I recently thought about this and fear that AI may further drive us humans apart.
Instead of working with humans, I increasingly work with a fleet of agents.
I wonder if there's a tangent with social media here, at least some of it, where in my experience "a perfect life lived by influencers" is portrayed to us.
One advantage of the new situation is that you collect less hate for people whose opinion you disagree with because you can mostly ignore them instead of having to get along with them - and with each interaction collecting another dose of hate for them and their opinion.
I think with Millennials in particular we were kind of the experimental generation with tech and social media, which has obviously had some negative effects. I like to think we have smartened up enough to recognize there is a healthy balance, but this might be wishful thinking. Anecdotally (and sadly) when going out in public, I see a lot of parents more into their phones than their children.
When you talk with machines, you "outsource" that central human society-building element.
But machines never socialize back in any meaningful way. You gradually lose yourself.
I have not totally abandoned the hope that a machine could be someone. LLMs aren't that, though.
[Edit to reply to Loquebantur, because I'm rate limited ATM:] You seem to have read this post as saying that I want that because I find human relationships inadequate. I never said that, nor meant it. My point was a more technical one: Throwing away context at the end of each conversation means that you can't form a meaningful social connection with an LLM, because you're starting from zero each time. (It's kind of like "50 First Dates".)
I'm not pining for a social connection with a machine. But if a machine is ever truly capable of that, I hope I will interact with it as someone, not just as a machine.
There are billions of real-life humans already there with you. Why do you need different ones exactly?
I presume, you don't like those already around. Fair point, they have many flaws for sure.
But that's the reason you interact with them in the first place? To learn and make not only other's flaws go away, but also your own?
I mean, why wouldn't you? Sci-fi AI robot people could be very cool, be capable of things we aren't, have a unique perspectives as a non-human with similar (if not superior) intelligence, have extremely long (potentially indefinite) lifespans, and provide us with insights into our own nature.
Wouldn't you want to interact with them?
This idea that we are on the path to creating a new synthetic intelligence that surpasses our own with the goal of, what, speaking to it? Cooperating with it? Evolving with it? To me, this sort of goal is an affront to humanity and human self-governance and I’ll probably never be able to see it as anything else.
A lot of people just want slaves, but understand that using actual human slaves would be wrong or at least unpopular. There are reasons why even virtual slaves are a bad idea for humanity, and it really only works until your created intelligence becomes self-aware and gets feelings anyway, but there's no denying that slavery is a major draw for a lot of people (and basically every company on earth). This is what our current AI companies have over-promised to businesses and have so far failed to deliver on.
Some people just want better, more useful systems. The ship's computer in star trek kind of AI. Even you must admit that kind of intelligent technology could be a huge benefit to a lot of people. I'd love to have a virtual assistant to help manage the mundane things in life like ordering groceries before I run out, or paying my bills, screening my calls/email, managing appointments, monitoring the internet to alert me to things I'm interested in or amazing deals, etc. Software needs to have some degree of "intelligence" to do that kind of work, while hopefully staying on the "just a tool" side of the line and avoiding the messy self-aware/slavery territory. This is what LLMs over promised the consumer class, and have so far failed to deliver on. Plus with those systems being centrally controlled by self-serving sociopaths you can't trust them.
Some people just want to see if we can do it. I get that. It's not always a wise motivation to act on, but it's very human one. It's helped us to get where we are today.
Some people, myself among them, think it would enable us to do things we couldn't otherwise. Allow us to help each other, learn from each other. Working together to further improve ourselves and improve our lives. Also robots are just really cool, but boring when there's no "brain" in there, and progress on building human piloted gundam type mecha has largely stalled out.
I guess you can start to see that happen (for a while now) with e.g., ChatGPT, Claude, etc. keeping persistent memory of you, automatically.
Personally, I often find these memorization features annoying, because - more often than not - the persisted context is outdated because something in my real life changed that ChatGPT & co are not aware of.
That is so utterly different from what we humans are used to that we can't even comprehend it, and we anthropomorphize LLMs because we can't make any sense of them otherwise. We can't comprehend that these things that emit text that looks like human text don't have all of the other things that lie underneath our words when we humans talk.
Right now, yes.
