alt Hacker NewsThe post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll.
It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
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I'm right there with you, and it's been my core gripe since ChatGPT burst onto the stage. Believe it or not, my environmental concerns came about a year later, once we had data on how datacenters were being built and their resource consumption rates; I had no idea how big things had very suddenly and violently exploded into, and that alone gave me serious pause about where things are going.
In my heart, I firmly believe in the ability of technology to uplift and improve humanity - and have spent much of my career grappling with the distressing reality that it also enables a handful of wealthy people to have near-total control of society in the process. AI promises a very hostile, very depressing, very polarized world for everyone but those pulling the levers, and I wish more people evaluated technology beyond the mere realm of Computer Science or armchair economics. I want more people to sit down, to understand its present harms, its potential future harms, and the billions of people whose lives it will profoundly and negatively impact under current economic systems.
It's equal parts sobering and depressing once you shelve personal excitement or optimism and approach it objectively. Regardless of its potential as a tool, regardless of the benefit it might bring to you, your work day, your productivity, your output, your ROI, I desperately wish more people would ask one simple question:
Is all of that worth the harm I'm inflicting on others?
I dunno, I might be getting old, but I think the idea that people absolutely need a job to stay sane betrays lack of imagination. Of course getting paid just enough for survival is pretty depressing, but if I can have healthy food, a spacious place to live, ability to travel and all the free time I can have, I'd be absolutely happy without a job. Maybe I'd be even writing code, just not commercially useful one.
There are a few areas where I have found LLMs to be useful (anything related to writing code, as a search engine) and then just downright evil and upsetting in every other instance of using it, especially as a replacement for human creativity and personal expression.
Don't worry that much about 'AI' specifically. LLMs are an impressive piece of technology, but at the end of the day they're just language predictors - and bad ones a lot of the time. They can reassemble and remix what's already been written but with no understanding of it.
It can be an accelerator - it gets extremely common boiler-plate text work out of the way. But it can't replace any job that requires a functioning brain, since LLMs do not have one - nor ever will.
But in the end it doesn't matter. Companies do whatever they can to slash their labor requirements, pay people less, dodge regulations, etc. If not 'AI' it'll just be something else.
What I don't understand is, will every company really want to be beholden to some AI provider? If they get rid of the workers, all of a sudden they are on the losing end of the bargaining table. They have incredible leverage as things stand.
I think it just reflects on the sort of businesses that these companies are vs others. Of course we worry about this in the context of companies that dehumanize us, reduce us to line item costs and seek to eliminate us.
Now imagine a different sort of company. A little shop where the owner's first priority is actually to create good jobs for their employees that afford a high quality life. A shop like that needn't worry about AI.
It is too bad that we put so much stock as a society in businesses operating in this dehumanizing capacity instead of ones that are much more like a family unit trying to provide for each other.
Regarding that PS:
> This strikes me as paradoxical given my sense that one of AI’s main impacts will be to increase productivity and thus eliminate jobs.
The allegation that an "Increase of productivity will reduce jobs" has been proven false by history over and over again it's so well known it has a name, "Jevons Paradox" or "Jevons Effect"[0].
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use [...] results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.
The "increase in productivity" does not inherently result in less jobs, that's a false equivalence. It's likely just as false as it was in 1915 with the the assembly line and the Model T as it is in 2025 with AI and ChatGPT. This notion persists because as we go through inflection points due to something new changing up market dynamics, there is often a GROSS loss (as in economics) of jobs that often precipitates a NET gain overall as the market adapts, but that's not much comfort to people that lost or are worried about losing their jobs due to that inflection point changing the market.
The two important questions in that context for individuals in the job market during those inflections points (like today) are: "how difficult is it to adapt (to either not lose a job, or to benefit from or be a part of that net gain)?" and "Should you adapt?" Afterall, the skillsets that the market demands and the skillsets it supplies are not objectively quantifiable things; the presence of speculative markets is proof that this is subjective, not objective. Anyone who's ever been involved in the hiring process knows just how subjective this is. Which leads me to:
> the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.
Disagree that that's what the promise about. That IS happening, I don't disagree there, but that's not the promise that corporate is so hyped about. If we're being honest and not trying to blow smoke up people's ass to artificially inflate "value," AI is fundamentally about being more OBJECTIVE than SUBJECTIVE with regard to costs and resources of labor, and it's outputs. Anyone who knows what OKR's are and has been subject to a "performance review" in a self professed "Data driven company" knows how much modern corporate America, especially the tech market, loves it's "quantifiables." It's less about how much better it can allegedly do something, but the promise of how much "better" it can be quantified vs human labor. As long as AI has at least SOME proven utility (which it does), this promise of quantifiables combined with it's other inherent potential benefits (Doesn't need time off, doesn't sleep, doesn't need retirement/health benefits, no overtime pay, no regulatory limitations on hours worked, no "minimum wage") means that so long as the monied interests perceive it as continuing to improve, then they can dismiss it's inefficiencies/ineffectiveness in X or Y by the promise of it's potential to overcome that eventually.
It's the fundamental reason why people are so concerned about AI replacing Humans. Especially when you consider one of the things that AI excels at is quickly delivering an answer with confidence (people are impressed with speed and a sucker for confidence), and another big strength is it's ability to deal with repetitive minutia in known and solved problem spaces(a mainstay of many office jobs). It can also bullshit with best of them, fluff your ego as much as you want (and even when you don't), and almost never says "No" or "You're wrong" unless you ask it to.
In other words, it excels at the performative and repetitive bullshit and blowing smoke up your boss' ass and empowers them to do the same for their boss further up the chain, all while never once ruffling HR's feathers.
Again, it has other, much more practical and pragmatic utility too, it's not JUST a bullshit oracle, but it IS a good bullshit oracle if you want it to be.
LLM slop doesn't have aspirations at all, its just click bait nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
Drives people insane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftBiNu0ZNU
And LLM are economically and technologically unsustainable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA
These have already proven it will be unconstrained if AGI ever emerges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM
The LLM bubble will pass, as it is already losing money with every new user. =3
> It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise.
Same here, and I think it's because I feel like a craftsman. I thoroughly enjoy the process of thinking deeply about what I will build, breaking down the work into related chunks, and of course writing the code itself. It's like magic when it all comes together. Sometimes I can't even believe I get to do it!
I've spent over a decade learning an elegant language that allows me to instruct a computer—and the computer does exactly what I tell it. It's a miracle! I don't want to abandon this language. I don't want to describe things to the computer in English, then stare at a spinner for three minutes while the computer tries to churn out code.
I never knew there was an entire subclass of people in my field who don't want to write code.
I want to write code.