Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash(bloodinthemachine.com) |
Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash(bloodinthemachine.com) |
The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching it's metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone. Who, in that world, can spend the fiat and for what? I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine. Everyone else is either bunker prepping or plugging into the matrix.
Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?
Not true at all. If you have a robotic servant that can "do everything" for anywhere close to an affordable amount for even a middle-class person, please post a link and specify what it can do.
There a big gap between a tool that can spew out large amounts of code and something you trust to not screw up your house. Once I can tell a robot to do a simple plumbing task in my house, I'll believe in this metamorphosis you're talking about.
Why do people keep positing this? The robots get better every year, but they don't get better fast enough to make me think there will be a robot servant doing anything for anyone in my lifetime. As has been the case for the past fifty years or so, they're either hyperspecialized or remote controlled by people, and neither of those spell doom for the economy.
These signals seem to validate rather than disprove the direction.
Edit: In terms of AI/LLM's etc..
WALL-E?
> This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.
.... 3 responses ....
> Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial. I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...
Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").
Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace
Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."
My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.
Love.
Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.
To wit: Our love of self is so closely tied to our output and if we have no output do we have value?
Edit: tl;dr - I am not sure I understand the point of anything anymore and many others feel the same way. I do not think this is some "existential crisis" I believe it is a logical conclusion to draw given the evidence presented by the day and age we live in.
Spending more hours working to make somebody else rich, yeah, no. Let's go through the archway in the forest.
Translation: I've never picked potatoes for a living
Then we can take down monopolies, tax large corporations, regulate them, empower anti white colar crime agencies again and regulate finance.
That will actually do. Bullshitters and sociopaths are too empowered. That is an issue, and acute one.
If I go on X, the vibe there around AI is amazing. You have folks constantly talking about cool things that they get their agents to do. Agents can help you make things you didn't have the knowhow to make, teach you things at a level that you couldn't get just by searching Google and take care of the boring parts of your life so you can spend more time doing the things you care about. Overall things are very positive and makes you excited for the future.
Contrast that with the public comments by AI executives. Pretty much all of the messages fall flat at best or are just outright doomery at worst. It's such a stark contrast and while I'm personally really excited for the future, I can totally see how someone who isn't plugged into that world to get a very grim view of the future.
And even when they run ads about AI, it's always the worst examples (thinking of that Gemini ad that talked about writing a letter to your family with AI). I really wish the industry could have a better messenger around this stuff. Don't talk about how it can help you do stuff you already know how to do, run an ad about how it can enable you to do stuff you couldn't do before.
I think the best example of this is a bike mechanic fixing a Reevo bike and writing firmware using Claude Code so it no longer required an app to work[1]. The author outright said he didn't know how to code or do anything in that area but was able to figure it out with the help of AI. I think a message like that around AI is awesome but no all we hear about is how AI will take your job.
The Butlerian Jihad has started.
I don't think it's a coincidence that terrible persons without a lot of training are also terrible messengers.
For another, apply AI where it's good but stop forcing it where it doesn't belong. Ask the users, they know.
I guess video games are a problem too. And social media. They wrote about it on their Facebook Group. The news one, the one where they repost TikToks of people pointing and nodding at another video where someone in a trucker hat is talking about a conspiracy theory, not the one where they talk about Candy Crush.
I don’t use AI. Nothing about these conversations makes sense.
obviously from chinese models running a campaign to keep the US from pulling away.
Big tech is too short-termist to realize it, but we are about to destroy a lot of economical value if we destroy the internet and the trust behind it.
That it's likely to be used to mine your personal data and be used to create AI slop in exchange for more global warming are just reasons to hate it more, but I think it's not the primary hate point.
The real kick in the pants is the ever present danger that you'll end up with a data-center that generates its own power on site, using turbo-generators running 24/7/365 because the grid and generation doesn't have anywhere near the required slack (aka resilience, aka redundancy) to take on hundreds of gigawatts of new base load. In addition to the noise, you also get particulates and pollution.
If they do manage to avoid local generation, you're still left with the noise of cooling systems, and the waste heat island.
