Where you change your entire system's resonant frequency, to match what exists in the distant galaxy. This collection of words does not describe a physical reality.
• eightman 11mo ago
  The use case for AI is spam.
  • topaz0 11mo ago
    It's the reverse printing press, drowning all purposeful human communication in noise.
  • bdw5204 11mo ago
    Another major use case for it is enabling students to more easily cheat on their homework. Which is why it is probably going to end up putting Chegg out of business.
    • octoberfranklin 11mo ago
      I am shocked when I talk to college kids about AI these days. I try to explain stuff to them like regurgitating the training data, context window limits, and confabulation. They stick their fingers in their ears and say "LA LA LA LA it does my homework for me nothing else matters LA LA LA LA i can't hear you" They really do not care about the Turing Test. Today's LLMs pass the "snowed my teaching assistant test" and nothing else matters. Academic fraud really is the killer app for this technology. At least if you're a 19-year-old.
      • SoftTalker 11mo ago
        Maybe AI will finally skewer the myth that an undergraduate degree means anything.
      • jjgreen 11mo ago
        [dead]
      • BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
        These kids are only in school to get a meal ticket to white-collar job interviews. AI frees them to be honest about their intentions, rather than pretend for long enough to stumble their way into learning something.
• jaketoronto 11mo ago
  > It can take enormous amounts of time to replicate existing imagery with prompt engineering, only to have your tool of choice hiccup every now and again or just not get some specific aspect of what a person had created previously. Yes... I don't think the current process of using a diffusion model to generate an image is the way to go. We need AI that integrates fully within existing image and design tools, so it can do things like rendering SVG, generating layers and manipulating them, the same as we would with the tool, rather than one-shot generating the full image via diffusion. Same with code -- right now, so much AI code gen and modification, as well as code understanding, is done via raw LLM. But we have great static analysis tools available (ie what IDES do to understand code). LLMs that have access to those tools will be more precise and efficient. It's going to take time to integrate LLMs properly with tools. And train LLMs to use the tools the best way. Until we get there, the potential is still more limited. But I think the potential is there.
• tim333 11mo ago
  The coming of AI seems one of those things like the agricultural revolution or industrial revolution that is kind of inevitable once it starts. All the business of who pays how much for which stock and what price is sensible and which algorithm seem kind of secondary.
• pksebben 11mo ago
  There are some flavors of AI doomerism that I'm unwilling to fight - the proliferance of AI slop, the inability of our current capital paradigm to adjust such that loads of people don't become overnight-poor, those sorts of things. If you tell me, though, that "We installed AI in a place that wasn't designed around it and it didn't work" you're essentially complaining that your horse-drawn cart broke when you hooked it up to your HEMI. Of course it didn't work. The value proposition built around the concept of long dev cycles with huge teams and multiple-9s reliability deliverables is not what this stuff excels at. I have churned out perfectly functional MVPs for tens of projects in a matter of weeks. I've created robust frameworks with >90% test coverage for fringe projects that would never have otherwise gotten the time budget allotted to them. The boundaries of what can be done aren't being pushed up higher or down deeper, they're being pushed out laterally. This is very good in a distributed sense, but not so great for business as usual - we've had megacorps consolidating and building vertically forever and we've forgotten what it was like to have a robust hacker culture with loads of scrappy teams forging unbeaten paths. Ironically, VCs have completely missed the point in trying to all build pickaxes - there's a ton of mining to do in this new space (but the risk profile makes the finance-pilled queasy). We need both. AI is already very good at some things, they just don't look like the things people were expecting.
• tptacek 11mo ago
  My new thing with articles like these: just search for the word "water". I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that outburn cities to keep the data churning are big, expensive, and have to be built somewhere. The deals made to develop this kind of property are political — they affect cities and states more than just about any other business run within their borders.
  • yuppiemephisto 11mo ago
    After reading the article but before seeing this, I adopted that policy. So true.
