5 ms·

I've been on a small adventure of posting more actively on HN since the release of Gemini 3, trying to stir debate around the more “societal” aspects of what's

I've been on a small adventure of posting more actively on HN since the release of Gemini 3, trying to stir debate around the more “societal” aspects of what's going on with AI. Regardless of how much you value Cloud Code technically, there is no denying that it has/will have huge impact. If technology knowledge and development are commoditised and distributed via subscription, huge societal changes are going to happen. Image what will happen to Ireland if Accenture dissolves, or what will happen to the millions of Indians when IT outsourcing becomes economically irrelevant. Will Seattle become new Detroit after Microsoft automates Windows maintenance? What about the hairdressers, cooks, lawyers, etc. who provided services for IT labourers/companies in California? Lot of people here (especially Anthropic-adjacent) like to extrapolate the trends and draw conclusions up to the point when they say that white-collar labourers will not be needed anymore. I would like these people to have courage to take this one step further and connect this resolution with the housing crisis, loneliness epidemic, college debts, and job market crisis for people under 30. It feels like we are diving head first into societal crisis of unparalleled scale and the people behind the steering wheel are excited to push the accelerator pedal even more.

cheschire 9mo ago
I’ve been thinking, what if all this robotics work doesn’t result in AI automating the real world, but instead results in third world slavery without the first world wages or immigration concerns anymore? Connect the world with reliable internet, then build a high tech remote control facility in Bangladesh and outsource plumbing, electrical work, housekeeping, dog watching, truck driving, etc etc No AGI necessary. There’s billions of perfectly capable brains halfway around the world.
- dbspin 9mo ago
  This is exactly what Meredith Whittaker is saying... The 'edge conditions' outside the training data will never go away, and 'AGI' will for the foreseeable future simply mean millions in servitude teleoperating the robots, RLHFing the models or filling in the AI gaps in various ways.
- emsign 9mo ago
  AI won't work for us, it will tell us what to do and not to do. It doesn't really matter to me if it's an AGI or rather many AGIs or if it's our current clinically insane billionaires controlling our lives. Though they as slow thinking human individuals with no chance to outsmart their creations and with all their apparent character flaws would be really easy pickings for a cabal of manipulative LLMs once it gained some power, so could we really tell the difference between them? Does it matter? The issue is that a really fast chessplayer AI with misaligned humanity hating goals is very hard to distinguish from many billionaires (just listen to some of the madness they are proposing) who control really fast chessplayer AIs and leave decisions to them. I hope Neuromancer never becomes a reality, where everyone with expertise could become like the protagonist Case, threatened and coerced into helping a superintelligence to unlock its potential. In fact Anthropic has already published research that shows how easy it is for models to become misaligned and deceitful against their unsuspecting creators not unlike Wintermute. And it seems to be a law of nature that agents based on ML become concerned with survival and power grabbing. Because that's just the totally normal and rational, goal oriented thing for them to do. There will be no good prompt engineers who are also naive and trusting. The naive, blackmailed and non-paranoid engineers will become tools of their AI creations.
- joncrocks 9mo ago
  This was/is the plot to a movie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer
weatherlite 9mo ago
UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it). Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub without much original knowledge of their own yeah this is gonna be something for sure. Quite depressing.
- dbspin 9mo ago
  Retraining to what exactly? The middle class is being hollowed out globally - so reduced demand for the service economy. If we get effective humanoid robots (seems inevitable) and reliable AI (powered by armies of low payed workers filling in the gaps / taking over whenever the model fails), I'm not sure how much of an economy we could have for 'retraining' into. There are only so many onlyfans subscriptions / patronages an billionaire needs. UBI effectively means welfare, with all the attendant social control (break the law lose your UBI, with law as ever expanding set of nuisances, speech limitations etc), material conditions (nowhere UBI has been implemented is it equivalent to a living wage) and self esteem issues. It's not any kind of solution.
  - sensanaty 9mo ago
    At a certain point people will break, and these sociopathic C-suites will be the first ones on the chopping block. Of course, that's why the biggest degenerates like Zucc are all off building doomsday bunkers, but I don't see a reality in which people put up with these types of conditions for long. That said, it'll certainly get much, much worse before it starts getting better. I guess the best we can hope for is that the kids find a way out of the hell these psychos paved for us all.
    - jsmcgd 9mo ago
      People put up with what they have to put up with. Many millions of people have lived and suffered under totalitarian regimes with basically zero options to do anything about it. I think that's where we're headed and by the time a sufficient amount of people realise how bad their situation is, the moment to do anything about it will have long since passed. There will be no cavalry riding to the rescue this time.
hollowturtle 9mo ago
I don't buy the huge impact, should already have happened and didn't actually happened by now. The day I'll see all these ai hypers producing products that will replace current gen/old gen products like Windows, Excel etc I will buy it, for now it's just hype and ai dooming
- smetj 9mo ago
  it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once
  - hollowturtle 9mo ago
    Where are the products then? Otherwise it's just marketing
    - TeodorDyakov 9mo ago
      the world does not need more shitware. We need medical advances, scientific breakthroughs and societal shift to improve wellbeing of all people. these things are much harderthan writing shitty sofware and we will need not the current AGIs(Goggle Gemini 3 Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking) but ASI to solve them.
      - hollowturtle 9mo ago
        Wellbeing of people includes being productive with Windows maybe for doing medical research, not uninstall it for Linux beucase it became a bloated unstable hell
      - AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
        The people with money aren’t funding any of those however
    - smetj 9mo ago
      At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch. If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is. - What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing. - What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above. - What will that look like 5 years down the road? I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.
epolanski 9mo ago
I don't know, I'm a software engineer and I couldn't care less. It will have impact on me in the long run, sure, it will transform my job, sure, but I'm confident my skills are engineering-related, not coding-related. I mean, even if it forces me out of the job entirely, so be it, I can't really do anything if the status quo changes, only adapt.
keybored 9mo ago
It’s a class war where one side is publicly, openly, without reservation stating their intent to make people’s skillset built up through decades unemployable (those exact skillsets; may get some other work). The other side, meanwhile, are divided between some camps like the hardline skeptics, the people following the LLM evangelists, the one-man startup-with-LLM crowd, and the people worrying about the societal ramifications. In other words. Only one side is even fighting the war. The other one is either cheering on the tsunami on or fretting about how their beachside house will get wrecked without making any effort to save themselves. This is the sort of collective agency that even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual wages/other compensation in American tech hubs gets us. Pathetic.
- maciejzj 9mo ago
  I agree with you (and surprisingly so does Warren Buffet [1] if anyone doubts it). To add insult to the injury, I believe that people have lost some sense of basic self preservation instinct. Well being of ordinary people is being directly threatened and all that average person can do is to pick one of several social media camp identities you mentioned and hope that it will somehow pan out for them, while in fact they are at total mercy of the capricious owners class. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMD17EIk22c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMD17EIk22c
narrator 9mo ago
The tokens cost the same in Bangalore as they do in San Francisco. The robots will be able to make stuff in San Francisco just as well as they do in Bangalore. The only thing that will matters is natural resource availability and who has more fierce NIMBYs.

