4 ms·

Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us

68 points by jamesgill 3mo ago

sergiomattei 3mo ago
> But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no. I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI. I find myself doing more projects outside of work. I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown. I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work. I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed. Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.
- reticulates 3mo ago
  > it’s definitely a revolution in access to information Did you mean: Google?
  - socalgal2 3mo ago
    Google was the previous revolution. AI is the next. I get info from LLMs way better than I generally got from Google, at least for some large subset of things I used to try to get from Google.
  - sergiomattei 3mo ago
    An example from last night. If I Google “how much is 7KwH”, I get a list of calculator websites for converting units. If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!” The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
    - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
      Did you deliberately screw up the capitalization so thoroughly that it bears no resemblance to the standard abbreviations? Are you one of those people who writes about "mb" and "kb" for computers, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour Obviously, LLMs are quite tolerant of typos, and even ignore mis-capitalization, or it may have at least tried to correct your improper usages.
      - annoyingbanana 3mo ago
        “what’s unnecessary is prickly commenters who call out ordinary English writing for no fuckin’ reason except to smell their own fuckin’ farts, so MYOB” this was you less than an hour ago
      - joenot443 2mo ago
        I think it’s unlikely they made that typo deliberately. Similarly, I don’t think you were intentional in misspelling miscapitalization, I figured it was an honest mistake. Is this deliberate miscapitalization thing a behavior you often encounter?
    - reticulates 3mo ago
      You said revolution, that’s barely incremental. If you had googled “apartment electricity usage calculator” you would find many options that provide exactly the information you want without risk of hallucination.
  - joenot443 2mo ago
    No, they’re talking about LLMs - they’re a different technology from search engines.
EGreg 3mo ago
If I may, I think it has to do with this... and it's about to get weirder and weirder unless you change the paradigm: https://safebots.ai/declarative.html https://safebots.ai/declarative.html
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  My first-impression is that this site is vaporware generated by someone prompting an LLM to babble about how an LLM could be secured. At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing. > [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction. > Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?
  - reticulates 3mo ago
    Read enough of EGreg’s posts and you’ll immediately recognize that this site is definitely his but at least LLMs stopped him posting about qbix all the time, a sweet mercy
    - EGreg 3mo ago
      I’m flattered that you followed my posts long enough to have an opinion on all this and even can recognize if a site is “definitely mine”. Question though — what do you have against what I’m saying or working hard towards? Trying to create healthier versions of technologies and help people? https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
      - reticulates 3mo ago
        go back through all of your comments from the last decade, group them by comments that promote/mention one of your projects and comments that do not. I’d ballpark 95% of your comments have been self-aggrandizing self-promotion, it is exhausting to read. I guess today was the day I said something when I saw someone else suffering through another one of your comments. You might want to create healthier technology but you have contributed nothing to HN in almost 20 years, almost impressive enough to be an achievement unto itself. I’d eat my hat if I could find a substantive comment you’ve ever written that wasn’t self-promotion.
dboreham 3mo ago
I mean, I'm concerned about the societal impacts too, but this article is pure nonsense as far as how useful today's AI tools are. I know multiple people with very high paid jobs who have told me they simply couldn't do that job now without AI. I create software much quicker and better than I have in the past 40 years using AI tools. I've learned all kinds of things technical and otherwise from LLMs. This writing is about as useful as the people who said calculators would mean nobody understands mathematics, or that watching tv would turn everyone into a zombie (obviously it was smart phones that did that).
Legend2440 3mo ago
Everyone? Speak for yourself. I'm not weirded out by it.
- TRiG_Ireland 3mo ago
  Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.
  - derac 3mo ago
    I disagree, though I highly dislike the affect of Anthropic models.
  - antonvs 3mo ago
    It’s one of the most amazing technological achievements of the 21st century to date, if not the most amazing by far. But it’s still a machine executing a program. Your emotional reaction to it might be because you’re seeing it as something more than that.
    - runarberg 3mo ago
      mRNA vaccines takes the first place for sure, and by a wide margin. But also advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology. We also finally generated electricity with fusion power this century, traveled to Pluto and set up the James Webb Space telescope [albeit the latter two are engineering achievements]. I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then used to perform mundane tasks and performs significantly worse then if done manually. If anything LLMs is one of the least impressive, yet most annoying technological achievement this century.
      - antonvs 2mo ago
        mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s, i.e. last century. None of the other things you mention come close, but I'll detail that at the end. First, I want to point out how inconsistent you're being in mentioning "electricity with fusion power". We've had the ability to create fusion for almost 3/4 of a century. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world today are primarily fusion weapons (mostly with fission starters.) This is a technology that has killed nearly a quarter million people. But you're touting a variation of it as being one of the most amazing technological achievements this century. That's fine, but then you have to recognize that you're distinguishing between the capabilities of the technology and its actual usages. Now do the same thing with AI, and if you're intellectually honest about it, you'll be forced to change your position. The technology represents the greatest technological advance of anything we've seen this century. The political and economic forces surrounding its use are a separate question. As for your list of technologies - the problem with it is that none of those items seemed like science fiction at the start of this century. Whereas, what LLMs can do now was essentially science fiction as little as five years ago. In detail: * mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s. There was little question that they could be made to work in humans, all that was needed was sufficient impetus, which was provided by COVID-19. * Advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology are incremental enhancements to existing tech. No comparison here. * Generated electricity with fusion power - that was first done in 1991 at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility. You may be thinking of the so-called "scientific breakeven" which was achieved in late 2022. That didn't actually generate electricity, just heat. It was also a rather arbitrary milestone that doesn't actually mean much, in practice. We're still orders of magnitude away from a true total system breakeven, where the total energy produced is greater than the energy consumed. The system that achieved scientific breakeven is not the kind of system that can be scaled up to address that gap. We're even further away from commercial power breakeven, where the value of the energy produced is greater than the cost of producing it. It's quite possible, even highly likely, that neither of the two goals I've just described will ever be achieved. There's no real breakthrough here, just marketing hype in a multi-decade effort to achieve something that may not even be possible. * Traveled to Pluto - the Voyager spacecraft passed Pluto's average orbital distance in the early 1990s. Choosing to send a probe directly to Pluto is just a choice that would have been just as possible last century. * The James Webb Space telescope - certainly a nice incremental advance, but not in the ballpark in terms of achieving something we didn't even know how to do before. In short, if that's the best list you can come up with, it essentially confirms that LLMs are the greatest technological achievement of the 21st century so far.
mattas 3mo ago
"Everybody's Weirded Out by AI-Except the People Who Live in Zip Codes Starting with 940, 941, 944, 950 and 951"
- efficax 3mo ago
  hey now there's plenty of ai fanatics in zip codes starting with 100 and 11
- tanseydavid 3mo ago
  Hey, there are some AI-affirmative people in Marin County (949).
- gs17 3mo ago
  There's some 98XXX codes that make the list too.
kenforthewin 3mo ago
> A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.” I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework? On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.
- cabaalis 3mo ago
  This sounds like a very much wanted release of mental stress to me.
- fzeroracer 3mo ago
  > What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework? Typically speaking, the ones that run companies. > On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless. To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.
  - cyanydeez 3mo ago
    yeah, I think we have plenty of evidence that a certain sector of the population absolutely "vibe codes" life.
  - AngryData 3mo ago
    Im not sure if the internet made anyone dumber. It is just early on the average idiot self selected out of internet usage and there wasn't as much corporate or advertising money it to be worth manipulating. AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations. Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.
pstuart 3mo ago
That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts: * It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not. * It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive. I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society: * solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible * integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors * the personal computer revolution * mobile telephony * the internet * smart phones * AI Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.) We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.
- socalgal2 3mo ago
  > It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI. There, fixed that for you. I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
  - pstuart 3mo ago
    I think you missed my point: it is incredibly useful. But its important to recognize that there are indirect costs that come from it and more in store. Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues? * Distracted driving * Attention span decimators * A culture of zombies staring at their screens? The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that. Are you capable of dialectical thinking?
vitalyan8184 3mo ago
[flagged]
- efficax 3mo ago
  can you actually justify this claim. many of these technological advances were met with genuine public fanfare
  - karahime 3mo ago
    I think it's pretty justified. The internet was unfairly maligned as a place solely for weirdos, nerds, and the unhinged by a lot of media for a long time, and often still is, even as everyone is online. You're thinking of the fanfare, but the fanfare is what is being treated dismissively as "just hype" within this same comparison.
  - vitalyan8184 3mo ago
    [dead]
- digitaltrees 3mo ago
  Except none of those were autonomous actors. And most of society was not as freaked out by any of those cycles. Each of them did have some fairly serious downsides that required social policy to correct. I don't want to go back to the era of Charles dickens.
arjie 3mo ago
