The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it(newrepublic.com) |
The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it(newrepublic.com) |
As it stands though the whole "the public hates AI" is about as credible as that phase from a decade ago where random tweets were used to justify any position they wanted to.
I don’t know a single non-tech person who has positive feelings about AI in that sphere.
The only people who still look positively at AI, are either the ones working on it/building something with it, or the ones who are profiting from it, kinda like crypto few years ago, and just like how crypto is mostly immediately associated with scams now, I imagine something similar will be associated with AI soon.
Even other tech people that are not directly in the AI industry hate AI, due to all the shortages in chips and prices increasing across the hardware board, from gamers to sysadmins to hobbyists, I mean, the rpi are almost like a fully fledged NUC few years ago.
Edit: to add, did AI improved the average person life? Nope, if not increasing the costs, or tracking and violating their privacy, it did flood the internet with slop, or a frustrating useless AI chat support.. from an average person perspective, it added none to their quality of life, it didn’t make things cheaper, it didn’t improve their travels, it didn’t magically made them teleport, and so on, instead, AI was used for all hostile purposes against average person. Even from technical perspective, have we seen any breakthrough in tech given AI is a “superior” assistant? Nope, software is more shitty and buggy now, and SaaS are even increasing the prices (probably to pay for AI tokens), software developers are saying coding isn’t fun anymore, hardware designs didn’t improve, governments processes still have the beuqacratic system plus AI. Unlike when automation was introduced decades ago, where people did notice an improvement in their quality of life.
Upsides of AI: I can ask it if my farts are caused by the celery I ate earlier
I take your other points, but I can't see the connection there. I've heard that they increase electricity rates in many cases (poorly managed electric utilities that can't build out grid capacity without raising rates for everyone), but not that they're affecting housing.
Next to that there is net congestion. The energy grid is currently critical, if you add a data center that means you will not be able to connect 20 to 30 newly build homes to power. There are currently new homes that are waiting for a connection to the grid before people can live there.
Space. In the densest country of Europe (non-microstate), a hyper scale data center could have been a neighborhood.
Latest point, maybe not the strongest, is construction workers. While construction workers building a data center are different from construction workers building homes, it doesn't really help with the labor shortages in construction if electricians are all busy building data centers.
I've found that LLMs don't give good advice regarding diet. They just agree with whatever your hunch is.
ChatGPT agreed with my hopeful self that I got diahrreah from VR sickness as opposed to my poor food handling, which it turned out to be
History has repeatedly taught us that violence is usually the answer. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but it is what it is.
It's just that most voters don't agree with you.
... and in a classic example, apparently the mere mention of concern regarding the rise in US political violence got this thread flagged. Where can you have a discussion anymore?
Many people here would call Putin's assassin a hero, the important distinguishing factor is whether it's a clear societal good or bad. If it's unclear then it's assumed bad.
I am not disagreeing with you here. But platitudes do nothing to convince people. You need to actually explain why the world is a better place with X politician in it, because it does actually matter.
Once you start shooting, everyone starts shooting. Bystanders get hit. Companies start defending their businesses with private armies. The economy collapses. We all lose.
Countries high in political violence are the worst places in the world to live.
I am not condoning violence, but claiming it is not a politically effective tactic is disingenuous. I get that columnists are trying to cover their asses, but still.
Violence is the reason slavery ended in the US. Violence brought us civil rights laws. Gay rights. Women's rights. Labor laws. Environmental protection laws.
Every right granted by default to white Christian gentlemen at the founding of this great nation had to be taken in blood by everyone else. That's just how America is. It cannot be trusted to live up to its own standards except at gunpoint.
When, where and how violence is justifiable is a different question, of course. But the premise that "Naturally, violence is never an answer, nor is it a politically effective tactic" is simply false. If violence were politically ineffective, authoritarian states wouldn't use so much of it.
They need to accept far more than that. They need to accept that they may not be able to "create a genuine technology that benefits the public" at all, and that they therefore may be required to stop completely and totally dissolve all their operations if it turns out that is what is best.
This is creative destruction in a whole new sense. Just chugging through genuine (or human) creativity, then training on human prompting, then finally ascending near the cluster of Anthropic/AWS nuclear power plants. And people pay for the pleasure.
And yet, as the will of the people is ignored to the benefit of but few, violence will become the answer.
2. flooding social media with obviously fake ai content
3. only billionaires benefiting from it and gloating about it .
Anyone who was in AI before 2022 can tell you about the last cycle that went from 2012-2018 or so when the metaverse failed, but we got tensorflow, pytorch, gpgpus
The cool thing is that every hype cycle generates a lot of really good new AI tech and integrations that persist. This time we got GPTs and diffusion sand splatting
I think this previous cycle will be seen as the penultimate with the next one permanently improving with no scale back.
We’ll be fine. We have survived every winter
Nicki Minaj has factor 10 listens over a band like Tool. The money will pick the close to zero production cost for 9/10ths of the viewers every time and the platforms will prioritise the many.
I very much doubt boycott has enough weight in the long run to hold back generated content from taking over most of the bigger spaces. We've already seen this happen in recent years with staged content mopping up a lot of the most viewed content by manipulating potential viewers. Cheap influencer content has similarly squeezed cultivated content ad revenue through volume and consistency on YouTube.
If you want change then the route would have to be a legal one, not a social movement. Especially since we've mostly forgotten how to do the groundwork for social movements, leaving us all hand wringing and shouting into the void.
Nothing at this point will make people believe AI is good for the masses.
What will need to happen for people to like AI ? I say they will get real $ month after month to cover more than the inflation, not the dumb tax deductions Trump harps on. In this case, maybe 1,000 USD per month adjusted for inflation yearly from AI will end this trend.
Why a payment ? All they see is the wealth of the top 1% increasing almost exponentially where they are struggling to pay their 'fixed' expenses.
In reality since 2008, the rich has been cashing in while workers have been footing the bill. That is the big issue.
billions use windows and gmail but have a poor opinion of microsoft and google both for obvious reasons. I expect the same will be true of AI platforms and the usual suspects behind them.
As we do this, we promise that if we set enough houses on fire, we'll build hell. And imagine how rich we'll be if we sell fuel to keep the hell we built running.
