I guess cynicism is trendy.
It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.
I would tell them this is the problem to fix. Taking your anger out on AI is the most shortsighted thing. When faced with a powerful new capability, disavowing the capability instead of enabling society to leverage it is absurd.
AI is fundamentally the automation of labor, and we can all see the incredible fruits we all reap from similar past leaps in capability.
Structure your society for a post-labor world. Don't halt the progress that has dramatically improved the human condition. To do so is a disservice to the species and all future humans - concretely, your own loved ones and especially your children.
You clearly accept this as Progress, but isn't the core debate here that it doesn't improve life for humans?
Does literally no one look at things from a historical perspective? The history of automation is right there on the Internet, for you to peruse at will.
Like, there will one day be a technology invented that could indeed wipe us all out in 5 years. On a long enough timeline, it's a certainty that someone will come up with such a thing. And when it comes, there will be people such as yourself saying "no technology has ever wiped us out before, therefore this one won't either". And then it will wipe us out, and there will be no one left to say "well I guess this time was the exception".
I'm not saying all technology is good. I never said that.
I'm saying automating labor is good. All of my arguments have been specifically scoped to the automation of labor.
To spell it out so we don't keep going around in this circle: it's worth looking at indicators other than the past to judge a technology's benefit to the labor force.
but making it measurably worse for vastly more people
can you really say that that technology is "improving life for humans"?
It isn't.
UBI also won't fix things. A post ai world that the us tech ceos want us to imagine is not a utopia. The us manufacturers almost nothing on the world scale. Our biggest contributors to the world economy were things like farm goods(which are in peril), fuel (which most countries are trying to phase out for environmental and recent geopolitical issues), software which will be commoditized through AI. Anything the us can manufacture China can do better, cheaper, and faster. It's not been in our culture for decades, and our infrastructure is shoddy.and will be shoddier once data centers spin up and more wealth is concentrated to people who do not pay any taxes.
GenZ and those coming after have no chance at a sustainable life if the billionaires get what they are asking for. Also in a capitalist society asking them to sacrifice their lives for the good of others is hilarious. Especially if there is no foreseeable good to come after.
Of course no one sees it as a collective achievement when the announcements are aimed at either scaring people about how even the team behind them is worried about releasing it or for CEOs to replace workers.
Artemis II, at least in the states, was an example of people genuinely feeling collective achievement. There is absolutely no reason this AI moment couldn't be that. Instead though the companies involved have explicitly chosen fear and capital as their marketing tools. We should be seeing this as an incredible time but those involved do not want us to and plan to keep the spoils for themselves so we shouldn't.
> But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
And labor automation, which is the single most valuable thing any technology can do. But if your answer is "kill the technology" instead of "structure society to live with it," of course you will experience pain.
Technology is value neutral. What you call cynicism is actually people thinking more critically about technology. Technology is not a fundamental good. It can be detrimental and destructive. It can be used to oppress, to kill, to harm.
Approaching this following a "we can fix things later" stance is horribly reductive and misguided.
You spoke of History in other replies. History is littered with technological advancements that caused immeasurable harm to society.
Won't even engage with the comparison to Zyklon B.
There's always been the positive and negative sides of technology. The major reason the pessimism is so strong in this case is because even the technologists involved aren't optimistic. I'm not saying that propaganda is good but with nuclear we things like "My Friend the Atom." What we now call Retrofuturism promised a wonder future while the nuclear arms race was running away in the background threatening total annihilation. Nuclear was also going to automate labor all power sources do but many people were thrilled by the future being presented.
The only future people see today is something like Cyberpunk which is a pessimistic and cautionary look at the future. You cannot lament the lack of optimism around a technology when there is simply no optimistic future being presented. Maybe it's a result of deeply ingrained cultural cynicism but the fact that even those pushing the technology only have pessimistic future views make it incredibly challenging to be optimistic. If those involved cannot even offer optimism then I don't know why anyone would expect optimism from the common man.
Well-said. You'll notice that people with jobs that are on paper most synergetic with LLM use, such as folks in the C-suite[1], are not worried at all. Why? Because they are part of the owner class and are not at risk of getting replaced. To them, it's all upside: a chance to put their feet up on the table a bit more often.
Would be nice if that also applied to the rest of us.
[1] "Mark Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him Be CEO" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47491355
It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI.
You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
Well, yes, but if humans need to stay in the loop (as most previous automations of labor), it is also moving the means of production into the hands of a small number of tech companies. In 2010 or 2020, anyone with a laptop could create a startup. It might be the case that in 2030, you could only do so if the major frontier model providers allow you to do so and do not make it so expensive that it's only usable by entrenched players.
I am not fundamentally against AI, on the contrary, but I think the models should be in the hands of the wider population (i.e. open weight models), so that everyone has the means of production and can benefit from the automation. Also, it would only be fair, since the models are trained on the collective output of humanity. Of course, there are several barriers currently. There are pretty good open models, but running the near-frontier versions requires a lot of capital in the form of GPUs.
I have yet to read a reasonable and logically sound explanation of how "AI" -- not the LLM technology itself, the tool, but rather its implementation as the promise to corporations that they can (eventually) replace most human labor -- is benefitting "all of humanity" (I'd even settle for "most of humanity").
You're welcome to try.
These tools are a very explicit threatening working people, artists and the independent web. A lot of the things we love are getting killed not as a side effect, but deliberately.
"AI" is an achievement alright (so was designing a nuclear bomb), but if it is allowed to further gut the middle class, lowering wages, and hence spending (and tax receipts, to extent that matters any more) then it will only hasten the spiraling of the US economy down the toilet.