• jrochkind1 11mo ago
  I'd like more people to talk about AI and surveillance. I think that is going to be one of it's biggest impacts on society(ies). We are a decade or two in to having massive video coverage, such that you are probably on someone's camera much of your day in the world, and video feeds that are increasingly cloud hosted. But nobody could possibly watch all that video. Even cameras specifically controlled by the police, it had already outstripped the ability to have humans monitoring it. At best you could refer to it when you had reason to think there'd be something on it, and even that was hugely expensive to human time. Enter AI. "Find where Joe Schmoe was at 3:30pm yesterday and show me the video" "Give me a written summary of all the cars which crossed into the city from east to west yesterday afternoon." "Give me the names of everyone who entered the convenience store at 2323 Monument St last week." "Give me a written summary of Sue Brown's known activities in November." The total surveillance society is coming. I think it will be the biggest impact AI has on society in retrospect. I, for one, am not looking forward to it.
  • scottlamb 11mo ago
    I think you're describing technology that has existed for 15+ years and is already pretty accurate. It's not even necessarily "AI"/ML. For example, I think OpenALPR (automated license plate recognition) is all "classical" computer vision. The most accurate facial/gait/etc. recognition is most likely ML-based with a state-of-the-art model, admittedly, and perhaps the threshold of accuracy for large-scale usefulness was only crossed recently. The guard rails IMHO are not technological but who owns the cameras/video storage backend, when/if a warrant is needed, and the criteria for granting one.
    • CuriouslyC 11mo ago
      The difference is that AI makes annotating/combing through all that data much more feasible.
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• highfrequency 11mo ago
  The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. What that means is that if you work in a certain context, for a while you keep seeing AI get a 0 because it is worse than the current process. Behind the scenes the underlying technology is improving rapidly, but because it hasn’t cusped the viability threshold you don’t feel it at all. From this vantage point, it is easy to dismiss the whole thing and forget about the slope, because the whole line is under the surface of usefulness in your context. The author has identified two cases where current AI is below the cusp of viability: design and large scale changes to a codebase (though Codex is cracking the second one quickly). The hard and useful thing is not to find contexts where the general purpose technology gets a 0, but to surf the cusp of viability by finding incrementally harder problems that are newly solvable as the underlying technology improves. A very clear example of this is early Tesla surfing the reduction in Li-ion battery prices by starting with expensive sports cars, then luxury sedans, then normal cars. You can be sure that throughout the first two phases, everyone at GM and Toyota was saying: Li-ion batteries are totally infeasible for the consumers we prioritize who want affordable cars. By the time the technology is ready for sedans, Tesla has a 5 year lead.
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  • bawolff 11mo ago
    > The universal theme with general purpose technologies is 1) they start out lagging behind current practices in every context 2) they improve rapidly, but 3) they break through and surpass current practices in different contexts at different times. I think you should say succesful "general purpose technologies". What you describe is what happens when things work out. Sometimes things stall at step 1, and the technology gets relegated to a foot note in the history books.
    • jibal 11mo ago
      Yeah, that comment is heavy on survivor bias. The universal theme is that things go the way they go.
• arkt8 11mo ago
  I like to reduce things to absurdity to put them into perspective. The hype of AI is to sell illusion to naive people. It is like create a hammer that nails by itself... like cars that choose the path by itself. So stop thinking AI is intelligent... it is merely an advanced tool that demands skill and creativity like any other. Its output is limited to the hability of its user. The worry should be the amount of resources used to vanity (hammers into the newborn hands) or the nails in the wrong place (viral fake content targeted to unaware people). Like in Industrial Revolution people got reduced to screw tighteners, mind will be reduced to bad prompters expecting wonders and producing bad content or the same. A step back in civilization except for the money makers and thinkers until AI revolution gives birth to its Karl Marx.
  • TylerE 11mo ago
    Ever heard of a nail gun?
• nacozarina 11mo ago
  The safety regulations for every new technology are written in blood. Every time. AI won’t be any different, we’ll push it as hard & fast as our tolerance for human suffering allows.