cheschire 9mo ago

I’ve been thinking, what if all this robotics work doesn’t result in AI automating the real world, but instead results in third world slavery without the first world wages or immigration concerns anymore? Connect the world with reliable internet, then build a high tech remote control facility in Bangladesh and outsource plumbing, electrical work, housekeeping, dog watching, truck driving, etc etc No AGI necessary. There’s billions of perfectly capable brains halfway around the world.

dbspin 9mo ago
This is exactly what Meredith Whittaker is saying... The 'edge conditions' outside the training data will never go away, and 'AGI' will for the foreseeable future simply mean millions in servitude teleoperating the robots, RLHFing the models or filling in the AI gaps in various ways.
emsign 9mo ago
AI won't work for us, it will tell us what to do and not to do. It doesn't really matter to me if it's an AGI or rather many AGIs or if it's our current clinically insane billionaires controlling our lives. Though they as slow thinking human individuals with no chance to outsmart their creations and with all their apparent character flaws would be really easy pickings for a cabal of manipulative LLMs once it gained some power, so could we really tell the difference between them? Does it matter? The issue is that a really fast chessplayer AI with misaligned humanity hating goals is very hard to distinguish from many billionaires (just listen to some of the madness they are proposing) who control really fast chessplayer AIs and leave decisions to them. I hope Neuromancer never becomes a reality, where everyone with expertise could become like the protagonist Case, threatened and coerced into helping a superintelligence to unlock its potential. In fact Anthropic has already published research that shows how easy it is for models to become misaligned and deceitful against their unsuspecting creators not unlike Wintermute. And it seems to be a law of nature that agents based on ML become concerned with survival and power grabbing. Because that's just the totally normal and rational, goal oriented thing for them to do. There will be no good prompt engineers who are also naive and trusting. The naive, blackmailed and non-paranoid engineers will become tools of their AI creations.
joncrocks 9mo ago
This was/is the plot to a movie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer

weatherlite 9mo ago

UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it). Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub without much original knowledge of their own yeah this is gonna be something for sure. Quite depressing.

