6 ms·

The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

129 points by JaakkoP 5mo ago

xvxvx 5mo ago
Americans aren’t in favor of being driven into unemployment and poverty? How dare they! Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with? No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime. I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…
- dotcoma 5mo ago
  It would be nice, but is it likely to happen?
  - onetokeoverthe 5mo ago
    [dead]
- gdulli 5mo ago
  All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be? The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
- WillPostForFood 5mo ago
  Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.
  - regularization 5mo ago
    If we roll back 10,000 years, people often worked less hours per week. No class society where we have to serve the rich. Drinking alcohol, painting caves. Sounds pretty good.
  - gensym 5mo ago
    Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then We won a contest against a global superpower, due to administrations stretching across generations executing on a consistently-escalating strategy, and then balanced the budget on the peace dividend. Of course it was great. The point is there wasn’t the option of just doing the 90s in the 60s, 70s or even 80s—it had to be diligently worked towards and sacrificed for. (To be clear, our leaders of those eras, flawed as they were, could ask for those sacrifices.)
- Daz912 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
  As Musk said, they were the bootloaders of AI. Finally we get gargantuan monster battles akin to Godzilla vs. King Kong.
baigy 5mo ago
It's going to get worse, way worse, before it gets better. You know that right?
- hsuduebc2 5mo ago
  I mean, people are semi developed selfish tribal monkeys. It must hurt us significantly before we are willing to solve the issue. Not a best way to so virtually anything.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
hydroplane 5mo ago
I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.
  - linkregister 5mo ago
    The public statements of frontier labs' CEOs that generative models will replace human workers have been front page news for months.
  - throwaway27448 5mo ago
    Mag7?
    - JaakkoP 5mo ago
      Magnificent 7, the new FAANG where Netflix got swapped to NVIDIA and Tesla got added.
      - throwaway27448 5mo ago
        Jeez, we could have chosen a less, erm, crassus-reminiscent acronym
        JohnFen 5mo ago
        Yeah, it's a term I won't use because of how awful and obsequious it is.
lowbloodsugar 5mo ago
I'll just keep repeating this: There are three options: 1. AI owned by everyone 2. No AI 3. AI owned by billionaires If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI. Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires. Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  4. AI owned by someone else. Unless you’re in America, China, the UK, France or Israel, it’s this or No. 2.
- jaredcwhite 5mo ago
  Yeah I'll pick two, thanks.
  - shimman 5mo ago
    It's hilarious how the elites don't understand the politics of rejection.
- heddycrow 5mo ago
  I wish that those who support #2 looked a lot less like #3. For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.
- prettyblocks 5mo ago
  #2 is not really an option though. It's more like #1 or #3.
- xscott 5mo ago
  I agree with your logic, but you should replace 2 with "AI used by governments only". The haters would have more luck getting rid of nuclear weapons than putting the AI cat back in the bag. Governments will use it for surveillance. Think "sentiment analysis" to make sure you're not a terrorist.
spking 5mo ago
Non-paywalled link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion-against-ai-is-gaining-steam/ar-AA23w1HH https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion...
- chasil 5mo ago
  Thanks for that post. Checking MSN is a good alternative to archive.ph, or otherwise searching for the author and title?
lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
People don't see the safety net, that's the problem. Big tech hopes that bigdiks gonna bring in UBI and the like to ease the pepl, but it's nowhere near on the horizon. And it will be hard to persuade the ruling psychos to let the millions of their slaves running amok. So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck. Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD. Niice future.
xscott 5mo ago
All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves. The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI. The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI. People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI. So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly. Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!". The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement. Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money. If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.
- linkregister 5mo ago
  There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm. This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.
  - xscott 5mo ago