What I really hate is agentic customer support, sales etc. - when you have to use them you realize how stupid the workflows, tool call, MCP, and all that garbage that is glued is just to reduce costs instead of churn.
PS: Ironically I'm working on coding an "agentic platform" for the product suite and their backend services. I simply don't feel confident about the product I'm building but I guess it is paying my bills for the moment
What violence brought about women's rights or environmental protection laws? I suppose protestors destroyed the fur market.
This is an insane regulation, and I wonder if it was passed by NIMBYs whose actual goal is to prevent the construction of housing near them.
The municipality bought the emissions rights from the farmers that held those 8 cows and the farmers then had to move/remove/slaughter 8 cows.
Welcome to The Netherlands.
If the Dutch government was a bit smarter, they would buy out the farmers and create a mega-campus for ASML, including housing for all those expats.
Edit: I stand corrected, last month ASML was granted permission to expand by 20.000 employees.
The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income.
The other two critiques are trickier. The first is the environmental impact of AI, and the response is difficult. Doing work to make it more efficient, and continuing to develop cleaner energy sources is paramount. Taxing and efficiency requirements might be a start. We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive. It has to be non-negotiable if massive energy usage for AI is to continue.
The last is the REAL conversation, and I don’t know the answer. How do we handle AI doing creative work? How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI?
I guess there is another issue, related to the last one, which is how do we deal with the ability to use AI to mislead and commit fraud at scale. How do we deal with not being able to trust what actually said/done by a human and what is AI pretending to be human? How do we avoid and mitigate the ability for AI to generate a massive amount of custom content that is used to mislead and defraud people? So much of our current mitigation strategy relies on the assumption that it takes a lot of effort and time to do certain things that can now be done instantly thousands of times?
This was the argument about robots. It did not pan out. No taxes materialized. Robots and Automated Machines have not shared productivity. In fact, things like self-checkout has spread the labor load to the customer, instead of the company.
>We have the technology to produce energy in sustainable ways, but it is expensive
AI Datacenters should be completely sustainably self-powered. Full stop. We did not spend decades bringing down the cost of power only to have it all hoovered up by robber barons who "need" it to be the first immortal AI God. We did not install water treatment plants to bring down our water usage rates just to feed the machine spirit.
>How do we treat AI creative work? How much creative work do we feel comfortable handing over to AI?
Someone said it as a joke, but I want AI to be doing my dishes and sorting my laundry while I write books and compose music. I don't want AI writing books and composing music so I have more time to do my dishes and sort my laundry.
Well then we should maybe ask ourselves why RealityTV gets more views than well written work.
People who bring up basic income need to get serious about the numbers involved because I never see it. It's not a realistic solution.
The question that always pops up for me when it comes to UBI applied to the current capitalist system: even if you did actually come up with the money somehow (which is a pretty huge if as you say), once everyone has X “base money” per month, doesn’t that mean the cost of living (specifically renting) will rise to match this new “base”?
If we go back to a 60% corporate tax rate, for sure.
Almost definitionally it would. If society is saving a bunch of money on all that saved labor, that extra value is still there, it just needs to be appropriately redistributed
- employ you at 60k/yr
- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr
It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.
* A job guarantee like we had during the great depression
* Lowering retirement age
* Raise minimum wage
* Expanding medicare to everyone
It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be wildly deflationary so there's no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff or paying people more. Spend spend spend, baby!
Ah youre worried it cant do that? Maybe it is mostly smoke and mirrors then.
The pay levels are not comparable because you are also recompensed with time. You may choose to spend your time in a number of ways that you find rewarding that also reduce your expenses. Making your own meals, clothes, furniture, beer, wine etc. There are a lot of people who would enjoy doing these things but are too time poor to do so.
Your expenses also reduce by the amount you must spend in order to make yourself available to work. Travel, work clothes, medical certificates when sick. You can spend a lot in order to be paid.
If you want a world with a reasonable distribution of income levels. It stands to reason that those receiving more right now should receive less. Certainly, the absolute wealthiest should reduce the most, but on a global scale, it is hard to defend that those in the top 10% of incomes should retain their position.
The proposal for how much a universal income should pay is a variable to be argued itself. I can certainly see it being argued for at a lower level than ultimately desired since something is better than none.
In a sense the end state of a universal income in an equitable world would be remarkably simple. The income available divided by the world's population,
Those reviving more than their share now may not be happy about it, but I'm not sure they have a right to their larger portion either.
From this perspective, the main irritation of AI is that it is the biggest, most intrusive case of "some rich guy is messing with my life". This is driven largely from the willingness of a small number of rich people to lose large amounts of money shoving AI down everyone's throats in the hope that that will eventually lead to them recouping those losses.
I believe a significant amount of AI criticism is really about this, and that means we need to resolve the overall issues of wealth inequality and economic skewing. People would be much less angry about AI if its development and ownership were more diffuse, and if the patterns of its use were more directly connected to its current observable abilities, rather than based on what some group of insiders thinks about how much its stocks may go up in the future.
Every call for UBI should be qualified with two estimates:
1) How much money you think UBI will pay out
2) How much money you think the tax will generate
Creating a UBI program with AI taxes sounds like a clean solution to something until you do any math.
If we estimate today’s AI revenues across all the big providers at $100B annually (a little high) and divide by the population of the US, I get around $24 per month per person.
So a 100% tax on AI plans would allow us to give UBI of about 80 cents per day.
Even 10X the revenues wouldn’t make bring that to parity with UBI expectations. A 100% tax would also be an incredible gift to foreign AI companies that could offer similar services for half the price to everyone else in the world.
And AI "Ikea-fies" art and creativity. It doesn't get rid of it. Of course you can get a generic table from IKEA, but for a real unique piece, you need to go to a real artist. Always.
The real main critique is for AI jobs that are a one-to-one replacement, your taxi driver, your dock worker etc. I don't think UBI is a viable solution (I used to) but nothing replaces the community and status that a real job gives you. This is going to be a tough one.
A lot of this will both cost money AND require people to change their jobs, their investments, their equipment, ... And they hate it.
Everyone, including governments will have to adapt.
And to add insult to injury, everything comes from the US and it's really expensive.
1. Lack of memory/continuity
2. Lack of agency
3. Lack of self-awareness
Based on my understanding of the basic 'loop' of an LLM, solutions for these may be decades off or not possible. Which leads me to the fourth problem:
4. Lack of compute
To get anywhere near AGI we need massive context windows. The whole thing is a mess.