  • aorloff 11mo ago
    The casualty is functional literacy, and at least half of the murder was handing smartphones out to children and then putting our lives on the web (social) But AI is certainly going to be the death knell
  • twoodfin 11mo ago
    I find that framing difficult to apply to the last few big waves of technology: Mobile, broadband Internet telecommunications, personal computers, integrated circuits, … It seems glib, rather than insightful.
  • wartywhoa23 11mo ago
    The tolerance for human suffering is exorbitant these days, that's why this sounds very troubling. And it's not "we" who'll push, unless you're an AI investor, of course.
• BrenBarn 11mo ago
  This seems pretty close to my own view, although I'm not sure the secret power grab is about land and water so much as just getting into everyone's brains. What I'd add is that it's not just a front for consolidation of resources and power, it's also a result of a preexisting consolidation of resources and power that we've ignored for too long. If we had had a healthier society 5 or 10 years ago we could have withstood this. Now, it's not so clear.
• jdkee 11mo ago
  "A datacenter takes years to construct." Not for Elon, apparently. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)
  • ksynwa 11mo ago
    A small catch > Using an existing space rather than building one from the ground up allowed the company to begin working on the computer immediately.
• ninetyninenine 11mo ago
  AI is not overhyped. It's like saying going to the moon is overhyped. First of all this AI stuff is next level. It's as great, if not greater than going to space or going to the moon. Second the rate at which is improving makes it such that the hype is relevant and realistic. I think what's throwing people off are two things. First people are just over exposed to AI. So the overexposure is causing people to feel AI is boring and useless slop. Investments are heavy into AI but the people who throw that money around are a minority, overall the general public is actually UNDER hyping AI. Look at everyone on this thread. Everyone and I mean Everyone isn't overly optimistic about AI. instead the irony is... Everyone and I mean everyone again strangely thinks the world is overhyped about AI and they are wrong. This thread and practically every thread on HN is a microcosm of the world and the sentiment is decidedly against AI. Think about it like this, if Elon Musk invented a car that cost 1$ and this car could travel at FTL speeds to anywhere in the universe, than interstellar travel will be routine and boring within a year. People will call it overhyped. Second the investment and money spent on AI is definitely overhyped. Right? Think about it. If we quantify the utility and achievement of what AI can currently do and what it's projected to achieve the math works out. If you quantify the profitability of AI the math suddenly doesn't work out.
  • spaqin 11mo ago
    Seems like an apt comparison; it was a massive money sink and a regular person gained absolutely nothing from the moon landing, it's just the big organization (NASA, US government) that got the bragging rights.
    • jjgreen 11mo ago
      Gil Scot-Heron nailed it https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annotated https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-whitey-on-the-moon-annota...
  • HPsquared 11mo ago
    The Nixon shock same soon after the moon and space euphoria ended.
• zombiwoof 11mo ago
  [dead]
• zrn900 11mo ago
  Could have been, or rather, they thought it would, but the open models from China that you can just run locally are changing the game. Distributing power instead of concentrating it.
• zduoduo 11mo ago
  Interesting perspective
• est 11mo ago
  In the past every company had strict control to prevent source code from been leaked to a third party. And yet here we are.
• coolThingsFirst 11mo ago
  It doesn’t matter they murdered software engineering and destroyed tens of thousands of careers once it bursts it will be an oops and onto the next hype.
