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These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If yo

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

new_account_100 5mo ago
[dead]
mrbungie 5mo ago
AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
  - dredmorbius 5mo ago
    Upset with what aspect(s) of databases? The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create? That latter seems to have aged quite well.
    - kalleboo 5mo ago
      Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information). Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
  - knuckleheads 5mo ago
    The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.
  - lacewing 5mo ago
    There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
    - brandon272 5mo ago
      I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption. Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
      - andrekandre 5mo ago
        > Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI. its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms. right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...
  - hansmayer 5mo ago
    > People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?
  - keybored 5mo ago
    Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be. So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily. Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
    - TrnsltLife 5mo ago
      Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.
  - anonzzzies 5mo ago
    People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
    - andrekandre 5mo ago
      > But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc
  - the_gastropod 5mo ago
    Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
  - d0liver 5mo ago
    What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
    - dmantis 5mo ago
      Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.
      - the_gastropod 5mo ago
        In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it? The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
        KptMarchewa 5mo ago
        Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
        AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
        No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech? You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
        satvikpendem 5mo ago
  - bdangubic 5mo ago
    > It really isn't going anywhere It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
  - barnabee 5mo ago
    TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it. AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
  - customguy 5mo ago
    The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.
- empath75 5mo ago
  I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train. You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass. There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
  - bluefirebrand 5mo ago
    > There is no possible universe where AI is banned Yes there is It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
    - nba456_ 5mo ago
      No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI. And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
      - csande17 5mo ago
        You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
        empath75 5mo ago
        Why do you imagine this would change _anything_? There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models. If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
  none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.
- elpocko 5mo ago
  > To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in. Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
  - swiftcoder 5mo ago
    > Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
  - miltonlost 5mo ago
    AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
  - goda90 5mo ago
    Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
  - miyoji 5mo ago
    > It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues. No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
    - logicchains 5mo ago
      [flagged]
    - elpocko 5mo ago
      > dismiss people's legitimate concerns Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.
- logicchains 5mo ago
  >people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
  - hack1312 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - satvikpendem 5mo ago
    Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.
- potsandpans 5mo ago
  I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children." There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair. This is the world now.
justonepost2 5mo ago
The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.
- Procrastes 5mo ago
  As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess? Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_be_eaten_first/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...
fontain 5mo ago
That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.
chasd00 5mo ago
My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating. I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot. I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same. /I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice
- tiahura 5mo ago
  50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.
  - justonepost2 5mo ago
    How about when you’re 53 and unemployed on subsistence UBI?
    - pepperoni_pizza 5mo ago
      There will be no UBI.
      - justonepost2 5mo ago
        Probably correct :)
    - marris 5mo ago
      I will do the pro-social thing of wishing that resources were more scarce so that the resources I hold were worth more.
dfxm12 5mo ago
If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?
- dale_glass 5mo ago
  I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would. https://xkcd.com/1170/ https://xkcd.com/1170/
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    If your friends all start to jump off a bridge, the rational thing to do is question their sanity, not to just jump. That xkcd is dead wrong.
    - gitaarik 5mo ago
      Or you should wonder why they might jump instead of directly questioning their sanity. Then if you see the bridge is on fire and it's safe to jump into the water, then it makes sense, right?
- Filligree 5mo ago
  I mean. Yes? Probably?
- enoint 5mo ago
  If all my friends drove 75 mph, would I risk driving 15 mph in front of them?
lccerina 5mo ago
[flagged]
- dist-epoch 5mo ago
  You forget about the robot armies that will soon defend the data centers.
- empath75 5mo ago
  If you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
  - lccerina 5mo ago
    How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow? You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale. Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
    - zozbot234 5mo ago
      The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
      - DrewADesign 5mo ago
        For bang-on user cases like coding, sure. For concept art and other still-image diffusion tasks, sure. For damn near anything else, calling hardware that doesn’t approach the inference breadth and performance of data-center-hosted remote services ‘potato-level’ is pretty disingenuous… never mind any significant training. Not only that, hardware is less accessible than it’s been in years— nvidia is re-releasing the 3060 so gamers can buy something. For anything you’d stake your business on? Good luck.
dist-epoch 5mo ago
Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.
- mrspuratic 5mo ago
  Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.
add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago
Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.
probably_wrong 5mo ago
> If you can't fight them, join them. This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you. And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.
crazyfingers 5mo ago
> join them Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.
- XorNot 5mo ago
  This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result. The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind". But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it. The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    > There's nothing to learn with AI You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
    - debazel 5mo ago
      The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
  - 5mo ago
the_snooze 5mo ago
That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.
DiabloD3 5mo ago
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
pelasaco 5mo ago
You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?