    Yes, and I keep copies of the ones I like[0]. I can't run the huge ones, but the ones I can run aren't as good the "frontier" models. Regardless, I expect they will be considered contraband someday. [0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.
- junofan 5mo ago
  Is there any precedent you’re referencing? Many things that are expensive, slow, scarce, or bad are going to become cheap, fast, abundant, and awesome. Historically people like that a lot. I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?
kj4211cash 5mo ago
If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift. Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
hcurtiss 5mo ago
While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.
- customguy 5mo ago
  So you want your children to be rightless cogs in the belly of a machine so that machine can be in an eternal struggle with another machine running on slaves? What for?
  - hcurtiss 5mo ago
    Is that your experience with AI? It’s made my work vastly more efficient and valuable. And have you been to modern Chinese cities? Prosperity is awesome. Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists. There’s a way to have all that AND civil rights. But if we continue to outlaw development and energy intensive industries, then yes, the West will be Chinese slaves.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - customguy 5mo ago
      > Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists. Stop telling me to stop beating my wife, I'm not even married. You don't know what Luddites are, and I don't know what eco-nihilists are. > we continue to outlaw development Again, I have no idea what this is even referring to. I'm sure you mean something with that, but expressed in such a hyperbolic, all-or-nothing way I just don't know what to do with it, sorry.
      - hcurtiss 5mo ago
        You are doing the left-wing, pretending not to understand meme. Those are the principal objections in the linked article. Data centers are not an environmental catastrophe. And AI isn’t coming to take all of our jobs. There will be change, for certain, but if we don’t embrace it, the West is doomed. That is not hyperbole. History bears this out repeatedly.
dyauspitr 5mo ago
Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  Personally I'm not convinced by pro-accelerationism arguments. Why shouldn't technical progress be hard? Why shouldn't the inevitable be held back as long as possible? What does it mean to have someone else eat our lunch in terms of AI?
  - dyauspitr 5mo ago
    It’s because you live in a world with competitors now this isn’t the 60s and the 70s anymore. There are legitimately quite a few countries that can effectively compete. Someone else eating your lunch in this case means you’re poor, have no global power and life for all of us will be worse than what we currently enjoy.
    - customguy 5mo ago
      What's the competition about? If you can generate more value from less, why should that make anyone else poorer?
    - nozzlegear 5mo ago
      But in terms of AI, what does that actually mean? If the Chinese are ahead of us and have "eaten our lunch," what are the actual effects? Cheaper AI for everyone with the existential threat that they may shut off access whenever they like? We're not building weapons here, there's no end goal unless you believe in the myth of AGI that these companies are pushing. US companies won't suddenly take their LLMs offline if China's become sufficiently advanced.
userbinator 5mo ago
[flagged]
- Ifkaluva 5mo ago
  “Content”
  - userbinator 5mo ago
    Yes, memes and the like. Lots more than before. Entertainment is far better than it was before AI, when it was controlled by the big media companies.
    - customguy 5mo ago
      Memes were never controlled by "big media". But I'm sure some people LOVE that video generation is no longer "controlled" by there having to be a real thing to take videos of. You can just make shit up, and retreat even harder into bubbles. No need to interact with "the enemy" to even mock them, no need for source material to even twist or lie about; just generate whatever. There is a rift between "AI" and people, and one between those people vs. those who take having a society, culture and public spaces seriously.
SubiculumCode 5mo ago
We truly need to put a stop to leaving our citizens defenseless against nation-state propaganda campaigns coming out of China and Russia.
- nozzlegear 5mo ago
  Are you implying this story is Chinese or Russian propaganda?
  - postsantum 5mo ago
    Everything is Chinese/Russian propaganda unless it comes from a respectable source like BBC
  - SubiculumCode 5mo ago
    No. I'm implying that Chinese micro targeted propaganda is stoking fear of AI in the U.S. with the aim of slowing/diminishing our advantage in data center compute in the AI race.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
gensym 5mo ago
It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't. The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on). Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!"). Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 5mo ago
  Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example. I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
  - gensym 5mo ago
    > We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I'm right there with you. I think AI will be bad as a whole for the world, but I use it for work every day and am pushing my team to use it more. I think it's a really effective tool for my company even if it's going to be bad for the world overall. > I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example. I see nuclear as an example of where public opinion did stop development. In the US at least, we've basically given up on nuclear power, much to our detriment. Another example of this is human cloning, which seemed inevitable back when Dolly the sheep was first cloned.
soundworlds 5mo ago
1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers. 2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people. 3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: (https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...) The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.
- senectus1 5mo ago
  yeah, completely agree. Made worse by the fact that the boomer and gen X generations are really well known for the whole "fuck you I've got mine, i deserve to stay rich and comfortable" attitude.... I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.
  - otterley 5mo ago
    Please don’t lump GenX in with boomers. We are the first generation not to have lifetime employment and pensions, the first generation to pay through the nose for higher education, and many of our peers are just barely scraping by at 50 alongside our Millenial and GenZ friends.
    - heavyset_go 5mo ago
      Stop the Boomerification of Gen X's voting record and the comparison will go away.
      - otterley 5mo ago
        Unfortunately every generation has a plurality that votes “the wrong way.” This includes Millennials: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generational-cohorts-and-party-identification/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generati... It seems to start happening when people hit 30 years of age. Maybe it’s because that’s when they start having children; I’m not sure.
goodwinresearch 5mo ago
[flagged]
Sparkyte 5mo ago
AI is fine, AI eating up jobs and taking away autonomy of people's lives. Not okay. It is a tool, it is expensive to run if it isn't more efficient or better. It is a very fun tool when used correctly. I think there is a point where our current technology will wall before we achieve genuinely good AI. We're starting to see that now. We are also over invested in it which also leaves us vulnerable for a crash in the market.
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Related: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 An AI Hate Wave Is Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318
jim33442 5mo ago
Nothing against AI in particular, but Schmidt's commencement speech sounded boring, and I would've tuned it out.
fortran77 5mo ago
There's a lot to like about AI, but there's so much slop and everthing is getting so shitty, if I had to choose a side, it would be "against it." I had to suffer through taling to Sutter Heath's AI three times today before I could get through to a person to tell them about a billing mistake. I finally decided to send a formal demand letter via FedEx (written with the help of AI) rather than deal with all this AI slop they've put between me and customer service.
feverzsj 5mo ago
The AI winter is coming ... again.
- euroderf 5mo ago
  A.I. won't be placed on a back shelf like it was in the 90s.
kakaz 5mo ago
[dead]
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
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- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
  [dead]
IShotTheSherrif 5mo ago
Job losses are being fueled by cost cutting, not realized business transformation. There are early indicators of massive productivity gains in certain roles, coupled with a pervasive belief that the technology is advancing at a rate that means we must all evolve to survive in this new landscape, both people and organizations. Executive teams are under pressure to cut costs now to fund AI investment and capture efficiencies they believe competitors are already realizing, fueled by an echo chamber that inflates small AI advancements (relative to impact) into evidence of sweeping transformation. My gut says offshore is benefiting from, and accelerating through, this transition because it remains the most familiar and defensible path to immediate cost cutting for most organizations.
somelamer567 5mo ago
This is the product of a massive own-goal by America's rightwing feral business overclass. They were bragging to shareholders about how AI was being used to slash headcount, to gratuitously ruin thousands of lives to pump up the bottom line and "reward" their already-pampered shareholders. They themselves got handsomely rewarded for it. Now they're crying and acting all butthurt for the intense negative public reaction their greed-driven communication strategy provoked. Well, that is RATHER unfortunate, isn't it??

