In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
Sounds familiar. The proof-of-work blockchain scheme which was the fad a while ago is also often described as a solution in search of a problem.
I feel like block chain as a public ledger has found quite a few purposeful uses, and was a solution to a handful of problems most people rarely if ever encounter. Then fake money got involved
The core issue feels like the dead torrent problem.
Its distributed, so it needs to be hosted, by several locations. Which becomes probitive over time as.it becomes huge. Its also massively inefficient for what its trying to do.
At some point, its basically just one server farm somewhere hosting a glorified MySWL database that doubles as a space heater for the entire planet every time you need to add a row.
I was thinking that with legal backing, blockchain could be a good record of ownership for deeds. Like NFTs but for physical property.
The history of ownership and the public visibility are good features there.
Lack of reliable, authoritative attribution of changes and no rollback or compensatory transactions are all dealbreakers.
Yes, exactly.
Block chain would have been an amazing solution to most democratic vote validation processes.
It can still be used that way. While most people talk about how corrupt politicians enrich themselves with fake currencies, more legal and legitimate uses can still use decentralized ledgers for useful things. Of course these won’t make headlines.
There are far better global ledger approaches than blockchain.
I believe you, but can you name one so we can all learn more about the alternatives out there?
SWIFT is the easy one. Fun fact they looked into blockchain at one point and went “yeah, nah”
I thought Swift is currently Block-Chain based. Do you mean this Swift?
Well no, because we don’t have a problem that blockchain solves (better than open software, if it must be digital), and there are loads of problems that the blockchain doesn’t solve. Like how am I supposed to vote with that thing under no coercion.
I’m glad you specifically pointed out proof-of-work blockchains.
They’re very inefficient (economically and ecologically) by design. In almost all cases this design isn’t warranted.
Alas there are other designs and while most of them are rubbish as well, a few ones are doing things quite right.I hope that just like other schemes than proof-of-work were thought of regarding blockchains, there will be AI models that are way, way more efficient and ideally can be run locally - for those cases that can use AI…
That’s top down thinking for you.
I don’t think they’re all lying; most are just misinformed or using the term differently than Cory.
It’s like saying “global warming is changing everything.” Technically, not true, but the knock on effects of specific aspects of it recently hit an inflection point that causes it to affect the lives of everyone.
This has also happened in the field of artificial intelligence; LLM chatbots are only the visible mushroom fruits of the vast mycelium network that has been silently growing underground for years.
silently growing underground for years.
And not so silently, for decades. Even J. Edgar Hoover was using early forms of AI to manage his data trove.
I typed into Google “potatoes pressure cooker” to get a reminder of how long to cook them. The AI told me, and correctly said that I should use the steamer sieve, but also told me to salt the water. The water that would be under the potatoes and that wouldn’t touch them.
I asked why, and the AI said that little splashes of salt water from the boiling would land on the surface of the potatoes and salt them gently, that the salt would increase the boiling temperature, and that the vapour would be aromatic.
I pointed out that the amount of salt landing on the surface of the potatoes would be negligible, that the vapour is distilled water in gas form, and that the increase in boiling temperature from salting the water is less than 1°C. The AI said, oh yeah, you’re right on all counts. Don’t salt the water.
What it has been doing was exactly what an LLM does. It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
That aligns with what Cory Doctorow was saying here, namely that all the AI successes were from people who already knew what they were doing and could use the AI as a tool. Not from people who had no clue and just let AI do the job.
I use google “ai” in when thrifting for audio gear. Minimum 80% of the time it gets something GLARINGLY wrong. “Oh ho ho! You correctly pointed out that I was completely wrong on all counts! An astute observation! Let me try again but this time give you the CORRECT information.”
I mean, to be fair, that’s a dirt cheap model you’re talking to, and Google is not exactly at the forefront of any tier of model, cheap or otherwise.
Is that you being fair or is that you rushing to defend something?
As if you don’t know these “tools” don’t work.
It gave me the received wisdom from the internet.
I mean… it gave you the amalgamated wisdom of the internet after a very complex game of telephone.
Salting the water would increase the boiling temperature I guess, but it seems like a waste of salt because that info isn’t meaningfully changing the cooking time
I really like a song that has intro and outro samples and I wanted to know where they were from, so I googled. Google AI promptly informed me that the song has no samples. Guess that settles that.
I do potatoes in my instant pot but leave the water in, it just gets absorbed. So the salt is effective in that case. I salt the potatoes themselves and toss them before adding the water, too, so they should get reasonably seasoned.
Also i use soup stock.
Mashed, though.
That “AI” is a completely dumbed down one with reasoning disabled. Of course it’ll make stuff up.
Salting the water is relevant when not using a pressure cooker. It makes no sense when you’re steaming them in a pressure cooker. AI is a good tool, sometimes. But for everyday tasks, it is irrelevant and often wrong.
