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For the first time in decades, in my entire life, the US seems to actually be excited about real huge scale projects. We lead the world undeniably in a new state of the art, we have energetic and ambitious figures fighting each other in a titanic race to innovate on projects at never before attempted scale. A site the size of Manhattan! that's small beans lets do it in space! It's just such an incredible bummer how cynical and bitter so many seem to be about it. Truly it could all go wrong, scaling could stop it's definitely within the distribution of possible future that tokens become a commodity in such a way that these investments don't pay off. But if you wanted to make America great again, if you wanted to actually build impressive physical things here at home and show the world what we're capable of, then this is our ticket. Were you under the impression regeneration was going to be a sure thing?
I feel like I'm watching people sabotage nuclear energy all over again over bullshit hallucinated fears of disaster or made up sour grapes about how huge amounts of energy from fission wouldn't even be that useful. We made computers talk like people and they've progressed in only a few years from barely coherent chat partners to genuinely useful junior programmers. I think there's a fair chance this whole thing ends up with all of us dead as well as a fair chance that progress peters out but how can you not be excited?
Are you really surprised why a technology where its proponents and developers are saying that it has a solid chance of killing everyone and/or consigning the median person into permanent unemployment at best, or creating a titanic financial bubble that's going to bring everyone's retirement with it if it doesn't pay off at worst, is extremely unpopular?
As a software engineer I enjoy using coding agents and I do think with demographics and fertility being what they are, the only real choice as a society is leaning into AI and automation as much as possible even with the commensurate risks, but frankly the median person has really not seen proportional consumer surplus from the trillions invested into post GPT-4 or so LLM development, and in return all they get is dealing with a tsunami of online slop, vibe-coded software that gets worse even as engineers boast about how productive they are, and higher prices for power and RAM.
At least in China they have the message discipline to tell people that AI is going to be used to improve people's quality of life, but all SF can do is jerk off about the AI-induced permanent underclass happening any month now and how dangerous AI is is going to be; it's obvious why the median person hates the AI build-out.
The alternative is that we become Europe, a pathetic retirement home telling itself unending stories of its greatness or the populist have us tear ourselves apart on the pathway to becoming so. The chance of it killing us all is coming either way unless we can get yudd style international treaties to pause/slow down(which I do support but am not expecting to happen). And the likely results of trying it and it crashing don't look terribly different to me than the trajectory we're on if we don't take the swing. A bunch of retirement counts but especially silicone valley investor types get hosed and we all get ridiculously cheap cloud compute for a generation.
I mean of course they haven't because those dollars haven't even been meaningfully spent yet because we haven't built the datacenters. The models people are using are the results of more like the tens to low hundreds of billions of dollars and even that takes time to actually build into products people would like. It takes time for actual artisans to learn to use new tools to produce more than just slop.
The median person who hates AI thinks a literal bottle of water is obliterated from the universe every time you query chat gpt for anything. Almost all of the concerns raised by the median anti-ai person are retarded propaganda produced by slopulists who, correctly, think of them as cattle that they can lie to with impunity in order to gin enough outrage to propel them into office, keep them supporting their slop rage social media account or because they're genuinely foreign spooks trying to retard our progress.
Actually, this exact perspective is the thing that the median person hates about AI. The water usage isn't the issue, the slop isn't the issue, the fact that AI doesn't produce any value for the median person and instead makes much of their life notably worse isn't the issue - the issue is that pompous 'tech elites' think they're better than us.
I'm personally of the opinion that the AI ecology in its current instantiation is evil in almost every single way, but the biggest way it is evil is that it's a transparent attempt to destroy the lives of everyone who isn't a part of that ecology. It's a predatory economic model, and the prey is that median person that you have such derision for.
People caught up in slop anti-growth and anti-human ideologies are worse than people who aren't. You weren't born this way, you can stop being worse than people who are better than you instantly by coming to your senses. No one is forcing you to identify with a hateful dead end black pilled ideology who's arguments are soldiers because they have no actual arguments. In every way that matters you're no different to the communists who cope with their own failures and salve their egos by inventing conspiracies of the rich. And the most pathetic element of it is this pure bullshit demand to have your feelings coddled without there being any condescension. There is no way to be this careful about hurting your feelings without condescension, it's not possible.
"It's not any of the things I say it is, it's that you don't pretend to like the people saying ignorant bullshit trying to stop progress convincingly enough"
Give me a break.
Thanks for reinforcing my point! Somehow, in your view, it's impossible to disagree with your take on AI without being 'pathetic' 'anti-human' who can't 'cope with their own failures'.
I rest my case.
Certainly it's possible to disagree with my position. But you've not disagreed with it, you've explicitly said the problem isn't my position, it's the rhetoric used, it's your feelings. I have a number of takes on AI that I think have very reasonable foils, I've gone over them at length. If you want to engage with them then please do so. But if your demand is that I show respect for slopulist liars who have contempt for the truth then I refuse.
Sorry, no. If you just go back and look, I originally responded to your claim that
by arguing that the median person's position on AI is essentially rooted in the (correct) belief that AI and tech bros in general are contemptuous of them and their concerns. This is not a 'slop' view nor is it a 'demand to have your feelings coddled'. It plays out in all areas of the AI ecology, from billionaires paying off city councils to build data centers that almost every constituent opposes, to companies firing large parts of their workforce because of 'AI efficiencies' that don't actually exist, to the degradation of our public education system by replacing teachers with AI tools that don't work... shall I go on? AI boosters are deliberately and with malice aforethought trying to destroy the lives of the 'median person' and treating that as just an unfortunate externality of their race towards godhood. It's the very definition of evil.
If the efficiencies don't exist, it follows that the layoffs can't possibly be AI's fault.
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