129 points by JaakkoP 5mo ago

xvxvx 5mo ago

Americans aren’t in favor of being driven into unemployment and poverty? How dare they! Companies have their relationship with people, specifically employees, backwards. What percentage of companies out there are truly needed? What percentage solely exist because people have some surplus money to play with? No one needs Microsoft or Google products. No one needs overpriced Apple crap. AI means jack shit to almost 100% of Americans. Streaming services are one bad day away from ruin. We’ve seen what piracy can do. Now we have faster, better internet. Food delivery services RIP. I buy so little from Amazon these days that I’m questioning the $15 per month value of Prime. I hope we see society correct course and go back to how it was in the 90’s, before everything went to shit. No social media. No smart phones. Going out more. Less digital noise. Physical media from physical stores. The list goes on…

dotcoma 5mo ago
It would be nice, but is it likely to happen?
- onetokeoverthe 5mo ago
  [dead]
gdulli 5mo ago
All of these companies and their products and services are getting worse and more expensive. If their hostility to customers has not been punished so far then what reason is there to believe it ever will be? The time to have quit Prime was years ago, before the price hikes, the degradation of service, their complicity in the sale of counterfeit goods, etc. People didn't leave. They won. They know they can do what they want now.
WillPostForFood 5mo ago
Why would you only rollback to the 90s. Pretty sure TV was evil and destroying culture. And Rock and roll that was devastating, so we gotta roll back at least to the 1930's. That would be a fitting era to recreate.
- regularization 5mo ago
  If we roll back 10,000 years, people often worked less hours per week. No class society where we have to serve the rich. Drinking alcohol, painting caves. Sounds pretty good.
- gensym 5mo ago
  Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then, at least in the US. It wasn't perfect, but it really did feel like things were getting better. The Clinton administration had to start doing studies about whether paying off the national debt would be globally destabilizing! We really were talking about the "end of history". We thought the Internet would bring people together and end bigotry.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > Were you around in the 90s? People really were more optimistic then We won a contest against a global superpower, due to administrations stretching across generations executing on a consistently-escalating strategy, and then balanced the budget on the peace dividend. Of course it was great. The point is there wasn’t the option of just doing the 90s in the 60s, 70s or even 80s—it had to be diligently worked towards and sacrificed for. (To be clear, our leaders of those eras, flawed as they were, could ask for those sacrifices.)
Daz912 5mo ago
[flagged]
lofaszvanitt 5mo ago
As Musk said, they were the bootloaders of AI. Finally we get gargantuan monster battles akin to Godzilla vs. King Kong.

baigy 5mo ago

It's going to get worse, way worse, before it gets better. You know that right?

hsuduebc2 5mo ago
I mean, people are semi developed selfish tribal monkeys. It must hurt us significantly before we are willing to solve the issue. Not a best way to so virtually anything.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

hydroplane 5mo ago

I often wonder how different AI sentiment would be today if all of the layoffs that were opportunistically blamed on AI by the company CEOs were instead blamed on the real reason (likely pandemic related over hiring). The root of the backlash started as a result of all those “AI” layoffs and the hyperscaler CEOs gloating how everybody was going to lose their job due to AI. So in the end, they reap what they sow. A growing backlash that is not going away anytime soon.

tptacek 5mo ago
I think you'll find the American public is less motivated by how well-treated Mag7 software developers believe themselves to be.
- linkregister 5mo ago
  The public statements of frontier labs' CEOs that generative models will replace human workers have been front page news for months.
- throwaway27448 5mo ago
  Mag7?
  - JaakkoP 5mo ago
    Magnificent 7, the new FAANG where Netflix got swapped to NVIDIA and Tesla got added.
    - throwaway27448 5mo ago
      Jeez, we could have chosen a less, erm, crassus-reminiscent acronym
      - JohnFen 5mo ago
        Yeah, it's a term I won't use because of how awful and obsequious it is.

lowbloodsugar 5mo ago

I'll just keep repeating this: There are three options: 1. AI owned by everyone 2. No AI 3. AI owned by billionaires If you can make the masses fight for 2 instead of 1, then you guarantee that you don't get 1. If instead, the masses fight for 1, they've got a chance of getting it. You present AI as a false dichotomy: no AI or AI for billionaires. But 2 is a fantasy. There will be AI. Any of us arguing for (1) get shouted down by the very people who would benefit most from it. The masses do the job of the billionaires. Most utopian science fiction has AI doing the work and humans leading a life of leisure (e.g. Culture novels). Dystopian futures have AI keeping the rabble under control (Neil Asher's Owner Trilogy, Elysium). Time to choose folks.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
4. AI owned by someone else. Unless you’re in America, China, the UK, France or Israel, it’s this or No. 2.
jaredcwhite 5mo ago
Yeah I'll pick two, thanks.
- shimman 5mo ago
  It's hilarious how the elites don't understand the politics of rejection.
heddycrow 5mo ago
I wish that those who support #2 looked a lot less like #3. For that matter, I wish those who were pro-AI were more strictly supportive of #1.
prettyblocks 5mo ago
#2 is not really an option though. It's more like #1 or #3.
xscott 5mo ago
I agree with your logic, but you should replace 2 with "AI used by governments only". The haters would have more luck getting rid of nuclear weapons than putting the AI cat back in the bag. Governments will use it for surveillance. Think "sentiment analysis" to make sure you're not a terrorist.

