Upset with what aspect(s) of databases?

The technical implementation? Or the global surveillance and manipulation state they create?

That latter seems to have aged quite well.

What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.

TV is here to stay, I watch very little of it.

AI is here to stay, I don't want it anywhere near the art, literature, and music I enjoy, not least because part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge it had a very human creator. That should be perfectly achievable.

The idea of AI going anywhere always reminds me of https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-end-of-big-data/ from a decade ago.

People forget that a lot; my father came home end 70s explaining his life was over because databases, mid 80s because code could now be synthesised from models (with 'AI') that domain experts write; the latter went on a bit in different forms until now where it is becoming reality for things that were not very hard before anyway or in the hands of people who use it as one of their tools (antirez comes to mind), not as 'english programming'. The absolute crap (ads, tracking, no responsibility because computer says no etc) my generation built is, in my eyes, not really positive without something to counter it. Many positive things are there, but many things 'we' started and made normal must be ring-fenced and controlled as they are negative to an absolute sometimes. The current AI is hard to see; I am building things with it I could have never built on my own (and I have been programming since the 70s) as programmer, tech lead or cto, 1000s of projects over the decades, some tiny, some huge. I could build complex things but they took time, now they take time but only a fraction. But what I see most people building is absolute slop; it has no function outside trying to sell something that has no value in a time you still can if (and only if) you can do a little dance on tiktok for an audience. I will keep on happily hacking anyway until I die.

> It really isn't going anywhere

It might not be going anywhere cause it is already everywhere and has nowhere else to go :)

> People were upset about databases in the 1980s

Huh? In what universe did that happen?

Crypto bros said the same thing about NFT’s and ICO’s and whatever other nonsense they were pushing. And to some extent, they were right, I guess, in that these things still exist. But they’re practically irrelevant.

Some people say that we cannot solve catastrophic climate change. And then some other people claim that those are anti-solving the problem. Indeed the climate change problem is massive and it is incredibly, incredibly difficult to solve given the kind of world that we have engineered for ourselves. By contrast it wouldn’t be a problem at all to magically wipe the wonders of AI since that only happened three years ago, or last month, or last December, or whatever the current inflection point is or was deemed to be.

So I don’t really buy the inevitability of technological progress in a world where infinite progress and growth have turned out to be false. Especially with the strange dichotomy of this being so apparently obvious, as commonly stated, juxtaposed with the horde of people that point this out to us on the daily.

Tangentially, I expect both this Pandora’s Box narrative to continue and narratives about how the good times for commoners are over and they need to learn some real life skills like foraging for their own food. Just as a sort of emergent narrative development.

There's plenty of things that are ubiquitous but not well-liked, so I don't see how "it's not going away, get over it" works as an argument. Many people won't be getting over it. Traffic jams are here to stay but I'm never delighted to be in one.

Outside the tech bubble, a significant proportion of the population is using AI, but in all surveys, it's hugely disliked. It's probably due to social anxieties that in big part trace back to how AI tech companies do marketing. If you have billboards that say "don't hire humans" and Gates and Altman talking about how most jobs are going away, what do you expect? People are not gonna be optimistic even if they secretly enjoy asking ChatGPT for relationship advice.

This is the central problem with the dismissals of the tech's capability. Public discourse needs to shift to planning for the economic impact in particular, but the kind of High Brazilism from the naysayers who insist it's a proof of psychosis to even mention AI's potential, makes the inertia in policymakers much easier for them to maintain. Waiting for the financial effects to arrive and then improvising policy is the stupidest way of handling an upheaval on this scale - even if the precise form of those shocks can't be anticipated.

> There is no possible universe where AI is banned

Yes there is

It's just a whole lot more violent than you're imagining

> you can organize politically

Can you? Maybe if you can afford an AI powered social media bot farm. What a great technology.

> It's perfectly fine to tell people to suck it up on a huge number of more important issues.

No, it isn't. If you think it's "perfectly fine" to dismiss people's legitimate concerns and complaints by telling them to "suck it up", the problem is that you're an asshole, not that AI is unimportant or whatever it is you're trying to imply.

> Funny that AI is the breaking point here instead of things that actually matter

Nah, it's just one with high relevance to a tech audience. We say similar things around here re ubiquitous surveillance tech, internet censorship by governments / payment processors, the effects of social media...

Things that actually matter have been teetering on the edge because of the simple fact that labor has been needed to make money and money is power. If AI takes away the last leverage of labor, then things that actually matter will collapse entirely.

AI proponents are saying it will take away all knowledge jobs. How is being permanently unemployed something that doesn't matter?

Agreed, remember the learn to code moment? It's so funny to see people become hypocritical overnight when it affects their economic livelihood.

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