It's funny how this works. When Apple came out with the iPad Reddit absolutely hated it. No one would want it. It's a crappy product. Who even needs 4 iPhones glued together and so on and so forth. This all reads like that. It's just completely divorced from reality.
- AngryData 3mo ago
  But I don't know anybody that uses iPads? To me it clearly out sold the market it is actually useful for.
  - layer8 3mo ago
    I’m reading and writing this on an iPad. I don’t think it makes sense as an analogy to AI, however.
    - frizlab 3mo ago
      I am reading and writing this on my computer with my iPad next to me (side screen for alternate content). I plan on probably buying one for my wife who is not tech-savvy (to say the least). I don’t think the analogy makes any sense whatsoever either.
  - Reason077 3mo ago
    I bought the original iPad 2 on the day it was released (which was just after the Fukushima earthquake in 2011). Still have it. Still use it occasionally to play retro iOS games. Still runs great on its original battery and iOS 6. Still connects to my WiFi and Bluetooth devices! (Although the Safari is so ancient it’s pretty useless for the modern web) But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles. Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.
Reason077 3mo ago
Elon Musk himself used to be quite anti-AI, often saying that it was an “existential risk to humanity” or more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He seems to have changed his mind now that he owns a major AI company.
- AngryData 3mo ago
  Elon talks a lot of crap about topics he has barely a cursory knowledge of so I wouldn't take anything he says at value except for how to manipulate large financials and tax burdens.
tanseydavid 3mo ago
This piece is a little odd for me. I don't understand the logic behind this: "read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped" followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No." Why? Because "research says so." Wut? (still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)
- ALittleSlow 3mo ago
  As someone approaching their 50s, I do appreciate your diplomacy. You could have just posted "okay Boomer" or an old man shaking his fist at the sky meme. This essay bothers me for a number of reasons. I missed the em-dashes, because I listen to it, (un?)fortunately. But even in audio, it does sound a bit like AI slop. Essentially, it just reiterates every single short-sellers trope that's been developed over the last few years. And if it is, in fact, a real human being — well, that pretty much tells you all you need to know about America, its think tanks, and the caliber of human beings leading this nation for the last 40 years. But I do believe one thing for sure and that is that it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff and consolidate. There will be a lot more of this — the market demands men tilting at windmills, and margins to exploit.
lbrito 3mo ago
>The only field where people are being replaced wholesale is in computer programming, where AI is making leaps in capability. I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.
xnx 3mo ago
Blanket claims like "Everbody" are trivially falsifiable. I'm not "weirded out" by AI, and I'm not foisting it on anyone. There's a strange vein of aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous) even if it hasn't yet cured cancer, led to 100% unemployment, solved nuclear fusion, etc.
- keane 3mo ago
  You’re right, that’s a flourish. But more importantly, the author isn’t claiming no one uses it / finds it useful. Her point is about potential problems that could occur as its real (though flawed) utility drives its broader adoption in particular arenas.
- tim333 3mo ago
  Also that AI is "making society dumber overall" seems dubious.
- joenot443 3mo ago
  I think a bit of the aggressive denialism comes from sour grapes that American society’s best hope for UBI came from capitalists in tech instead of progressives in policy. UBI used to be a bit of a funny reddit pipe dream. Now it’s a serious long term hypothetical being trialed in the short term and that’s solely as a result of AI progress. When that result undermines the tenet that capitalism is the root of human suffering, it’s simplest to just reject the result wholesale.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
  "Blanket claims like "Everybody" are trivially falsifiable." As are claims like "No one" or "99.9%" How many times per week are such claims made on HN and in similar forums with respect to software and hardware curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=no+one&tags=comment |grep -Eo '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+' Perhaps the term "everybody" is just a figure of speech used in an online title. Can we, should we, forgive HN commenters for making 47,000+ trivially falsifiable claims How often do HN commenters use the trivially falsifiable term "everybody" curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=everybody&tags=comment|egrep -o '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+' What about the term "99.9%" I read the article but found no hint of "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" Instead I found a statement that the author finds AI "incredibly" useful: "An AI summary would have been incredibly useful" Where, specifically, is the "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" in this article The author's point as I understood it is about "AI" _hype_ not "AI" usefulness. The issue she has is with the _people_ who are hyping "AI" and the actual or potential effects of that hype
metalman 3mo ago
There are a lot of people getting very weird while useing AI, another big bunch of people who hate AI, and of course AI itself is weird, but I have no direct contact with AI while it finds my web sites and sends me work through some process that remains opaque to me. I have become quick to close any page that has strange gramar of phrasing, and no longer accept any claims or declarations that I cant verify indipendently. Having always been very very picky about any media I consume, I find it easy to avoid seeing anything that has been made useing AI. The whole upshot for me has been to spend more time doing real stuff and making money, which attracts more people to spend time with me.
ab_wahab01 2mo ago
we are also greedily chasing it and forcing it upon ourselves.