I use AI as a writing tool, not as a substitute for authorship.
The ideas, intent, perspective, and final judgment are mine. I decide what I want to say, what belongs in the piece, what does not, and whether the finished version accurately represents me. AI may help me organize my thoughts, clarify a sentence, improve the flow, or find wording that better expresses what I already mean. That is not fundamentally different from working with an editor, dictating to a transcriber, or revising a draft after receiving feedback.
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it. By doing that, I take responsibility for every sentence. If the writing is thoughtful, accurate, and effective, I am responsible for those choices. If it is careless, misleading, generic, or full of slop, that is also my responsibility. Blaming the tool would be an attempt to avoid accountability.
AI does not decide what I believe. It does not decide what I am willing to defend. It does not decide what I publish under my name. I do.
The tool may assist with the writing process, but the authorship comes from intention, judgment, selection, revision, and responsibility. The final work is mine because I chose it, shaped it, approved it, and signed my name to it.
that’s bullshit.
Why?
“authorship is when i make a few edits and sign my name to slop”
if you have willingly handed over your primary writing tool to a machine (for which there is no real meaning, association, appreciation, or delight in words), it is difficult for me to take your commitment to writing or “authorship” seriously.
I did not say “authorship is when I make a few edits and sign my name to slop.” That is not my argument.
My argument is that authorship is grounded in the origination of the ideas and intent, control over what goes into the work, judgment over how those ideas are expressed, endorsement of the final form, and responsibility for the result. Assistance with the linguistic realization does not, by itself, transfer authorship.
You point out that the machine has no meaning, association, appreciation, or delight in the words. I agree. But I do. That is precisely the distinction I am making. The machine does not know what I mean, care whether it represents me, recognize when an analogy fails, or decide whether an argument is worth defending. I am doing those things.
You seem to be defining “writing” as personally generating the initial sequence of words. Maybe that is where we actually disagree. But that definition cannot simply be assumed and then used to prove that I am not writing. Why should authorship reside specifically in first-pass word generation rather than in the thought, intention, judgment, revision, and control that determine what the final words mean?
That is the argument I am interested in having.
i started to read your response, and then i remembered i can’t trust the degree to which you authored it.
i’m not interested.
You’re lost in the sauce. Do you know any other writers in real life? How do they feel about this?
“I dont write anything but i take credit for everything”
Interesting. When you want to criticize the argument, the words are mine enough to hold me responsible for them. But when I claim responsibility for those same words, suddenly they’re not mine.
“I don’t write anything but take credit for everything” is a straw man. If you disagree, address what I actually said.
I was reading the initial comment with peer-reviewed publications in mind and it all sounded like standard practice, but then I read yours and was like “oh, are we talking about books now?”
Either way, its still a bad look. Peer review is even worse than Op Eds, or fiction, or what have you… But its all equally socially degenerate
What matters is that I review the final work, approve it, and put my name on it.
that’s just called writing.
That’s my point.
What has AI changed so far?
- Hardware prices are so far up that nobody can buy good hardware anymore
- we have AI child porn now, awesome
- we have AI undressing apps, cool
- we have AI, the great cheat tool now † we have AI, the confidently wrong 20% of the time tool
- we have AI, the great misinformation tool
- we are at the brink of the largest economic collapse in human history caused again by the rich loving to play Russian roulette
- there are a limited amount of actual useful applications as well, yay
And all it cost us were millions of jobs, thousands of psychosis and deaths, hundreds of new loud polluting data centers, untold amounts of co2 when were right smack in the mids of a climate crisis…
I’m not advocating for murdering the AI CEOs, but I’m definitely a fan of at least permanent tarring and feathering
Only pro is laborious, tedious programming tasks have become significantly faster to do, along with testing edge cases and stuff a programmer should be able to do but maybe doesnt need to.
Just about everything else is negative.
- two of my friends finally have diagnoses for their health problems they had been living with for decades, and can now get appropriate treatment
Trust me, bro!
They are real people these friends of mine, but you don’t know them, because they are from a different school. And you won’t see them this summer at all because… they are both actually models in Canada during the summer.
But totally cured and now they get boners also with THIS ONE TRICK that doctors HATE it!!!
The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
I can’t vouch for that other person’s anecdote, but it seems entirely plausible that an LLM chatbot would be able to better diagnose an issue than a search engine, or even a human doctor, especially if the underlying issue was something like an autoimmune disease, which are notoriously difficult to diagnose.
One of the big flaws in the medical profession (and, really, most professions) is that once you are out of school, nothing forces you to keep learning as the field advances. This potentially, and counterintuitively, results in gaps in knowledge that increase the longer a doctor has been practicing. LLMs, with access to the newer medical information and with the ability to receive and output natural language, do make good tools for diagnosis.
AI, as it turns out, is also way better at analyzing MRI scans and x-rays than humans.
