Except Anthropic has delivered a truly world changing product…
Edit: don't get me wrong, I'm a happy user. But I'd also be a happy consumer of refined sugar in the early 20th century. I'm still not sure if these tools won't destabilize society to the point of collapse. I don't think we understand the complexity of what's going on nearly enough, and am certainly not optimistic about AI being net good for us
Krugman: "I've been writing some about downsides of technological change and I realized afterwards that if I really wanted a really stellar example of a productive important innovation that had terrible effects on society would be the cotton gin."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQbfbpf7M&t=25m38s
Richardson: "I always have a hard time articulating this, but the number of large plantations in which enslavers owned in air quotes, you know, more than 25 or more than 50 other human beings was a very very small proportion of the American South, less than 1%. The majority of people who again owned their black neighbors had one or two enslaved people on their farms. They weren't necessarily called plantations. And they would be working alongside those black Americans. And the cotton gin could have made small farms viable and could have ended human enslavement. And instead what they gave us was, you know, the the Trail of Tears in the 1830s that cleans indigenous Americans out of the southwestern land. You get an extraordinary land rush into the American South in the 1830s and the 1840s. And you get the establishment of these gigantic essentially factory farms. And that's a place where, you know, the majority of southerners, obviously the indigenous southerners and the black southerners, wanted no part of this system, but it actually didn't serve the white farmers either. It served a really small, less than 1% group of American enslavers in the American South. And you look at that and you think that wasn't the technologies fault. That was the fault of the people who um who set up the political system that enabled it to work that way."
That's a really surprising but immediately sensible example. It tweaked my brain. Thanks!
And that is what the public should focus on.
AI in its current state is neither fantastic nor a sure path to doom. It can be a boon to society for sure.
But a few individuals leading a few companies that burn 100s of billions of $$ to get the rest of society hooked (and maybe, dependent) on a subscription service, that is a problem.
For all I care it would be better if that were government-funded research, and results open source everyting. Tax the people once, society profits forever.
The way it works now looks more like an attempt at wealth transfer from the public to a few executives & VC's pockets, using AI as a vehicle.
Seems the Chinese are showing the way here?
I suppose it'd be from a utilitarian perspective?
Ex: My gut feeling is nitrogen fixing would rank "low" on "terminal ecological impact" against "positive benefits to humanity"; the Vinyl resurgence would be around the middle; private jets for the Epstein class would the highest etc.
I for one am doubtful that AI as a whole has meaningfully improved the lives of just about anyone besides the few who have gotten rich. Meanwhile many have already lost their jobs as a result, even if AI is just a convenient scapegoat.
If AI went away tomorrow idk if my life would meaningfully change
Where are your browsers? Where are your compilers? Where are your databases? Where are your operating systems?
Can you point me to literally anything useful that works and was created by this world changing technology? All I see is dead project after dead project.
Google self reports 70% ai usage in code, bun was fully ai rewritten to be rust
I don’t think anything I say is likely to change your mind. You might need to get through this valley of depression by yourself in a few years and join the rest of devs using ai
You said “all” as in “all” developers on those projects. You haven’t spoken to all of them to make that claim. You’re just making stuff up. That’s what I was pointing out.
If you are suggesting that we can call the Chromium project a work of LLMs because some developers may or may not be using LLMs on the project it let’s just stop the conversation right here.
This is becoming a classic case of LLM brain rot. I hope you come back to your senses.
Is it something you aim for, or is it just the natural way of communication for people excited by a new technology, patricianly one they feel gives them some kind of insider advantage or hidden knowledge?
The jury's still out on AI, but coding agents have only really worked for about 6 months now. It's not exactly a fair statement to make. Obviously good things take time and thought. And understanding the full implications of technological advancement also takes time and thought.
The death of Stack Overflow being a visible indiction: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...