- virgildotcodes 5mo ago
  Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually. If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
  - pelasaco 5mo ago
    I was more thinking, Taxi drivers that hate cars, or people who hate their work but still do it, the whole life.. but yeah your answer is good too lol :)
KerrAvon 5mo ago
What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.
velcrovan 5mo ago
I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-future/ https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...
- 7tflutter7 5mo ago
  The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
  - velcrovan 5mo ago
    I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
    - 7tflutter7 5mo ago
      Ok i actually agree with that. Imo the gov is going to have to print a lot of money to deal with the impacts of ai (covid was $5T), if we do it now that same dollar would go 10x further and the people would effectively be the largest owner of AI labs like Anthropic. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure idea.
asklq 5mo ago
It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency. Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone". If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution. The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.
- 7tflutter7 5mo ago
  So your master plan is to purposely work ten times slower than everyone else to prove a point to a CEO who doesn't know your name?
- otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
  > It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone". Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.
- Paradigma11 5mo ago
  Of course these graduates have agency. So do the companies not employing them. Telling them to deal with it is well meant advice, not an attempt to coerce them into compliance. To be honest most likely nobody cares deeply if they take that advice or not.
malfist 5mo ago
These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.
- chasd00 5mo ago
  only time will tell, make your bets. carefully.
mpalmer 5mo ago
I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on. What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest. - Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship" - Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities - The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general - Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match
dburkland 5mo ago
Bingo
afavour 5mo ago
I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- splittydev 5mo ago
  The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
  - dml2135 5mo ago
    Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.
    - splittydev 5mo ago
      Yes. And I'm sure they're having a hard time. ^
      - mrbungie 5mo ago
        It really depends on their environment. Not every city is a car-first city.
      - throw4847285 5mo ago
        It's so funny when technological progress guys encounter YIMBYs. They can't even perceive that somebody would have a criticism of the impact of a technology on one's lived environment. "But, history is one big game of Civilization, and we replaced the little horses with tanks? What do you mean you don't like it?" Whigs gonna whig I guess.
QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago
You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.
jayd16 5mo ago
It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.
SubmarineClub 5mo ago
Doubt. How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools? Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming. I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  They aren't even good at programming, despite the repeated claims to the contrary by AI bros.
- duchef 5mo ago
  I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in. I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice). I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
JeremyNT 5mo ago
> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it. If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."
- 7tflutter7 5mo ago
  ^ doomscrolling john connor
bsza 5mo ago
> AI is here to stay I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op. How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.
- 7tflutter7 5mo ago
  Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.
  - bsza 5mo ago
    Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.
    - joquarky 5mo ago
      That's because we built very fast computers to simulate them.
    - saulpw 5mo ago
      We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation. Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
  - nmeagent 5mo ago
    In the mid-80s the world was estimated to have some 60000+, so 12000 is somewhat of an improvement. Ideally through arms control we could reduce this further, but that's no trivial undertaking.
- chasd00 5mo ago
keybored 5mo ago
Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here. Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.
righthand 5mo ago
This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?
beej71 5mo ago
Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.
tootie 5mo ago
Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.
kalleboo 5mo ago
AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight. We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired. This is what we keep being told. So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.
- jolt42 5mo ago
  When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
  - duchef 5mo ago
    I think his point was that we are bombarded with cataclysmic language from AI leaders about our sooncoming intellectual demise.
- mpalmer 5mo ago
  We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) FWIW the people saying this tend to be remarkably ignorant.
geremiiah 5mo ago
If you can't fight them, join them. That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.
iceflinger 5mo ago
Cool, fighting it is then.
bob1029 5mo ago
I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next. At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.
- ModernMech 5mo ago
  > A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next. Agreed. 20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.
- tavavex 5mo ago
  The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
  - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
    > It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. Correct it is not, but there was also some better tooling and frameworks before. We used to have RAD native tooling, now we have... Electron.
    - tavavex 5mo ago
      Yes, and there is still good tooling now, you don't have to use Electron. The reason why many companies use bad tooling or bad practices was provided in the sentence immediately after the one that you've quoted. When tech was new, companies needed to gain customers and engineers were on longer leashes, so making reliable and high-quality software was paramount. Now that everyone has to use computers, they refocused on extracting more money from what they already had by taking shortcuts, cutting dev teams and letting profit motives always take the driver's seat. But you can still write good software. Arguably, it's the easiest it has ever been.
827a 5mo ago
Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.
ai-x 5mo ago
Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations. I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.
lbrito 5mo ago
This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes. AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement. When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.
dspillett 5mo ago
To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping. If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :) Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…
- orangecoffee 5mo ago
  One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
- mancerayder 5mo ago
  Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone. Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.
  - dspillett 5mo ago
Aurornis 5mo ago
Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay. Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly. It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage. What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.
- skydhash 5mo ago
  > Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there. I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.
jgbuddy 5mo ago
True
vitality6637 5mo ago
"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
soloto 5mo ago
Assumed future facts are not facts, they are just your opinion.