An old-fashioned Google search can point you to more information, if you’re curious about how AI has advanced the medical field.
Medical AI is usually more along the lines of ‘we’ve created a proprietary model for computer aided diagnostics specific to x disease being scanned with y modality and we’ve taken this through the regulatory process in z jurisdiction’ than ‘put your symptoms into an LLM lol’.
There are studies that show that LLMs (chatbots) perform as well or better than human physicians.
I’m not suggesting getting rid of physicians, though. This is a tool for humans, not a replacement.
@joe @mobyduck648 [citation needed]
@joe if it’s a tool for doctors to use then it will simply increase the costs of providing care even if there is an increase in the quality of that care. That means adoption of that particular type of “AI” will be limited. If it’s possible to replace doctors with a chatbot, that will decrease costs even if the quality of care also decreases.
Which one do you think is more likely to be widely used in a profit-driven, anti-human system?
These are concerns with the healthcare system, not concerns with AI.
Funny how my experience is the American health care system is still 100% absolute shit that costs me 2k a month for the privilege of said shit. My wait times are the same, my “go fuck yourselves” are the same, my healthcare workers are still underpaid, and the systems for consumers are still shit.
“But the charts say AI is helping”
Once again it’s consumers get to wait for the piss to trickle down our backs. AI hasn’t done shit for the average Joe except make everything cost more while providing a worse service. Please, tell me how my healthcare experience has improved in the past 2 years. Go.
You are talking about a different thing than I am. The American healthcare system is garbage with or without AI, but AI is helping the medical field. Getting a more accurate analysis of an MRI scan is objectively a good thing, for example, even if the healthcare system that performed the scan is garbage.
They’re not using LLMs to analyse MRI scans. There are image processing algorithms for that, but they’re a whole other thing to what this entire thread is about.
Also, are you a fucking bot? I’ve read all your comments so far in this thread and uhh yeah. Please feel free to jog on now.
I’ve read all your comments so far
I’m flattered. Did you read the first one where I said it was reductive to equate AI with chatbots?
Super cool! Well we can base your personal healthcare on AI’s sole guidance and if you are misdiagnosed, injured or dead as a result of an “oopsie”, no human will be held legally liable - fun!
So no real stakes for anyone to get it right, as with human-led interventions (with careers on the line at every stage to keep people engaged and honest). But corporations will probably just naturally do the right thing.
But you’re brave, you offer yourself as tribute to the lying machine. Tight tight tight!!!
You seem very passionate about this topic, but you’re not really adding much to the discussion.
Don’t worry, its coming across loud and clear that AI could cure cancer and you’d still think it was better to have cancer than use AI. I get it. AI = bad, full stop. Message received.
“AI” isn’t a thing. Computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and neural networks are. These can all be useful tools when regulated and maintained with active oversight to balance with society’s other core priorities. What’s at question is the current method and human cost for this frivolously hyped, deceptively marketed lying machine with a single tangible use to date, being the operating system for Facebook’s pervert glasses. You didn’t read, of missed the entire point of, this important article, shared from an important contemporary mind.
Name and cite SPECIFIC examples of anything you claim.
P.s. you don’t “cure cancer”… cancer is a broad heading for hundreds of unique types of disease, presenting in different, completely unique systems within the human body. Like AI, “a cure for cancer” is a broad generalization of complex underlying systems that ignorant people make frivolously - People who think they HAVE the entire knowledge of the world in their brains, when they actually only have a plastic rectangle in their pants pocket with privilege-gated access to a (mostly corporate) CURATED VERSION of the world’s historic knowledge. So if you’ve “cured cancer” friend, why aren’t you treating the 20-30k humans that will die from a form or cancer today worldwide?
> The medical field is one of the places where AI has made real, tangible improvements.
This is demonstrably untrue.
AI tends to increase dangerous racial bias in healthcare.
- https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/healthcare-bias-in-ai-a-systematic-literature-review/
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5C_id=3747737
- https://tech4future.info/en/algorithmic-discrimination-healthcare/
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-022-00590-8
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40615-024-02237-0
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231213820
- https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(24)00321-5
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-01746-4@joe @Snapz AI is dangerously unreliable in a clinical setting and often provides dangerous medical advice in and out of clinical settings.
- https://futurism.com/typo-ai-doctor-haywire
- https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260
- https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AIoa2300015
- https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732121
- https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1181131532/eating-disorder-helpline-takes-down-chatbot-after-it-gave-weight-loss-advice
- https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/serious-medical-error-from-perplexitys
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732039AI can make medical professionals less competent
- https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10462-025-11352-1deleted by creator
To be clear, I didn’t mean to imply that AI was flawless or had no room for improvement, only that it has made real, tangible improvements. This is why it shouldn’t be used as a replacement for humans, but as a tool for humans.
@joe Please cite your sources. What improvements? How were these improvements tested, studied, and documented? Where were the results published?