68 points by jamesgill 3mo ago

> But would it have improved my comprehension? The research says no. I don’t know, I find myself doing things I would’ve never done before AI. I find myself doing more projects outside of work. I discover new problem domains and are less afraid of tackling the unknown. I code in languages I don’t know and start learning how they work. I can get anything explained to me, at any time, in a somewhat coherent manner, by a tutor that won’t get tired or annoyed. Look— I’m not exactly thinking AI is free of criticism, but it’s definitely a revolution in access to information and at least to me that’s a big deal.

reticulates 3mo ago
> it’s definitely a revolution in access to information Did you mean: Google?
- socalgal2 3mo ago
  Google was the previous revolution. AI is the next. I get info from LLMs way better than I generally got from Google, at least for some large subset of things I used to try to get from Google.
- sergiomattei 3mo ago
  An example from last night. If I Google “how much is 7KwH”, I get a list of calculator websites for converting units. If I ask an LLM, it tells me “your usage is pretty low for an apartment, good job!” The latter is exactly the question I had in mind. Not even close.
  - ButlerianJihad 3mo ago
    Did you deliberately screw up the capitalization so thoroughly that it bears no resemblance to the standard abbreviations? Are you one of those people who writes about "mb" and "kb" for computers, too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt-hour Obviously, LLMs are quite tolerant of typos, and even ignore mis-capitalization, or it may have at least tried to correct your improper usages.
    - annoyingbanana 3mo ago
      “what’s unnecessary is prickly commenters who call out ordinary English writing for no fuckin’ reason except to smell their own fuckin’ farts, so MYOB” this was you less than an hour ago
    - joenot443 2mo ago
      I think it’s unlikely they made that typo deliberately. Similarly, I don’t think you were intentional in misspelling miscapitalization, I figured it was an honest mistake. Is this deliberate miscapitalization thing a behavior you often encounter?
  - reticulates 3mo ago
    You said revolution, that’s barely incremental. If you had googled “apartment electricity usage calculator” you would find many options that provide exactly the information you want without risk of hallucination.
- joenot443 2mo ago
  No, they’re talking about LLMs - they’re a different technology from search engines.

