Something Big Is Happening | Hacker News Reader

Something Big Is Happening

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Here’s a link to the original blog post (to avoid Xitter): https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011

FWIW, the dupe is flagged.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". So, this guy is "building an AI startup and investing in the space", right. Thousands of jobs in AI depend on you to start paying for the models because "free version is over a year behind".

What AI is good at is generating billions of similar "something big, act now" stories just to get you to pay. It is an advert.

Indeed. There’s definitely a bit of that in there, no doubt. But I think, after reading it, that it’s one of those articles that might off on some details but is in the ballpark in terms of trajectory.

The trajectory is simple: everyone is hooked on paid AI subscription and loses the skill of thinking and learning. The models are proprietary and cloud-only. Everything you input is also monetized. The end.

If AI takes over everything even remotely in the radius of "knowledge work" and leaves 25% of workers jobless, where is all the demand for this new "productivity" going to come from. Robots buying stuff from each other? Our benevolent billionaire overlords stepping up their consumption to compensate?

We don't know and that's why the next few years are not looking bright. This is going to massively accelerate existing income inequality until it breaks our economy. Some have suggested universal basic income as the relief, but good luck getting the United States Congress to deliver that for its people. We're talking something much bigger than The New Deal and that only happened because the fucking Great Depression happened first.

Hyperbole? Hmm.

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