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The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire plane

by cryo32 4mo ago

The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.

operatingthetan 4mo ago
It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?
- aspenmartin 4mo ago
  Does it need to?
  - pesus 4mo ago
    If anything, it should continue and apply to anyone using AI.
  - operatingthetan 4mo ago
    nope!
- munk-a 4mo ago
  Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
  - operatingthetan 4mo ago
    I mean I can make a good meme with AI but it requires effort to ensure it is indistinguishable from a homegrown meme.
baron816 4mo ago
I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad. The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.
- willis936 4mo ago
  The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%20color%20percept,bias%20for%20colors https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
- esseph 4mo ago
  > I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
- alpha_squared 4mo ago
  > The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block. Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is. Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view. It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
  - baron816 4mo ago
aspenmartin 4mo ago
Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.
- nozzlegear 4mo ago
  Well, they hope they are on such a path.
  - aspenmartin 4mo ago
    Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.
    - geerlingguy 4mo ago
      I think that's an optimistic take; the load bearing portion hasn't permeated traditional development. Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.
    - nozzlegear 4mo ago
      I don't disagree that coding agents have high adoption when it comes to software, but I do disagree that there's high adoption outside of this industry. There's no breakthrough "Claude Code but for non-tech industries" product out there that people are picking up in droves. My brother-in-law isn't using AI to manage his construction business, for example, and my sister isn't using it to run her non-profit daycare. The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.
- ForHackernews 4mo ago
AngryData 4mo ago
I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems. Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.
- manoDev 4mo ago
  Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
  - munk-a 4mo ago
    A human that hand-compiles 10,000 lines of C code is a very silly person. A human that works on device drivers and drops into assembly code for a dozen highly critical lines to enable real time communication can be irreplaceable. AI is a tool that can be highly useful and it's a tool with a number of large flaws that you need to acknowledge and account for. Knowing when it's worth using is a vital skill.
  - bwestergard 4mo ago
    "There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human." I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.
tennfown 4mo ago
There needs to be a brutal humbling
- cryo32 4mo ago
  Definitely. That'll have to come through economic instruments though rather than failure.
spprashant 4mo ago
Not ever profession has an insatiable desire to automate away their own jobs.
karakoram 4mo ago
I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out. This is very basic in technology products. It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features) A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.
zombot 4mo ago
> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.
atleastoptimal 4mo ago
They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable. >The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.
- cryo32 4mo ago
  Not quite. They don't operate like that. It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public. We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
  - CamperBob2 4mo ago
    It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public. Right now they have to lobby and manipulate the government just to keep from being shut down on a mad king's whim. A mad king elected and re-elected by the same morons who now demand a say in how AI is built and used. No, thanks. Government is not the solution. Government is the problem. The Republicans told us that, and they were right, just not in the way they meant.
    - cryo32 4mo ago
      They literally helped create the situation they are in. No sympathy!
      - CamperBob2 4mo ago
        Anthropic, in particular, made a good-faith effort to meet the government halfway. You're seeing the (entirely predictable) result. Right now Sam Altman is sitting at Trump's literal right hand, while Amodei is exiled to the kids' table: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u8gg19/anthropic_ceo_dario_joins_top_ai_ceos_meeting/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u8gg19/anthrop...

by cryo32 4mo ago

The pushback I see everywhere outside of tech suggests the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet as much as it likes to think it does.

operatingthetan 4mo ago

It's to the point where if you drop an AI meme or screenshot of text in chat people will mock you. I don't see that getting better?

aspenmartin 4mo ago
Does it need to?
- pesus 4mo ago
  If anything, it should continue and apply to anyone using AI.
- operatingthetan 4mo ago
  nope!
munk-a 4mo ago
Memes have associations, connotations, subtleties in how they're used in different contexts - they're a communication medium. A well applied meme is like (it isn't - but it can be viewed similarly to) poetry where you've matched your idea with an evocative statement to a perfect degree and the subtleties and implications in your head are well and fully transferred to the reader. An AI meme is like a dry technical paper that lays out all of the information in a kludgy unimaginative manner. Good meme based communication relies on a lot of audience understanding and can draw people together as a demonstration of kinship.
- operatingthetan 4mo ago
  I mean I can make a good meme with AI but it requires effort to ensure it is indistinguishable from a homegrown meme.

baron816 4mo ago

I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though. Every third story I see on my news feeds is some sensationalist story about how AI/data centers are bad. The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block.

willis936 4mo ago
The media are followers here, not leaders. 84% of people can't agree on the color blue[0]. Don't try to make excuses for a few billionaires finding the limit of their reality distortion field. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%20color%20percept,bias%20for%20colors https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4921196/#:~:text=A%...
esseph 4mo ago
> I really think there’s a concerted effort by the media to demonize AI though That sounds literally insane to me. This is not coming from the media, many of the same people that own the media have a vested interest in this particular US political administration... which is also basically all of big tech.
alpha_squared 4mo ago
> The media does have an interest in doing this—writers are fearful that they’ll be first on the chopping block. Maybe, but it's also pretty clear that the entire purpose and intent of delivering "AI" to the economy is to wholly wipe out labor. Do I think that's realistic? No. SpaceX's total addressable market (TAM) in their S-1 filing to go public stated as much. Their TAM is $28.5T(!) with $26.5T of it being AI. That's larger than the US GDP (~$24T). You can only throw numbers like that around if you're explicitly aiming to replace labor, no matter how realistic it is. Personally, I'm tired of mediocre people who've attained some amount of business success turning around and trying to dismantle democratic systems because it's incompatible with their world view. It's more than reasonable to complain about these things night and day. The alternative to vocal complaints won't be pretty.
- baron816 4mo ago

aspenmartin 4mo ago

Frontier model companies aren’t banking on the general public “wanting” AI. They are on a path to a product that won’t need to be wanted because the entire economy will need it.

