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Comment by threethirtytwo | Hacker News Reader

Ai genuinely is incredible. Think about it.

It’s just the hype train is excessive and in everyone’s faces and anything that’s like that genuinely becomes hated.

Imagine if I saved the lives of hundreds of people everyday. And I would throw this fact in your face everyday via TikTok, email spam, YouTube, social media.

Pretty soon you’ll become sick of it. You’ll not care for anyones life. Thats what is happening with ai. Ai is genuinely from a logical standpoint, incredible. But all of that is diluted by overhype.

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Except AI isnt saving lives. It isnt even usually improving lives. For the most part it is being used to justify laying people off, to heap more responsibility on those that remain, to destroy the livelihood of artists, and to flood public spaces with slop. Even if the capabilities are incredible, the average lived experience of it is awful.

It's not the hype we are tired of. We're tired of the hype being wrong, and pro-AI people being quasi-religious zealots about, while ignoring the massive costs and harms. And if you question the AI dogma, you are accused of being either a Luddite who doesn't understand, or a victim of a Chinese influence campaign.

The hype is not wrong. It’s just too much. Navier stokes and hundreds of other unsolvable math problems were solved. That is genuinely real and worth the hype.

My entire company now uses AI to code. Nobody writes code by hand at my company anymore. At this point if you can’t see how incredible and horrifying it is then you’re delusional.

I get it though. One year ago you’d be right. The paradigm shift is happening so fast people haven’t updated their priors. What you believed to be true just changed. It flipped several times this year and people who keep up to date had to completely flip their understanding of the world and the nature of AI several times. This is not an easy thing to do and thus many people like you just missed the boat.

There’s no doubt that there is a financial ai bubble. But that bubble is completely orthogonal to the complete paradigm shift of the actual capabilities of AI.

I think the point is not that AI is not great, but it's less than what was promised.

Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course. Is is the thing that was promised to come out 10 years ago? Far from it.

If you expect AI to do everything for you, it's still not there. And if you're sceptic or even neutral to this topic- AI is just causing more problems (especially in security) by the day.

> Very good analogy with Tesla FSD. Is it great tech- yes, of course.

Not of course. I'll call it good to great the day it gets beyond level 2, and no sooner.

And LLMs are similar in a lot of use cases.

> Navier stokes and hundreds of other unsolvable math problems were solved

Does that put food on the table? It does not, to the contrary, this AI thing is taking food off the table for many, many people.

Stop using computers, electricity, cars, machinery, agriculture. Each of those took away thr jobs of millions.

I don't think you know much about actual economic history here.

Did they take food off the table from people initially or didnthey not? Electric lighting certainly must have killer the job of the gas lamp lighter or at least forced him to change. Cars obviously impacted horse drivers.

They did not took food off the table from people. They did not all caused mass unemployment and their goal was not to achieve mass unemployment. Which is literally stated goal of AI.

There is no need to argue by imagined history. We have real one.

Are you saying motorcars didn't cause mass unemployment among horse carriage drivers? Or that electric lighting didn't kill the gas lighter's job? Or that agriculture still requires nearly 70% of the population? You are making up completely imaginary histories with zero numbers or examples now. All labor saving tech were implicitly or explicitly sold as a means of reducing requirement on a given number of workers per amount of work. That has always been the point of technology from the industrial revolution forward. But you have special reasons to villainize and call AI companies ultra evil any more than any other technological advance throughout history.

No they did not. They did replaced them, slowly. They also created quite a lot of new jobs. No, no additional mass unemployment.

AI people also overestimate amount of horses in the population.

> That has always been the point of technology from the industrial revolution forward

This is straightforwardly not true.

What do you think was the point of tech if not to replace rhe amount of labor needed for a given amount of production? Why do you think luddites were smashing looms? They were wrong then and modern luddites are juat as wrong today. Again you had zero figures or data and completely ignored my agricultural data because you prefer paranoid villanizing imaginations not reality.