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

new_account_100 5mo ago

[dead]

mrbungie 5mo ago

AI as a tech is fine. But disliking it and the social/economic effects around it is fine too, people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in.

tptacek 5mo ago
There's a normative argument in the parent that's reasonable to engage and rebut, but there's also a positive component that's less easy to take issue with. It really isn't going anywhere, no matter what world you want to live in. People were upset about databases in the 1980s (some still are).
- dredmorbius 5mo ago
  Upset with what aspect(s) of databases? The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create? That latter seems to have aged quite well.
  - kalleboo 5mo ago
    Sweden had from 1973-1998 a law that made it illegal to have a computer database of personal information without getting approval from the government (in 1982 it was opened up so that approval was only needed for "sensitive" information). Looking back getting rid of that may have been a mistake.
- knuckleheads 5mo ago
  The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.
- lacewing 5mo ago
  There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one. Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.
  - brandon272 5mo ago
    I think that AI is less analogous to "traffic jams" and more analogous to "wheel-based transportation". It's an entire category, not a specific problem. The traffic jam is more analogous to excessive energy consumption or workforce disruption. Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI.
    - andrekandre 5mo ago
      > Many people seem unable to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to AI. its because "ai" means whatever the marketing dept decides it is... we've had all kinds of 'ai' in the past its just they enabled features based on some intelligent logic not just llms. right now llms are being shoved into everything whether its a good fit or not; so it makes for additional noise...
- hansmayer 5mo ago
  > People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?
- keybored 5mo ago
  Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be. So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily. Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.
  - TrnsltLife 5mo ago
    Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants. The Amish don't use tractors or whatever. I guess we could have AI free countries. The last bastions of true humanity or something.
- anonzzzies 5mo ago
  People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.
  - andrekandre 5mo ago
    > But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience people are doing this inside companies as well; stupid animations generated by ai posted in slack, powerpoint slides with super detailed drawings and images of ai generated "user experiences" where a couple of text boxes would have been fine, etc etc
- the_gastropod 5mo ago
  Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.
- d0liver 5mo ago
  What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.
  - dmantis 5mo ago
    Why would it? It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it. Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.
    - the_gastropod 5mo ago
      In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it? The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.
      - KptMarchewa 5mo ago
        Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
        AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
        No. You're not thinking it through well enough. The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business. Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.) The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech? You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?
        satvikpendem 5mo ago
- bdangubic 5mo ago
  > It really isn't going anywhere It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)
- barnabee 5mo ago
  TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it. AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.
- customguy 5mo ago
  The widespread criticism isn't based on "the tech not going away eventually". All of that is a red herring, a response to something nobody (mainstream) is talking about.
empath75 5mo ago
I would not recommend that people "suck it up", but I think people have to come to terms with the fact that AI is a legitimate technology that is going to transform the way people live and work. That is just a fact of life, as surely true about AI as it was true about the internet, or smart phones, or cars, or radio, or the train. You can close your eyes and pretend that it is not coming, or you can organize politically to mitigate the damage it is going to do while harnessing the benefits of it. Because it absolutely _is_ going to harm a lot of individuals, even if the best case scenario of benefiting humanity as a whole comes to pass. There is no possible universe where AI is banned, or it just fails and goes away as a technology. None. People have to just accept that and focus on realistic ways to regulate it and tax it, instead.
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > There is no possible universe where AI is banned Yes there is It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining
  - nba456_ 5mo ago
    No, there isn't. At this point you would have to wipe out humanity to get rid of AI. And then hope nothing else ever evolves intelligence.
    - csande17 5mo ago
      You'd have to wipe out, like, at MOST about ten executives and star engineers.
      - empath75 5mo ago
        Why do you imagine this would change _anything_? There's a voluminous amount of code and documentation on how to build and run LLMs. You can build your own chatgpt literally in a weekend and run it on a home server, based on publicly available models. If OpenAI and Anthropic literally evaporated overnight, there would still be Chinese labs training and releasing new models.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
none of us lives in the society they want to live in. had it been up to me, we would all retvrn to monke.
elpocko 5mo ago
> To recommend people to suck it up is not the answer I wish in the society I want to live in. Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter. It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.
- swiftcoder 5mo ago
  > Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...
- miltonlost 5mo ago
  AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?
- goda90 5mo ago
  Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.
- miyoji 5mo ago
  > It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues. No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.
  - logicchains 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - elpocko 5mo ago
    > dismiss people's legitimate concerns Ignoring your rudeness, the word "legitimate" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It would take me one second to present you with an issue that concerns me, that will make you say "suck it up" because you don't consider it a legit issue, and I would end up being the asshole in the exchange.
logicchains 5mo ago
>people should be allowed to feel however they want to feel about certain techs and situations. All the white collar workers whining about AI didn't give a damn about the tens of millions of factory workers who lost their jobs to automation. Society doesn't owe them any more sympathy than they gave to the workers whose jobs they automated away.
- hack1312 5mo ago
  [dead]
- satvikpendem 5mo ago
  Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.
potsandpans 5mo ago
I don't want to live in a society where privacy is a second class citizen, yet the prevailing sentiment seems to be "suck it up, we have to protect the children." There are plenty of things not to like about society. What's funny about AI is that the inequality it brings is proportionally affecting white people, and thats got a lot of people discovering with great consternation that the world isn't fair. This is the world now.

