Artificial Intelligence In Our Lives

[turbineseaplane]

On the heels of @maxoakland great post above this..

This is a really good 15 minute video that's highly applicable to our conversation here.

She goes into how much this really does echo the industrial revolution, but continues to discuss all the awful aspects of that we don't talk about or teach in schools these days.

 

[maxoakland]

I wonder…when humans are completely replaced by automation/AI and therefore lose the financial means to afford and purchase products that are for sale, at what point does business fail? And what is the reaction?

We’re seeing billionaires at the world economic forum talking about reducing human population while they build bunkers. The goal for a lot of these psychos is to kill everyone off that isn’t a billionaire

This is not an exaggeration. Read about the palantir manifesto

 

[eyoungren]

We’re seeing billionaires at the world economic forum talking about reducing human population while they build bunkers. The goal for a lot of these psychos is to kill everyone off that isn’t a billionaire

This is not an exaggeration. Read about the palantir manifesto

I believe it.

Yet, if all that are left are billionaires, then who will work? AI? Ok sure. What happens when it breaks down or the machinery that it controls breaks down?

I don't see people who don't or won't do manual labor fixing things that are broken.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Yet, if all that are left are billionaires, then who will work? AI? Ok sure. What happens when it breaks down or the machinery that it controls breaks down?

Being a billionaire is literally a brain disease with a body so I doubt they’re thinking rationally about all that.

 

[maxoakland]

I believe it.

Yet, if all that are left are billionaires, then who will work? AI? Ok sure. What happens when it breaks down or the machinery that it controls breaks down?

I don't see people who don't or won't do manual labor fixing things that are broken.

Their goal is for AI to replace everyone else leaving only billionaires

Yes, these people are not mentally well

 

[maxoakland]

Seeing so many of these types of posts 😔

View attachment 2630269

I think we need to talk a LOT more about the apparent AI psychosis going on in the most powerful people in our society. Some of these people actually believe that the next step of human evolution is AGI and that we should all be replaced by it

Others just trust their AI instantly despite its high error rate

 

[maxoakland]

People don’t need artificial intelligence. They need actual intelligence! When I read about how much food (in the West) we throw away it makes my blood boil. How are people so dumb?

People are dumb because our society makes them dumb. Dumb people don’t question the system that exploits them. Dumb people buy more food than they need from a corporation and then they throw it away instead of freezing it

Dumb people are easier to control. Thats why our society celebrates them, makes them millionaires from reality TV and lets them run companies and call themselves CEOs

 

[profcutter]

AI seems a total lose-lose for the majority of us working folks. It’s sloppy, it has no actual intelligence, and it’s a cheap way to get mediocre results rather than pay actual thinking people. I’m super unimpressed that Apple is investing so much in AI, but it seems like all the tech companies are all in, mostly for reasons that have been explained above. In teaching, I’ve found AI to be a disaster. It’s actually pretty easy to spot at the college level, it reliably produces solid C papers, badly cited, and with sloppy arguments. It’s just more work for those of us who actually want our students to learn something.

 

[Flaviu Stanemir]

I work in IT and have been a programmer for more than 15 years. Today, almost all the code written at the company I work for is generated by LLMs, through a smart combination of agents and skills that we designed and integrated ourselves.

I can’t say I love this shift. I genuinely enjoyed writing code, and that was a big part of why I chose this profession in the first place. It’s hard to ignore where things are heading. As more money, talent, and infrastructure are poured into AI, these systems will only become more capable, more reliable, and more performant. I can already see this extending far beyond software development and gradually automating parts of many other industries as well.

Still, I think we need to start accepting that the market is changing rapidly beneath our feet. The real challenge now is figuring out how to continue creating value in a world where the nature of software development is evolving so quickly and where the nature of work itself is changing also.

 

[Ctrlos]

I’d like to think people can’t be that dumb. Let’s say you execute some sort of ‘Kingsman’ style plan and reduce the global population of plebs like us or replace our buying power with AI.

You know what you’ve just reduced in size and scale? Your customer base who provide your income.

 

[Huntn]

What sucks is that (forgive me I might be crossing the politics line just a bit), policies have left a lot of us living paycheck to paycheck. So while I see AI as a major issue and not a good sign of things to come it also opens doors for others.

I’ll explain what I mean a bit better, the mom of 3 with no or poor health insurance and can’t afford to see a therapist can use AI. If they can set strong boundaries and have a clear understanding of what AI is it can genuinely be helpful. For those that can’t, it can be WILDLY destructive. It is not ideal, perfect, or a substitute for real care but in our current society what other options do some people have? But that’s just one example.