EGreg 3mo ago

If I may, I think it has to do with this... and it's about to get weirder and weirder unless you change the paradigm: https://safebots.ai/declarative.html https://safebots.ai/declarative.html

Terr_ 3mo ago
My first-impression is that this site is vaporware generated by someone prompting an LLM to babble about how an LLM could be secured. At best, perhaps it's an overengineered way to force humans to rigorously validate every action... which the humans are all very hostile to doing. > [Architecture page] Reasoning is Read-Only: Input=Data, not Instructions This doesn't make make sense unless the "reasoning" is regular executable code, and then someone still needs to audit the code whenever it changes. The core LLM algorithms simply don't have room for the distinction. > Complex workflows broken down into encrypted graph segments Grandiosity++, where does "the architecture" actually end?
- reticulates 3mo ago
  Read enough of EGreg’s posts and you’ll immediately recognize that this site is definitely his but at least LLMs stopped him posting about qbix all the time, a sweet mercy
  - EGreg 3mo ago
    I’m flattered that you followed my posts long enough to have an opinion on all this and even can recognize if a site is “definitely mine”. Question though — what do you have against what I’m saying or working hard towards? Trying to create healthier versions of technologies and help people? https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/ https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
    - reticulates 3mo ago
      go back through all of your comments from the last decade, group them by comments that promote/mention one of your projects and comments that do not. I’d ballpark 95% of your comments have been self-aggrandizing self-promotion, it is exhausting to read. I guess today was the day I said something when I saw someone else suffering through another one of your comments. You might want to create healthier technology but you have contributed nothing to HN in almost 20 years, almost impressive enough to be an achievement unto itself. I’d eat my hat if I could find a substantive comment you’ve ever written that wasn’t self-promotion.

dboreham 3mo ago

I mean, I'm concerned about the societal impacts too, but this article is pure nonsense as far as how useful today's AI tools are. I know multiple people with very high paid jobs who have told me they simply couldn't do that job now without AI. I create software much quicker and better than I have in the past 40 years using AI tools. I've learned all kinds of things technical and otherwise from LLMs. This writing is about as useful as the people who said calculators would mean nobody understands mathematics, or that watching tv would turn everyone into a zombie (obviously it was smart phones that did that).

Legend2440 3mo ago

Everyone? Speak for yourself. I'm not weirded out by it.