I was talking to Claude and ChatGPT, trying to fix an issue with a simple function in Rust, which is returning a boolean depending on day of week and time of day. The logic looked ok to me, but tests were failing. Notably, my real world data derived tests were succeeding, while brute-force/comprehensive tests written by Claude were failing. I wanted those "just to be sure". Both Claude and ChatGPT were spinning their wheels, introducing fixes, then undoing prior fixes, so on and so forth. They also updated tests. We were going from one failure to another, while they confidently reassured me that "this is the fix", they found the "crucial bug" etc. etc.
Turned out my logic was correct from the beginning. My tests were correct. Claude's tests were broken. I realized this by writing my own brute force test. Just a simple loop with asserts and printlns to see what is failing. I did what the machine was supposed to do for me. In less than 5 minutes I fine tuned the test to actually check what it was supposed to be checking and voila. The "fast" thinking machine episode took me 2 hours and only produced frustration. Sorry I should learn to speak the language - AI reduced my development velocity :)
The only poverty I see coming is from collapse of quality after these dumb machines are used to replace people, who actually know what they are doing.
Perhaps we should force companies to return each and every byte of stolen data to their owners.
Just as a good for thought, looking back into history, during the late 1920s, mass production had a critical impact on Art Deco [1]. Artists were divided on the question if mass-produced art (using new industrial methods) could have a quality similar to hand-crafted art. It is clear that different people will have different opinion on the subject.
The technology is not there yet, but one example of mass production from AI would be book adaptation into movies. I'm sure that there are many other examples hard to predict that might: empower people, degrade art quality, improve art quality, divide people or maybe gather people.
Nice, but completely unrealistic. The whole reason why AI is/will be adopted by companies like wildfire is to cut costs and increase profits. If they have to pay taxes equivalent to what they were paying in labor (or anywhere close to that), then AI is for nothing. Business will never agree to it. So this will never happen unless there is some sort of social revolution that completely remakes the system.
This is money obtained for doing nothing (i.e., like UBI but for the wealthy).
It should be taxed heavily and in inverse proportion to how long the investment was held. For example, HFT gains get a 90% tax. Gains held over 10 years gets a 10% tax. Fit an appropriate curve in the middle.
In the same way that it was straightforward to deal with job loss from the industrial revolution, or when the US shipped away all its manufacturing capability?
How much UBI you want from this AI tax ?
I don’t think they’d give me what I want
Making it more efficient will probably >>increase<< the total energy devoted to AI, not reduce it. See Jevon's Paradox.
Between "AI doing creative work", if you believe, and "fraud", there's all the low-key filler material that's sub-creative and sub-fraudulent. There's a similarity between the phrase it was made with AI and phrases like I didn't bake your cake myself, it came from a store or sorry, it's just a cheap plastic one. So part of AI's image is that it's a flourishing new source of disappointment.
Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignment problem to date in the existential form. Instead, it's the usual technology enabling bad actors stuff.
As far as the paperclip problem is concerned, we’ve already had that problem for a long time now in the form of good old fashioned human institutions.
UBI is a dangerous distraction in this context. It's a mammoth cost to achieve an impoverished quality of life. It may be worth implementing in general, but it absolutely must stay out of the conversation about AI. It's like if the ruling class started announcing that they would like to imprison us all, and your "discussion" about the problem revolved around how we can make our future jail cells feel as nice as possible.
We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.
> We are allowed to regulate businesses. We simply don't.
If workers are defunct, what are businesses? Also defunct. Business owners can’t gloat about not needing workers while at the same time claiming that their businesses have a right to life. What is a business owner sitting on a completely automated set of assets? Smaug sitting on his cache of gold.
This is straightforward? This is a colossal task. Monumental. Billionaires own it. That’s the political status quo. You could build something to counter those centers of power. But from what base?
Well-paid software developers have scoffed at or been ignorant of worker organizing for, maybe forever? But I have good paycheck and equity... Now what?
To the extent that it's even true that this is going to happen, that is laughably false.
Yes; LLMs can answer some questions well (but unreliably) and with the right setups, can be rigged to perform some tasks well (but unreliably).
There is no way they are ready to take over a single full-time job. If any employer tried, the number of errors in the performance of that job would jump by a huge amount, because LLMs are not reliable and cannot be made so.
Any UBI system will become as corrupted as our present tax system.
“Mythos is too dangerous to release.”
“OpenAI offers a bounty if you can get ChatGPT to teach you how to do a bioterroism.”
“Agentic agents will replace entire categories of jobs. They’ll just be like, gone”
This is all signaling to their customers; no not you on their $20/month plan, the governments and corporations of the world who have deep pockets, fat to trim, and borders to defend and expand.
It’s no surprise that people don’t like AI. It’s not for people.
This was said with a straight face like “people love puppies!”.
No self awareness at all.
Isn't this fundamentally what MBAs do with their time? Keep going with this analysis, because it goes much deeper... In my experience, BI is often a house of cards. A lot of times it's just narrative crafting, just like we're all encouraged to do when we write our resumes.
Can you embellish a story? Can you invent a convincing political narrative? As far as I can tell, that's the fundamental unit of US corporation.
If the industry continue to gleefully ignore public discontent over AI impact on society, I imagine what might happen is a public backlash that would make the post Chernobyl anti nuclear sentiment look tame.
The fact that AI acolytes are positively giddy about the above is just icing on the cake.
I wish articles like this would at least acknowledge the massive adoption AI has among programmers. It's not comparable to stuff like helping you write the occasional email, which I presume is the baseline for most people outside tech. Making it sound like a minor tool that some people are still just experimenting with completely misses the impact it has already had on software development.
Adoption in particular is a useless metric. They are forced to adopt even if it's not really helping in their case, or if it does help but using it makes them miserable, like being forced to switch jobs from something you enjoy to something you find boring and tedious. And then there's the "expertise debt" that will have who knows what impact in the coming decades.
Data centres popping up near you probably means higher electricity prices, poor air quality and water problems
Sam Altman is a massive penis, with a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The two things that link them are "rich" people imposing their will on everyone else, publicly.
It's not a gift, it's ignorance.
Altman and his peers live in a bubble.
They don't interact with former translators, copywriters, or web developers.
