Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistercheph | Hacker News Reader

write down "LLM's will cure cancer" on sticky note, put it on your desk and recite that every day, a hundred times and in the bathroom if you have to

View on HN

you're really crashing out about this huh

I know I am, though maybe not as visibly so as your parent. Us anti-AI Luddites are arguing against a massive propaganda machine with trillions of dollars on the line. It is not easy, and it is mentally draining. Especially since AI-companies are behaving in an obviously anti-human, anti-science, and anti-industry ways for their own short term profits.

And worse yet, we have seen this before (albeit on a lesser scale). GMO was supposed to solve global hunger, Carbon capture was supposed to solve climate change, etc. etc. These were obvious lies and propaganda back then as much as the lies where AI are supposed to help humanity today. It gets tiring, and at some point we simply crash out.

unfortunately technology will never fix humanity's tendency to ruin itself (see: war, climate change, etc; all of which we know the solutions for ie 'stop killing people' 'stop using oil' etc) but that is not a fault of the technology itself (gmo, carbon capture, crispr, llms, etc)

This is simply not true. Plenty of technology exists which has helped humanity unambiguously. But there is a difference between good and helpful technology and a grift. GMO could have been helpful but it was mostly just a grift, GMO solving world hunger was always an obvious marketing stunt, and it worked, even though many of us (particularly on the political left) saw it as such and called it out as such. Ditto Carbon capture.

AI is currently the grift of choice.

Also I fundamentally disagree that there is any tendency for humanity to ruin it self. There are perverse intensives, which rewards undesirable behavior, there are unfair, undemocratic, or otherwise hostile powerstructures which allows one class of peoples to exploit another class of peoples. And some technology sometimes plays a pivotal role in maintaining or furthering these hostile power structures/perverse intensives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com