spking 5mo ago

Non-paywalled link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion-against-ai-is-gaining-steam/ar-AA23w1HH https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-american-rebellion...

chasil 5mo ago
Thanks for that post. Checking MSN is a good alternative to archive.ph, or otherwise searching for the author and title?

lofaszvanitt 5mo ago

People don't see the safety net, that's the problem. Big tech hopes that bigdiks gonna bring in UBI and the like to ease the pepl, but it's nowhere near on the horizon. And it will be hard to persuade the ruling psychos to let the millions of their slaves running amok. So pepl gonna riot and hunt down AI researchers and ceos and gonna burn them at the stake and then eat them :D. Musk will tell the sect members to hunt down Sam and the first one who bites his calves will be awarded a cybertruck. Oh and data centers gonna be looted after hungry pepl eat the security guards and the mercenaries. Also remember everyone have rifles and gatlings buried in the garden :DDD. Niice future.

xscott 5mo ago

All that's going to happen is people will "voluntarily" take it away from themselves. The fearmongers will tell stories about biological or chemical weapons. It'll be things you could learn from a textbook - something like mercury molecules or cultivating rabies. People will vote to ban AI. The puritans will clutch their pearls because it can be used to make porn they don't like. They'll vote to ban AI. People who are afraid of losing their jobs will make tangential arguments about copyright violations. They'll vote to ban AI. So citizens won't be allowed to use AI directly. Instead, there will be regulatory capture. Microsoft and Apple will pay fees for compliance testing (bribes). Then they'll serve you a dumbed down version you can't escape. "I see you're trying to analyze numbers. Click here for a free signup to Office 365!". The social media sites will make sure you still have access to create rage bait slop. That improves engagement. Big software companies will pay for bug finding services. Small open source projects won't have the money. If you're upset by AI, you should ask yourself if that's part of the plan. Because there's a lot of money to be made and power to be stripped from citizens if everything above comes true.

linkregister 5mo ago
There are many cheap, open models available on the vLLM engine: https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm https://huggingface.co/models?other=vllm. This includes gpt-oss, LLaMa, and Gemma. This is in addition to Qwen, Deepseek, Mistral, Kimi, GLM, and Poolside.
- xscott 5mo ago
  Yes, and I keep copies of the ones I like[0]. I can't run the huge ones, but the ones I can run aren't as good the "frontier" models. Regardless, I expect they will be considered contraband someday. [0] - I've been using llama.ccp and Ollama. I should checkout vLLM.
junofan 5mo ago
Is there any precedent you’re referencing? Many things that are expensive, slow, scarce, or bad are going to become cheap, fast, abundant, and awesome. Historically people like that a lot. I just have trouble seeing how we get to there from here. Vote to ban AI? Has anything like that happened before?

kj4211cash 5mo ago

If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift. Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.

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hcurtiss 5mo ago

While the west clutches their pearls, China roars ahead on manufacturing, energy, and AI. Unqualified military supremacy will soon follow. I weep for my children.

customguy 5mo ago
So you want your children to be rightless cogs in the belly of a machine so that machine can be in an eternal struggle with another machine running on slaves? What for?
- hcurtiss 5mo ago
  Is that your experience with AI? It’s made my work vastly more efficient and valuable. And have you been to modern Chinese cities? Prosperity is awesome. Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists. There’s a way to have all that AND civil rights. But if we continue to outlaw development and energy intensive industries, then yes, the West will be Chinese slaves.
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  - customguy 5mo ago
    > Stop listening to the Luddites and eco-nihilists. Stop telling me to stop beating my wife, I'm not even married. You don't know what Luddites are, and I don't know what eco-nihilists are. > we continue to outlaw development Again, I have no idea what this is even referring to. I'm sure you mean something with that, but expressed in such a hyperbolic, all-or-nothing way I just don't know what to do with it, sorry.
    - hcurtiss 5mo ago
      You are doing the left-wing, pretending not to understand meme. Those are the principal objections in the linked article. Data centers are not an environmental catastrophe. And AI isn’t coming to take all of our jobs. There will be change, for certain, but if we don’t embrace it, the West is doomed. That is not hyperbole. History bears this out repeatedly.