Electric lighting actually did the inverse; Because of electric lighting, people quickly became overworked, and that's what directly formed to the creation and empowerment of unions.

Yes so why do you feel the newest round of technology won't also end up creating more work and jobs? The people being replaced by electric lighting and motorcars would have found it unimaginable too that it will lead to more jobs instead of killing large sectors of jobs without replacement.

Because nobody was 'replaced' by electric lighting. Motor vehicles did take jobs, but they created more jobs. And you could argue AI will lead to that too, but the primary goal of AI is complete invalidation of human work and creativity. Not only that, the fields AI touches upon are sweeping and all-encompassing. AI may create more jobs, but I'd be skeptical if it leads to more jobs than it takes. Unemployment is already a massive issue these days, and AI certainly doesn't help.

The effects of all of those those changes that you mentioned were not that drastic when it came to getting food off the table of those millions of people, I'm saying that those millions won't remain like sheep and will make things right sooner rather than later, that's what always happens (see Polanyi, for example).

But, yeah, you AI zealots on forums like this one can keep thinking that we, those millions, will just remain like sheep taken to the slaughterhouse while you enjoy your higher comps while in the service of today's AI masters.

You are the zealot who got frenzied into psychosis by one of the biggest accelerators of math and science that we invented.

And changes were in fact drastic, thr fact that countries like UK and Germany for several years became the most powerful countries in the europe due to the industrial revolution.

Solving abstract mathematical puzzles and enganhing in pointless research into substances for crnturies gave us ultimately the Haber-Bosch process, which literally keeps the human race from starving. You would prefer humans starve just to protect som jobs.

On the topic of farming, that used to be the occupation of most of thr population in olden times, today its barely 2 percent. Agriculture tech has already killed millions of jobs.

Human race is still starving. Starvation still exist, just not in richer countries.

>You would prefer humans starve just to protect some jobs.

a.) What are you talking about here. b.) the stated goal of AI companies is to make majority of people obsolete, dependent and ... well starving.

No amount of technology can solve the starvation in those countries. The starvation in those countries aside from physical blockades and wars like in Palestine if not usually due to lack of tech or agriculture. In any case, even if the land is bad, Israel itself is another example of crap land turned fertile by new technologies they were forced to invent during the course of the 40s and ahead by scientists like Bass. Here you want to block the biggest engine of technological and science development that has ever been invented.

The AI companies do what they must to market themselves, there is no reason to think it should be much different from other past mass disruptive technologies (today agriculture is down to just 2% of the population from 60-80% earlier for instance).

And if it solved most labor and jobs, then what? Would you rather block it than try to see how we can transition to a economic and government system that will actually let us enjoy it.

And I doubt we will ever run out of problems, there is always outer space as an endless source of new problems.

Agriculture as a job went from 70% of the population to under 2% in 200 years. Why are you not complaining about agriculture tech causing mass job killings?

Literally every technological advance till now has led to massive abundance and increase of food, and of the carrying capacity of agriculture itself till now. You have to explain why you think now technology will do the opposite of what it has done for millenia continually increasing the amount of and variety of food available worldwide. You have to show how this engine of science and tech research will do the literal opposite of what science has always done to food availability.

Well agriculture was not selling itself with "we will nake humans obsolete, replace all humans and make all people except few richest poor". Agriculture improvements did not came with "hahaha you looser artists you are not needed anymore, all art will be done with AI you loosers".

Agriculture selling point was and is "we will feed you"

I am also really not interested in alternative history. Nor in debate where people who know literally nothing about actual historical events make up fictional past out of imagination and movies and use that as argument.

> You have to explain why you think now technology will do the opposite of what it has done for millenia continually increasing the amount of and variety of food available worldwide

The destruction and desperation for average person is what AI companies sell. It is what THEY claimed will happen.

