Yes
552 karma · joined May 17, 2015
Even in the short time since we have developed the capability to annihilate ourselves, there have been dozens of accidents, false alarms, and near misses.
I am confident that on a long enough time line we will manage to fuck this up.
The wealthy and powerful have always held contempt for the poor and powerless, but for better or worse they needed them as a source of both cheap labor and, from time to time, as cannon fodder against their rivals. This part is what they can see possibly changing, and they are really, really, really hoping that they don't need you anymore.
People who say, "Well, who will they sell everything to if no one has a job" are stuck thinking in the past. When your existence is no longer tolerated, but now actively a nuisance, there is no need for a consumer economy supporting millions of people. While their vanity requires keeping some number of the permanent underclass around so they they will always have someone to degrade and feel superior to, I don't see this amounting to more than a few thousand underlings huddled in various competing compounds, and even this custom is likely be to be abandoned entirely by those who seek to transcend humanity itself.
The mask has been slipping for a while, but a combination of Trump getting elected and AI psychosis has lead to a lot of premature celebration over their belief in being the new masters of the permanent underclass. Now the the mask is completely off and revealed them for the disgusting reptiles they have always been.
They show their barely working demo to management who is also excited. It kind of works if you don't look too closely, but includes features and screens no one asked for or can explain, tables and graphs which turn out to be static artifacts using made up data (in one case I saw a pie graph which when summed, exceeded 100%), is a security nightmare, and simple changes must be made across the handful of functions which are hundreds or thousands of lines long, because there is no separation of concerns.
Eventually they turn this steaming pile of "prototype" over to an engineer who is asked to get it ready to ship because "the product team was having trouble adding the few extra features, but it should be easy, just use AI".
I can't tell if this is stupidity, an elaborate joke, or maybe I am already dead and this is some kind of purgatory.
One where humans are increasingly pushed to the periphery to make room for data centers and the human population is subsumed by robots.
Who is this future serving? Not me. Fuck this.
Most of these things are available bundled with most of the business Microsoft subscriptions while other telemetry comes from other tools or homegrown sources and is available to managers and IT staff on demand. Now, most of the time no one was really looking at most of this unless they had a reason to, and while I am no longer in this end of things since LLMs have reached this stage of maturity, I can imagine they are now being tasked with constantly watching for patterns in worker activity which deviate from the expected norm and are fully capable of notifying your manager automatically along with a detailed analysis of your activity.
The thing to understand is that the modern office is a veritable panopticon.
They issue a provocative public statement dressed up as a safety advisory and then sit back while the media and various industries (who for some reason take this all at face value) generate them tens of millions of dollars in free publicity through their own overreactions.