The sad thing is, tech is supposed to be about solving problems to make people's lives better. But instead of investing $$$$ in tech to solve people's problems, we're investing $$$$ to add to their problems.
It seems reasonable that these three things are part of ONE "backlash", but I don't believe they are. I think these are three separate issues with three different, mostly overlapping, groups of people who are giving "backlash".
Data centers themselves are subject to two different sources of b-lash. There are people who heard that datacenters use up "all the water". Then there are people who are broadly anti-AI because they don't want to lose their job (and home, and health insurance, and live under a bridge with all the other displaced people).
The backlash against Flock is predictable and unfortunate. Well, we defunded the police, and let political axe-grinders fill our DA seats with hyper-progressive activists. "Just put up cameras, it worked in the UK!" seems like the natural move, but it was a trap. People want to feel safe, and don't want to be spied on. We're going to have to have a functioning justice system at some point, aren't we?
The backlash against AI glasses is more visceral, more primal. People get shy on camera, so making everyone be potentially on camera at all times, or random times, is fueling a kind of anxiety that isn't going to just go away. hey, we've been here before, with google glass. Google was smart enough to discontinue it immediately.
When did this happen?
You must never play your hand like this or you risk being dunked on for your excessiveness.
2020's woke was like this btw.
Hmm wait a minute, unless that small minority is politically well connected with a lot of media access. Then they could manufacture a fake backlash. Much like the backlash to "woke!" Ok nevermind it is the same.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
What changed it? Actually spending a weekend with Claude Code building personal projects I had wanted to for the last 2 years, which also makes it obvious that we can solve sustainability issues using this tech.
Also seeing the open models reach the frontier and knowing the above ass-hats aren't going to end up with a monopoly helps a lot too.
We are not the target audience for those messages. The target audience are people like themselves who cannot wait to get rid of all those not-haves that are cramping their style and ruining their days.
Then they wonder why people are making the implication that their future plans are to completely take over society and run it according to their own whims.
because it doesn't matter whether you can use code to fix your Reevo bike if you can't afford to buy a Reevo bike in the first place because you lost your job
I had a terrifying thought while mowing the lawn today that we don't even have an inkling of a feel for how imaginary property laws are going to destroy the usefulness of hosted LLMs for individuals. Ask Claude Jr the easiset way to attach some mechanical actuators to your lawnmower and to write some software, and it's going to respond "sorry, automated lawnmowing runs afoul of patents X, Y, and Z. Please upload your patent license certificates". With LLMs we're currently at the stage where Google used to reliably return good links to cracks/warez/etc, and as we all know that's been thoroughly locked down.
I'll let you know when it's time
The conservatives you speak about are conserving ideologies they thought were revolutionary.
What both have in common is that they don't like change.
you know what change I'd like? abolish billionaires
- Cameras film me and my family and neighbors everywhere in daily life => Obviously an issue
- Something about secret agencies maybe (?) reading along my messages => “I’ve got nothing to hide in there anyway”
Cameras on our streets? Well, those were put there by local law enforcement and city councils, who are much more accessible (even though I'm sure they wish they weren't). If the camera is still there, it's still a problem. And if all other options fail, well, someone is probably willing to take the risk to cut that camera down.
It's the same as how communities respond to egregious law enforcement abuses. Accusations get nowhere as opposed to undeniable video of things like George Floyd.
The Snowden leaks had too much of an abstract bogeyman. PRISM couldn't inspire critical mass outrage because, at the time, Big Tech was still genuinely useful and, besides, the Big Tech involved could be sidestepped with some inconvenience. Flock is neither directly useful nor avoidable unless you resolve to never leave your house.
Metadata tracking is, again, too abstract of a concept, too much a statistical what-if. Compare that with Flock which tracks your very countenance.
Most importantly IMO, Flock has a physical manifestation on which people can direct their anger. There is a "frontend" to actively subvert as opposed to a mere "backend" to avoid.
(Benn Jordan has been so good at publicizing the flock issue, I would highly recommend to check his Patreon, his technical work over the years is really impressive)
Dragnet surveillance by the CIA was a bit harder to oppose.