justonepost2 5mo ago

The eschaton will devour the people who “join them” just as fast as the people who fight it.

Procrastes 5mo ago
As Jack T. Chick said, "No one can save you. We will all be eaten."[1] But isn't the real goal to be eaten first, so you can miss out on all that noisy screaming and awful mess? Eschatons have a solid track record of never showing up when invited, so there's that. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_be_eaten_first/#lightbox https://www.reddit.com/r/Cthulhu/comments/1m9uxmp/who_will_b...

fontain 5mo ago

That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.

chasd00 5mo ago

My wife is a former journalist and was beginning her career when the web began to take off. All the old editors and reporters in her industry blew off the Internet, blogs, and web publishing in general. They thought no one will ever quit buying papers, it was a staple of modern life! She tried to clue them in but hit a brick wall ever time. I feel like history is repeating. I use AI regularly, where it works it works very well for me. I've helped two people now who are not developers get started putting things together using claudecode. Nothing earth shattering, some dashboards of stock prices and an html clickthrough to pick a college backed by a bunch of spreadsheets. They're having a ball and learning a lot. I'm not fightning it, just learning where it works and where it doesn't and teaching others the same. /I'm 50 and have been in tech professionally since i was 20 so have been around this block once or twice

tiahura 5mo ago
50, lawyer, and it has completely revolutionized my workflow. Just shake my head at the denialism.
- justonepost2 5mo ago
  How about when you’re 53 and unemployed on subsistence UBI?
  - pepperoni_pizza 5mo ago
    There will be no UBI.
    - justonepost2 5mo ago
      Probably correct :)
  - marris 5mo ago
    I will do the pro-social thing of wishing that resources were more scarce so that the resources I hold were worth more.

dfxm12 5mo ago

If your ability to engage with the article and this topic is reduced to parroting cliches, consider this one: if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?

dale_glass 5mo ago
I'm generally friends with good, sane, smart people. If they're all jumping from the bridge, there's almost certainly something to jump from, so yes I would. https://xkcd.com/1170/ https://xkcd.com/1170/
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  If your friends all start to jump off a bridge, the rational thing to do is question their sanity, not to just jump. That xkcd is dead wrong.
  - gitaarik 5mo ago
    Or you should wonder why they might jump instead of directly questioning their sanity. Then if you see the bridge is on fire and it's safe to jump into the water, then it makes sense, right?
Filligree 5mo ago
I mean. Yes? Probably?
enoint 5mo ago
If all my friends drove 75 mph, would I risk driving 15 mph in front of them?

lccerina 5mo ago

[flagged]

dist-epoch 5mo ago
You forget about the robot armies that will soon defend the data centers.
empath75 5mo ago
If you burned down every data center in the world, AI would still not go away. It's just a computer program. You can run it on your laptop. You can't burn down an idea.
- lccerina 5mo ago
  How many devs would be able to keep working if GitHub disappeared tomorrow? You can do inference on SOME laptops, but the current shape of GenAI need massive data centers to be used at scale. Also the existence of various big tech companies rely on these data centers being place, without them they are useless.
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    The nice thing about local AI is that it really can run anywhere, you just need enough storage space for the weights and the context. It just gets slower if you run it on potato-level hardware.
    - DrewADesign 5mo ago
      For bang-on user cases like coding, sure. For concept art and other still-image diffusion tasks, sure. For damn near anything else, calling hardware that doesn’t approach the inference breadth and performance of data-center-hosted remote services ‘potato-level’ is pretty disingenuous… never mind any significant training. Not only that, hardware is less accessible than it’s been in years— nvidia is re-releasing the 3060 so gamers can buy something. For anything you’d stake your business on? Good luck.

dist-epoch 5mo ago

Everybody will. You will not be spared. If you think you are a senior prompt whisperer and that will save you, that is going away in a year too.

