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I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this da
by frizlab 5mo ago
I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations.
- MisterTea 5mo agoIt's numerous. CEO's lying, ceo-ceo marketing - fire your employees and use AI, environmental impact, social impact, memory/chip shortages, theft of information which has placed a massive burden on site operators assaulted by scraper traffic. I'm sure I'm missing a few but the negatives are real but so long as people get to feel like 10x engineers, it's fine. Personally, I find AI technology itself super interesting. Plenty of great use cases. However, The current crop of lying thieving assholes running the show make it repulsive.
- jesse_dot_id 5mo agoThey're not firing employees to replace them with AI. We're mostly engineers here I think. Does anyone actually believe they're replacing humans with the same AI that we're using in our day-to-days? I don't know about you, but my harnesses absolutely suck without a human driving them and the more knowledgeable the human, the less they suck. It's obvious they're just using AI as cloud-cover to act like assholes in the typical ways in which they would normally act like assholes.
- StilesCrisis 5mo agoI think the naive CEO-level reasoning is that one person can get twice as much done with a harness, not that AIs will suddenly become useful while autonomous.
- MisterTea 5mo agoIf one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into. AI is in its infancy, it's just learning to crawl. There will be more breakthroughs which will have more serious consequences. Today engineers are safe, holding the AI's hand as it crawls around, bumping into furniture. What happens when it learns to walk, run, and win marathons?
- ant_li0n 5mo ago(Assuming that LLM does indeed multiply productivity) We are likely in for some rough days, as it's much easier to just fire people and maintain the same level of productivity. Musk (arguably) did that with Twitter, even before this started. I was impacted by a post-COVID layoff, myself. But do you think that once that has leveled out a bit, the bandwidth/market bottleneck you referenced will be identified as the new bottleneck[0]? Like, new businesses will launch, or existing companies will identify new growth areas that they did not have the capacity to move into. I don't know how to respond to your second paragraph. Looking in that direction is a bit too overwhelming. [0] I think this was always the problem, not developer productivity
- zozbot234 5mo ago> If one person can become as productive as two or three, why keep the extra one or two employees? You might think that keeping the head count the same means the company can now do more but that is only true if the company has the bandwidth or market to grow into. If the extra one or two employees are 2x or 3x as productive as they used to be, why would they not be employed? There will be plenty of market to grow into since the gains in productivity are shared throughout the economy.
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoMoney and customers are finite. The market will only grow via finite constraints changing. And ai is not changing these finite constraints.
- jxnsnsjjdisj 5mo ago[dead]
- jesse_dot_id 5mo agoI've been on the free information train my entire life, back to my little hacker punk days in the 90's, so my opinion on that isn't worth much. I do think that the ecological considerations are also entirely the fault of the aforementioned CEOs. Machine learning research has been ongoing in good faith since the 40's. Blaming the technology is kind of silly. Imagine if we had banned trains because the robber barons were assholes in the 1830's. This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. The robber barons and monopolists tend to come out of the woodwork when incredible technologies emerge. It just sucks that we still haven't evolved them out of society.
- coldtea 5mo ago>This technology is going to drive some incredible discoveries in all of STEM. We could do without them.
- mindcrime 5mo agoTell that to the family of someone who dies a year before one of those discoveries that would have saved their life...
- joquarky 5mo agoI guess you don't know anyone who has cancer.
- coldtea 5mo agoI know plenty who have cancer because of STEM "advances". No shortage of STEM conveniences being carcinogenic. But the argument is always the small percentage that get medical treatment. Never the millions who get sick.
- jesse_dot_id 5mo agoWe could probably do without computers too, but that would be idiotic because they speed everything up. There's a good chance that the next pandemic is swatted down by LLM-powered vaccine development much faster than COVID-19 was. "We could do without them." is not a great take when it comes to people dying prematurely. In fact, I would bet that this particular technology will lead to climate change solutions eventually. If nothing else, it will drive an energy revolution in either nuclear or solar power. Probably too late to solve the AMOC collapse, but mitigation is still in play through science.