TRiG_Ireland 3mo ago
Really? Interacting with an LLM feels like stepping on a slug. It's just gross.
- derac 3mo ago
  I disagree, though I highly dislike the affect of Anthropic models.
- antonvs 3mo ago
  It’s one of the most amazing technological achievements of the 21st century to date, if not the most amazing by far. But it’s still a machine executing a program. Your emotional reaction to it might be because you’re seeing it as something more than that.
  - runarberg 3mo ago
    mRNA vaccines takes the first place for sure, and by a wide margin. But also advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology. We also finally generated electricity with fusion power this century, traveled to Pluto and set up the James Webb Space telescope [albeit the latter two are engineering achievements]. I think using an absurd amount of power to train a neural network on stolen data which is then used to perform mundane tasks and performs significantly worse then if done manually. If anything LLMs is one of the least impressive, yet most annoying technological achievement this century.
    - antonvs 2mo ago
      mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s, i.e. last century. None of the other things you mention come close, but I'll detail that at the end. First, I want to point out how inconsistent you're being in mentioning "electricity with fusion power". We've had the ability to create fusion for almost 3/4 of a century. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world today are primarily fusion weapons (mostly with fission starters.) This is a technology that has killed nearly a quarter million people. But you're touting a variation of it as being one of the most amazing technological achievements this century. That's fine, but then you have to recognize that you're distinguishing between the capabilities of the technology and its actual usages. Now do the same thing with AI, and if you're intellectually honest about it, you'll be forced to change your position. The technology represents the greatest technological advance of anything we've seen this century. The political and economic forces surrounding its use are a separate question. As for your list of technologies - the problem with it is that none of those items seemed like science fiction at the start of this century. Whereas, what LLMs can do now was essentially science fiction as little as five years ago. In detail: * mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s. There was little question that they could be made to work in humans, all that was needed was sufficient impetus, which was provided by COVID-19. * Advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology are incremental enhancements to existing tech. No comparison here. * Generated electricity with fusion power - that was first done in 1991 at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility. You may be thinking of the so-called "scientific breakeven" which was achieved in late 2022. That didn't actually generate electricity, just heat. It was also a rather arbitrary milestone that doesn't actually mean much, in practice. We're still orders of magnitude away from a true total system breakeven, where the total energy produced is greater than the energy consumed. The system that achieved scientific breakeven is not the kind of system that can be scaled up to address that gap. We're even further away from commercial power breakeven, where the value of the energy produced is greater than the cost of producing it. It's quite possible, even highly likely, that neither of the two goals I've just described will ever be achieved. There's no real breakthrough here, just marketing hype in a multi-decade effort to achieve something that may not even be possible. * Traveled to Pluto - the Voyager spacecraft passed Pluto's average orbital distance in the early 1990s. Choosing to send a probe directly to Pluto is just a choice that would have been just as possible last century. * The James Webb Space telescope - certainly a nice incremental advance, but not in the ballpark in terms of achieving something we didn't even know how to do before. In short, if that's the best list you can come up with, it essentially confirms that LLMs are the greatest technological achievement of the 21st century so far.

mattas 3mo ago

"Everybody's Weirded Out by AI-Except the People Who Live in Zip Codes Starting with 940, 941, 944, 950 and 951"

efficax 3mo ago
hey now there's plenty of ai fanatics in zip codes starting with 100 and 11
tanseydavid 3mo ago
Hey, there are some AI-affirmative people in Marin County (949).
gs17 3mo ago
There's some 98XXX codes that make the list too.

kenforthewin 3mo ago

> A study by MIT found that students who use AI to write show far less brain activity than those who used classic Google searching (with AI off) or those who used neither. Other studies find that students who use AI retain far less of the information that ends up in their writing, possibly as a result of “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.” I'm unconvinced that AI will make us all dumber. In the public perception, at least among students, AI is viewed as a cheating tool. What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework? On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless.

cabaalis 3mo ago
This sounds like a very much wanted release of mental stress to me.
fzeroracer 3mo ago
> What kinds of students gravitate towards cheating tools to complete their coursework? Typically speaking, the ones that run companies. > On the other hand, the opportunity for AI to act as a personal tutor, meeting you at your own skill and knowledge level, is limitless. To be especially contrarian here, people said the exact same thing about the internet. That it would let you connect with anyone and truly evolve your knowledge and skill. It may be true for an extremely small minority of people but for most the reality was almost exactly the opposite. People willingly became dumber, embedding themselves into conspiracy and ways to hide from reality.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  yeah, I think we have plenty of evidence that a certain sector of the population absolutely "vibe codes" life.
- AngryData 3mo ago
  Im not sure if the internet made anyone dumber. It is just early on the average idiot self selected out of internet usage and there wasn't as much corporate or advertising money it to be worth manipulating. AI im not sure of because it generates so much slop and anyone not already deep into a topic or field are unlikely to be able to recognize what parts are useful and what parts are common misconceptions or hallucinations. Search engines are certainly worse tho, the first 20 hits on certain topics these days are AI articles that lack the needed details in favor of verbose generalizations or have questionable figures that other slop makes difficult to verify.