They don't hear feedback from the people they have put out of a job.
But there are a lot of areas where AI is helping that people don't see, like in medicine. Drug development, cancer research and early detection, CT and MRI analysis, just to name a few. These uses cases are vastly more important but rarely get discussed. It's important to know that AI isn't this one singular thing or else we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm ashamed that we don't care more about human dignity. I care about human dignity and wonder if I'm an outlier? Even a tiny pledge and affirmation "Hey, we see you, we are working to bring relief and guaranteed dignity to your lives by doing xyz" would help. Instead when I ask for peace in war[edit: and basic income, anything that is an essential part of dignity[edit 2: and I hear its not possible right now while that isn't said of AI investments] I hear unaccountable leadership dodging the responsibility [of their constituents] and accelerating conflict while their friends' pockets get thicker.
While I find a Gemini Ultra subscription worthwhile for myself, most of the value is in the fun and entertainment of interacting with a strong API in AntiGravity (usually use Claude models), Gemini App, NotebookLM, etc. It is intellectually interesting and fun.
Can I justify the cost to society for data centers, possibility of US government bailing out the AI tech giants, etc.?
No I can't. I think the Chinese are skunking us. Building cheaper AI is the winning strategy. GLM-5.1 and Deepseek v4 are amazingly effective for much lower inference costs.
The people: ??
Investors: Tell us more.
Gone is all the experience in clean code, good idioms, etc. All replaced by easily generated shitty code that can be removed and generated again as we please, until it works. No thought about the quality of code itself. Some companies are straight up forcing programmers to live in Claude Code and never even see the code, just write the spec.
It’s disgusting. And the worst part is that you can’t opt-out. If you give even the slightest hint that you don’t like AI you’re seen as a Luddite and you’ll be put next in line for the upcoming layoff.
This is hugely generalized and a little offensive, but there is definitely a core difference that could be more thoroughly described.
Of course normal people found this incredibly off putting.
Helpful, sure. Would humanity be better off without generative AI? Definitely.
This kind of hyperbloic stance amongst the broad public is sad concerning
When you use ChatGPT for yourself, you may have a sense that what you see is made up; when someone else that you trust uses it and pronounces the output in a way that suggests it is their own, you are left doing much more complex social math to figure out if your trust in this person or entity can hold. It gets exhausting, personally.
And their company's leadership is famous for compulsively lying. Pardon me if I suspect they might be arriving at that number using creative math.
Because it's even less useful than a washing machine. Unless you trust a frickin' humanoid robot doing your house chores, which is batshit insane as things stand.
People, esp. many SWEs, like generating with AI, or more telling, wouldn't want to give it up in their work.
On the other hand, people generally hate consuming the product of gen AI.
Consumer experience = mostly negative
Producer experience = mostly positive
We built the most meritocratic and accessible career path possible. If you knew how to code, and you invested in your craft (or didn't!), you were more-or-less guaranteed multiple amazing, well-paying career paths anywhere in the world.
Yet, a cohort of us decided "what if we built this thing that literally does our job? what could possibly go wrong?"
Yeah, this is gatekeeping, but the medical and legal industries have perfected that, and our industry doesn't even require advanced degrees to climb the ladder! (John Ternus only has a B.Eng in MEng!)
Why did we Eric-Andre-meme ourselves?
Think back on a time where you and a teammate (or teammates) spent hours or days debating back and forth on different technological or architectural options for trade-offs. How much nuance and detail went into those discussion. We used to take pride in our ability to make careful and measured tradeoffs. And yet with this tech all that is thrown out the window.
I’m honestly baffled. What’s there not to like?
The situation might be different in the States, but I'd wager Joe Sixpack, brass fisher in Montana, couldn't care less about GPT-5.5 or whatever Musk is up to these days.
I don’t think Montana fishermen have a broad impact on society, or its decision making. There’s just not that many of them.
It’s easy to fixate on the OpenAI and Anthropic-level companies, but the real inescapable flood of AI garbage is coming from the downstream companies building on the core AI providers. Communities like HN have some role to play here. Maybe some peer pressure on AI founders to, maybe, not make the world a worse place?
My wife was shocked to learn how much she liked Claude after these forced experiences with AI.
Problem for jobs is that there are 200 countries and all the earnings will go to a few. Universal basic income for everyone? Or just the US?
Who gets to keep their house locations in a new fair world? The person whose parents bought in the right place 50 years ago? Who pays the money these models earn, if nobody clicks ads or does a job? What is income for if we don’t work and can just ask the AI for everything we want?
What happens when the super smart AI comes up with “better” (more fair, consistent, etc) answers than you think you have to questions like the above? What if they end up socialist? Do we force it (and invite risk it escapes and fights us for the greater good) or give in to the presumably more thorough reasoning?
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
We are spiraling toward the first half of this story. The second half is so idealistic at this point that it can be ignored.
This is the "safety" messaging that OpenAI and Anthropic keep harping on and on, and on about, while whistling a merry tune as they turn around and sell AI to the US military and worse, to the tune of $billions/year already.
The "and worse" needs elaboration, because fundamentally the single biggest cash cow for AI vendors will be (and maybe already is) implementing a dystopian future where everything we say, type, or do will not just be recorded but also: read, analysed, and cross-correlated by unfeeling heartless machines tasked with keeping us in line.
I'm not being paranoid, President Biden said as much, but only in reference to China. If you think only China has motivation to use AI to keep a lid on dissent, I have a bridge to sell you. And if you think the Land Of The Free(tm) will never abuse AI in this manner, well... I have some bad news. You may want to sit down.
Here in Australia, the cyberpunk dystopia is already starting to be rolled out. A customer of ours asked their IT team to hook up a variety of HR-related information sources to their new AI system tasked with making recommendations for hiring, promotion, and demotion.
Welcome to 1984, citizen.
And the scary thing is that you can probably easily sell it to Democratic voters if you track racism scores for people, so you can filter people out of your dating pool or job/rental applications. Most people don't care about privacy as a fundamental right, and they'll roll over and compromise if you give them a way to track what they hate. You just need to make sure it is "bipartisan" and it'll be wildly popular.
Like copyright. All modern LLMs are built on troves of copyrighted material that was used in their training. AI companies are claiming this is fair use, while pretty much all of the copyright holders would strongly disagree. This is going to get litigated for years, but regardless of what various legal systems decide, morally, people can be against this.
