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| ▲ | lovich 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are sizeable camps for both those opinions. | | |
| ▲ | Lerc 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I mostly agree, except for the Messiah part. I think the optimistic excited people are thinking more 'What a time to be alive' than 'All praise be, for they have come' Which is not to say there won't be people deifying AI, I just don't think there are many of those yet. The cynical side of me thinks it will happen, but right now I feel like most of those who seem susceptible to that kind of thinking are tending towards the Butlearian. |
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| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "Fired up" as in optimistic about the future and using it to build cool new things with it. ...is my read, but the wonderful thing about text communication is if I'm in a grumpy mood because I didn't sleep well, the other reading is also entirely possible. | |
| ▲ | pj_mukh 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >>"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 | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it gets lost in a translation somewhere. If it's boring technology, why be excited about it? I respect boring technologies and don't believe in the end of the world christian scams, either, so I'm really confused here. It's also not like I would do more work for less effort and be home by lunch. It will still be same 8 hours of doing something and be compensated to have the same general level of lifestyle with or without AI. I'm certainly not excited to have a new office chair or a coffee machine. | | |
| ▲ | pj_mukh 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >> If it's boring technology, why be excited about it? Surely, on Hackernews, we know we can get excited about technology that maybe boring to most of the public. And in this case, I think the technology has wide-ranging productivity enhancing applications Maybe your question is about why the tech billionaires are trying to get the public so excited about it? Totally different question. >> It will still be same 8 hours of doing something Yes but your 8 hours of work will serve more people. Will you see the fruits of that productivity gain? Very good question, but again, orthogonal to the usefulness of the technology. |
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| ▲ | jakebol 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Advancement of normal technologies can bring about profound conflict, I feel that is one of the main takeaways from the history of the Industrial Revolution. | | |
| ▲ | krapp 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The conflict in that case (and, I think AI) came about not from the technology or its advancement, but the use of that technology for class warfare by capitalists. I can imagine an alternate future where AI advances without all of the social, environmental and economic harm that it does, where there isn't a literal cult of neo-reactionaries using it to advance their authoritarian political agenda, where mass copyright theft isn't an issue, where the internet isn't consumed by slop and businesses aren't trying to put their workforce out on the streets as fast as possible. Where people don't literally believe it will evolve into some kind of techno-God whose judgement we should fear. Where we're not shoving it into every nook, cranny and orifice of our society, even when it doesn't work, because it's "inevitable" and we "just have to learn to live with it." A world where AI is just technology and not whatever this insanity is that it breeds in people. I wish I lived in that world, because the hacker in me finds the technology fascinating, and I'd like to be able to use it without abandoning my morals or supporting the infrastructure of fascism. | | |
| ▲ | Muromec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >The conflict in that case (and, I think AI) came about not from the technology or its advancement, but the use of that technology for class warfare by capitalists. Does this distinction matter practically? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop. Do I care if I'm the one falling from 10 meters high? | | | |
| ▲ | globalnode 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | defeating fascism should be tackled as a project called "defeating fascism" head on, rather than as "defeating their tools". ai is just such a generic tool that can be used in all sorts of ways to solve problems that are traditionally difficult to solve, thats why we're seeing it used everywhere right now. maybe once we have had our self inflicted extinction event we will put more care into teaching survivors of the importance of working together and all the other good things |
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| ▲ | worik 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, it is a tool. "Normal"? It will cause huge disruption on its way to increasing efficiency, and if we maintain our freedoms, increasing welfare. But: AI cannot do your job Your boss bought AI to do your job You're fired | | |
| ▲ | pj_mukh 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | "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... | | |
| ▲ | tbrownaw 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > In the numbers it's almost more boring than the industrial revolution. Being almost more boring than the thing that caused Malthus to become wrong is quite an accomplishment. | |
| ▲ | Muromec 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Our CEO generously offered generous 1% yearly salary adjustment to the trade unions, an RTO mandate and a plan to reduce the number of employees by 20% in a few years, despite having record earnings. It's a bluff of course and the unions will dress that clowhouse down a bit, but they weren't so brazen in the years before. |
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| ▲ | ben_w 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "Normal tech" puts people out of careers every so often, and kinda randomly. Society has benefited as everyone who isn't put out of a job significantly outnumbers those who are. I was expecting AI to put me, a software developer, out of a job after everyone else, because I thought coders would be needed to write the AI for everyone else, one job task at a time. Right now, it's looking like LLMs can translate not only English into Spanish, but business requirements into code. Sure, not perfectly, but well enough that I feel like I'm living that joke about a mechanic who charges $1 for a new bolt and $999 for knowing which bolt. #LeopardsEatingPeoplesFacesParty2026, but seriously, LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now. I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models, they're forced by economics to use the GenAI models. I hear rumblings of problems from copyeditors, translators, and mathematicians. It's affecting a lot of people at the same time, even if they can all point to ways it kinda still sucks or "lacks taste" or "has no common sense" or whatever. I can point to the models doing bad code, but I know from experience that "bad code" can win awards at the product level. Robots have been milking the cows and sorting the post for decades now. But even the first agricultural revolution had a lot of people moving out of the country and to the cities because they could no longer work on the land. Ironic that I only hear praises of AI-driven cars from one place, which has been saying "just a few years" for the last 13. The economic impact if that actually ships without any caveats would also be huge (which is something I'd want people to keep in mind if they feel like responding with how good Tesla's current version is, I've heard that for the last three versions at least). | | |
| ▲ | tjmtjmtjm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > LLMs have been able to train new AI for a while now. I admittedly am not an expert, but I don’t think this is true? At least not in the “AI is building itself” sense, which is how I interpreted it. | | | |
| ▲ | bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I hear similar from professional clothing photographers who find that even if they want to support the human models Nobody bans them from paying those models some kind of aid. Oh, they mean they want to support them with other people's money. Yeah that's not so easy. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They want to get paid enough to pay human models. Stops being "other people's money" once they get paid. | | |
| ▲ | bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Get paid enough by who and for what reason? Do they realize that the money has to come from someone who decides to pay it out of their own free will? |
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