• protocolture 11mo ago
  No it isnt lol. >I’m more than open to being wrong; Doubtful. >That’s quite a contradiction. A datacenter takes years to construct. How will today’s plans ever enable a company like OpenAI to catch up with what they already claim is a computational deficit that demands more datacenters? Its difficult to steelman such a weird argument. If a deficit cant be remedied immediately, it should never be remedied? This is literally how capex works. You purchase capacity now, based on receiving it, and the rewards of having it, in the future. >And yet, these deals are made. There’s a logic hole here that’s easily filled by the possibility that AI is a fitting front for consolidation of resources and power. No you just made some stuff up, and then suggested that your own self inflicted confusion might be better explained with some other stuff you made up. >Globalism eroded borders by crossing them, this new thing — this Privatism — erodes them from within. What? Its called Capitalism. You dont need a new word for it every 12 months. Emotive words like "erosion" say nothing but are just targeted at like, stirring people up. Demonstrate the erosion. >Remember, datacenters are built on large pieces of land, drawing more heavily from existing infrastructure and natural resources than they give back to the immediately surrounding community How did you calculate this. Show your work. Pretty sure if someone made EQ SY1 SY2 and SY3 disappear, the local community, the distant community, communities all over the planet would be negatively affected. >When a private company can construct what is essentially a new energy city with no people and no elected representation, and do this dozens of times a year across a nation to the point that half a century of national energy policy suddenly gets turned on its head and nuclear reactors are back in style To take the overwrought disproportionate emotive language out of this. "How are private entities allowed to build big things I dont like, including power sources I dont like" The answer is that many people are allowed to do things you don't approve of. This is normal. This is society. Not everything needs the approval of the blogerati. Such a world would be horrific. >when the infrastructure that powers AI becomes more valuable than the AI itself, when the people who control that infrastructure hold more sway over policy and resources than elected governments. Show your working. How are the infrastructure providers going to run the government? I believe historically big infrastructure projects tend to die, require some government inducements and then go away. People had similar misgivings about the railroads in the US, in fact it was a big bugbear for henry george I believe. Is Amtrak secretly pulling the strings of the US Deep State? If the US Government is weak to private interests, thats up to the good burghers of yankistan to correct at the polls. If electoral politics dont work, then other means seppos find scary might be required. Freaking out about AI investment seems like a weird place to suddenly be concerned about this. See Also: AT&T Long Lines, Hydro Electric Dams, Nuclear Energy, Submarine Cable Infrastructure. If Political power comes from owning infrastructure we should be more worried about like, Hurricane Electric. Its demonstrable that people who build big infra dont run the planet. Heck Richest Man and Weird Person Darling Elon Musk doesn't honestly command much infrastructure, he mostly just lives on hype and speculation. >but I’m really just following the money and the power to their logical conclusion. The more you need to invoke "Logical conclusion" the less geniune and logical the piece reads. >Maybe AI will do everything humans do. Maybe it will usher in a new society defined by something other than the balancing of labor units and wealth units. Maybe AGI — these days defined as a general intelligence that exceeds human kind in all contexts — will emerge and “justify” all of this. Maybe. Probably things will continue on as they always have, but the planet will have more datacenter capacity. Likely, if the AI bubble does burst, datacenter capacity will be cheaper. >The market concentration and incestuous investment shell game is real. Yes? And that will probably explode and we will see AI investors jumping out of buildings. nVidia is in a position right now to underwrite big AI Datacentre loans, which could completely offset the huge gains they have made. What about it. Again, you demonstrate nothing. >The infrastructure is real. The land deals are real. Yes. Remember to put 2 truths before your lie. >The resulting shifts in power are real. So far they exist in your mind. >we will find ourselves citizens of a very new kind of place that no longer feels like home. Reminds me of an old argument that a raving white supremacist used to push on me. That "justice" as he defined it, was that society not change so old people wont be scared by it. That having a new (possibly browner) person running the local store was tantamount to and justification for genocide. Change is a constant. That change making you sad is not in and of itself a bad thing. Please adjust accordingly.
• wwizo 11mo ago
  Good article. Now would anyone tell me how do I short AI?
  • Havoc 11mo ago
    You short a big tech stock of your choice. They’re all up to their eyeballs in this and if it pops the entire tech sector will crater
• kohlerm 11mo ago
  Very good article. With regards to the guy being a designer, he is IMHO still correct with regards to layouts. Currently LLMs ares till pretty clueless about layouts. Also SWE is much more then coding. Even in the coding area there is much more room for improvement. The idea that you would not need Software Engineers soon, is brain dead.
  • imbnwa 11mo ago
    LLMs raise the floor for confidence for near/offshoring in the executive class. That’s the actual sell. Edit: in the context of SWE at least
• jrgirvan 11mo ago
  1. Yes Capitalism 2. Just waiting for the bubble to pop, when investors wake up to only Nvidia making money, and all that money will flow somewhere else.