What is there alternative abour agriculture going from 70 percent to 2 percent of the population? Why do you think 8t had to be spelled out to the jobs that were killed that we are replacing you. The inventor of the tractor, thresher, etc didn't have to see what the point of these techs were. And it already made megafarms more profitable than small plots. Again, you failed to prove why technology wouls suddenly do the opposite of what it has done for centuries. You still failed to prove how technology is to blame for corript countries or countries being bombarded wnd blockaded. Instead you lie and imply technology causes starvation.

You should be the one proving things, but all you do is making claims you clearly made with 0 knowledge of economic history. You are talking about periods of booms and new jobs.

I did not blamed technology for goverments. I simply pointed out that starving is not technological problem. Which was your assumption.

Starvation is a tech problem too, without haber bosch we would probably had mass starvations in history. Without Israel inventing new forms of soil treatment and irrigation, the country wouldn't support agriculture at any reasonable rate. Why would you want to block the biggest killer of starvation as if doing that would solve the problem of corrupt governments?

You literally have given zero numbers till now. I gave actual numbers. You have provided nothing more than imaginary fluff without any data. You make up imaginary ideas in your head then claim someone providing actual numbers is making up stuff.

Whats the boom in a job going from 70 percent to 1 to 2 percent?

You are the one with zero numbers and imaginary histories, its hilarious to see you accuse me of making alternative histories.

I have actual history. Improvements in agriculture did not went along with high unemployment.

The selection of agriculture specifically is completely odd here.

Yes so why do you think if a job going from 70 to less than 3 percent hasn't caused mass unemployment worldwide, thr current newest tech should be any different? All new revolutionary techs feel devastating the first time they are introduced.

Silicon valley wants me to be completely 100% dependent on Silicon Valley to do anything. That's their goal, it's what they've been working toward this whole time.

"Trust me bro", they say. They have new and dangerously powerful tools to get me to trust them harder. Me, one of the dumb fucks.

Anyone who believes in infinite imaginary beings and imaginary things that supposed being wants you to do has no right to call anyone else religious. If you are not one of those, then a meaningful discussion can begin.

> Ai genuinely is incredible. Think about it.

It is literally incredible, that is, the claims people make about it are not believable. It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.

> It simply does not do the magical stuff people claim it does.

What are you even talking about? You can see it do the magic yourself for like $20. The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses disproof for exampe is straight up on github right now for you to look at.

What magical thing are you waiting for? It is literally currently revolutionaizing all engineering work.

It's just fantastic, to think the cost of running the Stasi was once 20% of national GDP and now that same oppressive all seeing surveillance and data collation is available for pennies on the dollar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi

For clarity, I'm more or less indifferent to AI, I do understand how it all works - it's humans with AI I don't trust and that I don't see being adequately reigned in.

> The lean proof of the exponential time hypotheses

The what now? I don't know what that is. Can AI help me put food on the table and pay my bills? That thing I can understand.

Did the centuries of work of scientists and philophers in chemistry put food on any groups table? Do you think haber bosch would have just dropped out of the sky one day randomly?

I can understand a triangle and how come Pitagora’s work might have been worthwhile, but I cannot even begin to understand what this Navier thing is about. You seem to believe in higher maths putting food on our tables, care to delve more into that?

Also a reminder of how come the post-WW2 USSR was a technocratic-scientist state/society and even so, by the end of its existence it had failed at this basic task of feeding its population.

200 years ago you would have said the same about research into optics or number theory. How would you have known back then what these two lead to?

I...I am out of words now.

If you don't know how and what kinds of math is needed in every tech and science we use, then I have nothing to say. I should have recognized when you said this and stopped interacting further.

The reason USSR failed was because its economic system was as we know in hindsight incorrect...and literally unscientific theories like Lysenkoism foisted by the government. If you wanted to argue the USSR failed due to science and tech, then you would be wrong. You also have to prove the USA didn't succeed due to tech.

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