There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.
There are real use cases for this technology! But the idea that the generation of superficially plausible text is "the next Industrial Revolution" comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees. We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context, and leverage it without getting manic about it.
I don't really think we should talk about it with "use cases" anymore when it can virtually replace/enhance literally almost any form of white collar work and soon physical labor as well (people will act surprised the moment it comes of course, the same as with LLMs despite all the researchs made prior, if theory supports it = it will be), of course humanoids will be in every homes and they'll cost the same as a phone, soon enough, and we will also not be able to live without.
We don't talk about human intelligence with "use cases", I think we need to be realistic about what AI will be in our lives, most people already can't do without, and this will without doubt expand further.
> . But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems.
> Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a “stepping stone” to his real dream: spaceflight.
Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light. Completely detached from reality, what a dumb person. Being this oblivious is anthitetical to intelligence.
> Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light
The message to a group of graduating artists should have been about the literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits. (And then, after WWII and the Green Revolution, encouraged us to start reckoning with its environmental cost.)
The message should have been one about AI being potentially useful, deserving neither worship nor demonization, yet historically and, increasingly empirically, likely in the wrong leaders’ hands, and it being the role of the humanities to show and guide the public through that mess.
I mean, duh. Do we really think someone with the title of "vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group" lives in the same universe as the rest of us? In her alternative universe, Zucc and Bezos are heroes to look up to. These people have no actual interaction with the rest of us, and just assume their world view is universally held.
The funny thing is that it's not even true. People invested in AI just glee at the thought of common men in abject poverty, so this is the marketing that stuck.
Shows you don't need to have red skin and horns to delight in the suffering of starving people.
That's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.
It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.
The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.
Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ
The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.
It isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times.
I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations) of ways.
That was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite.
What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.
Do we want to be distracted by sewing shirts and writing Python scripts when the hardware can do the math for us?
Programmers (and other workers but this a tech centric forum) need to start to accept that programming was a necessary evil of the before times. We didn't have the theories. We didn't have the manufacturing techniques.
Before hardware was powerful enough to run models on a laptop we needed all that hand crafted custom state management to avoid immediate resource exhaustion. Or to hide the deficiencies of the chips of the day.
For all the appeals of tech workers to a lean into a high tech life, programming as humans did in the before times seems pretty outdated. Bring back rotary phones too, I guess.
If we don't have jobs we are free to:
Take up arms against an exploitative political and owner class minority.
Make sure grandma and the kids are ok. Everyone has enough to eat?
Free the sweatshop kids we exploit without giving them a choice of "the mines" or college, from obligations to our own meat suits
???? What else?
Whole lot of job culture too was just busy work to satisfy the beliefs of they who are generationally churning out of life. Bye grandpa; thanks for zero assurances but tons of obligations; you won't be missed!
Elon and such are not an immutable constant of the universe. Few more years and he'll be Mitch McConnelling out on TV. Especially with all the drug abuse.
Everyone under 50 needs to prepare for the future not LARP the past.
the same people who have been using the AI to write their papers, etc.. while supposedly "not liking it". You can't have it both ways.
College graduates being that myopic and failing at such basic logic. One can only wonder about the quality of education they've got and how it would help in the modern technological world.
>University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media
They are both right, the revolution needs to be oriented for ordinary people and college kids to benefit from it or else their attitude is wholly justified. There's basically no reason for them to cheer on a future of trillion dollar corporations using AI services to battle for knowledge work market share.
My first day of orientation at the CS dept was at the height of the dot com crash. I think I got told by 20+ seniors that day to drop out before paying a single bill. That it was all pointless and the internet was an over valued bubble and no one was getting hired. Mood on campus was scary for almost two years post the crash. If we had social media back then I can only imagine how much more fears would have been amplified.
In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining. This time it might be truly different. If one day AI can actually do all knowledge work, there might not be anything left for former knowledge workers to do. There's no physical law that says new technology necessarily produces 1:1 new, different jobs.
Many people who pointed out the Industrial Revolution becomes the basis of modern quality of life skip what happened in between the 17xx-18xx until today.
Things like Unions, Wars, etc.
What comes after new technology has always been the elite class owning them all and forcing everybody else to suffer until something managed the distribution of resources slightly better (War forces that).
Rightfully so. Unfettered capitalism will only end with a bunch of rich people producing and selling the means of living to the rest of us at just the right markup to keep their feet on our throats. Organized labor needs a resurgence in a big way.
There's a very real possibility that AI proponents completely lose the next generation of adults. The output is not enjoyable to consume, the people who rely on it are not cool, and the effects of using it are unpleasant and hard to defend on aesthetic, intellectual, or moral grounds.
There are real use cases for this technology! But the idea that the generation of superficially plausible text is "the next Industrial Revolution" comes out of the same mindset that has turned a neat technology into a banal hellscape for consumers and employees. We desperately need some leadership in companies or institutions that can place this technology in its proper context, and leverage it without getting manic about it.
I don't really think we should talk about it with "use cases" anymore when it can virtually replace/enhance literally almost any form of white collar work and soon physical labor as well (people will act surprised the moment it comes of course, the same as with LLMs despite all the researchs made prior, if theory supports it = it will be), of course humanoids will be in every homes and they'll cost the same as a phone, soon enough, and we will also not be able to live without.
We don't talk about human intelligence with "use cases", I think we need to be realistic about what AI will be in our lives, most people already can't do without, and this will without doubt expand further.
They have to frame it this way, because the market has invested in it being "the next internet" kind of event.
> . But ultimately it was a game changer for global economic development and the proliferation of new businesses that never existed like Apple and Google and Meta and so many others, and not to mention countless job opportunities. So being an optimist here, AI alongside human intelligence has the potential to help us solve some of humanity's greatest problems.
> Before the industrial revolution comment, Caulfield praised Jeff Bezos for his passion and use of Amazon as a “stepping stone” to his real dream: spaceflight.
Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light. Completely detached from reality, what a dumb person. Being this oblivious is anthitetical to intelligence.
> Meta and Jeff Bezos being held up in a good light
The message to a group of graduating artists should have been about the literature, art and public works that turned the Industrial Revolution's hyper-concentrated gains into broadly-felt benefits. (And then, after WWII and the Green Revolution, encouraged us to start reckoning with its environmental cost.)
The message should have been one about AI being potentially useful, deserving neither worship nor demonization, yet historically and, increasingly empirically, likely in the wrong leaders’ hands, and it being the role of the humanities to show and guide the public through that mess.
I mean, duh. Do we really think someone with the title of "vice president of strategic alliances at Tavistock Group" lives in the same universe as the rest of us? In her alternative universe, Zucc and Bezos are heroes to look up to. These people have no actual interaction with the rest of us, and just assume their world view is universally held.
> Speaking to graduates of University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media
Well, yeah.
If you want people to like AI, show them a future that doesn't leave them in abject poverty.
The funny thing is that it's not even true. People invested in AI just glee at the thought of common men in abject poverty, so this is the marketing that stuck.
Shows you don't need to have red skin and horns to delight in the suffering of starving people.
That's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.
It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.
The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.
Then it should easy to show a world where we are all not in abject poverty. We’re waiting.
Correlation is not causation
Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ
The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.
It isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times.
I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations) of ways.
That was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite.
What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.
Do we want to be distracted by sewing shirts and writing Python scripts when the hardware can do the math for us?
Programmers (and other workers but this a tech centric forum) need to start to accept that programming was a necessary evil of the before times. We didn't have the theories. We didn't have the manufacturing techniques.
Before hardware was powerful enough to run models on a laptop we needed all that hand crafted custom state management to avoid immediate resource exhaustion. Or to hide the deficiencies of the chips of the day.
For all the appeals of tech workers to a lean into a high tech life, programming as humans did in the before times seems pretty outdated. Bring back rotary phones too, I guess.
If we don't have jobs we are free to:
Take up arms against an exploitative political and owner class minority.
Make sure grandma and the kids are ok. Everyone has enough to eat?
Free the sweatshop kids we exploit without giving them a choice of "the mines" or college, from obligations to our own meat suits
???? What else?
Whole lot of job culture too was just busy work to satisfy the beliefs of they who are generationally churning out of life. Bye grandpa; thanks for zero assurances but tons of obligations; you won't be missed!
Elon and such are not an immutable constant of the universe. Few more years and he'll be Mitch McConnelling out on TV. Especially with all the drug abuse.
Everyone under 50 needs to prepare for the future not LARP the past.
Cool. How am I going to do any of that when I can't pay the bills and become homeless? That's what actually happens when you don't have jobs.
Why don't you show us how AI will not create abject poverty?
How are we not going to be begging whoever controls chip fabs and electrical plants for compute tokens? HOW!? EXPLAIN IT.
the same people who have been using the AI to write their papers, etc.. while supposedly "not liking it". You can't have it both ways.
College graduates being that myopic and failing at such basic logic. One can only wonder about the quality of education they've got and how it would help in the modern technological world.
>University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and Nicholson School of Communication and Media
yep, clearly not Stanford.
For someone taking about basic logic, you're making quite the leap in logic by assuming they used LLMs to do every single bit of schoolwork.
> You can't have it both ways.
Yes you can. They use AI and also despise it because it will turn the world into one big caste system. Ones with access to compute, and ones without.
They are both right, the revolution needs to be oriented for ordinary people and college kids to benefit from it or else their attitude is wholly justified. There's basically no reason for them to cheer on a future of trillion dollar corporations using AI services to battle for knowledge work market share.
was the industrial revolution oriented for ordinary people at the time it occurred? were a lot of workers buying flying shuttles in the 1700s?
I'm confused - you're suggesting that past suffering justifies present suffering?
My first day of orientation at the CS dept was at the height of the dot com crash. I think I got told by 20+ seniors that day to drop out before paying a single bill. That it was all pointless and the internet was an over valued bubble and no one was getting hired. Mood on campus was scary for almost two years post the crash. If we had social media back then I can only imagine how much more fears would have been amplified.
He's pointing out that labor has always opposed labor saving technology, despite that being the basis of our modern quality of life.
In the past, "labor saving technology" has always spawned alternate jobs that people could take with some retraining. This time it might be truly different. If one day AI can actually do all knowledge work, there might not be anything left for former knowledge workers to do. There's no physical law that says new technology necessarily produces 1:1 new, different jobs.
Many people who pointed out the Industrial Revolution becomes the basis of modern quality of life skip what happened in between the 17xx-18xx until today.
Things like Unions, Wars, etc.
What comes after new technology has always been the elite class owning them all and forcing everybody else to suffer until something managed the distribution of resources slightly better (War forces that).
I mean the Luddites were mad for a reason, and many may forget the industrial revolution was a rather bloody affair.
Avoiding a repeat of that would be great while also increasing productivity would be good.
No, that's why unions exist.
Unions and worker's rights exist because workers were exploited to the max during the Industrial Revolution.
Rightfully so. Unfettered capitalism will only end with a bunch of rich people producing and selling the means of living to the rest of us at just the right markup to keep their feet on our throats. Organized labor needs a resurgence in a big way.
Related:
The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963163
Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443
https://archive.ph/EvzqM