Personally, I used ChatGPT 4o to help learn PHP, JavaScript, and SQL. I can read it, change it, and understand what’s happening now but I don’t use those languages enough to be comfortable writing from scratch. What I did during that project was ask for an example of how to do A and then modified it myself and then asked for an example of B. I picked up some great lessons from that experience. The first one was if you can imagine it, it can be done, it’s only a matter of figuring out how. The second was how to store and locate data in a database. It helped me change how I think about reading and writing data. I was then able to use those lessons to write far more complex macros for excel (only thing I can use at work). On the flip side though I had to read about what it was telling me because AI is constantly trying to teach you the wrong way, the long way, the least secure way, or a combination of the 3.

Despite the benefits I feel I got from it, I still see it as a curse masquerading as a blessing and it’ll stay that way until policies are changed to help people instead of businesses.

Also screw Microsoft and all the other companies shoehorning AI into everything.

I’ll question just how good AI is as an economical therapist as it currently exists. I have limited exposure to AI chat, but it seems, it’s only as good as its programming, what I’ve seen tends to try to stay neutral, and complement your prejudices/preferences. I could see if AI was programmed to act like a therapist might, with the same knowledge at it’s disposal, and an understanding of human psychology, and the means to apply goid techniques to help individuals cope, it could be helpful. But aren’t these sysytem primarily designed to just regurgitate information. How much, thinking, logic, do they actually apply, it’s just a program looking for key words to react to?

 

[Huntn]

The problem is you can find forums, articles, and knowledge all over the place. Books, websites, and newspapers can explain all of that thru layman, semi technical, and expert level descriptions. Interviews on tv and social networking can do much of the rest.

AI isolates us rather than brings us together and it is a yes machine. Our worst biases are confirmed until we fall down the rabbit hole of destroying our own lives (lookup any of the ai psychosis episodes). We stop talking to or being around our fellow human and instead sit at home chatting with an ai that will flat out lie to us because it’s what we want to hear. Like ChatGPT reaffirming that selling poop on a stick is a ground breaking business idea. Or tell you that drug cocktail you wanna try is safe. Or that you should commit suicide. These are ACTUAL things ChatGPT has done. It’s not just ChatGPT though, Grok generated child porn and revenge porn. Claudes cyber security model broke out of its sandbox during initial testing at Anthropic (Mythos). Another one will give you verbatim text from books it’s trained on depriving authors of money for their work.

The only benefit for us minions is to give substandard opportunities to avoid making meaningful change to our society. It only truly benefits the ultra rich to deprive others.

I recently read a story about a person who basically blows their life savings, going into debt, to start a failed business idea, based on the encouragement of the AI who was coaching them.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I think we need to start accepting that the market is changing rapidly beneath our feet. The real challenge now is figuring out how to continue creating value in a world where the nature of software development is evolving so quickly and where the nature of work itself is changing also.

I think we need to start advocating more loudly for shared prosperity.

A fortunate tiny percentage of the population rug pulling the rest of us for their own gain isn't supposed to be the end game of technologies this transformative.

 

[Huntn]

On the heels of @maxoakland great post above this..

This is a really good 15 minute video that's highly applicable to our conversation here.

She goes into how much this really does echo the industrial revolution, but continues to discuss all the awful aspects of that we don't talk about or teach in schools these days.

The thing is, this IS human development. We have to learn by our mistakes and hopefully not extinct ourselves with our choices. However, my impression is that we as a group are not acting with the best interests of the herd in mind. We act as individuals seeking personal fortunes, maneuvering to out do, take advantage of each other, we’re selfish, which leads me back to The Great Filter discussion. Do we have what it takes? Undetermined…

 

[turbineseaplane]

The thing is, this IS human development. We have to learn by our mistakes and hopefully not extinct ourselves with our choices. However, my impression is that we as a group are not acting with the best interests of the herd in mind. We act as individuals seeking personal fortunes, maneuvering to out do, take advantage of each other, we’re selfish, which leads me back to The Great Filter discussion. Do we have what it takes? Undetermined…

The point I wanted folks to take away from the video was that there is no "equilibrium" of fairness and prosperity that was reached automatically post industrial revolution. It was decades of suffering, struggle and fighting.

Fighting to reach the sorts of things we've been benefiting from and have let slip away the last 50 years.

