pj_mukh

"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...

>>"optimistic and enthusiastic about the new messiah"

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

Also the headline is about tech workers but the article is about Knowledge workers. I know a class of tech workers absolutely fired up about the new Industrial Revolution, they're just not on this forum or featured in lengthy navel-gazing articles like this one.

> if I hired a professional artist to draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle,

I think AI folks have done a terrible job of communicating this, but replacing a professional simply isn't the point. The point is to serve all the situations where people would've never considered hiring a professional, and where perfection or artistic merit isn't the point (say a personal throwaway recreation of an LOTR world).

And I think in that regard the benchmarks are pretty good.

what's fable at, does anyone know?

>If we all woke up tomorrow and thought 'we need 10 million new homes

The cost (no profit) of 1 Million homes where people want to live (where your community is), would be roughly 0.5 Trillion to 1 Trillion USD [1]. So, I don't think this is true :(.

We simply don't have the construction workers and the supply-chains to make it happen. Again, these are fixable problems and I want this to be true. But it is not today.

[1]: https://medium.com/@dtxtransitposts/how-much-does-it-actuall...

Yes to all of this, and want to double stress the Housing theory of everything [1]. Most of the "scarcity" people feel today in the North American context is driven by housing. And there simply isn't enough of it. And citing badly measured vacancy stats does a huge disservice to the effort to fix this.

I agree we can do a lot better. And I have no moral qualms about giving the excess away to everyone who needs it. But I need people to admit that it will require a lot of work till we can sufficiently claim we have a real realizable "excess".

And that work requires the current system to work more "efficiently" and with "higher productivity", in the economic definition of the word, not as a personal valuation as OP defines.

[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

Just a note those "vacancies" include dilapidated buildings and housing that is between leases (literally all the housing on craigslist is included in that number).

Vacancies in most major cities is near-zero. As a market-rate renter, when someone says "we have so much excess", I have no idea what you're talking about.

“We have enough excess in society”

How are you measuring this? Hopefully something better than stock prices.

Great, now let's (gradually) get rid of all surface parking lots and build hyper-optimized multi-floor parking setups not made for human driving. A sort of Ocado Grocery Warehouse [1] for cars.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE

As always, yes I know this already exists in Japan.

"It's just that the ecosystem became too fragmented"

Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic. Complain, complain, complain. Speaking of monopolistic, just google it guys, google knows where the movies/shows stream, that is your unified interface.

"Your feed is often just a reflection of what you're feeling"

No it is not. The feed is optimized for what will increase the intensity of feelings, and bad feelings are more easily optimized than good. Meta (patient zero for this nonsense) has pretty much said so, multiple times.

" more a result of the environment than algorithms"

What environment? People are sitting on their algorithms for 100x more time than any physical environment.

"This is actually how the world works"

The level to which our algorithmic feeds have made us so confidently wrong about things is so deeply problematic. Tech's original sin keeps biting us back. This rampant cynicism and nihilism borne from constant bombardment of headlines has us acting like we know the personal stories of all leadership all around the world, and it's deeply damaging to our trust in the system.

Plenty of Ivy League leaders quietly working away at their job, doing the best they can with great results and no one to write about them and you'll never hear about it anywhere. This is obvious to anyone on a second thought, but the first reactionary thought is what's acted on...always.

"I get a GPL version of Microsoft Office."

Is this not..Libre?

"The char isn’t a copyrighted work."

An Eames chair is, we just have a really high bar for what is copyrightable in the physical world, and it seems pointlessly discriminatory.

Real question, if an LLM shouldn't be able to remix someone's written work, why should a robot be able to build a chair that kinda looks like a chair a carpenter built that one time? The carpenter was a human, and humans are not a service.

Why this distinction only for intellectual work?

who gets to define what's real creative expression and what's not?

"so that it gets “traffic”, another form of goo that gets “funneled” and “converted” into money."

How is this any different from a small business hot dog stand, setting up outside a game to get more of the "traffic" instead of paying rent somewhere busy. You're a small business trying to get eyeballs, you do what you gotta do and call it what you want, instead of paying for ads like the big boys.

Is this a real debate? AI has a well-defined technical definition. It’s right there in the Wikipedia [1] . Yes it’s quite a broad umbrella of systems and algorithms but it’s all AI

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

AI and ML have very clear definitions[1]. ML has been a subset of AI, always has been. Latest marketing or "scare quotes" doesn't/shouldn't change that. Especially not in a technical forum like HN.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Ctrl-F Machine Learning. Apple Watch alerts are Machine Learning

Energy costs are a function of energy supply. We have infinite energy being beamed down to us everyday. Using energy as a cudgel to suppress demand and deflate economic growth is the real sophistry.

