I don't think its entirely class. I've met many people who have convinced themselves they have some special sauce--even in software! And even those who are insulated like doctors and plumbers don't realize they're still at risk from second order effects. What happens when half of their customers are broke? That possibility is not an exaggeration. Even if everyone re-skills over night, people will default on their mortgages at a scale greater than the '08 financial crisis.

And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.

Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first.

I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.

> society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?

I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"

I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.

> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.

Perhaps this is a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia (but kinda inverted) where everyone views AI as too inaccurate for their own niche, but perfectly fine for every other field that they know comparably little about.

Or there’s other people like me that know it’s coming for my job but see it as paradigm shifting technology and want to see where it goes. I’m not going to stifle progress just because it’s in my backyard. I think it’s small minded people like you, only preoccupied with your small little niche that can’t see why more open minded people see so much potential in the technology, whether it directly benefits them or not.

I'm thinking of some similarity between the non-technical middle manager using agents to avoid the biggest obstacle of their developers, and a person installing a wall socket at home.

It's not too difficult to install a wall socket, but many things can go wrong, so people would normally call an electrician. In some jurisdictions you are not allowed to install it without a license, or probably you can install it only for yourself but not for anyone else if you don't have a license, and you need to call an inspector and check your work when you're done. Some other jurisdictions truly don't care, you can do whatever, and all the possible damage is on you.

Electricians are somewhat fungible, because you often don't care who will do the job for you, but the profession exists and they can pay their bills.

I wonder how far we are until, at least in some jurisdictions, a person won't be legally allowed to update the website that stores customers' data or processes payments without being a licensed software developer, and how rules, should they be adopted, will change our profession.

> in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability.

Hasn't this been the case since the power loom put hand weavers out of a job?

I hate the term "democratization". It's putting a respectable face on something that shouldn't be respectable at all. In the age of the internet, coding and other creative skills have always been largely democratized to people that care enough to learn. Nothing is being "democratized" by AI, there's simply (an attempt) at driving the value of actual skill to zero so the skill-less and stupid can purchase their way to mediocrity (without the benefit of transferring that money to someone who has worked to be skilled). There is NOTHING "democratic" about that.

> democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager

Works the other way too. Now a junior engineer can use AI to do much of what a middle manager had been doing in the past.

Frankly I think the middle manager ought to be WAY more worried than most.

Coding was always "democratized". You just had to put in the effort of learning and understanding. Finding free resources is very easy.

AI doesn't make that learning and understanding easy but just allows people to skip it.

That doesn't mean democratization at all.

I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing.

Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.

But I might just be overly radicalised.

One of the billionaires on the All In Podcast, (which I listen to sometimes to get that kind of perspective), mentioned that one thing the U.S. and China could work on as far as regulating AI, is Know Your Customer controls. At first after one of the hosts said this I didn't think much of it but then started thinking through the second order effects later on. Why would that be such a main concern? He gave the example of dangerous people using AI to do bad things, but I think the subtext is much more complicated. At least from the ownership class point of view. Which also ties into the original idea behind OpenAI. Which is that the public should have access to the full abilities of any model equally. But the ownership class can't have this. In another post someone made a good point about licenses and this can be extended to stuff like the legal system, where at the end of the day the personal human connections decide things far more than what a model would compute the result of a case to be...

So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S.

In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.

One large part of this is that all the heads of AI companies and business leaders in the US and Europe keep talking about how AI is going to take jobs away and displace "lower-value human capital", while we see power shortages and higher energy rates in areas where AI datacenters are built. Meanwhile, China's 15th 5 year plan involves integrating AI across the whole economy while expanding vocational retraining programs, and building out new renewable infrastructure to power datacenters. The Chinese Human Resources Ministry expects AI to create 6-10 million new jobs in the short term, and the Chinese government plans to use it in the long term to fill in gaps in the labor force caused by its demographic shortages.

I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.

Seems to me that it is downstream from the fact that China's economy is growing strongly and strong state power means that they see infrastructural improvements. US and European governments reflect the views of their people which are generally retrogressive and aimed at a fictional view of the 1970s as described in The Simpsons. Consequently, the Chinese are enthusiastic about Nuclear Power, and Solar Power, and Wind Energy, and AI, and ship building, and space programs, and trains, and electric vehicles, and so on ad infinitum to the degree that they don't mind smoggy cities to get these. Meanwhile Western nations mostly want to live in whatever they already have and would prefer nothing change or if it does that this change moves them closer to a past world, while nonetheless enjoying clean air and water.

I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.

The classic progression of an economy is resource -> manufacturing -> knowledge.

AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.

Maybe it has to do with % of blue collar vs. white collar jobs in those countries? I also wonder if they have stronger safety nets for displaced workers? It is curious. My anecdata has shown that people who feel "safe" job wise are either neutral or pro. Otherwise negative.

> In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries.

I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.

Maybe chinese are generally more positive about everything. Many European countries and the US are in a decline for some years now.

The attitudes aren’t 1-1 comparable. China is on a winning streak in terms of socioeconomic development, and AI is likely seen as merely a new technology in the context of the social contract. The US is going the opposite way, and people here view AI through the lens of oligarchy more often than not. I wouldn’t say that a lot of people feel as optimistic, even if they are actually more economically secure.

Where did you find a parachute?

They're not now, but they went so far as to strong arm them because they wanted their product.

It’s a case of sour grapes though, in reality they’d still want Anthropic’s grapes.

The question is what classes of jobs will replace the ones made obsolete by a particular innovation, and how many vacancies there will be. With electricity we had managerial, creative, high dexterity, etc. jobs. If a sufficient amount of human capabilities are replaced then that may be different to electricity. Also it's about how many top-tier "power plants" (AI, robotics) there are, who owns them, and once "everything is solved" (which it isn't yet) how much of that will trickle down to everyone else's life quality.

I’ve wondered about this.

If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence.

If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay?

Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise.

That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.

Honestly, I'm baffled that a software engineer would want to work at those companies. Like, you think they're going to keep you around once their AI is good enough to improve itself? Or are they just holding out hope that they can get their bag before billionaires create a permanent underclass, and they can be a step above the untouchables?

Especially basic scientific research is so far removed from actually useful applications that there is no direct cause and effect relationship between single items of research and any eventual effect on society.

>Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.

I would consider that apathy.

do people at the bottom have access to medical advances or are they in lifelong debt in the unfortunate case when they need those medical advances?

> Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase.

We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.