- The luddites: it's just hype.
- The doomers: AI will kill us all.
- The AI indie hackers: dunno about AI, I'm trying to make money with it.
Somehow the intersection is right: AI is not really smart, but it will replace a lot of human activity anyhow.
Neo-Luddism is still opposition to a lot of modern technologies, but for a very disparate set of reasons. For example, many oppose the mass adoption of social media due to perceived mental health and social impacts. Others oppose smart phones and "screen addiction." These things can qualify as "neo-luddism" even though the opposition is not rooted in job displacement.
I've often said that I am myself becoming more and more of a "neo-luddite" but it's purely for personal reasons. I don't want to see social media or smart phones disappear as I couldn't care less about what other people do with their lives. I just find that the older I get, the less I want to use modern tech in general.
It might just be burnout and boredom. I am now middle aged and I've been coding since I was 10. I used to be extremely enthusiastic about technology but as time progresses I have less and less interest in it. The industry in which I have based my entire career just doesn't excite me anymore. Today I just couldn't care less about ChatGPT / "AI" / LLMs, Bitcoin, smart phones, video games, social media, fintech etc. In my free time I find myself doing more things like reading books, going hiking in the backcountry and pursuing craft-related hobbies like performing stage magic with my wife and partner.
I’ll also say, I think LLMs are different than bitcoin. It has its own killer app, and it has tremendous social impact, not necessarily positive. If anything, crypto doesn’t really make sense without AIs.
One thing though is that the foundational models are created and controlled by big tech. It’s been compared to silicon fabs and its scales of economy … However, I don’t see a future where foundational models can only be created by large orgs with a lot of resources is something beneficial for society.
One of the reasons I love it so much is that it is a multi-skill discipline and it's really a type of theatre so it can be kept as simple and narrow or as broad and open ended as you want it to be.
https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Wilsons-Complete-Course-Magic/dp...
To me, there is no greater toy than a programming language. ChatGPT is neat, but it isn't a programming language. Same for blockchain or agile or whatever other trend is happening in the industry. Some of the trends literally are new programming languages! Golang is really fun! So is TypeScript!
Some trends or technologies make programming even more fun (in my opinion anyway) and I embrace those feverishly: distributed version control, CI/CD, pair programming (sometimes it's even more fun with a friend!), configurable linters like Perl::Critic, Intellisense, JUnit-style testing frameworks. All this stuff helps me feel more in control of the computer (or distributed cluster of computers), which I've discovered is the main thing that gets me off about programming.
I'm even still hopeful that LLMs will have some role to play in my having more fun with programming. I've tried CoPilot and so far it hasn't grabbed me, but maybe this will change. In any case, there are clearly other people having fun with it so I guess that's good. Maybe somebody can find joy by debugging GPT-4 prompts the same way I enjoy pouring over stack traces.
I'm a "maker." Although I try to bring a level of "craftsmanship" to my code, and I care a great deal about code quality, refactoring and solving problems at the code level - and I definitely enjoy the process - it is still a means to an end. It is the configuration of raw materials that contribute to the final form of something useful and tangible.
The most tragic part is realizing that it is very unlikely that I will ever care about what it is that I am producing in tech. I was self employed for 15 years and that was extremely rewarding because the business and the product was my vision, my creation etc. Now that I am back in the job market I find that what was a career for 20 years has become "just" a job. I am making something, and that matters, but I'm not making something I would personally use as an end-user. And that is not a slight against the things I am making. They are useful to someone. Just not to me. I have spent the last few years thinking about what it would look like to make something I myself use and that's when I realized that, relatively speaking, I hardly use any tech as an end-user in my personal life at all.
But in general my long term goal is to go write mini Lisp interpreters in a cabin in the woods, and move away from the direction Big Tech is going.
I love computers, software, but I would not say I love technology anymore, nor I think that the Internet is a net benefit for humanity anymore. It's been quite hard to accept that my view of the tech world has turned upside down in no more than a couple years.
Though when my wife and I have talked about "going off grid" and living remote, she wanted to understand my limits and asked about electricity.
I pointed out that electricity led to the discovery of logic gates, which led to integrated programmable circuits, which led to the Von Neumann Architecture, which led to Ethernet, which led to the Internet which led to Twitter.
It's a slippery slope!
The difference is I'm mostly tired of the social garbage that keeps piling up on top of things. The competitiveness, the pressure to "be productive", the grifters, the capitalists who put money before people, the bureaucrats. It's never enough more more more faster faster faster meanwhile the roadblocks that are put in place get bigger uglier and stickier than ever.
I just stopped participating in that stuff. Got off Facebook. Got off Twitter. Curated my Reddit feeds to be built around useful and helpful communities, not reactionary meme-ified BS. Started reading more. Started using RSS again (but again a reduced and focused subset of useful sites).
I'm feeling much better and I still find I enjoy technology. Microelectronics, 3d printing, functional programming, distributed systems.
I'm working on a cloud connected garage door opener. I don't care that it's never going to be productized. I don't care that I can go an Alibaba and order one for $15. I'm just doing it because I want to work on my microelectronics skills and I find it fulfilling. I'm doing it my way, at my own pace, without the BS.
Hype cycle topics seem to attract opinionated folks who have strong feelings on topics and have the need to shout them from the rooftops, whether that's doomer, booster, or luddite. That's what I find exhausting.
It’s broader than simply, that people lose jobs to automation. A much bigger societal impact comes from treating people as automatons, which is how business are incentivized to end up with non-people automations.
Which will really show how much busywork we humans do in a lot of areas. If -- before AI is "smart" -- it can impact humanity.. well, i feel it says more about our current society foundations than it does AI heh.
And we thought there was an epidemic of bullshit jobs before! Not only will everyone be spending their days churning out this garbage, but everyone will be forced to read it as well!
This is not the dystopia I had in mind! It’s much more boring and missing the cool mirrored shades.
Anything that you can make into a fairly formulaic job for someone who's not really interested in doing it or improving too much is probably not very intellectually demanding (but perhaps may be a bit demanding in world perception or actuation than current AI/robotics systems).
And I believe that is "most jobs."
- The luddites: who is going to benefit from LLM's and who will suffer more?
- The doomers: AI will kill us all
- The children: look at this! look at me! look at this! Wheeeeee!
- The money: how many people can we pay less or not at all thanks to AI
- The scientists: ok, that's cool, but what happens if we ...
- The scammers - how many well-meaning people can we use an LLM to build meaningful (to them) relationships with, to the point where they're willing to just send us money?
- The griefers - how much discord can an LLM create, for the lulz?
(to be fair, those might be subsets of "realists", but I think they're important subsets)
Sometime toward the end of the diffusion days though, the property rights scissor cut through the community. The conflict had a dramatic cooling effect on AI-created/assisted content.
I just think it's neat how the perception of AI shifts depending on proximity.
- The luddites: it's just hype — because I will kill it with fire before it takes over.
These types of participants are the most easily simulated with AI because they're (whether they know it or not) just optimizing for a variable, something that existing AI tech is pretty good at so I expect their numbers to explode before the other three types you listed.