And people are already sick and tired of AI-generated content being used to replace human made content, be it on Spotify or TikTok. This is part "AI replacing humans", part "I'm being scammed by lower quality content".
OpenAI: We’re allowed to steal everything to train our AI and you can’t complain
Developer: Ok, I’ll use your AI to train mine
OpenAI: NO NOT LIKE THAT, UNFAIR
In the more immediate run, I think the concern is that AI will reduce the ability of workers to collectively bargain and thereby grant the wealthy oligarchs even more control over their workers’ lives.
However, they will also disregard any attempt to slow down or halt AI progress in general, so it isn't like the people wanting to end AI in general are any more likely to succeed than those wanting to do what I propose.
I personally feel my suggestions would be slightly more feasible to gain support for than trying to stop AI completely. The power brokers in control of AI currently certainly aren't going to stop developing and pushing AI, but they might be convinced that sharing the wealth is the only way to avoid massive revolt in the long run. While it is conceivable that the wealthy wouldn't need the masses for labor like they do now in the AI future, they still need to not be killed in a massive uprising when 90% of the population is unemployed and starving. While I know a lot of people think the plan is just to kill off that part of the population, that is not that easy to do even with an army of AI robots, and would likely be cheaper and easier to just share a bit of the productivity. I don't think it will be trivial, but I don't think it is impossible.
UBI has been a major donor priority, at least on the left.
The very same CEOs are extremely against social support, any taxes for themselves and any govermental agencies that help or protect people.
How is can this be possibly easiest in the world of Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Palantier and overtone window moving toward economically conservative for years.
You can't put things back in the bag. Perhaps the true underlying social problems are:
1. There's too many humans and not enough jobs.
2. The capitalist system only rewards profit seeking and cost externalization.
3. Our democratic representation myth is dead and buried.
4. Even in the developed world, middle-class security is gone.
So here's my question: given the current global system has failed and is clearly in its death throes, as a pan-national species how can we transition to a less mono-focal economic rationalism driven means of governance and self-organization without turning in to an autocracy or reinforcing negative nationalist bloc-level thinking that will tie us in to the same old human-thump-human stone age ape-ism and environmental cost externalization?
Perhaps AI can help in areas like improved education, improved media, proposals for improved government process or process transition for enhanced efficiency. Enforce transparency and accountability in the halls of power by reducing human process and corruption. Public auditable decision making and public auditable oversight. It's at least potential grounds for partial optimism. The best I can summon under present conditions. Of course, we want to avoid a dystopian global AI autocracy, the technocratic basis for which we have already well established, but if you view the present system as a dystopian human autocracy with the same technocratic basis (an increasingly rational perspective given recent events), then it starts to look more rosy.
Inflation is driven by scarcity. More demand for a fixed/limited resource drives up the price. Historically, every good and service humans bought followed this pattern, so we didn’t even have to consider an alternative.
Already in our current economy, however, we have seen a good portion of our economy shift to things that do not have this characteristic. For example, take something like a video streaming service. The marginal cost for additional demand is small enough to be almost negligible; if everyone in the world decided they wanted a Netflix subscription, there wouldn’t suddenly be a shortage of streams or a run on episodes of The Great British Bake Off. They would have to build more datacenters, but the cost per additional user is tiny compared to almost every other traditional good that came before.
If AI and Robots start doing all work, then this would spread to more of the economy. The increase in productive capacity would severely reduce the limitations that have historically driven inflation. We obviously have to invest in building robots and AI, but once we have enough robots they would be making more of themselves and we would be limited by natural resources, but we could use robots to get more of those, too… and we could focus on clean energy, since we would have plenty of robots to do that work, too.
If the Epstein class wouldn't go for something like this in a world where they needed workers to produce, the idea that they will when we are surplus to requirement is inconceivable.
We erase it and call out the ghouls “creating” that shit, simple. They deserve being called out for creating shit and poisoning our minds.
Then again the CEOs of these companies want to get their company at all cost to society.
In fact it's a very sad story about a 20 year old throwing their life away instead of fighting for what he believes is right through non-violent activism and/or regulations.
Last year I wrote an article asking the very question "Who will be the next Luddites?", National Geographics followed-up months later. I'm sure many before, after or in-between covered the same topic. There is truth to it, we will be impacted but let's not forget we went through this during the industial revolution and we should be better equipped than ever to fight using meaningful non-violent acts and operations.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-neo-luddites-more-importa...
http://nationalgeographic.com/history/article/luddite-indust...
We've tried to internally pitch many ideas to the larger organization before but mostly got nothing back.
Finally, one of the various board members talked to my boss and told them that, essentially, it has to be top line growth, not bottom line savings.
We looked this up and it came down to some MBA mumbo-jumbo about how X% of growth is better than that same X% of savings once you run the math (?). Look, I know, that's not how percentages work and I know that savings actually do matter. But in 'I have an MBA-land' the mantra is topline > bottomline.
So, then we started to pitch ideas around growth (new lines, more customer sales, more customers, etc). Which went ... nowhere ... again.
Time goes by again, and another helpful person reaches out and tells us that our ideas are 'not worth considering' as they 'don't meaningfully impact revenue targets'. Again, essentially, just to justify the salary-time that these internal boards spend, the idea has to be net positive. Then it we learned that, no, it has to impact the revenue to 1%. For our BigCo that in the ~$10M ballpark. We do have the customer base to support that, but it is in the revenue ballpark of Atari or the Hypixel servers.
Look, either way, the run-around that I get told is that for AI projects that we pitch internally: 1) Top line growth only 2) ~1% increase in revenue (~$10M).
Now, why anyone would not just go take that ~$10M idea and not just make a company themselves is beyond me, but I don't get paid the big bucks, so who knows.
Still, that is what these BigCos are looking for: Growth in the ~$1-10M range.
It's an expensive route to mediocrity, which doesnt offer an edge in a market where everyone is using the same snakeoil.
So now you're wrangling an "AI" system and you're doing most of the work you would have had to anyway. ...And when you don't it can get really embarrassing.
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/elite-wall-street-la...
Not the first time, surely not the last. The problem is that so much money is tied up in this thing, and the moment the music stops the bag holders are going to be utterly doomed.
magnet for scum like boosters on X, middle managment types, linkedin ai influences, ppl making fake videos on facebook.