I trust you’re capable enough to do your own Google search.
Just adding my two cents to this because I have heard this before. The AI wasn’t programmed to do this. It was training to based off the racist shit on the internet that it takes from. Systemic racism just doing it’s thing.
c/nothingeverhappens
That’s awesome! Imagine if we took all the resources spent on pushing AI for stuff it isn’t good at and invested them in training models for detecting, classifying and correlating medical indicators and using that to anonymously connect people with a network of physicians and psychiatrists for further evaluation and preliminary diagnostics to help with getting actual treatment.
We could bring a more reliable version of that help your friends happened to get to more people, with less of a random chance that the model will reinforce the issues or misdiagnose people with dangerous consequences. We could improve the world.
Instead, they burn books, fire people and abuse eminent domain to displace people so they can run power lines to feed data centers fucking up the water supply for residents that got no say in whether they want oversized heaters in their backyard.
I’m glad your two friends got some use out of this. Is that really worth the price?
I 100% agree. I have no idea why my comment gets downvoted so much. I just wanted to point out that AI and even LLMs absolutely do have valuable use cases. I use them a lot and I see people around me making their lives better using them. Are they overhyped? Probably. Are AI companies using public information that should belong to everyone in an unfair way to become rich and powerful? Absofuckinglutely. Is that how it should be? Definitely not. Is AI a technology with massive potential to change the world for the better? Also yes. Does AI have the potential to completely wreck our society and economy if we do the whole thing wrong? Probably also yes. I hope we can find a way to turn this into something positive.
I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week!), but pretending that “AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.
If the internet was “turned off” after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
To the average person (and this includes politicians, basically anyone not a software engineer developing the tools )who Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.
Should they be? No. But that’s a whole different thing and trying to change that in the general public mind doesn’t change his current point about AI as the public thinks of it right now.
Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.
I think the comparison is acceptable with maybe a terminology clarification in the footnotes, because “AI” is the false term under which this current bullshit is being marketed.
And people who believe the core mechanism in large language models to be AI are so uneducated that they will probably neither understand the distinction to legitimate AI research, nor bother to read footnotes.
That’s exactly the thing. Those who understand such a footnote don’t need it, and those who might learn more from it are unlikely to understand it. The above commenters are simply being pedantic.
Pedantic or AI bros ;) I find this new generation of gullible tech users scary. Recently saw someone voice their disappointment with Codeberg’s anto-vibecoding stance, and the person was describing themselves as “tech optimist”, which I believe is a great way to self-out as being extremely gullible.
And people who believe the core mechanism in large language models to be AI
What does that mean? Transformers aren’t AI? What? I don’t think you understand this as much as you think you do.
Think all you want, statistical text prediction has nothing to do with AI. The “intelligent” algorithms are all in the pre- and postprocessing steps that make the output sound good enough to fool gullible people into assumong intelligence.
Is equating chatbots with AI any different than equating a bunch of if/else statements with AI? Is any of this AI considering none of it involves actual intelligence or informed decision making?
Sure AI is more than LLMs, but those are the face of it in the public’s eye and is what’s driving these trillion dollar corporate valuations, which then lead to every company on earth declaring that their product is “AI!”
Yep, most people would not understand Machine Learning or Big Data analysis generally being AI, so just market your product by the sub category and you don’t have to deal with the expectancy of GenAI
What’s lost? I can’t think of anything.
Words are meant to convey meaning, and I bet you would lose a lot of non-technical people if you tried to explain the intricacies of what makes large language models worse than content recommendation systems, and doing this would be redundant for technical users.
So Corey can safely use the two words interchangeably and communicate with technical and non-technical alike.
As a non-techie: websites are the internet.
Like, I conceptualize the internet as basically just a giant shared network, but the point of it is the websites (for me).
I apologize to anyone I may have just gravely offended.
I apologize to anyone I may have just gravely offended.
lol
I don’t know how “non-techie” you are, but a good example is online games. When you’re playing Fortnite, Roblox, World of Warcraft, etc you’re not going to a web page, but you’re on the internet.
I straight up almost called it a series of tubes, lol.
Yeah, that’s probably why I do think of it as a shared network, I just don’t play online games, so that’s not what I associate with the internet.
There are other examples but I take your point.
Cory generally writes to try and inform, they are the same.
then he has completely failed to understand the concepts for people using him an a information proxy
isnt he supposed to help inform? or is he just an echo chamber to the lowest-common-loudmouth?
Stepping up and doing it better is free.
Too busy using AI at work to make everything easier for my coworkers and earn another raise
Good luck when they stop subsidizing the tokens 👍
I also can’t imagine bragging about being so busy doing work for the hope of a raise that I didn’t have time to pursue things I felt strongly about. Recenter your priorities.
