(not a native speaker) fired up as in "optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah" or as in "Butlearian jihadi, all AI is haram" way?
I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come'
Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet.
The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian.
Yes everybody sees it as useful tool, and everybody damn well understands in medium term their work is at huge risk. That rolls over any emotion around 'oh what a nice new toy to use'.
What do you think people are talking about when they refer to "the singularity"?
If you go by the original expression of the idea of the singularity, it is that the duration between significant advances has been decreasing throughout history at an accelerating pace. This suggests that the primary factor governing this property will reach a limit and a different property will become dominant. What happens then is unpredictable because up until now, that other property has not been discernable due to its relative scale. Like measuring the gravity of an asteroid while it is next to a star. Or seeing a star during daytime.
...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible.
I mean that's you agreeing with Elon Musk, I disagree, I think AI is just normal technology [1], there's a lot of us. Like tech revolutions before, it'll have huge effects on productivity alleviating major scarcities. That's boring to the algorithm, not enough conflict, but it's exciting to a lot of tech workers.
No messiah's and no Jihads, just excited about going to work to make sure we can do more with less tomorrow than we can do today.
[1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
"Normal"?
It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare.
But:
AI cannot do your job
Your boss bought AI to do your job
You're fired
This is true only in the headlines and the loud CEO pronouncements that we for some reason take at face value. In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. A "white collar reshuffling" [1] the industrial revolution was not.
[1]: https://www.hiringlab.org/2026/08/05/q2-labor-market-outlook...
Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment.
I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people.
I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism.
Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high?
But then I suspect you don't care one way or another what the effects of LLM usage are, you just don't want the pace of LLM acceleration interfered with. It's the same basic rationale that Americans have with guns, and they make the same bad faith arguments when gun control comes up.
I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now.
I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level.
Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land.
Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least).
I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it.
I've had LLMs write code which performs a genetic algorithm for balancing video game AI*. There's a very soft line in quickly moving metaphorical sand between what it can do and what it can't, and right now I'm not sure which side of that line you'd find a user saying they want a computer vision system to turn a robot arm into a barista given LLMs can search for, download, read, and seemingly do a decent job of implementing research papers e.g. sim2real.
Just to be explicit though: I'm not saying the state of AI-led research is sufficient to render unimportant researchers who find better ways to train AI, just me as a software engineer is no longer a blocker to productising that research.
* The same LLM had also written the game AI, but while I'm fine pointing to a genetic algorithm balancing it, I don't think that the game AI in itself counts because "game AI" is GOFAI.
Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy.
Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid.
By their customers, for doing the same thing they'd been doing for much of their working lives up to this point.
> Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will?
You'd have the answer if you'd continued for just four more words (or five if you count the "they're" as two) past where you cut off the quotation:
they're forced by economicsNo, in reality, people do not want to pay for what he wants to sell. It's concrete people. Not something disembodied.
Economics (/ˌɛkəˈnɒmɪks, ˌiːkə-/)[1][2] is a social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.[3][4]
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyses what is viewed as the basic elements of economies, including individual agents and markets, their interactions, and the outcomes of those interactions. Individual agents may include households, firms, buyers, and sellers.
That, too, is a job that's gone. I used to know some actress/model/waitress types in LA. They'd sometimes do catalog modeling: "OK, the next one is the blue sweater, and hurry it up, we have thirty more to do before lunch".
Yes, I'm still waiting for that. It's gonna lift productivity in what's a large sector in most economies. Of course, most companies will have to re-organise their processes to take full advantage, because eg truck drivers also perform all kinds of ad hoc labour around loading and unloading.
You don't seem to get it. If what you said is true then the only reason why your job is gone first is because software moves faster than hardware. The chain reaction to get rid of all jobs has started.
After all, you can now automate the development of physical hardware including robots and their control algorithms. Then all we need to do is give the AI a job shop and mechanical engineering is done next.
And so on. Until every single job is gone.
My surprise was the ordering.
We saw the same with the pandemic and the vaccines where the personal harm % of the vaccine was significantly smaller than the personal harm % of the illness and yet had (still has) a huge conspiracy theory about it.
The first agricultural revolution would have been one guy planting seeds with the expectation that edible crops would grow. That led to a huge population boom, but not to cities.
The industrial revolution didn't have the mechanics you're imagining. People left the country for cities because work was available in cities, not because it wasn't available at home. Peasants were always in a constant state of having more labor available than the land they worked required, but that push factor never meant the surplus labor could leave. You can't leave without somewhere to go to.
With the significant exception of post plague periods during which some big changes occurred wrt landholder / serf relations, expected pay rates, part ownership, etc.
eg: (unvetted source) Worker Power: How the black death revolutionised workers rights - https://historyguild.org/worker-power-how-the-black-death-re...
The period after the Black Death was characterized by serfs abandoning their family farms for more lucrative options elsewhere. If the family farms needed them, that wouldn't have happened.
It's your assertion that
* no peasants died during the Black Death,
* peasants owned "family farms"
* no peasant owned family farms suffered a labour shortage despite being "abandoned for more lucrative options elsewhere"
?
Okay. Sure.
It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI.
I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine.
Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications
Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question.
>> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something
Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology.
I work in place that serves about the third of a population of a small country and I highly doubt the advances in technology future or past (hello COBOL and Azure) will change that much. I also really doubt the changes in the landscape are making the quality of experience better. It's sort of induced demand where increases in technical performance either mean less colleagues or just more work for the same of work.