Comment by star-glider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by star-glider | Hacker News Reader

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It seems that a certain kind of person cannot separate the following things: 1) I dislike AI as a technology 2) I dislike the people and companies that profit from AI 3) I think AI is useless

These are three completely separate positions to have. You can think AI is incredibly useful and also dislike it because it will, for example, reduce your relative status in society. You can love the tech but think that Sam Altman is a dishonest person, etc. But for some reason, most anti-AI commentators feel compelled to present all three arguments.

Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged. Of course, I don't really believe that they think it's useless. I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige, though, and they're just hoping beyond hope that somehow everyone will one day "wake up" and share their belief that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" with no utility, despite the fact that people are using them every day and can watch in real time as they improve.

> ... the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal, and the people you don't like will have lost money, so there's no point in being outraged...

Except that in the process of the markets finding out, things will not go back to normal if everyone's retirement is tied to the market. And in the process of finding out, things will not go back to normal if the hype cycle disrupts traditional hiring/firing decisions.

If it's as bad as some of us believe, then when it falls apart, a lot of people get hurt as collateral damage.

The market eventually found out about Bear Stearns, but a lot of innocent people lost their homes in the process.

They'll be fine

Tetraethyl lead is not useless; in fact, it was hugely useful to the petrol engine economy throughout the 20th century! It just happens to cause nonobvious brain damage throughout societies.

In some ways things that are both useful and harmful are the hardest to deal with. And this isn't just "prestige", it's the already-decaying post-truth infosphere and the already-overheating CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

AI is useful in cases where you can automatically catch errors. Programming is uniquely suitable for this, because we have already got all our machinery of type systems and CI tests to catch human errors. How useful it is in other cases depends on how cheap it is to catch errors and how much they cost - and whether the cost of errors is inflicted on other people.

> Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal

People who are against AI don’t care if it’s useless, they care it’s harmful. And you can’t systematically cause harm then say “oops, our bad” and have everything return to how it was with a snap of the fingers. The consequences of harm don’t go away when the source does.

> I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige

Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.

> > I do think they're worried about what it'll do to their prestige

> Why must this always be the argument? It was the same with cryptocurrencies and NFTs, there is a specific type of proponent who always accuses critics of secretly being pro the technology but publicly against it due to some ulterior motive. Most people aren’t selfish lying rat bastards who think like that.

Meanwhile, the prestige to be gained/lost from supporting/doubting the big mainstream thing is immense, and the incentives are actually in completely the opposite direction...

Anyway, on that topic The Line Goes Up video covers the arguments about prestige far more extensively and far more elaborately than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

But it's very much not the doubters who are worrying about prestige in crypto and NFTs, and probably not with AI either.

been involved with several crypto projects as a dev

i think you are wrong

I see little evidence that people combine all three positions together. You're making a broad generalization based on personal vibes.

I see plenty if I care to look outside my usual echo chamber. There’s lots of ‘it’s just the next token prediction’ (in 2026 still!), but there are more sophisticated arguments like ‘it can’t be creative’, ‘it doesn’t think’, ‘it’s just pattern matching’ etc. They might even be true for today’s models, but linearly extrapolating an exponential trend is a classic mistake.

Confusing a logarithmic trend with an exponential one is also a classic mistake.

accurate; your point being...?

> Which is even sillier when you think about it, because if it's useless, then you really shouldn't care: the markets will eventually find out that it's useless, and everything will go back to normal

And in that period where the markets are irrational people are losing their jobs, hardware is being priced out of consumer markets and the rich are trying to embed themselves so hard that we get to pay for it when the market corrects itself. I think your take is highly indicative that you live in a shrinking bubble unaffected by those things.

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