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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> This enhances my work. However other people seem to feel threatened.

I wish people would stop spreading this as if it were the main reason. It’s a weak argument and disconnected from reality, like those people who think the only ones who dislike cryptocurrencies are the ones who didn’t become rich from it.

There are plenty of reasons to be against the current crop of AI that have nothing to do with employment. The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking, the decrease in quality of life (e.g. people who live next to noisy data centres)… Not everything is about jobs and money, the world is bigger than that.

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Don't forget the fact that most of the time, the AI tools don't actually work well enough to be worth the trouble.

AI meeting notes are great! After you spend twice as long editing out the errors, figuring out which of the two Daves was talking each time, and removing all the unimportant side-items that were captured in the same level of detail as the core decision.

AI summaries are great - if you're the sort of person that would use a calculator that's wrong 10% of the time. The rest of us realize that an hour spent reading something is more rewarding and useful than an hour spent double checking an AI summary for accuracy.

AI as Asbestos isn't even an apt comparison, both are toxic and insidious, but Asbestos at least had a clear and compelling use case at the time. It solved some problems both better and cheaper than available alternatives. AI solves problems poorly and at higher cost, and people call you "threatened" if you point that out.

AI summaries are great for orgs that dont do them (AI better than nothing) but not that great for those orgs that have an agenda and a note taker. What is very rare. Bur better quality

No way. Anything written down becomes the source of truth 3+ months later. Either write it down correctly or don’t write it down at all.

No, having no summary can be more valuable than having a wrong summary.

The problem is that the wrong summary will be treated as the truth, as the original recording will of course have been deleted after a grace period. Oh, you're looking into a way to clean up hanging child processes spawned by your CI worker? Guess it's now on the record that "rvba mentions looking into the best way to kill his children without leaving a trace"! There's no way that could possibly be misinterpreted a few years down the line, right?

Asbestos was a great product! We used it absolutely everywhere for a reason: fireproof, a great insulator, and you can literally make fabric out of it. If it wasn't for the whole lung cancer thing, it would've still been as common as plastic.

AI, on the other hand? Seems like we're mostly getting cancer.

Ngl I feel like most people only accept these criticisms of AI because they’re against AI to begin with. If you look at the claims, they fall apart pretty quickly. The environment issue is negligible and has less to do with AI than just computing in general, the consolidation of resources assumes that larger more expensive AI models will outcompete smaller local models and that’s not necessarily happening, the spread of misinformation doesn’t seem to have accelerated at all since AI came about (probably because we were already at peak misinformation and AI can’t add much more), the decay in critical thinking is far overblown if not outright manipulated data.

About the only problem here is the increase of surveillance and you can avoid that by running your own models, which are getting better and better by the day. The fact that people are so willing to accept these criticisms without much scrutiny is really just indicative of prior bias

Would you say there's at least fifty percent of people who are informed about these?

It’s not clear to me what exactly you’re asking, but I’ll try to answer it anyway. I’d say that of the people who are against AI, fewer than 50% (to use your number) aren’t against it solely (or primarily, or at all) because they feel threatened for their job. Does that answer your question?

I meant more about this part:

> The threat to the environment, the consolidation of resources by the ones at the top, the spread of misinformation and lies, the acceleration of mass surveillance, the decay of critical thinking

My question was that how many people are actually concerned about those things? If you think about it it's kind of obvious but it takes conscious effort to see it and I suspect not many people do.

anecdotal but it seems many people are concerned about those things

I know, right? And very often I have the notion that that these things are obvious concerns for all sensible people. Except that lately I've been noticing how for some reason I only get that notion as long as I'm regularly consuming one information-containing product or another.

When I turn off my browser, video player, and ebook reader, outside it's a bit of a hellscape really, I really can't wait to get back online where people care about the real things, such as systemic collapse. But while I'm disconnected I do notice how the only thing that people seem to actually be enjoying right now are those self-same glass beads and plague blankets of Big Tech that we're dissing while trapped within them.

Yes.

Source: My ass.

Would it make their concerns less valid however if it wasn't?

You might have read that wrong.

Of course not. I think more people should be aware of this especially talking about the majority who are outside of our own bubble. If you go to a random place and interact with a random person, you will likely encounter the dominating group, and that, I think, directly corelates to what is going to happen next.

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