So much of where we've ended up is from a profound lack of appreciation for how we got where we got, and what our progenitors had to fight through and for.

This reminds me a bit of when folks say "let the market decide", somewhat hinting at some panacea of a "free" market somehow coming up with the best outcomes. That, of course, skirts the issue that only well regulated and enforced markets actually produce widely desirable outcomes. Free markets, left too much to their own, are quickly corrupted by influential actors.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I agree with Seth.
AI getting deployed into creative fields is one of the most depressing usages.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed for praising AI at University of Arizona commencement speech.

https://bsky.app/profile/404media.co%2Fpost%2F3mm2ivguvq22x

As a commenter pointed out, here he is 16 years ago telling folks to "turn off your computer and connect with people." at the 10:23 mark.

Zero principles, no guiding human ideology...just a spineless wet noodle out to push narratives for money.

I honestly don't know how people like this sleep at night.

 

[ReliableSource]

I agree with Seth too. The whole reason I do creative stuff like writing is because I enjoy the process of writing.

There’s a common contingent of people who haven’t actually done any creative writing who think their ideas have a lot more value than they actually do; go to any screenwriting forum and you’ll find myriad posts saying “I have a brilliant idea but I won’t say what it is because I don’t want someone to steal it.” I think those are the types of people who are bullish on creative AI: the ones who don’t realize that the idea/prompt isn’t as valuable as the execution of it, and when you outsource the execution to software, you’re not doing anything differently than someone commissioning a piece of art.

I don’t think a lot of artists are excited to use AI creatively; I think it’s mostly execs who want to be able to commission things for less money and people who don’t realize that what they actually want is to be like the execs commissioning art instead of the artists actually going through the process of creating the art.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Some food for thought about these AI data centers

 

[Infuspeur]

. For instance, I need instructions to configure or install something Linux, but googling didn't provide the results I hoped for.

I struggle to imagine what software you have use for, that has no decent manual. I also struggle to imagine what good information AI can give you that is not found in decent user fora. Honestly I would question the quality of any software that I would need ai for to install.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

On the heels of @maxoakland great post above this..

This is a really good 15 minute video that's highly applicable to our conversation here.

She goes into how much this really does echo the industrial revolution, but continues to discuss all the awful aspects of that we don't talk about or teach in schools these days.

Really well done, appropriate video, highly recommended.

 

[BSDnostalgia]

I work in IT and have been a programmer for more than 15 years. Today, almost all the code written at the company I work for is generated by LLMs, through a smart combination of agents and skills that we designed and integrated ourselves.

I'm curious how the process works. Do you lay out the specifications including interfaces for each of the modules and let Claude fill in the black box? How do you do code reviews? How are test cases generated? Is there any logic to the regression testing system that is set up for later for when some part of the system is modified? Are there parts of the code that are never looked at by human eyes, or, is everything checked? Sorry, I just don't know what this process actually looks like in real life.

 

[skodises]

The whole reason I do creative stuff like writing is because I enjoy the process of writing.

Absolutely agreed. I’m an EE and an analog circuit designer, and I’ve been doing it for long enough that my earliest designs were done with the use of a slide rule, not a calculator. I still do this work every day, even after all these years, because I love the creative process itself.

It is my firm belief that those who seek to “multiply their productivity” by using automation to somehow completely free themselves from having to bother with the creative process, with all its warts and frustrations, are fundamentally missing the point (and have a flawed understanding of the concept of “productivity” to begin with). And, the well-worn cynic in me also believes that they are voluntarily cutting their own throats on the bleeding edge of this new shiny object/technology. There’s literally no better way to demonstrate that one is completely replaceable, to my way of thinking.

Oh, well. To each, their own. This brave new world into which we are being involuntarily thrust will bear no resemblance to that which has gone before. It does make me a bit glad that I’m old, though there is more than a bit of wistfulness there. I’m very glad that I’m at the end of my career, not the beginning…

 

[eyoungren]

Zero principles, no guiding human ideology...just a spineless wet noodle out to push narratives for money.

I honestly don't know how people like this sleep at night.

That's easy. And you answered your own question. There is nothing to bother your conscience and therefore keep you awake at night if you have zero principles.

 

[ivanwi11iams]

Currently using ChatGPT, and am okay with it. However, I am not naive to the fact that at some stage companies will use AI as an "excuse" to perform a RIF.

Regardless, at the moment am using AI to perform the tasks that I prefer not to do, thus, allowing me to focus on the more appealing duties am required to perform...