I already got two raises in the past 18 months and it brings me joy to see things happening at work more efficiently, all on 20$ claude subscription, that’s fine ill pay $100/mo for the same stuff in a year, easily worth it (my employer pays it anyway)
Sorry if it replaced your only marketable skill or something, and we absolutely should have universal basic income for these kinds of cases!
I think you’re making a strawman argument here. He isn’t arguing that it’s a binary switch that has failed to throw, he’s arguing that we don’t have compelling evidence that the ends justify the means:
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
And this is completely true! Supposedly “data informed” organizations are trying to find a yardstick that shows actual, meaningful improvement in business outcomes from AI. In my own organization we have people touting LOC yet again because “big number”, but anyone who’s ever worked in software can tell you it’s an asinine metric to use as a KPI.
It’s inherently unscientific to start with the answer and work backwards to a satisfactory question. His point that this push is coming from the least knowledgeable of real processes- and more closely resembles religious fervor than business acumen- seems to at least warrant consideration.
The world is full of people who insist that “AI is changing everything” but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they’re pretty sure that AI will change everything.
If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country’s chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country’s ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
He is definitely pretending that change is either on or off.
Are CEOs jumping the gun on how quickly they adopt AI into workflows? Definitely. However, there’s a big difference between “AI isn’t at a threshold where it is disruptive” and “AI isn’t disruptive”. Or, to belabor the metaphor: CEOs are jumping the gun, but the race is about to start and they’re on the correct track.
If you watch a full podcast (he has done a ton in the last couple weeks), he clearly identifies AI as not a mere hype technology, as something interesting and potentially useful from a technology perspective, and he definitely doesn’t conflate a chatbot with all AI. That doesn’t undermine the vast problems with it, how it’s being used against regular workers, the threat the bubble poses to the economy, the criti-hype cycle, etc.
I think you’re oversimplifying “Cory Doctorow” based on the article you’re reading or specifically how he presents a more complex idea to different audiences.
Watch the Jon Stewart podcast interview if you want more nuance:
A key word in that sentence is “if”, it is a rhetorical example, that’s probably pretty much correct at this point. It’s not a recommended course of action, it’s a declaration that it contrary to crazed hype, it isn’t currently as core to everything as would be befitting the current hype level.
I would argue that the CEOs aren’t on the correct track, they aren’t really in a particularly specific trajectory. I just had a debate with someone on this and their stance was “well in a hundred years do you expect things to be like they are”. My response “I cannot possibly speak to that, but we need to speak to today instead of pretending we know how things will be in a hundred years and pretending they are already at that level”. The “imagine a hundred years from now” by a relative outsider to the tech is dominating CEO mindset, and that’s problematic.
Once the bubble pops, we will almost certainly see a more durable and sane adoption for these technologies. For now, the hype is a problem as it enables some of the worst possible stewards of the technology and favors grift over progress.
Corey Doctorow isn’t speaking to you, he’s speaking to the many, many people who have been fooled by the ai craze.
And often I wonder, how many people have been fooled, and how much of the enthusiasm and over the top fantasy is astroturfing by a few people incentivized to sway public opinion?
And how much of the doomerism is a campaign to keep the common man from using a revolutionary tool for, well, revolution, by alienating those most likely to do revolutionary things with it?
Once you look at the actual numbers for pollution, water usage, etc it becomes very clear that the issues are vastly overstated. So, why?
That’s one for the fooled side.
Yeah. I guess we’ll see.
EDIT: you should go on claude’s reddit and look at all of the tools people have built to keep companies and politicians accountable, to renegotiate billing, to improve their lives at the expense of capital. Or you can just go on thinking you’re right!
Fuck reddit but i have a friend who automated fooa requests with claude, sent foia requests to every county in the state and has all the tracking and everything automated. Only thing he needs to do is review the emails before they get sent. It’s amazing and he’s bring transparency to every corner of the state using ai.
Yeah I personally use it to analyze public data bases for fraud.
I keep comparing the datacenter numbers to Bitcoin - only BTC, not all of crypto, is still using more electricity than AI. That may change in the future, but JFC people, where was the outrage about the global Ponzi scheme?
I generally respect this guy’s opinion (I probably use the term “enshitification” multiple times a week
A lot of people don’t use it the way he used it though. He used it specifically for two sided markets (eg a service that has both businesses/advertisers and personal users) where the focus shifts to the business customers, but people have started using it to mean anything that used to be good but isn’t good any more.
“AI” and “Chabot” are interchangeable
In the same way that most people if you say you’ll take them to their destination with your vehicle, they assume in your car and not on the back of your bicycle, although both are technically correct.
If the internet was “turned off” after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
That’s a questionable statement that may reflect on your main argument. After all, when was the Internet “switched on”? Sounds very binary to me.
To be clear, Doctorow discussed switching off AI and proposed that there would be little to no change on the world. I was just changing the technology to show the flaw in the stance.
and thereby revealed the flaw in your own counterargument.