pstuart 3mo ago

That was not a very insightful article. It's super easy, and in most cases, correct to hate on AI. But that ignores a couple key facts: * It's not going to go away and will only get more sophisticated whether we like it or not. * It has legitimate super powers that can enable people do things that would either be impossible or insanely expensive. I've been fascinated by tech my whole life and have watched various waves of technology transform society: * solid state electronics enabling portability and functionality hitherto not possible * integrated circuits bringing down the cost and increasing the capability of electronics, including microprocessors * the personal computer revolution * mobile telephony * the internet * smart phones * AI Most of those wonders have come with significant societal costs (e.g., silicon valley promised a revolutionary new industry without pollution, but instead gave us multiple superfund sites to clean up the toxic materials they haphazardly dumped without care, etc.) We can't stop AI but we should try to have serious conversations how how to live in a non-dystopian world that it threatens to bring us. The small flaw with that idea is that those in power have no fucks to give in that regard and will sell out humanity if it means they can have the deluxe bunker package and enough slaves to serve them.

socalgal2 3mo ago
> It's super easy, and in most cases, incorrect to hate on AI. There, fixed that for you. I'm not saying the haters have zero point, but I find AI far more useful than not. I think so do most people. If I walk into any coffee shop and look over the at the screens of the people next to me, I see all asking AI questions and getting something positive from it. So I don't think "most cases" is correct.
- pstuart 3mo ago
  I think you missed my point: it is incredibly useful. But its important to recognize that there are indirect costs that come from it and more in store. Smartphones are cool, but do you think that they don't have issues? * Distracted driving * Attention span decimators * A culture of zombies staring at their screens? The list goes on for everything I mention: virtually all of them had some sort of cost to society and it's important to recognize that. Are you capable of dialectical thinking?

vitalyan8184 3mo ago

[flagged]

efficax 3mo ago
can you actually justify this claim. many of these technological advances were met with genuine public fanfare
- karahime 3mo ago
  I think it's pretty justified. The internet was unfairly maligned as a place solely for weirdos, nerds, and the unhinged by a lot of media for a long time, and often still is, even as everyone is online. You're thinking of the fanfare, but the fanfare is what is being treated dismissively as "just hype" within this same comparison.
- vitalyan8184 3mo ago
  [dead]
digitaltrees 3mo ago
Except none of those were autonomous actors. And most of society was not as freaked out by any of those cycles. Each of them did have some fairly serious downsides that required social policy to correct. I don't want to go back to the era of Charles dickens.

arjie 3mo ago

It's funny how this works. When Apple came out with the iPad Reddit absolutely hated it. No one would want it. It's a crappy product. Who even needs 4 iPhones glued together and so on and so forth. This all reads like that. It's just completely divorced from reality.

AngryData 3mo ago
But I don't know anybody that uses iPads? To me it clearly out sold the market it is actually useful for.
- layer8 3mo ago
  I’m reading and writing this on an iPad. I don’t think it makes sense as an analogy to AI, however.
  - frizlab 3mo ago
    I am reading and writing this on my computer with my iPad next to me (side screen for alternate content). I plan on probably buying one for my wife who is not tech-savvy (to say the least). I don’t think the analogy makes any sense whatsoever either.
- Reason077 3mo ago
  I bought the original iPad 2 on the day it was released (which was just after the Fukushima earthquake in 2011). Still have it. Still use it occasionally to play retro iOS games. Still runs great on its original battery and iOS 6. Still connects to my WiFi and Bluetooth devices! (Although the Safari is so ancient it’s pretty useless for the modern web) But I always swore I would never buy another iPad until Apple added one key feature: support for multiple user profiles. Can’t understand why they’ve never done this. Even Apple TV has user profiles now. Perhaps they think they will sell less iPads if family members can share them.

Reason077 3mo ago

Elon Musk himself used to be quite anti-AI, often saying that it was an “existential risk to humanity” or more dangerous than nuclear weapons. He seems to have changed his mind now that he owns a major AI company.