mrspuratic 5mo ago
Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.

add-sub-mul-div 5mo ago

Not everyone is empty enough to be okay with participating in the expansion of something they strongly believe will be a net negative for the world.

probably_wrong 5mo ago

> If you can't fight them, join them. This is a similar argument that the one people used to justify Facebook: "if you don't join then say goodbye to your social life". Now that we have papers, books, and even court decisions showing conclusively that this was a bad idea (including, paradoxically, the death of social life), I would argue the exact opposite: if you don't fight against it now then Silicon Valley will take your choice away from you. And more generally: I find it interesting that your argument isn't "this is good" but rather "this is unstoppable". With that attitude we might as well bring CFC and leaded gasoline back.

crazyfingers 5mo ago

> join them Become an LLM? Probably better to try and differentiate ourselves from LLMs than try to mimic them.

XorNot 5mo ago
This is the part the AI advocates don't seem to get. There's nothing to learn with AI: each new model is better then the last. Requires less input to achieve a workable result. The advocacy has always felt like cope to me and you see it in the advertising and LinkedIn: "get ready for AI", "adapt your AI workflows" - it's all centered on saying "you need the skills for the new thing so you don't get left behind". But I don't need the skills for the new thing, because it does things for me. And each new successive generation will do more. Any time I would've spent bolting together some AI workflow a couple of years ago was wiped out when Claude came along. People are talking about there very clever multi-agent workflows or whatever, but it's all just prompts into the same datacenters and then...wiped out when the next model can just do it. The advocacy is well...an excuse. The product looks and feels like AI. It's not impressive when it's generated by AI. The user isn't going to improve or build a better one, because they don't work on training new AI models. And a new AI model of sufficient power will just wipe out whatever skills you obtained, and the thing which might be useful - understanding the AI output - you'll never learn because you aren't doing it.
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  > There's nothing to learn with AI You need to steer the AI effectively and assess its results, otherwise you just get nonsense. That takes real-world knowledge. In fact availability of AI makes knowledge skills more valuable, not less.
  - debazel 5mo ago
    The amount of steering necessary is rapidly decreasing. You're looking at a way too small timeline if you think this will be sustainable, or you're hoping that LLMs will hit their peak very soon.
- 5mo ago

the_snooze 5mo ago

That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.

DiabloD3 5mo ago

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is DOA, and it's vanishing very rapidly. If you can't participate in a functioning society, fight them.

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pelasaco 5mo ago

You can still hate it and find it useful or work with it daily, no?

virgildotcodes 5mo ago
Yeah, it’s like living in an unsustainable society whose luxuries you enjoy are entirely predicated on the destruction of the natural world, the enslavement and abuse of your fellow human beings, and the death and torture of billions of other sentient beings annually. If you’re honest, you know it’s evil, but it’s pretty undeniable that all the affordances this provides us are useful (to the beneficiaries) and that we all contribute to it daily.
- pelasaco 5mo ago
  I was more thinking, Taxi drivers that hate cars, or people who hate their work but still do it, the whole life.. but yeah your answer is good too lol :)

KerrAvon 5mo ago

What the author is actually discussing is a broader sociopolitical issue of society having a thing jammed down its throat by billionaires. While the thing in question is GenAI, it's not really about the actual technology or the applications of LLMs.

velcrovan 5mo ago

I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-future/ https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

7tflutter7 5mo ago
The only entities that would make meaningful money from an ai version of this would be IP giants like Disney. Your average guy is not going to get rich off his microscopic amount of data used. Basically Spotify.
- velcrovan 5mo ago
  I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them
  - 7tflutter7 5mo ago
    Ok i actually agree with that. Imo the gov is going to have to print a lot of money to deal with the impacts of ai (covid was $5T), if we do it now that same dollar would go 10x further and the people would effectively be the largest owner of AI labs like Anthropic. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure idea.

asklq 5mo ago

It bothers me that this is just the "deal with it" and "get on the rocket ship if you are offered a seat" argument. These are the exact arguments of the CEOs that were booed and the article correctly interprets it as giving graduates no choice or agency. Even if a technology is good like the German Maglev, it can ultimately find (almost no) buyers. AI tech isn't even good. It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone". If you don't resist and learn real skills, you will be the first to be fired in maybe four years. The companies are using the current enthusiasts as useful idiots, and it is well known what happens to those after a revolution. The graduates are well advised to wake up and see their real roles. You can fight them.