dyauspitr 5mo ago

Bunch of idiots. We’re all going to lose our jobs but you can only hold back the inevitable for so long. This idiot populous has a total inability to see past the extremely short term. What exactly is going to happen you’re going to block the data centers. You’re going to make it hard to make technical progress and then someone else will eat your lunch and now you’re just poor.

nozzlegear 5mo ago
Personally I'm not convinced by pro-accelerationism arguments. Why shouldn't technical progress be hard? Why shouldn't the inevitable be held back as long as possible? What does it mean to have someone else eat our lunch in terms of AI?
- dyauspitr 5mo ago
  It’s because you live in a world with competitors now this isn’t the 60s and the 70s anymore. There are legitimately quite a few countries that can effectively compete. Someone else eating your lunch in this case means you’re poor, have no global power and life for all of us will be worse than what we currently enjoy.
  - customguy 5mo ago
    What's the competition about? If you can generate more value from less, why should that make anyone else poorer?
  - nozzlegear 5mo ago
    But in terms of AI, what does that actually mean? If the Chinese are ahead of us and have "eaten our lunch," what are the actual effects? Cheaper AI for everyone with the existential threat that they may shut off access whenever they like? We're not building weapons here, there's no end goal unless you believe in the myth of AGI that these companies are pushing. US companies won't suddenly take their LLMs offline if China's become sufficiently advanced.

userbinator 5mo ago

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Ifkaluva 5mo ago
“Content”
- userbinator 5mo ago
  Yes, memes and the like. Lots more than before. Entertainment is far better than it was before AI, when it was controlled by the big media companies.
  - customguy 5mo ago
    Memes were never controlled by "big media". But I'm sure some people LOVE that video generation is no longer "controlled" by there having to be a real thing to take videos of. You can just make shit up, and retreat even harder into bubbles. No need to interact with "the enemy" to even mock them, no need for source material to even twist or lie about; just generate whatever. There is a rift between "AI" and people, and one between those people vs. those who take having a society, culture and public spaces seriously.

SubiculumCode 5mo ago

We truly need to put a stop to leaving our citizens defenseless against nation-state propaganda campaigns coming out of China and Russia.

nozzlegear 5mo ago
Are you implying this story is Chinese or Russian propaganda?
- postsantum 5mo ago
  Everything is Chinese/Russian propaganda unless it comes from a respectable source like BBC
- SubiculumCode 5mo ago
  No. I'm implying that Chinese micro targeted propaganda is stoking fear of AI in the U.S. with the aim of slowing/diminishing our advantage in data center compute in the AI race.
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gensym 5mo ago

It's funny how easily you can differentiate people in the tech industry who spend all their time with others in the tech industry from those who don't. The former either seem puzzled about the general public's anger at AI or dismissive of it ("they don't really hate it - look at ChatGPT usage!", "they only hate it because they've been misled about water usage!" and so on). Non-techies aren't as stupid as people in the tech industry think. Normies can see their social media feeds filling up with slop. They see people in their social circles who can no longer hold a normal conversation without feeding everything into ChatGPT. And - most importantly, I suspect - they are seeing the plan they've built their lives around - get your kids to do well in school, get them into college so they can have a good career and make enough to pay of the loans that plan will require - being casually dismissed by AI boosters ("they'll be plenty of jobs, we just don't know what they are yet!"). Here's a clue for people who don't understand the backlash: if you don't understand that stability has value on its own, then you lack a basic understanding of what more people actually care about.