AngryData 3mo ago
Elon talks a lot of crap about topics he has barely a cursory knowledge of so I wouldn't take anything he says at value except for how to manipulate large financials and tax burdens.

tanseydavid 3mo ago

This piece is a little odd for me. I don't understand the logic behind this: "read Kant and found it to be dense and impenetrable...an AI generated summary would have helped" followed by "Would it have improved comprehension? No." Why? Because "research says so." Wut? (still waiting for one or more HN commenters to freak out because the article has gasp! multiple em-dashes)

ALittleSlow 3mo ago
As someone approaching their 50s, I do appreciate your diplomacy. You could have just posted "okay Boomer" or an old man shaking his fist at the sky meme. This essay bothers me for a number of reasons. I missed the em-dashes, because I listen to it, (un?)fortunately. But even in audio, it does sound a bit like AI slop. Essentially, it just reiterates every single short-sellers trope that's been developed over the last few years. And if it is, in fact, a real human being — well, that pretty much tells you all you need to know about America, its think tanks, and the caliber of human beings leading this nation for the last 40 years. But I do believe one thing for sure and that is that it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff and consolidate. There will be a lot more of this — the market demands men tilting at windmills, and margins to exploit.

lbrito 3mo ago

>The only field where people are being replaced wholesale is in computer programming, where AI is making leaps in capability. I'll give the author a pass because he's not in the industry, but even an outsider looking closely enough would know that this is not true. Companies have been laying off while using AI as an excuse, but before AI it was the end of ZIRP, and before that it was something else. Also the layoff peak was 2023.

xnx 3mo ago

Blanket claims like "Everbody" are trivially falsifiable. I'm not "weirded out" by AI, and I'm not foisting it on anyone. There's a strange vein of aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous) even if it hasn't yet cured cancer, led to 100% unemployment, solved nuclear fusion, etc.

keane 3mo ago
You’re right, that’s a flourish. But more importantly, the author isn’t claiming no one uses it / finds it useful. Her point is about potential problems that could occur as its real (though flawed) utility drives its broader adoption in particular arenas.
tim333 3mo ago
Also that AI is "making society dumber overall" seems dubious.
joenot443 3mo ago
I think a bit of the aggressive denialism comes from sour grapes that American society’s best hope for UBI came from capitalists in tech instead of progressives in policy. UBI used to be a bit of a funny reddit pipe dream. Now it’s a serious long term hypothetical being trialed in the short term and that’s solely as a result of AI progress. When that result undermines the tenet that capitalism is the root of human suffering, it’s simplest to just reject the result wholesale.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
"Blanket claims like "Everybody" are trivially falsifiable." As are claims like "No one" or "99.9%" How many times per week are such claims made on HN and in similar forums with respect to software and hardware curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=no+one&tags=comment |grep -Eo '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+' Perhaps the term "everybody" is just a figure of speech used in an online title. Can we, should we, forgive HN commenters for making 47,000+ trivially falsifiable claims How often do HN commenters use the trivially falsifiable term "everybody" curl https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=everybody&tags=comment|egrep -o '\"nbHits\":[0-9]+' What about the term "99.9%" I read the article but found no hint of "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" Instead I found a statement that the author finds AI "incredibly" useful: "An AI summary would have been incredibly useful" Where, specifically, is the "aggressive-denialism that anyone could find AI genuinely useful (bordering on miraculous)" in this article The author's point as I understood it is about "AI" _hype_ not "AI" usefulness. The issue she has is with the _people_ who are hyping "AI" and the actual or potential effects of that hype

metalman 3mo ago

There are a lot of people getting very weird while useing AI, another big bunch of people who hate AI, and of course AI itself is weird, but I have no direct contact with AI while it finds my web sites and sends me work through some process that remains opaque to me. I have become quick to close any page that has strange gramar of phrasing, and no longer accept any claims or declarations that I cant verify indipendently. Having always been very very picky about any media I consume, I find it easy to avoid seeing anything that has been made useing AI. The whole upshot for me has been to spend more time doing real stuff and making money, which attracts more people to spend time with me.

ab_wahab01 2mo ago

we are also greedily chasing it and forcing it upon ourselves.