People are beginning to understand.
The datacenter meeting for our board was the largest I've ever seen in town. They had to move it to the school auditorium when 1000+ people showed up the first time.
Just adding a “libertarian vs. authoritarian” axis to both labels changes things up wildly. And shows me at least a little bit how someone can label themselves conservative and also be totally fine with the surveillance state. Or totally against it.
This is about the right time for the children, nieces, and nephews of the first and second big generations of post-Web software engineers, IT workers, etc. to be getting old enough to become a political force. There's been an explosion of tech workers since the mid-90s, and that means an explosion of people related to them as well. The kids who watched their parents be stacked ranked at Amazon, saw the difference in how MS treated contractors and employees, listened to their corporate IT parents talk about how hostile MS is, etc. all learned that the big tech companies are not anyone's friend even if the specifics of the tech go over their heads. And while the workers themselves might keep their heads down and be quiet in public for the sake of their careers, their kids and relatives are less constrained.
And they can talk to each other and find that it's a common sentiment. Since they don't necessarily have technical careers or hobbies, they're also able to export this sentiment to a wider variety of people through overlapping hobbies and interests (e.g. the IT guy at a school in suburban Ohio has a kid who's a theatre nerd, and the kid is good at communicating their anti big tech position to this 'new' group of people).
The distribution of knowledge about how tech companies operate is shifting and diffusing into channels and communities it didn't before.
also, snowden is a traitor. putin's stooge
This will not happen in my lifetime.
It may do some. It may even do a lot. It will certainly augment close to 100% the remote jobs.
AI will never be able to “do every job that is remote”.
It's more effective when they slash the tires.
But I don't expect that to slow down any of the main drivers for now. Some have too much invested monetarily and emotionally, others have been caught up in the hype cycle.
Cui bono?
I'm not sure what the ideological term is for someone who doesn't argue for a return to the past or advancement into the future, but for permanent retention of current conditions.
We don't need to engineer plumbing robots - they will engineer themselves. We will see a silicon Cambrian Explosion. Maybe next year maybe in 500, but it's inevitable with the current economic incentives.
I first heard about Elon Musk in my teens when I was reading astronomy magazines and wishing Robert Zubrin was running NASA. Why wasn't Nasa progressing? We stopped going to the moon and made a space truck to ferry satellites and ISS nodules into LEO for $2B a pop and 1/100 odds of fatality. Anyway here comes this SV guy wishing he could put a greenhouse on mars and see if a plant would grow in Martian regolith...
I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.
Musk was never sincerely planning any kind of sci-fi future, the fact that SpaceX was built with help from Mike Griffin (who was a key player in the 80s 'Star Wars' SDI program) and the fact that Starlink's roadmap is basically reheated leftovers of Brilliant Pebbles[1] really gives the game away. He's just a generic military contractor with (well, used to have) good PR.
Me, too. He's just another Lucy, holding just another football.
People keep talking about how we're going to enter some kind of positive feeback loop where the chatbots design better chatbot chassis but so far we've just started generating articles about that prediction at a higher rate. This is typical of the gains from LLMs: not a qualitative improvement, but a quantitative improvement. I'd sooner believe we're about to build a Paperclip Maximizer than a Singularity Machine.
The general populace sees mostly the creative’s view. The results are poor and it comes at the expense of ripping off IP and providing bad copies of it.
The pervasive argument right now doesn’t view LLMs as a tool that have more or less eliminated entire segments of knowledge workers, who had already been offshored and are now basically redundant. Every mid level programmer who copied and pasted stack overflow snippets all the way down to support techs are done.
AI has made making a demo easy and sometimes it’s might present more than a quick trip to wikipedia would surface. Edit: also it makes making mistakes in Excel easy(analysis).
Best give up all hopes of a future now.
But we haven't. The only kind of software you produce in the latter scenario is unmaintainable and full of flaws. It's not at all a replacement for a team of experts.
Then they stand there and say 'how come they can't see what I see? Hmm'.
Oh the answer is - inertia! Lets see how long they toe that line for.
Go back to the movies of 30-40 years ago... that's what people envisioned about the future.