Can you elaborate? I’m not following what you’re saying.
I think it’s a worthy simplification that sums up the current state of things well. We have AI that broadly has different uses and then we have the ChatBot/ChatBot derived AI applications. The market is not going insane over the broader AI category. Executives are not tripping over themselves to say things like machine vision is going to replace all labor, or at least all white collar labor. The chatbot is the only thing in the conversation of consequence.
All the “everyone says AI is the reality, so everyone feels like they must say AI is the reality” refers to this specific category. It might be veering towards being oversimplified, but it’s trying to balance a perspective that is also oversimplified. Generally, we aren’t good at weighing simple straightforward takes against complex nuanced takes, so you have to “net it out” to have any hope of the point landing.
Pretending AI and Chatbot are interchangeable is a marketing strategy by the companies who make these advanced chat bots. “They are artificially intelligent bro”.
I don’t disagree that the term AI has shifted significantly in the last 4 years or so, but I was actually meaning it in the other direction, as in, there is more to generative AI (what people are calling “AI” these days) than just chat bots.
“Chatbot” style AI is wildly good and bad at varying kinds of tasks, and a lot of that has to do with how it has been prepared.
Some LLMs have been trained to make images - I’ve not been too impressed with them, but that’s what they’re “good” at - and better than the LLMs that have been trained to write computer code when you ask the coding LLMs to draw a picture.
The code writing LLMs have actually improved the most at reviewing code over the past 8-9 months, and that ability to review their own code makes them dramatically better at writing code as well.
I find Google Gemini to be pretty impressive at scanning laws and regulations and finding, not creative, but functional solutions to stated problems within the constraints of (often frustratingly bizarre) legal structures.
And all of them will lie to you, tell you what a great idea you have, etc. They’re not really lying, they’re mostly just taking what they read at face value without checking corroborating sources enough to find the obvious (to you) blunders. If you want the LLM to be sure, ask it to go on the RAG (Research Augmented Generation) - check everything before saying it, they can do that, especially “paid mode” engines, but it reduces their capacity for analysis of complex problems by 3-10x, because they’re spending so much context window “being sure” - you can alternatively spend 3-10x as long solving complex problems / accomplishing complex tasks if you have them do their homework, verify everything from “the best” available sources 3x and build up a local document set of “trusted information” which is used in preference to whatever it might find at random on the internet. This isn’t as sexy as “Hey Claude, code me up a database that does X Y Z” and getting the result in 30 seconds, but it is how professionals have been doing their jobs for centuries: learn reliable information first, then act on it.
Oh look it’s arbitrary-narrow-definition-that-fits-the-argument-I-want-to-make man!
Oh look it’s arbitrary-narrow-definition-that-fits-the-argument-I-want-to-make man!
I’m saying there’s more to generative AI than chatbots. My definition of AI is broader. What are you going on about?
That your definition is only advantageous to the argument you want to make. Everybody else understands “common usage” by non-technical folks. I’m a “technical folk” working in the area and I understand the “common usage” by the “regular folk”.
In my academic field of sustainability, AI still fails to explain what economic sustainability means. It’s very simple.
I lecture and explain to my students that economic sustainability is about how we assess and manage our knowledge, innovations, wealth, and other man-made capital. I stress that it is ABSOLUTELY NOT profit and revenue.
Sure enough, my students submit assignments clearly written by AI that state economic sustainability is profit and revenue.
AI is regurgitating decades of green-washing and even bad academic articles that state economic sustainability is about profits. I use that AI god mode site to test several AI’s at once and they’ve consistently gotten this wrong for 3 years.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent, and we as humans really bad at acknowledging how little we individually know about the world around us.
The easiest example to ask AI detailed questions about something that you know you have expertise in. If you try to test its limit, no matter what your particular expertise is, I’m confident that in 5-10 minutes you’ll realize it’s no more intelligent than an average Joe who spent their lunch break Googling the subject or maybe someone who read a book about it once.
To give credit where it’s due, that does mean that these AIs have a much wider breadth of knowledge than any one person could have and that is, objectively, very cool.
On the other hand, that’s why it’s so easy to believe that AI is this all-knowing oracle that can replace all of humanity. It can give you a way better answer in an instant about things you know nothing about than you ever could off the top of your head, so it seems unbelievable. It’s instant gratification that also feels really valuable.
Despite the trick that AI plays on our psychology, you could also just read a book or two or participate in any form of genuine learning, and it really doesn’t take long for you to outgrow whatever the AI is capable of. It takes a bit longer, but now you have grown your actual intelligence and you get to keep it for a $0/month subscription and they don’t need to build another data center in your backyard.
The trick that AI pulls is just that it is really good at appearing competent
Yeah it’s almost like the AI is an unthinking machine trying to model what a person would answer to the question (prompt) provided to it.
