Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmathai | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to discount the amazing progress we've made with technology to improve people's lives.

There's the meme that the smartest people in the world are figuring out how to show ads. It's no different this time around. I understand that not everyone working on AI is building an ad network - but ultimately it feels like that's the end result.

It didn't feel quite this way 15 years ago. Back then, it felt much more tangible how technology was improving our lives. It is sort of tangible now too - I am doing things with AI that I otherwise couldn't. But somehow if feels like progress for the sake of progress.

And to be honest, it doesn't feel like the progress is for me or the people I care about.

> ... it doesn't feel like the progress is for me or the people I care about.

AI is doing very little to improve the human condition; all it seems to be good at is optimizing productivity and generating profits somewhere maybe. That is not an AI-generated problem; using profits as an all-things compass is a disease we have been cooking for ourselves for a long time. But I'm sort of hoping AI will make the problem so bad that we will be forced to fix it, or perish.

That’s one of the main points in Karp’s book. All the smart people are happy to spend all day pushing gooning content on children or triggering alcoholics to relapse, but ask them to tackle crime or defend the country and they’ll tell you it’s immoral.

Nobody tries to solve any actual problems anymore, they just produce meaningless consumer slop. And when people like Musk try to invent reusable rockets or electric cars, everyone says they’re stupid. And then they do it, and everyone says it was always going to happen anyway.

When is the last time Google or meta or whoever actually solved a problem? They’ll spend 500b in a year, enough to reforest the entire planet, and what do they actually give us? I couldn’t name a single thing they’ve done in the last ten years which actually produces value, but they’ve spent trillions.

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