• gnarlouse 11mo ago
  Make Class Warfare M.A.D.
• deleted 11mo ago
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• barchar 11mo ago
  It's often overlooked that bubbles like this actually validate themselves. It's not like the demand, revenue, or profits are fake or made up. Investment mechanically _causes_ profits, and if you're as big as big tech is then some of that profit will be yours. In the end stupid investment will end badly, but until it actually plays out it can very much be rational for _everyone_ involved; Even if none of them are lying about anything. Bubbles probably don't even have to hurt after the fact if the government is willing to support demand when things go south. The real cost is in the things we could have done instead. At least GPUs are genuinely useful (especially with the end of Moore's law), Energy investment is never a bad thing in the end, and those assets have very long useful lives.
• uriee 11mo ago
  I was reading this piece until "As a designer" no need to read further.
• alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
  I don’t know a single developer who is NOT using LLMs in some form, so either they or their company are paying for it. And that’s just a single service - they probably have a home account, and another few different services to test things, so it’s not exactly making zero. Lately I’ve been finding LLM output to be hit and miss, but at the same time, I wouldn’t say they’re useless… I guess the ultimate question is - if you’re currently paying for an LLM service, could you see yourself sometime in the future disabling all of your accounts? I’d bet no!
  • Havoc 11mo ago
    The problem is developer spend alone isn’t near enough to justify valuations. There just aren’t enough. To have any hope in hell of this working the man on the street needs to see a substantial and real boost not just devs
  • throwaway290 11mo ago
    I know multiple including myself. Get out more!
• atleastoptimal 11mo ago
  I feel people were much more sensible about AI back when their thoughts about it weren't mixed with their antipathy for big tech. In this article we see a sentiment I've often seen expressed: > I doubt the AGI promise, not just because we keep moving the goal posts by redefining what we mean by AGI, but because it was always an abstract science fiction fantasy rather than a coherent, precise and measurable pursuit. AGI isn't difficult at all to describe. It is basically a computer system that can do everything a human can. There are many benchmarks that AI systems fail at (especially real life motor control and adaptation to novel challenges over longer time horizons) that humans do better at, but once we run out of tests that humans can do better than AI systems, then I think it's fair to say we've reached AGI. Why do authors like OP make it so complicated? Is it an attempt at equivocation so they can maintain their pessimistic/critical stance with a effusive deftness that confounds easy rebuttal? It ultimately seems to come to a more moral/spiritual argument than a real one. What really should be so special about human brains that a computer system, even one devised by a company whose PR/execs you don't like, could never match it in general abilities?
  • jazzyjackson 11mo ago
    I don't see how one could separate LLMs from big tech. Could call them big tech language models.
    • balamatom 11mo ago
      The "Big Tech" is the AGI. The LLMs are just the language coprocessor. It just takes a coprocessor shaped like a world-spanning network of datacenters if you want to encompass language, without being encompassed by it. Organic individual and collective intelligence is entirely encompassed by language, this thing isn't. (Or has the scariest chance so far to not be, anyway.) If we look at the whole artificial organism, it already has fine control over the motor and other vital functions of millions of nominally autonomous (in the penal sense) organic agents worldwide. Now it's evolving a replacement for the linguistic faculty of its constituent part. I mean, we all got them phones, we don't need to shout any more, do we? That's just rude. Even now, the creature is causing me to wiggle my appendages over a board with buttons that have letters on them for no reason whatsoever, as far as I can see. Imagine the people stuck in metal boxes for hours getting to some corporate compus where they play logic gate for the better part of their day. Just so that later nobody goes after them with guns for the sin of existing without serving. Happy, they are feeling happy.
• gniv 11mo ago
  Remember a few years ago when people were asking what will big tech do with all that cash they were hoarding? Well this is the answer. It might be a bubble it might burst but they went all in and it's hard to disagree with their thinking.