nozzlegear 4mo ago
Well, they hope they are on such a path.
- aspenmartin 4mo ago
  Yes but what evidence is there that they aren’t? To me, scaling laws and empirical benchmark trends along with high adoption (all of this together, not individually) strongly support this, and also coding agents have become load bearing so it’s sort of already happening I would say.
  - geerlingguy 4mo ago
    I think that's an optimistic take; the load bearing portion hasn't permeated traditional development. Like so many things popular on HN, the tools that are here are great aids for good development processes and practitioners... but they are not actually replacing them in applications that will exist after the AI bubble deflates.
  - nozzlegear 4mo ago
    I don't disagree that coding agents have high adoption when it comes to software, but I do disagree that there's high adoption outside of this industry. There's no breakthrough "Claude Code but for non-tech industries" product out there that people are picking up in droves. My brother-in-law isn't using AI to manage his construction business, for example, and my sister isn't using it to run her non-profit daycare. The most AI usage I've seen from my wife and family is when they take pictures of our/their lawns and houses, then use ChatGPT to reimagine them with different landscaping ideas or paint trims.
ForHackernews 4mo ago

AngryData 4mo ago

I think the tech industry is overestimating its value. Because it can code they think it can do anything else, but unlike code a lot of other work can't have a bunch of little bugs and mistakes because you can't open up real life and edit it after the fact. Plus it lacks actual reasoning to solve novel problems. Hiring an engineer to finetooth comb blueprints for mistakes before construction will take nearly as much time as having an engineer draft them themselves. And they will be smart enough to not do something silly like putting the electrical panel on the back of the shower wall. If you just vibecode some blueprints and start construction without the comb you could lose way more than you saved with something as simple as pouring a support pillar or building a wall 2 inches off and having to tear it out later and rebuild.

manoDev 4mo ago
Definitely. The secret will be identifying use cases where AI usage is a potential upside with limited downside, not the current blanket statements about replacing all jobs without considering lifetime ROI. There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human.
- munk-a 4mo ago
  A human that hand-compiles 10,000 lines of C code is a very silly person. A human that works on device drivers and drops into assembly code for a dozen highly critical lines to enable real time communication can be irreplaceable. AI is a tool that can be highly useful and it's a tool with a number of large flaws that you need to acknowledge and account for. Knowing when it's worth using is a vital skill.
- bwestergard 4mo ago
  "There’s a lot of boring work AI can automate with minimal risk. There’s also the potential to decrease risk with AI too, including ensembles of different AIs modals and AI + human." I think the trouble, economically speaking, is that while it will be possible from a purely technical standpoint to unbundle a job performed by a human into separate tasks, many of which can be "done" by agents, the new process will not present a cost savings overall once the entire lifecycle of the task is taken into account. The economist David Autor has written about these challenges extensively, and his theory accords with my experiences.

tennfown 4mo ago

There needs to be a brutal humbling

cryo32 4mo ago
Definitely. That'll have to come through economic instruments though rather than failure.

spprashant 4mo ago

Not ever profession has an insatiable desire to automate away their own jobs.

karakoram 4mo ago

I have said this before, I just can NOT understand how you can measure adoption of a technology or product without giving people a full opt-out. This is very basic in technology products. It is very easy to say that Gmail AI product has 1.8 Billion users because there are about 1.8 Billion Gmail accounts/users and they have absolutely no way of completely opting out. (opting out without the company punishing users by taking away important features) A simple A/B Test with just 50,000 or 100,000 users depending on the product will give everyone the REAL picture of where users stand.

zombot 4mo ago

> the tech industry vastly overestimated the interest. You should consider that the industry is just lying to make everyone believe that everyone else is interested. Creating a sense of inevitability. It's the same trick that every ad out there uses, selling you a profitable fantasy as reality.

atleastoptimal 4mo ago

They didn't overestimate the interest. ChatGPT is extremely popular and notable. >The tech industry doesn't speak for the entire planet Of course they don't, but they are still allowed to make a product, and pivot if there's no consumer demand. However there is huge consumer and business demand for AI so they are justified in making the investments they are.

cryo32 4mo ago
Not quite. They don't operate like that. It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public. We MUST be entirely insulated from their failure as society. If they can't raise the capital for the product then they should fail quietly and insignificantly which is not what is going to happen at the moment.
- CamperBob2 4mo ago
  It is not ok to lobby and manipulate governments for fiscal policy changes to write off the costs and risks on the general public. Right now they have to lobby and manipulate the government just to keep from being shut down on a mad king's whim. A mad king elected and re-elected by the same morons who now demand a say in how AI is built and used. No, thanks. Government is not the solution. Government is the problem. The Republicans told us that, and they were right, just not in the way they meant.
  - cryo32 4mo ago
    They literally helped create the situation they are in. No sympathy!
    - CamperBob2 4mo ago
      Anthropic, in particular, made a good-faith effort to meet the government halfway. You're seeing the (entirely predictable) result. Right now Sam Altman is sitting at Trump's literal right hand, while Amodei is exiled to the kids' table: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u8gg19/anthropic_ceo_dario_joins_top_ai_ceos_meeting/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1u8gg19/anthrop...