rTX5CMRXIfFG 5mo ago
Is there room for people who are already in the acceptance phase? We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example. I think that the concerns underlying the outrage are real and honestly valid, but the question I’m asking now isn’t “how to stop it” but “what now”? Because economies are cyclical and if it wasn’t AI it’d have been something else that would threaten our survival, and there are many good alternatives right now: climate change and war.
- gensym 5mo ago
  > We started aggressively adopting AI in my company this year. I think I disliked (though never hated) it for a few days, but it’s a systemic change that I can’t just push back against. I'm right there with you. I think AI will be bad as a whole for the world, but I use it for work every day and am pushing my team to use it more. I think it's a really effective tool for my company even if it's going to be bad for the world overall. > I don’t believe that strong public opinion can stop technological development either—just take nuclear for example. I see nuclear as an example of where public opinion did stop development. In the US at least, we've basically given up on nuclear power, much to our detriment. Another example of this is human cloning, which seemed inevitable back when Dolly the sheep was first cloned.

soundworlds 5mo ago

1. So AI companies royally screwed over artists and other culture workers. 2. Culture workers are a big part of who sets the narrative for the general population - especially young people. 3. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about AI and the number is falling: (https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...) The current wave of AI companies did this to themselves. Had things moved more slowly and actively worked with all the affected industries, I suspect people would be far less interested in seeing the technology fail.

senectus1 5mo ago
yeah, completely agree. Made worse by the fact that the boomer and gen X generations are really well known for the whole "fuck you I've got mine, i deserve to stay rich and comfortable" attitude.... I get the feeling that shits coming to a head.
- otterley 5mo ago
  Please don’t lump GenX in with boomers. We are the first generation not to have lifetime employment and pensions, the first generation to pay through the nose for higher education, and many of our peers are just barely scraping by at 50 alongside our Millenial and GenZ friends.
  - heavyset_go 5mo ago
    Stop the Boomerification of Gen X's voting record and the comparison will go away.
    - otterley 5mo ago
      Unfortunately every generation has a plurality that votes “the wrong way.” This includes Millennials: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generational-cohorts-and-party-identification/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/age-generati... It seems to start happening when people hit 30 years of age. Maybe it’s because that’s when they start having children; I’m not sure.

goodwinresearch 5mo ago

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Sparkyte 5mo ago

AI is fine, AI eating up jobs and taking away autonomy of people's lives. Not okay. It is a tool, it is expensive to run if it isn't more efficient or better. It is a very fun tool when used correctly. I think there is a point where our current technology will wall before we achieve genuinely good AI. We're starting to see that now. We are also over invested in it which also leaves us vulnerable for a crash in the market.

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

Related: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 An AI Hate Wave Is Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318

jim33442 5mo ago

Nothing against AI in particular, but Schmidt's commencement speech sounded boring, and I would've tuned it out.

fortran77 5mo ago

There's a lot to like about AI, but there's so much slop and everthing is getting so shitty, if I had to choose a side, it would be "against it." I had to suffer through taling to Sutter Heath's AI three times today before I could get through to a person to tell them about a billing mistake. I finally decided to send a formal demand letter via FedEx (written with the help of AI) rather than deal with all this AI slop they've put between me and customer service.

feverzsj 5mo ago

The AI winter is coming ... again.

euroderf 5mo ago
A.I. won't be placed on a back shelf like it was in the 90s.

kakaz 5mo ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo ago
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IShotTheSherrif 5mo ago

Job losses are being fueled by cost cutting, not realized business transformation. There are early indicators of massive productivity gains in certain roles, coupled with a pervasive belief that the technology is advancing at a rate that means we must all evolve to survive in this new landscape, both people and organizations. Executive teams are under pressure to cut costs now to fund AI investment and capture efficiencies they believe competitors are already realizing, fueled by an echo chamber that inflates small AI advancements (relative to impact) into evidence of sweeping transformation. My gut says offshore is benefiting from, and accelerating through, this transition because it remains the most familiar and defensible path to immediate cost cutting for most organizations.

somelamer567 5mo ago

This is the product of a massive own-goal by America's rightwing feral business overclass. They were bragging to shareholders about how AI was being used to slash headcount, to gratuitously ruin thousands of lives to pump up the bottom line and "reward" their already-pampered shareholders. They themselves got handsomely rewarded for it. Now they're crying and acting all butthurt for the intense negative public reaction their greed-driven communication strategy provoked. Well, that is RATHER unfortunate, isn't it??