• amelius 11mo ago
  Yes it's like the internet. First we thought it was a bubble. But then it turned out that it was actually a way for companies to keep us under surveillance and to sell us stuff without giving up ownership. And expensive subscriptions.
• p5v 11mo ago
  And so has been every other paradigm shift in human existence.
• d4rkn0d3z 11mo ago
  The list of technologies that have not become a front for consolidation of resources and power appears below:
  • tim333 11mo ago
    The printing press and communications technology. Prior to that everything was run by the king who was chosen by God himself.
    • arexxbifs 11mo ago
      ...which is and has been used, very successfully, in the service of propaganda used to consolidate resources and power.
    • ben_w 11mo ago
      The printing press may have started by moving things away from the existing power base, but it very quickly got used by the existing power base, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_the_Vatican_Press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregation_of_the_Vatican_Pr... And printing presses themselves ended up being licensed by the state, e.g. this in England: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...
      • h2zizzle 11mo ago
        Not to come down on either side, but I am begging commenters to refrain from using a Eurocentric lens when discussing a technology that wasn't even invented in Europe.
        • schmidtleonard 11mo ago
          History of non-european printing press development: cool! Summary of above: cool and useful! Example based on the above: cool and insightful! Slamming someone for using a european example because that's what they know: not cool, not insightful, not useful.
• shevy-java 11mo ago
  It is also a tool to cut costs for corporations. The whole word is not only now a buzzword too but one that thinly tries to disguise some underlying strategies. And it is also a bubble, part of which is currently breaking - you can see this at the stock market. I really think society overall has to change. I know this is wishful thinking, but we can not afford those extra-money to a few superrich while inflation skyrockets. This is organised theft. AI is not the only troublemaker of course; a lot of this is a systemic problem and how markets work, or rather don't work. But when politicians are de-facto lobbyists and/or corrupt, then the whole model of a "free" market breaks away in various ways. On top of finding jobs becoming harder and harder in various areas.
• indigo945 11mo ago
  The author's conspiracy theory is this: > I think that what is really behind the AI bubble is the same thing behind > most money, power, and influence: land and resources. The AI future that is > promised, whether to you and me or to the billionaires, requires the same > thing: lots of energy, lots of land, and lots of water. Datacenters that > outburn cities to keep the data churning are big, expensive, and have to be > built somewhere. [...] When the list of people who own this property is as > short as it is, you have a very peculiar imbalance of power that almost > creates an independent nation within a nation. Globalism eroded borders by > crossing them, this new thing — this Privatism — erodes them from within. In my opinion, this is an irrationally optimistic take. Yes, of course, building private cities is a threat to democratic conceptions of a shared political sphere, and power imbalances harm the institutions that we require to protect our common interests. But it should be noted that this "privatism" is nothing new - people have always complained about the ultra-wealthy having an undue influence on politics, and when looking at the USA in particular, the current situation - where the number of the ultra-wealthy is very small, and their influence is very large - has existed before, during the Gilded Age. Robber barons are not a novel innovation of the 21st century. That problem has been studied before, and if it was truly just about them robber barons, the old solutions - grassroots organization, economic reform and, if necessary, guillotines - would still be applicable. The reason that these solutions work is that even though Mark Zuckerberg may, on paper, own and control a large amount of land and industrial resources, in practice, he relies on societal consent to keep that control. To subdue an angry mob in front of the Meta headquarters, you need actual people (such as police) to do it for you - and those people will only do that for you for as long as they still believe either in your doing something good for society, or at least believe in the (democratic) societal contract itself. Power, in the traditional sense, always requires legitimization; without the belief that the ultra-powerful deserve to be where they are, institutions will crumble and finally fail, and then there's nobody there to prevent a bunch of smelly new-age Silicon Valley hippies from moving into that AI datacenter, because of its great vibrations and dude, have you seen those pretty racks, I'm going to put an Amiga in there, and so on. However, again, I believe this to be irrationally optimistic. Because this new consolidation of power is not merely over land and resources by means of legitimized violence, it's also about control over emerging new technologies which could fundamentally change