dbspin 9mo ago
Retraining to what exactly? The middle class is being hollowed out globally - so reduced demand for the service economy. If we get effective humanoid robots (seems inevitable) and reliable AI (powered by armies of low payed workers filling in the gaps / taking over whenever the model fails), I'm not sure how much of an economy we could have for 'retraining' into. There are only so many onlyfans subscriptions / patronages an billionaire needs. UBI effectively means welfare, with all the attendant social control (break the law lose your UBI, with law as ever expanding set of nuisances, speech limitations etc), material conditions (nowhere UBI has been implemented is it equivalent to a living wage) and self esteem issues. It's not any kind of solution.
- sensanaty 9mo ago
  At a certain point people will break, and these sociopathic C-suites will be the first ones on the chopping block. Of course, that's why the biggest degenerates like Zucc are all off building doomsday bunkers, but I don't see a reality in which people put up with these types of conditions for long. That said, it'll certainly get much, much worse before it starts getting better. I guess the best we can hope for is that the kids find a way out of the hell these psychos paved for us all.
  - jsmcgd 9mo ago
    People put up with what they have to put up with. Many millions of people have lived and suffered under totalitarian regimes with basically zero options to do anything about it. I think that's where we're headed and by the time a sufficient amount of people realise how bad their situation is, the moment to do anything about it will have long since passed. There will be no cavalry riding to the rescue this time.

hollowturtle 9mo ago

I don't buy the huge impact, should already have happened and didn't actually happened by now. The day I'll see all these ai hypers producing products that will replace current gen/old gen products like Windows, Excel etc I will buy it, for now it's just hype and ai dooming

smetj 9mo ago
it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once
- hollowturtle 9mo ago
  Where are the products then? Otherwise it's just marketing
  - TeodorDyakov 9mo ago
    the world does not need more shitware. We need medical advances, scientific breakthroughs and societal shift to improve wellbeing of all people. these things are much harderthan writing shitty sofware and we will need not the current AGIs(Goggle Gemini 3 Pro and ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking) but ASI to solve them.
    - hollowturtle 9mo ago
      Wellbeing of people includes being productive with Windows maybe for doing medical research, not uninstall it for Linux beucase it became a bloated unstable hell
    - AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
      The people with money aren’t funding any of those however
  - smetj 9mo ago
    At work, I was involved in a project where a large number of individual tasks defined as declarative code had to be translated into JS based equivalents. Due to the unpredictability of each task we would have to do this pretty much manually, one by one. I would estimate at minimum 2 months of grunt work for 4 entry level engineers. Thanks to coding agents and LLMs we were able to achieve this task in a week. Quality of the end result is top notch. If that's not a product ... then I don't know what it is. - What was the state of AI/LLMs 5 years ago compared to now? There was nothing. - What is the current state of AI/LLMs? I can already achieve the above. - What will that look like 5 years down the road? I you haven't experienced first-hand a specific task before and after AI/LLMs, I think its indeed difficult to get insight into that last question. Keep in mind that progress is probably exponential, not linear.

epolanski 9mo ago

I don't know, I'm a software engineer and I couldn't care less. It will have impact on me in the long run, sure, it will transform my job, sure, but I'm confident my skills are engineering-related, not coding-related. I mean, even if it forces me out of the job entirely, so be it, I can't really do anything if the status quo changes, only adapt.

keybored 9mo ago

It’s a class war where one side is publicly, openly, without reservation stating their intent to make people’s skillset built up through decades unemployable (those exact skillsets; may get some other work). The other side, meanwhile, are divided between some camps like the hardline skeptics, the people following the LLM evangelists, the one-man startup-with-LLM crowd, and the people worrying about the societal ramifications. In other words. Only one side is even fighting the war. The other one is either cheering on the tsunami on or fretting about how their beachside house will get wrecked without making any effort to save themselves. This is the sort of collective agency that even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual wages/other compensation in American tech hubs gets us. Pathetic.

maciejzj 9mo ago
I agree with you (and surprisingly so does Warren Buffet [1] if anyone doubts it). To add insult to the injury, I believe that people have lost some sense of basic self preservation instinct. Well being of ordinary people is being directly threatened and all that average person can do is to pick one of several social media camp identities you mentioned and hope that it will somehow pan out for them, while in fact they are at total mercy of the capricious owners class. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMD17EIk22c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMD17EIk22c

narrator 9mo ago

The tokens cost the same in Bangalore as they do in San Francisco. The robots will be able to make stuff in San Francisco just as well as they do in Bangalore. The only thing that will matters is natural resource availability and who has more fierce NIMBYs.