Digression, but gun laws (or lack thereof) apply equally to cities where most people live and where guns wreck most of their havoc and cities are banned from passing any laws to help fix. Different issue entirely.

In fact this kind of case-by-case handling is exactly what I’m asking for in AI as opposed to blanket laws.

You’re not doing this but to your example: Guns don’t have numerous other positive use cases, so AI is simply not a fair comparison.

And in the case of AI, given the media environment the fact that it’s being used to save millions of hours doing back office automation is never covered.

So yes this is a prime argument for AI. It’s just a tool with a myriad of uses that no one covers cuz they’re boring.

As to the rest of the authors argument, obviously I’m aware of its myriad negative consequences but just disagree that banning matrix math or NIMBY-ying warehouses where matrix math happens is somehow a solution to those problems.

You want to talk about policy fixes at the level of applications, I’m all ears.

What if I used no AI in writing it i.e. it was all heartfelt but used AI to literally edit a video together? The author says

"Two videos, with different stories, shared so many similarities that most people thought they were roughly the same.

Same similar tone of voiceover with cadence. Same cutscenes of flying over empty beaches, and navigating forest trees and stars/universe, and same narrative: after years of evolution scientists have yet to discover the power of such love with a national geographic tone in both (one of the videos even started with that logo)."

Which to me, just means the manually done cutscenes was a waste of time? In fact in most situations pre-AI you'd foist this task on "that one friend" who's good with Movie Maker or hire a hobby videographer. Now I offload to AI, why is that bad?

I think having Claude wholesale write a wedding speech is obviously silly, but the rest doesn't seem so black and white, just more Ikea-fication of consumer art.

"A year can be taken to assess what effects are likely to come about and how acceptable they are. Create some guidelines. "

Yea, and my bet is none of this is going to happen. There is simply no incentive to make it happen. Why would a government take all these steps? What's the incentive? Much easier to just keep things the way they are, or more likely, simply re-sense the political headwinds in a year.

"The right wing is far more responsive to business wants"

This is all pre-Trump thinking. Trump just randomly banned Fable, tonnes of MAGA politicos running on the "ban datacenter" ticket, all this is simply no longer true.

"tax havens and loopholes"

Feels like we should fix those instead of wonton lashing out at any and all economic output.

"Meanwhile, I opened Reuters this morning to this article"

This is not a measure of anything, except "news that is popular".

What you're looking for is fraction of datacenters that flaunt regulations, and I'm guessing you don't have those numbers and I'm betting they aren't that actually egregious compared to..anyone else building things. Again, I'm not saying this is bad politics, but let's not claim there is some actual issue here.

I mentioned politically impoverished communities, and that explains the Reuters headline more than anything specific about the people that build datacenters and how much they love polluting the air around Black communities.

P.S: Extremely funny for Mr.Solar Panel-Electric cars to now be installing Gas Turbines to run his data centers.

"environmental impact and effect on residential energy pricing"

Sooo, how does that change in New York in a year? You've mostly re-inforced my point. And specifically the bill doesn't use any automatic re-enablement criteria, so data centers are basically dead in the state.

Realistically, this is a canard, AI scares people and environmental impact is a lever to use to stop it. Ask yourself this: if this was a new Ford plant (dirtier, also uses a lot of energy), would we be having this conversation?

I actually do mean politically impoverished. Banning Data centers is a horsehoe populism issue, the right wing loves it too. The data center builders will just have to find municipalities with less people and/or a less engaged political atmosphere aka politically impoverished. They mostly already have.

Blocking is easy, UN-blocking is hard (see: zoning and housing). There are no objective concerns to be met, and there will never be. I would bet a lot of money the moratorium is indefinitely extended every year.

Always thought letting populism define a "slow-down" was silly, its a moratorium and a permanent veto everyone is looking for. It's fine, the data centers will be built elsewhere in more politically impoverished states, New York and especially NYC will still reap the benefits and offload solving the gnarly energy problems to someone else. Federalism working?

Yes, plus, all these meta-studies always seemed to ignore the reasons for the demand shock.

"It's not the permits, it's the demand shock" (the last image in the blog post). The "demand shock", was the economy growing...quickly. And that statement is left hanging in the air like we're supposed to do something about it.

The economic growth is a good thing, we should have a housing system that reacts to it like surge pricing but instead we get a lot of hand-wringing then rezoning 5-10 years too late, so instead of temporary surge pricing, we get permanent ultra-heavy-high-surge pricing.