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> in part because of the huckster-like triangulations of scumbags like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't c

> in part because of the huckster-like triangulations of scumbags like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads. At this point I automatically dismiss writing like this, the motivated reasoning is palpable. Their distaste for the character and general vibes of the AI industry trap them in blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now. I am all for well-researched criticisms of these companies and their claims, but please start at the facts and use them to derive your conclusions, rather than the other way around.

madaxe_again 4mo ago
The preceding clause is just as bad: >> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie that’s been accepted by the masses I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration. Anyway. The belief that the author isn’t talking out of their ass is an insidious lie spread by dark forces. QED.
- atleastoptimal 4mo ago
  I think in the short term much of the concern for AI replacing jobs was overblown, largely due to two factors 1. Benchmark performance of LLM's and AI models did not fully represent skill in real-world domains 2. Most jobs span far more requirements than their specific job descriptions, many of which lie, even in simple jobs, in the realm of highly adaptive, context rich multi-modal information processing that most humans do still better than AI However, there is nothing fundamental that prevents LLM's from scaling and improving, aided by better scaffolding, to the point of replacing many white-collar jobs, especially ones which have limited, specific requirements and output parameters. This is an enormous chunk of the white collar work force, and displacement is already happening in limited sections, and will surely continue as AI capabilities diffuse. It seems however deeply entrenched in many people's identity to deny this fact, because to accept it requires accepting that many of the essential claims of AI CEO's are somewhat true to a degree, and that LLM's are a genuinely useful technology.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case It hasn’t happened. We have AI rolling out and the jobs data aren’t showing this effect.
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet.
    - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
      > No one knows what AI will look like 6 months No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested. Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.
      - torginus 4mo ago
        And its a quite insane thing to push, even if true - AI spend has outgrown wages (even in software) to such a degree, that basically if AI allowed companies to fire every human employee, they wouldn't be saving that much.
        fragmede 4mo ago
        "Basically" is doing a lot of work there. What are the profit margins at FooCorp, and how much time and money is spent on messy human drama? If you could replace every human employee with AI, then you could fire the entire HR department and replace it with one AI "HR" that just spins up new AI employees like we do EC2 instances today. Since there are no more messy human resources to manage, anyway. Shutting down the entire department should boost profits by quite a bit!
        4mo ago
- wiseowise 4mo ago
  > I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration. We’ve heard Claude is good enough now that you no longer need SE and founders will just do their coding for a year already. It hasn’t happened. And guess who develops CC and other Anthropic/OpenAI products?
  - satvikpendem 4mo ago
    The false part is that the masses do not accept the lie, as most don't actually believe those companies.
    - keybored 4mo ago
      People who talk about the masses are at the same time completely distanced from them but also completely tuned in to their mass psyche, or so they claim.
      - satvikpendem 4mo ago
        Maybe, not always, but doesn't make them incorrect.
        keybored 4mo ago
        Of course not. We have no proof that their hot takes are completely useless.
keybored 4mo ago
Most reasoning outside of philosophy departments is motivated and it is fine as long as it is either reflected on or the audience knows where they are coming from. This is just having skin in the game. You know, needing a job to survive, which is much more immediate than the motivation of society disruptors who either get to become fantastically rich or else move on to some other executive role. I would also have wished for some substantiation for how this and that were a lie. As it stands though it’s an argument against multi-level marketing. And it really doesn’t hold up that your everyman will be able to make money off of vibe coded apps. Maybe build their own very personal software gadget? Yeah, but there’s no money in that. The Reasoned Case Against AI Disruptors does not need to be covered in such a piece.
mschuster91 4mo ago
> I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads. The thing is... many prominent figures, both individuals and companies, in the AI industry just lend themselves to being hateable. Sam Altman personally completely fucked up the RAM market with his double dealing. Every single one of us felt the consequences of that and we will feel it for years to come. And it is why I will call for his arrest, speedy trial and imprisonment every time I have the misfortune of reading his name. I wish to see this person suffer from the bottom of my heart. Elon Musk, well, there are so, so many valid reasons to hate him. Regarding AI itself, the mechahitler incident and the "undress her in a bikini" CSAM generator are the worst issues. Regarding him as a person, the "pedo diver" incident, the shady stuff surrounding virtually all of his children's mothers, the complete clusterfuck around his daughter, DOGE, the right-arm salute his fanbase keeps denying being a nazi salute, him stoking racial riots in the UK twice, his constant overpromising in all of his ventures (some of which would normally fall under "investor defrauding" claims if there were a functioning legal and regulatory world), the trashcontainer on wheels... Google has no (notable) individual persons to raise the pitchforks against, but as a company, they severely degraded the quality of their "ordinary" search and have gone to steal clicks and thus money from creators by distilling their work into the AI results box at the top of every search. Microsoft keeps shoveling AI down everyone's throats no matter if we want it. Anthropic has literally ripped books apart to scan them for Claude. Google, back when they created the dataset for Google Books, at least didn't destroy the books. Destroying books at that scale is a sacrilege. Every single AI company is guilty of using questionably sourced materials - either outright stolen or human input based on exploitation. And on top of that, it's not just RAM that has gotten expensive. The entire rest of the economy - both individuals and companies of all sizes - are priced out of personal and even cloud compute, as the blown-up AI giants scoop up everything they can and the scraps and aged hardware that's available gets fought over by everyone else. > blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now. It is undeniable that the entire AI sphere is a bubble, artificially propped up by circular investments and wash trades, and that is now poised to raid pension funds.
- atleastoptimal 4mo ago
surgical_fire 4mo ago
> I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads. It would annoy me more if those AI figureheads were not such hateful people.
- atleastoptimal 4mo ago
  What evidence do you have that Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, etca re hateful?