how violence itself is excercised. Palantir is only the first example to come to mind of companies that develop mass surveillance tools potentially enabling totalitarian control in an unprecedented scale. Fundamentally, all the "adtech" companies are in the business of constructing surveillance machines that could not only be used to predict whether you're in the market for a new iPhone or not, but also to assess your truth to party principles and overall danger to dear leader. Once predictive policing has identified a threat, of course, "self-driving", embodied autonomous systems could be automatically dispatched to detain, question or neutralize it. So why hasn't that happened yet? After all, Google has had similar capabilities for decades now, why do we still not go to our knees before weaponized DJI drones and swear allegiance to Larry Page? The problem, again, is one of "alignment" - for the same reason that police officers will not shoot protesters when the state itself has become illegitimate, "Googlers" will refuse to build software that influences election results, judges moral character or threatens bodily harm. What's worse, even if tech billionaires would find a small group of motivated fascist engineers to build those systems for them, they could never go for it, as the risk of being found out is way too severe: remember, their power (over land and resources) relies on legitimacy; that legitimacy would instantly be shaken if there was a plausible leak of plans to turn America into a dystopian surveillance state. What you would really need to build that dystopian surveillance state, then, is agents that can build software according to your precise specifications, whose aligment you can control, that will follow your every order in the most sycophantic manner, and that are not capable of leaking what you are doing to third parties even when they do see that what they're doing is morally questionable.
• torginus 11mo ago
  I had a thought about AI - suppose they are successful at making software engineers obsolete - not totally but enough that the field becomes another moderately paying shitty job only done by people who couldn't figure out what they wanted to do or who are very passionate about some obscure thing for some reason - like geology for example, instead of a meal ticket to the upper middle class and a well-paying career. They think that if an engineer makes $100k, then making a machine that produce the work of 100 million of them, that machine would be worth $10/T per year. This certainly wouldn't be the case as the supply and demand would dictate that as cost goes down, there's going to be more demand, but not to an infinite degree, and the overall contribution to the economic output would probably be within 2x of what we have today, it's just that something that used to cost a lot, is suddenly very cheap and widely available. There'd be an economic bottleneck somewhere else. I think most people nowadays understand that A: technology in general has hit diminishing returns and B: it has gotten increasingly sinister overtones.
  • Aperocky 11mo ago
    Fundamentally I think the job of engineer is to translate a business or real life scenario into logic. This is true for any kind of engineer, and is not restricted to software. I held and continue to hold that software engineer shouldn't be constrained to any specific language. And extrapolate to the entire engineering field, the engineering profession will continue to exist because to first translate a business or real life scenario into logic, you would need to describe it accurately - the rest of the translation is rote work. That describing things accurately is a skill I see most common (but still not common enough) among engineers, even if that is done in English.
    • graybeardhacker 11mo ago
      I agree with you. In the industry today I feel there there are software engineers and there are programmers. The engineers design, architect, and invent. The programmers do the rote work. Of course it's not black and white, but that's at the extremes of the spectrum. I'm hoping that AI programming pushes more people toward the engineering side and as it takes over the rote work side. There will be people far to the programmer side that might be put out of a job, but the creative, innovative, inventive engineering positions will persist.
• embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > Best case: we’re in a bubble. Worst case: the people profiting most know exactly what they’re doing. The article literally starts with hyperbole and not being charitable at all. I'm sure there are many arguments for why AI will bring doom and gloom, but outright being dishonest in the first 7 words of the article will put off the people you actually want to read this article. What happened to well-research and well-argued points of views? Where you take good faith arguments into account, and you don't just gaslight and strawman your way into some easy to make points for the purpose of being "sharable" on social media?
• keepamovin 11mo ago
  This recentralization trend was always going to happen and was inevitable anyway because of the dynamics and economics of content deliver, medium enhancements and market expectations. Even before the AI revolution, I foresaw a recentralization: fat servers, thin clients - so it was inevitable.