At least crypto does not take away more jobs than it creates, where as we all know AI takes away more jobs and no-one can give a solution or explain what the "new jobs" are.
Because the value from AI is to automate the jobs from humans. Claiming otherwise is being intellectually dishonest. Same goes for defining "AGI".
AI has real value. We can argue about whether the cost is worth the value, whether we're on an exponential improvement curve or not, whether it ends up creating jobs or destroying jobs, but AI is mind blowing science fiction that nobody would have believed you will exist 10 years ago.
Except sometimes when there's a huge black swan event, or when the bubble pops. Such things can result in significant layoffs even though it's a completely different mechanism.
You can tell that everyone loves chain buffet restaurants by going to Golden Corral and asking everybody if they are enjoying their meals
Also, looking at current market situation how many people would be willing to say to their bosses or even publicly that they think AI is quite a lot of bullshit.
My new favorite game at work is "guess if this person is really into AI or they just have to be because their boss is and if they weren't they would get replaced by someone who is" and it's quite hard to say.
And since the "boss" of CEOs are the investors in the stock market, and the stock market is automated to ridiculous degree, is this AI pushing for itself?
Meanwhile I saw some survey where only something like a third of Gen Z and lower are pro-AI.
Of course the survey also said like 70%+ of them still used it.
LOL. That's like saying 93% of people who go to Star Wars conventions like Star Wars.
A person having a negative attitude about AI doesn't mean that they wouldn't keep the parts that are mostly positive if they could.
This comment could just as easily apply to a conversation about computers in general, it's just that people whose lives have been "ruined" by now-established technologies have been largely forgotten by society.
AI is massively marketed by AI people as a tool to replace your job. So either the AI people are bad at marketing or the gains in other industry are insignificant/ do not generate shareholder value.
Keep in mind who pays the AI companies.
It's not you, it's the C-levels. The marketing is aimed at them.
When AI produces those meaningful advances in those fields, great, we can start having meaningful discussions about them. The greatest medical advancement of the 21st century is likely mRNA, or maybe GLP-1 for some. Neither were LLM assisted in any meaningful way as far as I know (they predate ChatGPT, perhaps more primitive models were involved in ways I’m not familiar with). Until those advances come, this argument is fanfic.
Plus, in the most morbid way possible: who gives a shit about living longer if they are stripped of their career, are inundated with slop at every angle, and can’t trust any information. These are real problems that AI has already created, unlike the fanfic of ridding cancer.
What good are these to someone who will never afford them?
A lot of this talk reminds me of Elysium (2013).
(a) loss of fulfillment (b) lower quality of output and nobody will care so the world will just "degrade" and (c) a perceived lack of autonomy ("forcing", "you can't opt out") around how adoption itself is executed
Although, full disclosure: I have quibbled with Gemini quite a bit over the trailing comma, which clutters the diff, and buries the lede at code review.
But it's been very gratifying to refer to modules entirely by their role in a given design pattern (eg "driven adapter") and be understood. To define the idiom, and see it adhered to.
But am I operating still at too low a level? Would I be penalized, at these "some companies" for not producing shitty code?
Ah, but in my particularly forward-deployed line, there's always an element of showmanship compelling me to write demonstrable code.
But, also, how can I specify the behavior if I can't name the component? Is it really possible to "vibe" code à sophisticated piece of software entirely from the user's domain terminology? Without any intermediate abstractions in mind? Inconceivable, frankly. There are invisible walls, invisible shapes beneath the surface.
Then again, I'm young enough to have never allocated memory manually in my professional life.
The "boss" is often not a promoted engineer, but an MBA brought in to "manage" engineers.
Engineering is where idealism hits reality, and the increasingly undisciplined cronies who "manage" us don't like hearing that their idea is incompatible with physics.
We are subject matter experts who are burdened with responsibility but denied agency and authority in our area of expertise.
So we found something much worse than crypto.
You can opt-out of crypto, but you cannot opt-out of AI and have no choice but to participate.
Another factor to consider is that putting more money in the hands of people in need of <thing> means producing <thing> becomes more profitable and thus more investment and resources are directed towards <thing>. If we assume the economy works the way the proponents of capitalism say it does, this should eventually drive the cost of living back down.
But personally I think the biggest benefit of UBI would be the reduction in number of people who are desperate enough to accept work – both legal and illegal – that is unfairly compensated, inhumane and/or immoral. The existence of that class of people is the driving force behind many societal problems. Exorbitant amounts of resources are wasted treating the symptoms of those problems instead of fixing the root cause.
A 60% corporate tax rate wouldn’t get to the levels needed for UBI proposals either.
I would not get up in the morning in such case.
For high levels of UBI it’s not possible to get all of the necessary tax revenue from taxing billionaires or corporations or other simplistic ideas that sound good unless you do math.
I'm curious for metrics, but Dario strikes me as being less perpetually online. Given equal time, they may each be unlikeable. But they don't put themselves out there equally–Sam and Elon are unable to focus on their work. (I'll admit I've had a soft spot for Dario since he stood up to Hegseth–maybe I'm just not seeing the equal hate he's getting.)
The work that is most replaceable by AI is work that is mostly digital. That work most easily moves to another country.
When the work is replaced by AI you can relocate it to another country much more easily than when you have to relocate workers.
I can get more muscle mass at the gym. That is straightforward. Only a few things makes it not easy.
But “share the productivity with society at large”... you have to collapse so many more variables.
- How to organize political resistance against AI tech billionaires
- How to not get co-opted by counter-measures by AI tech billionaires
- How to resist false promises (backed by nothing) that some AI tech billionaire will enact UBI for everyone so everything will be fine (those with all the power can withdraw whatever they want at any point)
- How to deal with white collar competition in the interim period before automation: everyone using AI and nodding along with it[1] just to not “fall behind”
- How to potentially fight against a small minority (AI tech billionaires) but that now might have enough megawatts to turn their stochastic parrots against any dissenters
And maybe more.
Like I was telling someone else, what we've made here is the ultimate double-edged sword. Use it right and there's great glory. Use it wrong and you're a lifeless, empty husk. In this case, though, people get the far greater dopamine hit from using it wrong.