7tflutter7 5mo ago
So your master plan is to purposely work ten times slower than everyone else to prove a point to a CEO who doesn't know your name?
otabdeveloper4 5mo ago
> It is a plagiarism instrument for those who cannot use "git clone". Code generation is a very silly way of using LLMs. They're not even good at it.
Paradigma11 5mo ago
Of course these graduates have agency. So do the companies not employing them. Telling them to deal with it is well meant advice, not an attempt to coerce them into compliance. To be honest most likely nobody cares deeply if they take that advice or not.

malfist 5mo ago

These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Beanie babies are here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. The third reich is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Dogecoin is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Spiked hair is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Sears and Roebuck is here to stay, and they're expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them.

chasd00 5mo ago
only time will tell, make your bets. carefully.

mpalmer 5mo ago

I don't hate AI - how can you, really? It's the humans behind it we should be focusing on. What I have, and cannot shake, is a growing contempt for all the AI pushers and many of the users, as they make choices that clearly go against the public interest. - Students graduating into a job desert as CEOs urge them to "get on the rocket ship" - Data centers spewing noise and waste into communities - The ongoing collective cognitive retreat of students, teachers(!) and knowledge workers in general - Consumers reacting to low-quality AI output by lowering their standards to match

dburkland 5mo ago

Bingo

afavour 5mo ago

I think this attitude is part of the reason there's so much pushback. "it's here, it's staying, so shut up and like it". You're allowed to still hate something that ubiquitous. God knows a lot of people hate their jobs and have for a long time now! I think everyone should still be allowed to criticize AI. Criticism is good. Including for AI.

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splittydev 5mo ago
The same thing happened when we transitioned from horse carriages to cars. I'm sure a lot of people were quite outraged. But aren't we glad it happened? Sure, you're allowed to hate whatever you want. I never said they're not allowed to hate AI. I said they're gonna have a hard time in the future if they can't accept that the times are a-changing'.
- dml2135 5mo ago
  Plenty of people don't like cars to this day.
  - splittydev 5mo ago
    Yes. And I'm sure they're having a hard time. ^
    - mrbungie 5mo ago
      It really depends on their environment. Not every city is a car-first city.
    - throw4847285 5mo ago
      It's so funny when technological progress guys encounter YIMBYs. They can't even perceive that somebody would have a criticism of the impact of a technology on one's lived environment. "But, history is one big game of Civilization, and we replaced the little horses with tanks? What do you mean you don't like it?" Whigs gonna whig I guess.

QuadmasterXLII 5mo ago

You don’t get to choose whether they allow you to join them.

jayd16 5mo ago

It's yet to be seen that LLM oracles have to be a remotely owned mono-culture. Technology wise, more local and more diverse seem better, but that won't get "race to own the monopoly" money. At that point it's just another tool used by people.

SubmarineClub 5mo ago

Doubt. How much money has been pumped into these products, to produce slightly coding tools? Despite what the AI boosters keep screaming, these tools are absolute shit at anything outside programming. I highly doubt they will stick around outside of tech companies once prices rise to the true costs.

bigstrat2003 5mo ago
They aren't even good at programming, despite the repeated claims to the contrary by AI bros.
duchef 5mo ago
I think this is a fair point. I'm not a programmer but I'm a well paid professional with a technical background and the means to dive in. I cannot find a single significant use in my working or personal life for AI (I have infrequently used it to look up information - for example, providing me with plumbing advice). I've looked into products like OpenClaw etc. I'm desperate for a significant personal use for this technology - but I just can't find one. It's incongruent with the constant public proselytizing I see online

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JeremyNT 5mo ago

> These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. AI is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them. I'm perfectly capable of hating this shit even while my employment situation demands that I use it. If you're working somewhere that's pushing this stuff, there's never been a better time to dust off your copy of the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual."

7tflutter7 5mo ago
^ doomscrolling john connor

bsza 5mo ago

> AI is here to stay I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op. How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

7tflutter7 5mo ago
Exactly. Just like how the world vetoed atom bombs from existence instead of making 12,000 of them.
- bsza 5mo ago
  Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.
  - joquarky 5mo ago
    That's because we built very fast computers to simulate them.
  - saulpw 5mo ago
    We still have hundreds of nuclear power plants worldwide! There have been some terrible accidents but overall the consequences of nuclear power are much less than fossil fuel electricity generation. And some people wish we hadn't nerfed our ability to build nuclear power plants through over-regulation. Now of course we shouldn't completely deregulate nuclear power either. As in all things, the middle way.
- nmeagent 5mo ago
  In the mid-80s the world was estimated to have some 60000+, so 12000 is somewhat of an improvement. Ideally through arms control we could reduce this further, but that's no trivial undertaking.
chasd00 5mo ago

keybored 5mo ago

Plenty of these comments that wash their hands of being pro- or anti-. They are just about the Inevitabilism. It is just here. Whatever happened to rational critique for or against something? No, humbug—what do you expect from this forum full of technologists (and misc.)? It’s technology; fruitless to critique, impossible to stop, resistance is futile.

righthand 5mo ago

This is defeatist. If you can’t fight them, then don’t play their game. Joining them just continues the terrible state of things. By not using llms nothing has changed in my life over the past 5 years. I don’t have any disadvantages either. Can you name any disadvantages to an average individual not using AI products hocked by the rich?

beej71 5mo ago

Meth is here to stay, too, and--damn--is it great for productivity.

tootie 5mo ago

Nowhere in that piece did she say AI is useless or isn't generating returns for businesses. She's just saying it's probably going to be a net negative for society and I'm not sure she's wrong. World leaders are not taking it seriously.

kalleboo 5mo ago

AI is here to stay. It's getting better every day with no end in sight. We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) We're maybe 3 years away from robots, they'll take over blue-collar jobs, anyone working manufacturing or in the trades will be fired. This is what we keep being told. So why would I bother adopting it? How will that help me whatsoever? I'm getting fired no matter what I do.

jolt42 5mo ago
When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.
- duchef 5mo ago
  I think his point was that we are bombarded with cataclysmic language from AI leaders about our sooncoming intellectual demise.
mpalmer 5mo ago
We're a year away from AGI, once we have AGI, there is no need for white-collar jobs, everyone working in an office will be fired. (Some people argue we already have AGI, some argue that the term AGI doesn't even matter anymore since the models are already so intelligent) FWIW the people saying this tend to be remarkably ignorant.

geremiiah 5mo ago

If you can't fight them, join them. That's completely meaningless. Of course everyone will be doing their best to try to be the one who is AI-augmented rather than AI-replaced, but the end effect is still a far more brutal job market. Not to mention the 2nd and 3rd order effects of massive unemployment.

iceflinger 5mo ago

Cool, fighting it is then.

bob1029 5mo ago

I think the Death Star is the most apt analogy so far. You can either help build and maintain it, or you can risk becoming one of its first test targets. In this analogy, the laser system has demonstrated to function at low power as of a few months ago, and some targets have already been destroyed successfully (i.e., layoffs). A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next. At some level, I want to hand the keys to the business. Some developers are really yucky people to work with and I would like nothing more than to see a totally non-technical person run circles around them. I've given up on the notion that I can out-code the computer. I am leaning on taste, trust & customer sentiment as a career moat now. No one can hide behind bullshit technology arguments anymore. The business can instantly pierce that veil now.

ModernMech 5mo ago
> A full-scale test is imminent. 20% headcount reduction is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what comes next. Agreed. 20% headcount reduction -> enshittification of products what comes next -> enshittification of entire companies

giancarlostoro 5mo ago

I swear everyone seems to forget how awful software has been BEFORE AI. The trajectory as an industry has been going downhill. Now with AI I can build myself fully native tools that aren't just some browser wrapper piece of trash because I fully grasp what I am designing. I'll take the slop that's high quality (which arguably isn't slop, but the haters label anything 'tainted' by AI as slop). I welcome our new AI coding overlords if I can get an OS that isn't eating up all available RAM for no good reason.

tavavex 5mo ago
The problem of low-quality software is a problem of people and organisations, not tooling. It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. The biggest players just learned to optimize away every shred of 'excess' usability if it meant they got to save a few cents. AI doesn't change this. The people who already cared about quality will continue producing quality software. But when you make producing good software easier, big tech won't jump on the bandwagon - they'll use the newfound efficiencies to lower the bar even further. Fire workers and use the rest with an AI machine gun to spit out whatever without ever checking, optimizing or fixing their output unless absolutely financially necessary.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  > It's not like writing good software is harder today than it was before. Correct it is not, but there was also some better tooling and frameworks before. We used to have RAD native tooling, now we have... Electron.
  - tavavex 5mo ago
    Yes, and there is still good tooling now, you don't have to use Electron. The reason why many companies use bad tooling or bad practices was provided in the sentence immediately after the one that you've quoted. When tech was new, companies needed to gain customers and engineers were on longer leashes, so making reliable and high-quality software was paramount. Now that everyone has to use computers, they refocused on extracting more money from what they already had by taking shortcuts, cutting dev teams and letting profit motives always take the driver's seat. But you can still write good software. Arguably, it's the easiest it has ever been.