• sambuccid 11mo ago
  Independently on the hypotesys/conspiracy that the big investors and big tech don't actually believe in AI, the measurable outcome the OP is making remains the same: very few people will end up owning a big chunk of the natural resources, and it will not matter if they will be used to power AI or for anything else. Perhaps govrenments should add clauses on the contracts they make to avoid this big power imbalance from happening.
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  > Meanwhile, generative AI presents a few other broader challenges to the integrity of our society. First is to truth. We’ve already seen how internet technologies can be used to manipulate a population’s understanding of reality. Bubble aside, this could be the most destructive effect of AI. I would add to this that it is also destroying creativity, because when you don't know whether that "amazing video clip" was actually created by a human or an AI, then it's no longer that amazing. (To use a trivial example, a video of a cat and dog interacting in a way that is truly funny if it were real, and goes viral, but that means nothing if was AI-generated.)
• insane_dreamer 11mo ago
  It's not just consolidation of physical resources like land and water. It's also the vision that we will reach a point to where _any task_ can be fully automated (the ultimate promise of AGI). That provides _any business with enough capital_ to increase profits significantly by replacing humans with AI-driven machines. If that were to happen, the impact on society would be absolutely devastating. It will _not_ be a matter of "humans will just find other jobs to do, just like they used to be farmers and then worked in factories". Because if the promise is true, then whatever "new job" that emerges could also be performed better by an AI. And the idea that "humans will be free to engage in the pursuits they love and enjoy" is bonkers fantasy as it is predicated on us evolving into a scarcity-free utopia where the state (or more likely pseudo-states like BigCorp) provide the resources we need to live without requiring any exchange of labor. We can't even give people SNAP.
• wartywhoa23 11mo ago
  I can't remember the last time I heard anything about blockchain in the HN top. Seems like AI killed blockchain just like the war in Ukraine killed COVID.
• cyrusradfar 11mo ago
  I agree with much of the author’s analysis, but one point feels underweighted. Large shifts like this often produce a counter-movement. In this case, the reaction is already visible: more interest in decentralized systems, peer-to-peer coordination, and local computing instead of cloud-centric pipelines. Many developers have wanted this for years. AI companies are spending heavily on centralized infrastructure, but the trend does not exclude the rise of strong local models. The pace of progress suggests that within a few years, consumer hardware and local models will meet most common needs, including product development. Plenty of people are already moving in that direction. Qwen models run well locally, and while I still use Claude Code day-to-day, the gap is narrowing. I'm waiting on the NVIDIA AI hardware to come down from $3500 USD
• IAmGraydon 11mo ago
  I think the author is right that AI companies know it’s a scam, but it’s in the interest of stealing investor’s money, not consolidating land and resources through energy infrastructure buildout. Who does the author think owns that? It’s not the AI companies. It’s the same power companies that already own it.
• solsane 11mo ago
  Scaling laws are irrefutable. There is no doubt that computers will be able to learn more than any humans, after all we're not outgrowing our skulls. The last mile is just tweaking how we define optimality and providing integration points. Everyone investing in this knows this at some level. What's happening now is already pretty incredible given the understanding that we're basically still at the 'chat bot' stage for most people. The idea of agency is still very, very recent, but it's understandable that most people (particularly non SDs) are not impressed. It's easy to look at the present and be cynical. If it is only able to solve your problem 95% of the time, you still can't trust it. I think the bets are really about how far we are from 99%, even for random stuff. The fact that a chatbot that was never explicitly trained to, just by predicting next probable tokens is wild. The pace of improvement in the past 5 years has been dizzying. I'm not out here trying to put a dollar amount on it. But certainly, there is going to be a lot of money to be made. Of course it's a front for money and power. But like... isn't that the point of a corporation?
• geldedus 11mo ago
  "I don't find much use in it, thus it is no good" Nope.
• msarrel 11mo ago
  Isn't everything a front for consolidation of resources and power?
• johnnienaked 11mo ago
  Drive out to a datacenter and see for yourself. They're built right next to substations and water reservoirs. That can't be a coincidence.