Algorithmic social media is like this and we already see people rotting out on the infinite scroll. And genAI makes social media look like 70s weed. The question is: on the whole, which side of that double-edged blade is going to be doing the slicing?
Good news, the plan is for us to be the bag holders as they rush to IPO.
That 12k doesn't include healthcare, it doesn't include a lot of things. It's basically ensuring that people live well below poverty level, and for what? I just don't get how the numbers work, even if it was politically feasible.
I'd much rather have free healthcare and other amenities other countries have. Here in the US if you lose your job there is virtually nothing between you and the streets besides family and friends.
I'm facing this right now. I cannot get a job in tech which means restarting my career. Getting a job right now is not easy in any field especially not in anything like a living wage. If I did not have my parents I would be on the streets right now, thankfully I don't have a mortgage or anything like that. I'm not sure how much $12k per year would really help, it certainly wouldn't pay for housing.
It's rough out there.
Well, they simply don't. Everybody is forced to use it at my (>100k employee) company. They are tracking it - if you don't use it every single day, you get flagged. Tons of people hate this.
I use it constantly. Everybody I work with uses it constantly. We use it voluntarily (we are the software folks). And we would all give it up in a heartbeat if there was a way to destroy it.
I hear this sentiment constantly online and from friends at other large companies. You are not observing the general reality.
But that position is orthogonal to whether they like having to participate in the race to begin with.
Sam Altman still says, after being the victim of anti-AI violence, that "the fear and anxiety about AI is justified" and "it will not all go well".
People simply refuse to believe that AI companies are serious about this, and get twisted into knots trying to understand why AI companies would choose this messaging under the premise that they can't be serious.
All of what you said is false.
Stablecoins are not speculative and have value, and you can send money at a low fee, low cost, worldwide to wallets on the same day, right now with far less energy than today's "AI".
> AI has real value.
What do you mean by "AI" specifically? LLMs in data centers?
The value in for this mysterious "AI" or even "AGI" paradise is not even for you. It is actually used against you.
> We can argue about whether the cost is worth the value, whether we're on an exponential improvement curve or not
You understand that the current iteration of "AI" needs tens of gigawatts of energy and hundreds of billions of dollars and wasteful amounts of water which causes electricity prices in certain cities to skyrocket?
The way that it is financed appears to be close to fraudulent with vague "commitments" and mountains of debt that would take almost a trillion dollars in revenue to pay off the data centre build out.
> whether it ends up creating jobs or destroying jobs, but AI is mind blowing science fiction that nobody would have believed you will exist 10 years ago.
Assuming after the data centers will be built (if they ever will be), can you name what are those new jobs that will be created from "AI"?
Bitcoin uses 200TWh (per year) probably pretty similar to all the AI usage today give or take. Certainly if we look at the area under the curve Bitcoin still by far has used more energy (~1000TWh) than AI/LLMs. For what is essentially a scam/pyramid scheme. And this is just Bitcoin. But yes, LLMs are using more and more energy (but also potentially with a larger % of renewable sources).
I mean AI in the colloquial sense. Large language models. It's ridiculous to compare the value produce by Bitcoin (negative- crime, money laundering, funding terrorist regimes, tax evasion etc.) to the value of LLMs.
LLMs enable people who couldn't produce software applications before to do so. This enables new business that didn't exist before. Those business hire people directly (including eventually software engineers) and create indirect jobs. This is no different than the steam engine or the Internet. You're arguing that the Internet took away the jobs of the people working in the post office because letters could now be sent electronically. I don't have a crystal ball but the historical experience teaches us that new jobs do get created and the economy is not a zero sum game. Maybe this will be different and maybe it won't.
Have you not had a discussion with Opus where it insists it is correct about something it is objectively wrong about for several turns?
> Do you realize that "memory" requires eating your hilariously small context window?
I do! LLMs are structured differently than humans, so the component we call "memory" corresponds to what humans call "short-term memory"; practical long-term memory for an LLM looks much more like what a human would call "let me write this down". But you can and commercially available systems do load it into context on demand when it's needed for some problem or another.
The LLM only currently has the illusion of these things. Hence the bubble.
I know that you (or anyone) as a human being don't have the illusion of these things.
This is not like the car replacing the horse for transportation. The LLM as-is cannot fundamentally replace the person. They require the agency of a human to take turns at all, and even more so to enact change in the world.
Your LLM does not actively engage in the world because it does not experience anything. It only responds to queries. We can do a lot with that, but it's not intelligence. It can't say oh hey SpicyLemonZest, I was thinking and had an idea the other day. Because it has nothing between each query.
That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument.
And I'm still calling baloney! The "AI will kill us all" argument backfired on Altman et al, so now we have an "it'll take over all the jobs" pitch. But it's all smoke and mirrors for investors. We have no good reason to expect current AI methods will lead to an AGI that can not only do most human labour, but do so economically competitively.
* artisanal, handmade products
* affordable products, not just for the rich
* well-paid workers
This was true of clothing, agriculture, and will also be true of SaaS. I choose affordable products and well-paid workers, but that requires embracing automation.
What does this mean? It's obviously false on its face.
This might also come with the benefit of reducing the number of nepo-imbeciles running things now.
While this is counter-intuitive, since we are talking about taxing billionaires and megacorps etc. to the tune of >90%, but it would actually make those people and companies part with their gains, unlike 90% tax which will never work. Every single company in the world above certain size and every single millionaire and above, are employing criminal schemes to evade paying taxes, declare funds and participate in the economy in other ways. By enforcing a certain minimal tax and banning all "drains" the amount of accrued money would be astronomical. There would be no need for 90%, instead the crazy 50-60% taxes paid by the fools (actual middle class) could be meaningfully reduced to the levels half a century ago and there would still be money left.
This has become some kind of truism that has little actual evidence. It was said it would happen in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and is still being said but it isn't true. The models got better this year but they've always gotten better. And none of the recent improvements have been as dramatic as say GPT3 to GPT4. I feel crazy. People are saying the sky is falling but every researcher or person who analyzes these issues professionally says the opposite.
A strong minimum wage makes UBI more attractive. More people will want jobs in addition to UBI. UBI is also seen as a market force to naturally drive minimum wage up, because UBI offers workers more choices: more opportunities to build a startup or take a sabbatical instead of work 40 hours. The labor market has to compete with that "opportunity cost" in ways it doesn't need to care about today. It would increase liquidity in the labor market and in terms going all the way back to even Adam Smith, make the market more free. Wages would better reflect demand for the work if laborers had more choices at more times in their lives where and how much to work.
