> Listening to the keynote all I could feel was disgust and I can't fathom what people were clapping for.
My friend, there are equally as many if not more people who are fed up by AI for example, students booing people is a recent case.
The people who are at Google AI are very likely the people who are working at AI and are quite desperate for it for both financial and technical reasons.
> I used to point fingers and laugh at communist luddites and I don't really want to become one and I don't know how I could escape that path.
I think that you are worrying about being luddite because of that label itself. Like because you have laughed previously at luddites, you might be worried about that label and thus having a self contradiction which is creating a small crisis of identity.
For what its worth, its still worth mentioning that companies aren't getting any tangible benefit from AI while burning millions of dollars some of which even layoff-ing people and people speculating about it because of the high costs attached.
It is questionable as to the real practicality of AI in many things. They might be good in certain use cases but I think that we are treating it as something more than a tool, which feels the wrong approach.
There are people highly respected like Mitchell who are saying that there are people that he respects in the industry and literal companies who are in the state of AI psychosis and ask these companies on how they make profit is still a question of sweat to them as it seems that they are degrading the tooling and models (Famously anthropic has had a lot of heat recently)
Also, think about 2022-23, how many skills used then of AI are being used right now. Nobody knows whats gonna happen in next few years (and if they do, they might have exterior incentives too)
So either way if the technology turns out to be absolutely amazing and life changing and people are clapping about it on google I/O. don't worry, the features will come in general testing and you would then see the normal consensus of things and you don't really have to do things or follow them as you can just have your own vibes and you wouldn't really be a luddite.
My point is that if you are trying AI right now because of the fear of missing out or in some sense the fear of being called a luddite at the moment, then even by the own premise of AI, there wouldn't be many skills that you can meaningfully learn about AI and you could just pick it up down the line if or when the tech stops being speculative asset with whole economy relying on it while crossing fingers.
So my point is, don't worry about these labels or anything perhaps. I am a crypto luddite (except stablecoins) and that has worked in my favour for the most part, if AI works great, if it doesn't work, still great :)
Anyways I am really getting interested in robotics and for some reason making my own operating system or reading some source code of C compilers and golang or running ternary LLM models on FPGA (yes LLM related but I am really interested in fpga right now).
Honestly the bigger question I am worried about is the job market as someone still in high school.
And ps, I am saying this as someone who has been vibe-coding before it was a term or like the LLM way, but I feel like one can churn out a lot of projects and I surely have done it too but they lack any meaning or depth and I am just saving them so that I could in college, learn the languages more properly and understand what they are doing as I wish to understand these softwares.
Just my 2 cents but thanks for reading, not sure if its related to your comment or not but just my thoughts and yeah thanks for reading and have a nice day!