I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.

Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.

"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.

But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.

There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.

The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net benefit to all eventually while hand-waving the details.

> Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture.

I really love this comparison. Everyone bitches about Ikea, but at the end of the day unless you're rich as fuck then "buying new furniture" means either Ikea or some other shop that adopted exactly the same business model, because we all know that the price/quality ratio is unbeatable. Ikea furniture can easily outlive you as long as you pick the correct product for your use case. "I put my fat ass on a dining table that's explicitly marketed for light distributed load and it broke in half, boo-hoo Ikea bad" like no shit, if you need a table you can stand on then choose one with extra support beams, Ikea has these too. "But if you disassemble and reassemble Ikea it falls apart" okay cool but the cost of transporting old furniture to your new house is often higher than just buying new furniture anyway. Not to mention that the chances that your old furniture will match your new house are pretty much zero.

This translates to engineers not being able to grasp the concept of "good enough" where end user doesn't care about quality improvements beyond certain threshold. Cue the audiophiles remaining perplexed to this day why nobody uses 24-bit FLAC.

I feel this is written from the mindset, "all objects within a set must be obtained at once." Or, perhapse, "nothing lasts anyway, so there's no reason to bother."

Quality has its cost. A quality dining table could only have the potential to be sold to every room one might place a dining table, exactly one time. IKEA might sell that same dining table to the same room every year. IKEA is destined for the landfill; quality can outlive a bloodline. Sales of quality must sustain all those employed for the process accordingly. - Sure, some TLC is required, but IKEA can't even get wet.

Quality also provides additional benefits. They are not only a functional object, but a wealth of sentiment and memories for the home. They are also a symbol to the pride one takes in their craft, and a silhouette of their creator's experience and deserved reputation. IKEA is for parties and showrooms/staging. Quality is for comfort and places of importance.

My heart aches, that the notion of buying prefabricated trash to use in the interim of its journey, is better than searching individually for items that will bring character and meaning—as well as, functional superiority—over the course of a lifetime.

This equates to software bragging about how great its algorythm adjusted the color of a Submit button to improve deliverability on a website masquerading as a web app that could have been written in HTML and CSS without the button at all.

Cool, if you're rich you can do that. Mere mortals have to make a decision "do I buy a luxury dining table or do I send my child to college" and it's understandable that choosing between these two isn't exactly straightforward.

Thing is that quality furniture can be bought second hand, since they last so long. At least you used to be able to, when they still made that stuff.

Going the IKEA route you'll end up re-buying the same furniture over and over in ever crappier quality. Once you add that to the equation, it suddenly isn't quite as cheap anymore.

> can be bought second hand

I tried. It's a major PITA, and transport costs alone make the whole endeavor not economically viable, so I backed off.

A friend of mine bought some renovated old wardrobe and I helped him move it from the hall to the bedroom and this resulted in me for the first time ever seeing him have a heated, emotional argument with his wife.

Finally, your pink bathroom from 50's just isn't fashionable. Trust me on this one. Give your cabinets to someone who can skillfully paint them (which costs money obviously).

> Going the IKEA route you'll end up re-buying the same furniture over and over in ever crappier quality.

I've never had Ikea furniture randomly fail on me, and I haven't heard of this happening in my social circle. Again, don't sit on a god damn Linnmon table. It's for everyday use items only. If you need something sturdier, choose a different product.

I emplore you to discover the difference between quality and luxury.

YOU can make a better quality table than IKEA with a few 1x2s, plywood, nails, a hammer, and a hand saw.

Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.

That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.

It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.

> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"

Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.

> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both.

Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.

Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.

* xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.

> Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit.

Where did you get this notion? Did you hallucinate it?

> Where did you get this notion?

Thirty-one percent being smaller than half.

It was 22 a year ago. Either 9% got blinded over a year or they got into a position from which they could see better. I am inclined to believe the second option is a more likely explanation.

The thing is what is the alternative option? If you don't build it, then your rivals do. All of your electronic and military systems then become compromised because your rivals can exploit or negate them one way or another via AI. So you have to build it regardless. It's a suicide pact the same way nuclear weapons are a suicide pact but if you don't have them then you're at the mercy of anyone else who does.

> what is the alternative option?

Build it without the catastrophising PR. Try, you know, selling it as something that will do good.

Altman wanking on about how he’s going to end the species is great for attracting investors—this crap worked for Bankman-Fried, too [1]. If you are building world-ending kit, you’re a super-important dude who has to be listened to. On the other end of the spectrum, you have everyone quietly doing their work.

[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie...