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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

There are two key elements in the current AI fearmongering:

1) People think they can predict the future

2) People think humans can't adapt

The number of disruptive "game changing" technologies throughout history is immense. There's no question some people get negatively affected, but humanity as a whole has prospered because of these disruptions.

Literally every time, including during the industrial revolution, people thought it was game over for society, good manners, the youth, the planet etc.

Keep cool and try to adapt to the inevitable change. The next generation will certainly do it and leave you behind if you stay in a corner denying the new reality.

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Adapt, sure, but is my life better or worse after adapting? It's a fair question and a fair worry. The goal of most AI companies seems to be to replace some amount of labor with AI. Look how that worked out for our factory workers. They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.

> They adapted by getting jobs at Walmart and Dollar General, or scraping by in the gig economy.

The tech crowd used to say that only the "dumb" ones did that. They said those who were "smart like us" were much more adaptable, learning to code and whatnot to find new, often even better careers. It will be interesting to see if the emperor has clothes.

Can you not see how you're doing the same thing now? Not all people in tech so dismissed the struggles of others -- but you are.

No, and obviously neither can you, else you would have explained yourself. Best to not post while under the influence of silly emotions. That is what those tech people who called those manufacturing people "dumb" did and, like this, wasn't useful.

Why is it whenever people try to downplay the efficacy of LLM’s evangelists go “there’s literally never been anything like this,” but the moment people critique them or try to weigh their impact on society the response is “well it’s nothing we haven’t seen before”?

The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation. We are clearly experiencing a moment of sorts, and anybody who is worried about what the fallout will be is just handwaved away as ignorant fear mongers. Unless you are the head of these companies doing it in a disingenuous way to pump up your valuation, then suddenly it’s legitimate - but not so legitimate that we should do anything besides let the US government build a moat for them!

> The amount of money flowing and the sheer scale of all of this stuff is without precedent. We are seeing governments from the local to federal level literally shift their economies because of all the speculation.

Yes, the absolute numbers might now read TRILLION instead of BILLION or MILLION, but the concept of "Technology so impactful governments shift their economies" is in no way new, and has already happened a bunch of times before in humanity's timeline.

I guess that's why you're seeing some of us less stressed out about it, as again, scale is different, because scale today is different in everything, but relatively, we're just repeating another of those "Technology changes everything" milestones that we've done before.

We have never seen governments essentially leverage their economies so heavily, so quickly, for a speculative technology. It is literally propping up a significant portion of the US economy right now.

When have we seen anything like this?

> When have we seen anything like this?

The US canal and railroad boom in the 1800s definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger", it looks comparatively small. But in their world, back then, it was basically the same thing, just with canals and railroads. Indiana almost financially ruined itself because of their "infrastructure program". The government got involved heavily with the "1862 Pacific Railway Act" as well.

And yes, easy to say now that "Duh, that's essentially infrastructure" but at the time, that wasn't as obvious to everyone, as and railroad were newfangled technology, especially deployed like that, on a scale never seen before.

> definitely had exactly the same thing happening, just compared to our scale today where everything is "more" and "bigger",

And faster. More, bigger, faster. Which substantively changes the situation the same way a musket stops venn diagraming as a “firearm” at some point when compared to a 50-round automatic rifle.

Because they're liars. Plain and simple. Lying is a virtue as long as the lie is powerful enough to sustain attention.

You're mixing a bunch of different "people" in the same bag. I'm not the one saying "there's never been anything like this before".

The investment is massive, but not bigger than other projects by an order of magnitude. Major wars were bigger than AI. The dot com bubble was 2-3T dollars.

If we’re comparing war between entire nations to speculative economic investment than I’m not sure I need to make any more points.

There may not be so much in the way of soldiers in the field guns blazing, but we are very much seeing a 'cold war' emerging with AI at the centre of it. Call it speculative, but the incentives for nations to spend are essentially the same in cold and hot wars.

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