I’m so goddamn tired of people (not you) acting like an LLM “knows” anything nevermind whether it’s right or wrong or could even tell you if it didn’t know the answer. It’s not like a person that can say, “I don’t have that knowledge so I know any answer is likely wrong” the machine is going to give you an answer every time. That answer will never be “idk” it’ll be whatever hallucination it’s confident enough is right based on the model and training.
I do think there are use cases for it and the technology is cool but the vision being sold and propping up our economy with a venture capitalist circle jerk is so far removed from reality.
You will get an email at some point asking you if you would accept some well paid contract to train an LLM to answer like you would. That’s how they simulate professional behavior on top of the probabilistic monsters that is behind.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
I’m no economist but I had plenty of professors who wanted their particular theories reflected back at them.
While students should do their own reading and writing, using ‘they write mainstream ideas’ as a litmus test for writing and AI seems parochial. And I’d go so far as to say AI is becoming a standard research and writing aid like the web word processors, and you sound like teachers who ranted against those too.
Have you engaged either group in open discussion about comparing the perspectives you’re challenging? I bet several modern models could debate your philosophy on merit, I wonder if you ever gave students the chance.
I teach what is correct, but the incorrect mainstream understanding is what AI provides. It’s the crux of the problem I focus on in my research.
So you teach something different from the mainstream - cool. But don’t be surprised when students or AI cite others or take an alternative position.
Not every class is debate. Plenty of courses are simply taught by an expert in their field, and students are graded on how well they learn from that professor’s instruction. Is it a perfect system? No. But that’s why we have experts. Some classes exist to simply establish a baseline of knowledge among the students. Such classes cannot be continuously derailed by engaging in rigorous debate about topics that experts in the field consider unambiguous and long-settled. Students are free to form their own opinions and whatever conclusions they want, but they need to demonstrate that they have at least learned the material as taught. You can believe the Universe is 6000 years old if you want. You cannot expect your astronomy professor to spend half the class debating with you about it.
A creationist student doesn’t have to believe in evolution to get an A in an evolutionary biology class. But they do have to demonstrate mastery or at least competence in the principles of evolutionary biology as taught by their professor. If they want to view the whole course as “a silly exercise in memorizing the lies of evolutionists,” well they’re free to do so. It’s a free country. Believe whatever you want. But that doesn’t mean they can just write, “God did it” to every answer on the final and still receive a passing grade.
You’re free to believe or reject anything a teacher or professor teaches you. That doesn’t mean you get out of learning the lesson entirely.
I’m pretty sure the fucking economist you’re replying to is not “teach(ing) something different from the mainstream” that’s the whole point of their post.
The whole point is the AI tools are hallucinating* completely incorrect answers and that students trying to use them as study aids and tools to learn with are going to have a lot of fake and wrong information to sort out and good luck to them knowing what is or isn’t incorrect or wrong when they’re just trying to learn a subject they know nothing about.
The only reason you or I or anyone else knows when AI hallucinates in its output is because we know stuff from our prior knowledge and can catch it that way. If you’re ignorant to a subject and trying to learn stuff you’re not going to know off hand the AI is lying to you if it sounds convincing enough for a layperson to accept.
*which I kind of hate that term because to the AI there’s no difference between truth and hallucination - it’s just output as far as the robot is concerned
he expects to debate every professor he encounters, which brings up other quesitons about his motives.
It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, helpful.
This is stupid. The tools are helpful. Overhyped? Sure. But to pretend they are in no way helpful is just wrong.
Nothing is helpful until you need help. The fact that you think AI is helpful for you don’t have to force me to use AI. If you pay me $100k+ per year and you force me to use your tools to do my job why you even hired me ? To force this cult on me or to do the job ?
It’s pretty normal for an employer to dictate what tools and applications an employee uses. If you prefer gitlab but your employer requires teamcity, you don’t really get a say, right?
However, if you think you can meet your deadlines without using a code generating AI tool, then don’t use it. Ideally, if they are as useless as you imply, no one will be able to tell whether you’re using it. The conflict should only really appear if they do increase productivity, and you refuse to use them, resulting in less productivity than your peers.
Company will be able to tell if you’re using it because companies behind sota models come with monitoring. You will have meeting with hr and your manager when you will be forced to use it even if you meet quotas. They will argument it that maybe you can do more and increase your normal quota with expected ai usage increase in productivity even if you had best productivity in team without ai and your productivity stays the same. Suddenly you will be under performing because you are refusing to use ai so you will be first to fire even if you are best employee. That’s how corporations work. They are monitoring usage because it costs them money. For big corporations they pay upfront to get discounts. Company also make many trainings and meetings to encourage everyone use AI models they pay for but nobody wanted.
The conflict should only really appear if they do increase productivity, and you refuse to use them, resulting in less productivity than your peers.
While it should be easy to point out where this helps, it very much is not in reality because AI accelerates execution on ideas, but corporations nearly always suck much more at deciding which ideas to actually implement in the first place.