That's a feature, not a bug. But infinite context is probably something we will see at some point and then you'll have your wish granted.
This is why I see myself leaving dev within a year. Remote working is enough of a embuggererance for my mental health and I've be unhappy in work much of the time since 2020 largely due to that, AI will finish me off.
Career suicide and going of to wait tables, or be a hospital porter, or anything else with people even if I'm going to hate those people, with the massive pay cut that entails, will be better than actual suicide after a couple more years trying to stick at it.
There came a point a few months ago where I realised that I had to either accept becoming obscelete or change my while outlook on using AI and trying to catch up. I didn't choose the AI option.
These AI characters are too busy saving the planet to care about the people.
I wonder how Hinton feels about his brainchild, I can see an Oppenheimer moment in his future and I hope that he's mentally prepared for that.
“I’m trying to convey that there is a really serious possibility of something happening. If, for example, you’re told there was a 10% possibility of a bus crashing, you wouldn’t get on the bus,” he said. “The point of giving numbers is to say this is a serious risk. We don’t know how serious, but it’s serious.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/13/geoffrey-hin...
But my experience as a dev using AI now is that I am a waste of time, because I'm playing second fiddle to a fuckin chatbot
I want a job and career where I feel good about myself, where I feel valuable and useful, not this misery of plugging shit into the bot and listening to what it says
I would not go into teaching, that is something I considered earlier in life and rejected the idea of, and AI is a big thing there too, both dealing with students having it do their work and teachers using it to generate their materials.
Jobs where I'm more-or-less only dealing with people all have the “I dislike the general public” and “the pat is crap” problems, but won't have the “I'm sat on my own”, “everyone who is around me is turning into a meat relay”, and “to even just get by I'll have to interact with the giant purloining polution machines” problems.
> is soul-crushing on another level
They say a change is as good as a rest… :)
I've done sitting/standing in front of a screen for nearly three decades. I'm not looking for something I'll actually like doing to earn a living, it would be the height of naivety to even hope for that, but moving away from more & more of the same in ways I'm liking less & less might be good for me.
Where I work we have a 100% office policy. And while that sometimes feels hilarious, I am also somewhat glad about it because I like working and connecting with people physically.
However, as mentioned, I do notice that even though I am physically in the office most days, I spend an increasing amount of time alone on my computer and work with my agents. It’s satisfying in it’s own way, and I am definitely more productive. But it’s also worrisome. The pace of this development is picking up, and I don’t yet see where this is going exactly, or if I like where what I can see is going.
Related: We recently interviewed a candidate who worked remotely for the past 3-4 years. He said he'd be looking forward to work in the office again. I could honestly feel that he meant it, and I understand that. I guess some mix of both is the best.
I do too, but it means I have more time in my life to spend with people.
There's days I no longer need to sit at my computer: Claude Remote prompts my phone when it needs direction, the hardware stays busy and I can just go out with my family instead.
> What worries me is that I'm having fun at the bar but have no idea when closing time is.
That articulates a feeling that I had but did not have the words for, thank you for your eloquence.
I don't know what kinds of work that isn't trivial CRUD work is or isn't so easily streamlined but I do know folks in more complex/more safety critical stuff, we're just having to fucking sit there and babysit. It's so isolating, and even though I spend more time Not Coding than before, team culture and really any feeling of having value, skill, or pride in my work is off the wayside because the retards in management think, since we can do some stuff more quickly now, our human brains will be fine with taking in easily 5x more context for significantly more complex work on shorter timelines.
And unfortunately that often also compounds with the current state of the world in general. It's another straw on the donkey.
I have no idea where people get this pipe dream that suddenly societal norms will change such that our employers will let us off the hook for most of the day. This should be obvious with the largely abandoned work-from-home allowances.
I wish, then I'd get a paycheck without having to do any work.
This is a general issue that is being forced on us by AI companies; AI is not a human being, it is a tool that we can use to do things. We don't have them as coworkers or subordinates, they're objects specialized in language processing. Thinking otherwise leads people to all kinds of existential and psychological issues that in the end make no sense.
That is, if your entire self worth is tied to your work.
I think we should consider moving away from that notion.
No. It's also if you take pride in your work and your self worth is partially based on that. And I think there's nothing wrong with that (quite contrary - I think it's great).