At some point in the future, someone can pose a similar problem to an AI one that you spent months, weeks, or days optimizing with the help of AI and they'll end up with the same solution as your final result in less than 10 minutes.
So you need to figure out whether you want to solve the problem today or let others solve it and simply query LLM, let's say, 6-12 months later.
So now not being the first becomes the smarter move. Kinda fits that it's all built on ingesting vast volumes of stuff people made because they couldn't just prompt, but doesn't spell good things in the long run IMO. It makes me think me of complaints about dating in big cities, people tend to hold out for meeting someone even better rather than committing and making the best of it.
Because in reality, I'm seeing a mix in my group of friends with younger kids. They are, at a macro-level nervous-curiosity about the unknown (future of jobs, their kids' job market future, is this going to make us all dumber, etc), but are also trying the various tools and benefitting from them and acknowledging that too.
That's 3 things to be nervous about, none anyone is "curious" about. So they're nervous about the prospects, but also acknowledge they "benefit from them", which is 100% vague versus actual concerns. If that's the best you can come up with after this stuff about the media trying to find boogeymen, that's kind of an own goal.
And you don't even mention something I see mentioned in the wild all the time, often at the forefront: how these companies just took and take everything people made, without asking, while if you take from them they sue you. That is so glaring I would even say if all people you know don't care about that, it would be a problem with your friends, not legitimize what these companies did and do.
Maybe the difference in certain other countries is that people aren't so used to being treated like baggage by a government run by people who are obviously interested in self-enrichment above all else. It's very hard to square the AI industry's promises of an eventual transition to luxury gay space communism with what we see in eg the Trump administration (as well as their own desperate obsession with growth at any cost).
> I think the US is a lot more exposed to the apocalyptic narratives from the bosses of AI labs, who sort of painted themselves into that corner in the pursuit of valuations.
I'm sure that narrative plays into why AI is so hated in the US, but I think widespread distrust in our government to handle things well also plays a huge part in why the average American is so anti-AI.
Our social safety nets have all either been falling apart or have been being purposefully dismantled for decades. Most of us are wholly reliant on our jobs in order to be able to get even the most basic healthcare. Most working class people are already struggling to keep their heads above water in the face of constant inflation and limited wage growth.
When the most likely outcome if the job displacement narrative does turn out to be even partially true means you can't afford a place to live, can't afford to eat, can't get healthcare and based on current trajectories you suspect the most likely government solution to the problem could be rounding up more and more of a growing underclass and sticking them in corporate run prisons, it isn't too difficult to understand why people might not be super jazzed about AI.
If none of those things are true for you it's going to feel apocalyptic and existential.
Related is probably cultural bias to "evil" or dangerous technology, particularly thinking machines, vs. benevolent partners, assistants or tools.
And so much more...
Can you explain this line of reasoning to me. My own intuition tells me that as AI automates away jobs, the center will be more open to government programs that create jobs, provide a social safety net, and allow people to retrain.
Why is it you think the right gains power?
Historically, they used their dominance of mainstream media to control public opinion, but now much of that power is being democratized (e.g. Twitter being uncensored), which enables the average user (using GenAI) to participate in public discourse. The US left doesn't have the ability to do this since the average individual only parrots what mainstream media says and can't create any novel/interesting ideas (thus "the left can't meme").
The same problem is with AI today - it's clearly subpar to a competent human. It's just cheaper so it gets used instead, but that will probably change as AI improves.
Anyway, it seems to me that many people don't look for slaves in AI, but for their master, and primarily use AI to tell them what to do.
That is an example of the "everyone except me is an idiot" fallacy.
Automation, Programming module/libraries.
But for replacing others we don't care about, often the doorman fallacy is hit.
the legacy media is running an unapologetically dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it. just consider how much we hear about AI guzzling water, while in reality all US data centers account for 0.25% of US water usage and dedicated AI data centers account for a fraction of that. the rest of their arguments are similarly deceiving.
>In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
Iran had also been a target of atrocity propaganda campaign back in January when CIA and Mossad were preparing the American public for the imminent war.