827a 5mo ago

Short-sighted. There exists substantial evidence we're barreling straight into a period of high-instability, in-part driven by technology and AI. The world in ten years will look very different from the one we live in today, in the worst ways possible. AI depends heavily on the stable capital environment of the 2010s, but even that is disappearing (e.g. look at the 30y yield), let alone incoming Western political instability and class divide. A ton of the spend in AI is circular, and one small breach in that circle can torpedo OpenAI or Anthropic's financial projections by so much that they start missing required payments for data centers (or worse, paychecks). The technology isn't going anywhere, but the meaningful ability to deploy it at an affordable price may be.

ai-x 5mo ago

Imagine making "AI Hater" as your personality

AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
I don't hate AI as AI. I hate AI for what it's doing to human conversations. I want to hear from other humans. I want to touch their minds and their hearts, and have them touch mine. I hate AI for what it's doing to things I love. I hate AI because I love and value those other things, and I'm watching AI badly damage them.

lbrito 5mo ago

This is exactly the out of touch sentiment that the article criticizes. AI is not rain or a thunderstorm or electromagnetism. It is not an unavoidable force of nature that we have to "deal with", and pretending otherwise is a clear political statement. When people write articles like this about AI, they are not even talking about the specific technology. That's unimportant. They're talking about the economical and political decisions driving the "its coming, its unavoidable like electromagnetism or gravity, deal with it or else" magical thinking that people like you are making.

dspillett 5mo ago

To be frank I'm having a hard time already. I was already wanting to be out of tech as a job because after years of mental issues since 2020ish I've come to realise that remote working is a significant factor in that. Being in a company where all I hear day-in day-out when I do talk to people is “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, AI, …” really isn't helping. If GenAI continues unabated with current growth patterns, many of our (dev, writers, certain researchers, etc.) jobs will be gone, and we'll be fighting for table waiting and shelf stacking tasks before they are taken over by physically capable AI too. Maybe those of us avoiding the train and hoping to be made redundant before we leave [insert-industry-here] voluntarily because we can't stand being surrounded by it any more, will be ahead of the rest of you in already having one of those minimum wage jobs when you are desperately looking for one rather than having nothing :) Or maybe there will be some room for some of us who want to do a job ourselves, rather than manage others (people or machines) that are doing the job. Unlikely, but you never know…

orangecoffee 5mo ago
One idea we have discussed in my network is if as an industry reset we all said CS should become a 2X to 6X minimum wage career. So say 30k beginner to 100K senior/lead. This would keep many more jobs available and open. But I guess it would not be acceptable to many?
mancerayder 5mo ago
Remote working is an incredible privilege I'd today take a big big salary cut for. Instead I'm in an expensive city paying 8 dollars for coffee, whatever in rent, and dealing with congestion of people everywhere. Congestion of people everywhere is way more of a mental health hazard for me than being alone. Point is, you lost me after complaining about remote work. It reminded me of what I lost forever. I could have been working from a rainforest or the beach, in a low cost of living area, instead of this nightmare.
- dspillett 5mo ago

Aurornis 5mo ago

Tech people had a really good thing going for a lot of years. It peaked right after COVID when it seemed like anyone could get a job and a raise in tech by doing some interview practice and learning how to say the right things. Things even started getting weird for a while when this combined with remote work and being overemployed (multiple remote jobs) entered the common vernacular, even if it wasn’t common. When I interacted with college student software devs doing resume reviews and interview prep it was crazy how many had plans based on trends like getting a FAANG job to FIRE in 10 years, using a VPN to do a remote job while they secretly traveled the world, or doing overemployment with 3 jobs. Everyone had this idea that tech was the place to be for an easy job with low demands and high pay. Only a few years later the situation has completely reversed. Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly. It’s natural to be frustrated with this sudden change. None of likes when our industries start changing in ways that reduce our leverage. What’s unhealthy is reacting with denial or a belief that you’re going to stop the future by resisting it. There are a lot of anti-AI writings that reach the front page every week, but nearly all of them come from writers who pride themselves on not using AI. One of the highly upvoted posts yesterday was from someone who had only used a little AI in a free trial of a tool some time ago, but they were talking authoritatively as if they were an expert on these tools. These writers are just not good sources for anything other than feeding denial about the future.

skydhash 5mo ago
> Even veteran developers are angry that the talents they’ve been building for years have become a little less unique almost overnight. I believe there is still a lot of value to experienced human developers, but there’s no denying that the barrier to entry has fallen significantly The barrier to entry was always low. You only need a book and a computing device that allows to run code you’ve edited. The rest is just technical skills, theoretical knowledge and practical experience (gained over time). What was always hard is systematic problem solving, which is a mindset thing. And LLM can’t help you there. I don’t consider my talents unique. My only value as a developer was always problem solving. Anything else has been automated for ages.

jgbuddy 5mo ago

True

vitality6637 5mo ago

"These people are going to have a really hard time coming to grips with reality in the next few years. Slavery is here to stay, and it's expanding very rapidly. If you can't fight them, join them."

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soloto 5mo ago

Assumed future facts are not facts, they are just your opinion.