Planktonne

Neither of those is a reasonable belief; the two of them are either delusional, or lying.

I think it degrades the level of discourse on HN when people insist on treating eschatonic navel-gazing as a significant contribution to a separate and ongoing debate.

Just because an insular group of people who share the same unsupported apocalyptic beliefs have labelled themselves as rationalists doesn't mean they are actually being rational; the actual debates around AI and its uses are very far away from the cult-like beliefs espoused here, but the focus turns to them again and again.

It's as if a board for discussing NASA's advances kept getting sidetracked by Raëlists. Discussing these beliefs as though they were serious positions is bad for the field, bad for the discourse, and bad for the writers themselves.

This would be a stronger argument if it hadn't been made for decades by the industry exploiting the open web with bad bots. Every pro-freedom article rings hollow when we've seen the tech world act nothing but extractively and without restraint.

The knight who wrote it took on a larger project without AI or a computer at all.

> If you have a functional AI that delivers on the majority of what AI companies promise

A good education would let you realise how unlikely this is.

People will have varying levels of trust in Google, but 100% is clearly too much, given the quality of results.

I have met a bunch of people who assure me they just use AI as an editor; almost invariably, they are incorrect about how much they let it write.

That would make society worse, not better. More people being unhappy and unfulfilled and underpaid is not progress.

From this Wondermark comic [1].

[1] https://wondermark.com/c/1062/

> "We are judges, and we are being told that rather than deciding our cases on the basis of the facts and the law before us, as we are duty bound to do, we're being asked to decide the cases or not decide them in accordance with the wishes of the U.S. government," she said.

Just incredibly naked corruption.

I'm not going to argue with you about what you pretend you're saying; you know what you are, and so does everyone else.

It says nothing good about you that you leap at any opportunity to minimise and undermine sexual assault allegations.

That's a legitimate usage of both words.

Everyone involved in AI should have read The Library of Babel [1].

It's about many things, but perhaps the most relevant idea here is that no information matters without understanding. We could generate all possible knowledge, but unless someone--a human--can verify and understand it, it doesn't count. The cure for mortality could be written on the moon, but if no one reads it, it hasn't really been discovered.

[1] https://maskofreason.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/0...

The majority of British accents would pronounce the 'h'.

I've met all kinds of people, but the most likely explanation for people doing something they said they were going to do and had the capability to do is that they did it.

Twisting yourself in knots to pretend it's more likely that the US has paid no attention to Iran for 13 years than it is that they did the thing they said they would is not rational.

> There's a very obvious explanation, which is that nobody bothered to check the date and assumed that if it was military base in 2013 it was still a military base today.

That's not a particularly obvious or even likely explanation. The US clearly has updated intelligence on Iran since 2013, or they wouldn't have been able to bomb any of the targets they did successfully hit.

The simplest explanation--Occam's razor being sharper than Hanlon's--is that the country that has repeatedly

- Threatened to target the families of 'enemies'

- Boasted of their accurate weaponry

Fired their accurate weaponry at a target consisting of the families of those they think of as enemies.

This is a pervasive technology that--from most people's perspectives--has primarily negative effects and is promoted primarily by people with negative intentions.

Protests are more than understandable.

> But most of the writing is usually, these are the ideas, this is how the idea are structured together, now let's review them and then let's get a nice prose out of it.

I know lots of AI-enabled writers believe this, but I've never actually seen it be true.

But then the human should also get Stockfish, and we're back at a stalemate.

I think projects like this--feeding a bunch of incomplete information into AI and making a glossy-but-shallow output--do more harm than good.

How stories and created and shared and transmitted is a vast and complex field, something well worth diving into and addressing properly. Reducing that to a single output made without care presents beautiful richness as a solved and simple detail.

That would mean we should consider any human with coding knowledge a chess grandmaster, which is obviously not the case.

That's part of my complaint. More and more money is poured into 'innovation' across our society, but what do we have to show for it?

It's hard not to see this as a consolation prize. In 1969, we went to the moon.

In 2026, with all the benefits of a tech industry that has become ever more powerful, with endless money poured into innovation, our 'rough guide back to the moon' is an AI model that maps it. It's powerful and impressive, of course, and doubtless very useful to researchers, and space exploration is not a priority--all of that is true, sure.

But to have the fruits of 50+ years of technological progress result not in going back to the moon, or onto other challenges, but just a refinement in looking at the moon. Is this the best giant leap we can muster now? So much innovation and yet we lack a capability we used to have.

I know there are all sorts of ways to explain this away, but it still makes me sad.

> Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.

I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.

Would that really count as a 'massive benefit' then?

I don't agree that people do see that, and if they do, it's hardly an overwhelming trend.

> those who learn to use AI effectively are seeing massive benefits

The massive benefits should be visible to outside observers as well, but where are they?

AI can be very helpful in lots of ways, but I think it's fair to say that it is most powerful as an enabler for bad actors.