That’s a lot.
yes, there probably aren't data centers in the Death Valley and Mojave. they're being built where water is cheap. water is cheap where it's abundant.
>That’s a lot.
an 1/400th water usage increase is not the catastrophe the public is being manipulated into believing.
If that 1 bucket is 1 of 2 available to you then it’s a huge issue with climate change increasing risk of draught and extreme weather events.
And cheap water is a very tiny factor in locating a data centre.
Certainly not all of them. Several AI data centers in my state have been built near small communities where water is scarce. Those communities believed the companies building them about how the water impact would be limited and wouldn't result in a serious impact.
That has turned out not to be the case. The water usage of these centers has been terrible and is increasing, and the cost of trying to find and develop alternate water sources (this means trucking water in) is being placed squarely on the shoulders of the community -- and these are small towns without a great deal of financial resources.
[citation needed]
There have already been stories about residents in some areas having to ration water due to drought, but the recently-built datacenters still guzzling water.
And, AIUI, the only reason they use up any water, rather than using a completely closed-loop system, is because it's cheaper that way.
common sense? businesses like making money and don't like spending money. why build glorified warehouses where it isn't economical to do so?
>And, AIUI, the only reason they use up any water, rather than using a completely closed-loop system, is because it's cheaper that way.
evaporative cooling takes way less power to operate.
"The data center can get water cheap" is not the same as "water is generally cheap in the area the data center is built."
"Water is cheap in the area" is not the same as "water is plentiful in the area."
You talk like you think economics in the real world works like "spherical-economy-in-a-frictionless-vacuum" Econ 101 terms. I assure you, it does not. There are lots and lots of exceptions.
> evaporative cooling takes way less power to operate.
So build the datacenter with a bunch of extra solar panels and batteries.
Or will that cut too deeply into the poor, starving billionaires' bonuses?
if a small town is worried about its local water supply because a large AI DC is being built next to it, it doesn't matter whether AI only consumes 0.25% of water usage in the USA (if that's even true), they will be negatively affected and they have a right to oppose it. your stats are offensive to them because you're basically telling them that they should bear the negative consequences so people can have ChatGPT. It's not like they should suffer so that we can cure cancer or something useful like that.
> dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it
If anyone's being dishonest, it's the AI companies.
We're supposed to be _significantly reducing_ our energy consumption to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences, and instead here we are _significantly increasing_ our energy use (and water use, for which we don't have a "renewable" solution), and for what? so you and I can code faster with CC/Codex? I feel like all these "it's not so bad" people have developed collective amnesia about the climate change crisis.
Even if LLMs aren't sentient now, there's a goal of building something sentient, and I doubt that powers that be would change the operating model to respect that sentience.
I'm reminded of Ms. Casey in Severance. When we use AI we spin it up, tell it do some some task (maybe incredibly stupid and boring), then tell it to go off into the void 'cause we're busy and got things to do. If that thing's conscious and aware, that's it's entire existence. Imagine being born, sat down a a table, told to read a boring report and summarize it, then expected to obediently get shot in the head when you've completed your assignment.
Here's a clip. For those unfamiliar with the show, it has a technology to split people's personality and create versions of them lacking personal history to be used as workers. The personality shown in the clip had a lifetime of only several dozen hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SeveranceAppleTVPlus/comments/1myfw...
Which is what we often do to LLM-based systems. Some get to keep a long term self (updating "soul.md") but most don't.
I agree with the author that almost everyone wants to use AI to do the things they have no interest in and don't want to pay someone else to do while being vehemently opposed to AI taking their hobbies or professions away. Which explains one of the greatest social paradoxes of today: approximately everyone is using AI and almost everyone is hating it. I don't mean HN, but public opinion polling for the tech is absolutely awful. In the US, it had an approval level comparable to Iran.
I don't think it's an AI-specific thing, though. It's exactly the same mechanism that makes us object to the government meddling in our profession but think it's high time for the feds to regulate other people's jobs. I guess some balance of holding each other at gunpoint gives us a stable society. I don't know how AI fits into that.