- deaton 5mo agoThe IP considerations, environmental considerations, "lol we're gonna destroy the world and get you laid off" considerations, and of course the big middle finger given to artists of all types, from authors to musicians... They painted themselves as villains and then they were shocked when people viewed them as such.
- moffkalast 5mo agoPiracy is not theft. If something can be copied infinite times without any effort with broad societal benefit, then it's a moral imperative to do so. The opposite is gatekeeping in the name of monopolistic profiteering and the wealth concentration that the modern broken IP law enforces. Besides, Anthropic did allegedly buy the ebooks they trained on so it's not like they even did that. It goes both ways though, they should get comfortable with their models getting distilled and opened up for everyone to run however they want. LLMs trained on people's data belong to the people.
- hwh 5mo agoI would be very surprised if the ebook license they bought does entail using it for training machines. In fact I'm pretty sure it didn't and I thus do not think they did such a thing in the first place as I credit them with enough legal prowess to know about this.
- joquarky 5mo agoNow that's thinking with your gut!
- xigoi 5mo ago> If something can be copied infinite times Except it can’t. LLM crawlers DDoS websites so that no one else can access them.
- moffkalast 5mo agoNot with Anubis they don't. You can't leave your front door unlocked, and then get mad when people go in?
- xigoi 5mo agoTerrible analogy. I leave my house locked because I don’t want people to go in. On a website, I want people to read it, but without disturbing others. A better analogy would be that I open a small art gallery with free entrance and someone sends in an army that barely fits in the room. Anubis is just a patch that shouldn’t be needed; it annoys regular visitors and prevents people on low-powered devices or with JavaScript disabled from reading the site at all.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- palmotea 5mo ago> I don’t think it’s only that. I personally hate AI not because of CEOs and co, but because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft, and is still, to this day, evolving thanks to theft. And that’s even before the ecological considerations. I also hate it because: 1) Fundamentally, it's about reducing the power of labor (which are what the vast majority of people are) and I know I'm a laborer. This is why the CEOs and wealthy are excited about it. 2) It's about automating the engaging and creative knowledge work, and leaving the humans with manual labor and drudgery.
- senderista 5mo agoWhat new technology does not reduce the power of labor in some way?
- jononor 5mo agoCommunication tech/tools enable more people to collaborate. It increases ability for labor that is far away from high value markets to contribute. Same goes for shipping tech wrt physical goods. On the global scale that is empowering the labor class. Any productivity tool that individual laborers can purchase also (and that still needs the worker) is probably good for labor, overall.
- senderista 5mo agoSeems to me that global collaboration tech devalues local labor?
- satvikpendem 5mo agoIf you're a programmer or (physical) engineer you've been automating other people's labor all this time, it's ironically hypocritical that now that engineers are the ones being automated that they cry foul.
- WorldMaker 5mo agoI left one employer in part because I thought some of their automation of almost-but-not-quite minimum wage jobs was unethical to me. In Software, we don't have an industry-wide ethics board that people trust, so the complaints about individual automations remain quieter and personal. It is entirely possible for people in these conversations to not be "hypocritical" in their relationship to this topic versus their personal ethics. It's definitely hypocritical at the "industry ethics" level, but again we don't have an ethics board and all we have are personal and public opinions. (Arguably this is one of the current problems with AI is that there is no ethics board for software so instead we must debate this in the court of public opinion, such as HN comments.)
- jpttsn 5mo ago“You wouldn’t download a car” is making an unexpected comeback after all these years
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo agoThe ecological considerations are wildly overstated. Data centres in general != AI, and other industries, including meat production and (ironically) paper for print all use far more water and create more damage. This might change in the future if the planned insanely huge data centres get built and used. But today the situation is clear - AI isn't any more ecologically damaging than other popular data centred activities like streaming music and video, and general social media.
- seidleroni 5mo agoAlso, I just listened to the latest Volts podcast and they make the claim that data centers will actually lower the cost of electricity fairly soon (~2030). Very counterintuitive but it does make sense. We'll find out soon enough. https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity https://www.volts.wtf/p/sooner-than-you-think-electricity
- jesse_dot_id 5mo agoI've been telling my friends this since LLMs launched. If your interest is in lowering the use of fossil fuels, then a global race for compute is great because the increased demand is probably going to usher in a nuclear/solar revolution in the energy sector. It feels like a very large segment, on both sides of this argument, is completely incapable of forming nuanced opinions on this stuff.
- frizlab 5mo agoAs it was already supposed to be the case (and has never been) with crypto mining, yeah…
- mindcrime 5mo agobut because the tech is intrinsically born out of theft Two thoughts: A. That's only true (to any extent) if you hold the extremely myopic view that 'AI == Generative AI'. For my part I'd posit that "AI" at large is not "intrinsically born out of theft". Not unless you think that linear regression, or a genetic algorithm, etc., inherently involve theft somehow. B. It's an open question whether or not copyright infringement should be considered "theft" at all. It's curious though, that historically hacker oriented communities tended to lean towards "No" being the answer to that. But the scale at which GenAI affects things may be the reason that sentiment seems to be shifting a bit?
- xantronix 5mo agoI think it should be fairly obvious by now which form of AI people refer to when they talk specifically about theft. It gets a bit old and repetitive to expand the shorthand in every conversation possible. If people are genuinely curious about other forms of AI, that information is readily available. When Tesla FSD was in the zeitgeist, theft never entered the discussion, because it was clear that form of AI was not predicated upon theft.
- mindcrime 5mo agoIt only takes three extra characters to say "GenAI" instead of "AI". It's just lazy use of language to not disambiguate what one means.
- xantronix 5mo agoA lot of this discourse is intended for a wider audience than just us technical folk, and so the vocabulary used mirrors that of news headlines. If I were to guess, I would say it distracts from the discourse of the sociopolitical and socioeconomic impacts of generative AI providers and their products. It is understood which forms of AI are at play here when the discussion revolves around the massive companies, capital investments, datacenters PR campaigns, and mandates required to create and sustain them and their usage.
- 5mo ago
- vrganj 5mo agoDon't even get me started on the socioeconomic considerations! AGI is a savior figure for the capitalist class. A tech version of the Second Coming, delivering them from the pesky demands of workers, like a living wage or (gasp!) sick leave. That's why they're all so obsessed with it, it has religious-ideological component to them. When you hear them talk about AGI, there's always this weird eschatological vibe with it. Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Even if their cyberjesus comes down to them through the machine and replaces all workers, who's gonna buy all their stuff then? All they're doing in their capitalist zealotry is ringing in the end of capitalism.
- bmink 5mo ago> Unfortunately, they're blinded by their beliefs and can't think things through even one step further. Yes, our new generation of overlords seem to be socially and emotionally stunted and exhibit an alarming naivete about the world. This worries me almost as much as the tech itself. It is impossible to predict the future but in the past when a ruling class completely disregarded the effects of their greed and excess on the wellbeing of society, at some point the bill came due and the consequences for them (and society) were dire.
- vrganj 5mo agoI blame the disdain for humanities, philosophy and the liberal arts. Not just with the overlords, but also with our fellow nerds. We're all so busy trying to see if we can build something that we don't stop and think if we should build something, what consequences that might have or what history has taught us. Theres a reason those fields of study are important.
- layer8 5mo ago> who's gonna buy all their stuff then? The top 10% earners in the US account for half of all consumer spending. The capitalist class may be counting on that imbalance to only strengthen.
- WorldMaker 5mo ago
- satvikpendem 5mo agoI (and I assume many others on especially HN) don't consider intellectual "property" as real so there is no "theft" in our minds, so this argument doesn't bear much weight.
- karmakaze 5mo agoThe idea of artificial scarcity and property in a capitalistic society runs deep. It's the reason why copying => theft for them.
- jsbisviewtiful 5mo agoEverything you said plus now these out-of-touch and incredibly rich CEOs are shoving it in our faces that they are determined to take away our income while pocketing even more riches.