madaxe_again 4mo ago

The preceding clause is just as bad: >> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie that’s been accepted by the masses I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration. Anyway. The belief that the author isn’t talking out of their ass is an insidious lie spread by dark forces. QED.

atleastoptimal 4mo ago
I think in the short term much of the concern for AI replacing jobs was overblown, largely due to two factors 1. Benchmark performance of LLM's and AI models did not fully represent skill in real-world domains 2. Most jobs span far more requirements than their specific job descriptions, many of which lie, even in simple jobs, in the realm of highly adaptive, context rich multi-modal information processing that most humans do still better than AI However, there is nothing fundamental that prevents LLM's from scaling and improving, aided by better scaffolding, to the point of replacing many white-collar jobs, especially ones which have limited, specific requirements and output parameters. This is an enormous chunk of the white collar work force, and displacement is already happening in limited sections, and will surely continue as AI capabilities diffuse. It seems however deeply entrenched in many people's identity to deny this fact, because to accept it requires accepting that many of the essential claims of AI CEO's are somewhat true to a degree, and that LLM's are a genuinely useful technology.
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case It hasn’t happened. We have AI rolling out and the jobs data aren’t showing this effect.
- fc417fc802 4mo ago
  We're what, 2 years in? Or 6 months since the coding models became reasonably proficient. No one knows what AI will look like 6 months from now let alone 5 years so the present jobs data can't tell you anything other than that nothing catastrophic has happened yet.
  - JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
    > No one knows what AI will look like 6 months No, but we know what it’s looked like over the past 6 months. We also have two years of Altman preening about imminent, massive job losses. Per his own timelines, those haven’t manifested. Predicting indeterminate catastrophe isn’t a prediction, it’s a scam.
    - torginus 4mo ago
      And its a quite insane thing to push, even if true - AI spend has outgrown wages (even in software) to such a degree, that basically if AI allowed companies to fire every human employee, they wouldn't be saving that much.
      - fragmede 4mo ago
        "Basically" is doing a lot of work there. What are the profit margins at FooCorp, and how much time and money is spent on messy human drama? If you could replace every human employee with AI, then you could fire the entire HR department and replace it with one AI "HR" that just spins up new AI employees like we do EC2 instances today. Since there are no more messy human resources to manage, anyway. Shutting down the entire department should boost profits by quite a bit!
      - 4mo ago
wiseowise 4mo ago
> I see no argument whatsoever in the piece as to why this is the case, just an emphatic declaration. We’ve heard Claude is good enough now that you no longer need SE and founders will just do their coding for a year already. It hasn’t happened. And guess who develops CC and other Anthropic/OpenAI products?
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
  The false part is that the masses do not accept the lie, as most don't actually believe those companies.
  - keybored 4mo ago
    People who talk about the masses are at the same time completely distanced from them but also completely tuned in to their mass psyche, or so they claim.
    - satvikpendem 4mo ago
      Maybe, not always, but doesn't make them incorrect.
      - keybored 4mo ago
        Of course not. We have no proof that their hot takes are completely useless.

keybored 4mo ago

Most reasoning outside of philosophy departments is motivated and it is fine as long as it is either reflected on or the audience knows where they are coming from. This is just having skin in the game. You know, needing a job to survive, which is much more immediate than the motivation of society disruptors who either get to become fantastically rich or else move on to some other executive role. I would also have wished for some substantiation for how this and that were a lie. As it stands though it’s an argument against multi-level marketing. And it really doesn’t hold up that your everyman will be able to make money off of vibe coded apps. Maybe build their own very personal software gadget? Yeah, but there’s no money in that. The Reasoned Case Against AI Disruptors does not need to be covered in such a piece.

mschuster91 4mo ago

> I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads. The thing is... many prominent figures, both individuals and companies, in the AI industry just lend themselves to being hateable. Sam Altman personally completely fucked up the RAM market with his double dealing. Every single one of us felt the consequences of that and we will feel it for years to come. And it is why I will call for his arrest, speedy trial and imprisonment every time I have the misfortune of reading his name. I wish to see this person suffer from the bottom of my heart. Elon Musk, well, there are so, so many valid reasons to hate him. Regarding AI itself, the mechahitler incident and the "undress her in a bikini" CSAM generator are the worst issues. Regarding him as a person, the "pedo diver" incident, the shady stuff surrounding virtually all of his children's mothers, the complete clusterfuck around his daughter, DOGE, the right-arm salute his fanbase keeps denying being a nazi salute, him stoking racial riots in the UK twice, his constant overpromising in all of his ventures (some of which would normally fall under "investor defrauding" claims if there were a functioning legal and regulatory world), the trashcontainer on wheels... Google has no (notable) individual persons to raise the pitchforks against, but as a company, they severely degraded the quality of their "ordinary" search and have gone to steal clicks and thus money from creators by distilling their work into the AI results box at the top of every search. Microsoft keeps shoveling AI down everyone's throats no matter if we want it. Anthropic has literally ripped books apart to scan them for Claude. Google, back when they created the dataset for Google Books, at least didn't destroy the books. Destroying books at that scale is a sacrilege. Every single AI company is guilty of using questionably sourced materials - either outright stolen or human input based on exploitation. And on top of that, it's not just RAM that has gotten expensive. The entire rest of the economy - both individuals and companies of all sizes - are priced out of personal and even cloud compute, as the blown-up AI giants scoop up everything they can and the scraps and aged hardware that's available gets fought over by everyone else. > blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now. It is undeniable that the entire AI sphere is a bubble, artificially propped up by circular investments and wash trades, and that is now poised to raid pension funds.

atleastoptimal 4mo ago

surgical_fire 4mo ago

> I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads. It would annoy me more if those AI figureheads were not such hateful people.

atleastoptimal 4mo ago
What evidence do you have that Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, etca re hateful?