Medicare for Everyone and Universal Health Care make UBI simpler. Health risk is always going to be variable and insurance-like risk pooling will always be a good idea for society to defray costs in bad years from surpluses in good ones and defray costs from unhealthy people by considering how many people are kept healthy. UBI could be designed to try cover much of health care, but it is never going to be as efficient as a pooled single payer. If a country already has Universal Health Case, the conversations about UBI get a lot simpler. It is a lot easier to sell it is a flat universal grant. Your health care can be provided by a complex risk pool and smart accountants doing a lot of smart math on your behalf. Your UBI can be just a flat number. Simpler: you can think about how you spend your UBI without having to consider your predicted health outcomes in that period of time. UBI's flat universal value can be set on benchmarks that don't need need complex amortization schedules and risk analysis.
The Canadian Social Credit Party, formed to espouse UBI was one of the keys to building Canada's Universal Health Care and their priority was that first, then UBI. That still seems the best priority order to me.
So without AI, the path forward is obvious: those 3 will become worse. Lowering retirement age, raising minimum wage, and expanding medicare won't happen without AI. They can't.
We already are reasonably close to a job guarantee. If unemployed people would accept any job, unemployment would drop by a lot. Not to zero, obviously, but a lot. Unemployment is also pretty low by historical standards, so fixing unemployment with a job guarantee can't fix much. We'll need something else.
> It's worth remembering that if AI really can do everyone's jobs then it'll be hyperdeflationary so no need to worry about pesky government spending on this stuff.
So yeah, I disagree. If you're going to assume AI will just jump to how capable it'll be 100 years from now, then you need to think a bit deeper. What AI effectively does, it provides capital-based labor. You buy a robot. Robot costs a lot, but operational expenses are marginal, energy and (maybe) "tokens". Add solar power, and let's say local AI becomes a thing, at least for normal robots, and you need nothing other than the initial cost of the robot.
Okay, so this will mean everything can be staffed with tens of thousands of these robots. Remote mine? No problem. 500 robots in your house? Why not. Cleaning very large facilities? Not a problem. Farm hundreds of square kilometers? Fine. Dig a canal to avoid the strait of Hormuz and just do it with shovels? Let's get to it. AI can be a universal machine that can do anything labor can achieve.
Obviously AI will massively increase the output of the economy, and people will figure out what to do with that, as people will want a shitload of things done. Which means the problem you're identifying will be trivial to solve, and we'll figure something out.
Historically, that "we'll figure something out" has usually meant the economical wipeout of large parts of the population, sooner or later followed either by some epidemic event or other "act of god" (like fires) that was a consequence of squalor and poverty, or by some sort of war to thin out the herd.
I'd prefer if history would not repeat itself for once.
Uh, historically everything has usually meant the economical wipeout of large parts of the population. It still means that in most third world countries. Economic power is not the huge differentiator here.
The extra steps reduce costs and encourage offsetting production. Those are important steps!
^ this would be an accurate representation of your opinion then?
The point is - with the use of law, morality, social pressure, we can moderate the frequency and scale of some phenomena, but we cannot stop it. I think this idea is what prevents some bans. "If the Chinese can do it, and we stop ourselves from doing it, they will gain an advantage and we would lose". Substitute "the Chinese" with whoever is the opponent at any given point in time and you have a rather plausible explanation for why things were the way they were.
Unless we are all to become serfs, a new way to distribute resources needs to be on the table.
UBI is a salve, offered to keep victims of the system out of abject poverty. It is too little, too late.
You will not own anything. You don't even really own your tech now.
The writing is on the wall: you will not be allowed to modify what you own.
One of the more famous examples here in the US is that of the equal rights marches in the 1960s ultimately leading to the end of segregation.
What I'm not sure of, though, is what kind of impact there is on the required percentage of people participating when we have media outlets like Fox News, which was demonstrated to have fabricated images during events like the Black Lives Matter protests to make them look as if they were violent.
There needs to be an actual mechanism for the protests to bring about the fall of the authoritarian regime. Unfortunately, in our current context, a lot of the feedback mechanisms that should cause protests to change actual policy and affect the people in power are broken, largely due to the Republicans' efforts over the last several decades to eliminate accountability both from the actual institutions and as a valid concept in our national consciousness.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
> equal rights marches in the 1960s
Since then, authoritarian think tanks have planned ahead and now have comprehensive documents for how to nullify the effects of peaceful protests.
MLK Jr.'s Civil Rights protests are an obvious counterpoint to this claim.
Not all sacrifice needs to be all or nothing.
How can we glorify Thomas Jefferson and teach kids about him saying "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" only to then condemn the spilling of any modern blood? Truly what is the difference between torching a warehouse of toilet paper compared to tossing some tea in the harbor?
How can we condemn one and celebrate the other without being hypocrites?
Propaganda is the difference between rebels and freedom fighters.
You could have written L'Overture instead and it would have been a great example.
One could say the same thing about all the little art projects a hypothetical society on UBI might busy itself making. The pertinent difference seems to be one about scale and co-ordination. Job guarantees say we work together–through a centralised power–to build big things. Handing everyone cash leans more towards arts and crafts and consumption.
Creating busywork doesn't strike me as a particularly worthwhile endeavor, compared to idleness.
Make work isn’t the same as busywork. As another comment mentioned, the Hoover Dam isn’t useless busywork.
NASA arguably ran its post-Apollo pre-Artemis period as a jobs program. Again, there will be waste. But there will also be waste with UBI. My suspicion is peoples’ tendency towards purposelessness will exceed bureaucrats’ tendency towards uselessness. That’s a loose hypothesis. But in its balance lies which system is more competitive (and satisfying).
The question we need to answer is, given infinite labor (limited over time, but unlimited given unlimited time) is there infinite meaningful work that a government can allocate it to? Eventually you will have built all the dams, tunnels, and bridges that you can usefully build. Historically what tends to happen is that work that isn't strictly necessary gets allocated. Roads that are fine get repaved, etc. I don't see how needlessly wasting energy and resources is better than paying people to spend their time however they see fit.