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Comment by seltzerboys | Hacker News Reader

my best friend is a high school english teacher. he said the worst part is kids keep hearing 'it's inevitable,' the complete integration of AI into every facet of life and thinking is gonna happen no matter what anyone says or does. this is the most manipulative and untrue thing anyone could say to a kid scared of a certain kind of future. its it's own kind of misinformation to tell people that something that will take an exorbitant amount of man power, coordination, resourcing, and experimentation to execute on is 'inevitable.'

he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.

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In my 20+ years of career it has definitely felt the most tyrannical rollout of a technology I ever experienced.

Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic.

AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.

I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.

Extremely sober take. And rare. Couldn't agree more.

To some extent, I also think the global mood around Silicon Valley has soured. I remember just starting university when Facebook was taking off in the UK, and there was genuine buzz and excitement around being able to keep up with all your old friends. Years marched on and we started to uncover all the problems with social media, and their carelessness around their own impacts to society, so most people I know who were excited in 2010 were desperately finding ways not to be there.

Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.

Social media aren't disruptive, things like Facebook and Twitter worked great with chronological feeds. Same with YouTube. God, I miss pre-2012 YouTube when things mostly just got popular organically.

Once they started to have algorithmic feeds and those algorithms got tuned for maximum engagement at the detriment of every other factor, that's when things started to spiral downward.

>AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.

The only part here with which I disagree is that I feel very similarly about the smartphone.

How is this different from saying the internet is inevitable? Paul Krugman famously disagreed, but that didn't make him right.

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