4 ms·

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

by tptacek 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
> People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?
keybored 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
      Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
      - AnimalMuppet 6mo 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 6mo ago
bdangubic 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.

by tptacek 6mo ago

dredmorbius 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago

> People were upset about databases in the 1980s Huh? In what universe did that happen?

keybored 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo ago
    Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.
    - AnimalMuppet 6mo 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 6mo ago

bdangubic 6mo 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 6mo 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 6mo 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.