I predict that the longer this goes on, the more useless, untested half-features will be stuffed into software and the more bloated “fall back” implementations full of duplicated spaghetti code will exist.
If the tools don’t stick around because it’s too cost prohibitive to keep using them, we’re going to be cleaning up after the bots for a decade.
It’s been a boon for personal slopjects for me. But that’s because I could never find time for execution in the past. Now I just have the (free tier) AI slop up my ideas.
useless half features will be stuffed into software and the more bloated “fall back” implementations full of duplicated spaghetti code will exist.
Which happened without AI, too.
Remember that AI, in whatever form or field, only has to be better than the average human in the field, to be useful to a company project.
Which happened without AI, too.
Sure, but not at this speed. The bots can churn out a mountain of non-sense that does not work faster than people can review it and the bots themselves will lie to you and say “it’s all implemented”.
For people who have clear ideas of what to implement but struggle to find the time, this is a big gift. You can work hand-in-hand with the bot and say “nope, not that, this” until it implements what you had in mind. For aimless corporations with “ideation” meetings who cannot stop coming up with terrible ideas that none of their customers want, it’ll hasten the process of them making their software worse over time.
That’s exactly what I’m seeing at my current company.
That’s a fair point, but it’s not an issue with AI; it’s an issue with corporate culture. Corporate culture can and does change, especially with advances in technology, but there will be a churn period where it’s chaotic and mistakes are made.
I agree with that as well. A lot of the problem with my current company comes straight from the executive leadership level. I’m afraid that the culture will only change when they change (or more likely, the company will eventually just go bust).
They bought the lie that AI will replace all of software engineering, whereas I see the picture more like this:
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/why-ai-hasnt-replaced-software-engineers
A CEO that thinks that they’re going to develop all of the software, even with Claude code, is nuts. They simply do not have the necessary skill set to run a software project even if 100% of the hands-on programming is done by AI. They are not going to be sitting there telling a machine to move things around on a web app. They are going to believe the bot when it says that “it is implemented”.
Honestly if they hired someone who refuses to use AI in 2026 it’s on them.
I don’t need you to use you turn signals, but it’s helpful. I’m pretty sure I could come up with a multitude of situations where your first sentence is refuted without contest.
I thought the turn signals were required by law
I’m not necessarily suggesting Doctorow is correct with this assertion, but on a macro scale what productivity gains will generate AI provide?
Yes there’s a few skills it’s good at coding, medical research, and image recognition being a few.
The genuine question is: has this improved everyone’s quality of life?
I work at a sales-first (read: no accountability) software company, ran by inept nepo-babies and a hostile VC. I frequently have to completely re-do all of the sales engineering work when a new project starts, because they refuse to standardize or talk to each other.
After enough time doing this shit by hand, I took my best examples from previous projects and had an agent “fix the errors based on the conventions I established over here”. Instead of going line by line on these big serialized data formats now, I do about 10min of checking the results and editing down the change log.
It’s wack that I have to re-do someone else’s job still, but at least I can force some version of standardization without killing myself on the tedious bits.
That doesn’t really answer my question. It’s changed your job, but has it improved your customers quality of life?
You’re getting direct examples of people its helped, and you keep brushing it off and asking what about everybody else. You’re obviously not going to get a single answer that affects everybody, and why do small successes not matter?
Because they’re not really successes.
No one here is saying AI has reduce their workload so now they spend half their time catching butterflies.
The answers are all saying that AI has automated some mundane task that wasn’t particularly important, and now they can spend their time doing something more interesting.
Is the changes to their role, multiplied by millions of employees, actually better for humanity or society?
In a way, this is what Doctorow is arguing: where is the data showing the productivity gains.
My follow up question is, how are these productivity gains being used, if they exist.
Aren’t you assuming productivity gains will lead to free time? Why? It never has. Most of us work a fixed amount of time and get paid for that time. Not the amount of tasks we finish if that can even be measured.
Salaries have also not increased with increased productivity long before chatbots came online. So they won’t suddenly increase now.
AI is much more just like a new laptop you get from work. The new device is faster, has more RAM and allows you to do more, potentially.
The big question is, if the purchase was worth it. Unlike a new laptop, LLMs are an ongoing cost to users and providers. Nobody except for GPU producers are actually making money right now. Hyperscalers make some of the money back they themselves invested into the companies using their services, but in the end the ROI looks pretty dim for anyone.
So even if there are real productivity gains, you won’t see people relax with their kids more. And even if these gains are significant they may not prevent a huge economic collapse so we all will have plenty of time with our kids in the end anyway.
AI has automated some mundane task that wasn’t particularly important, and now they can spend their time doing something more interesting.
That absolutely sounds like a win to me. Why is productivity gains the only thing that’s important? QoL is what matters. Unless you’re a capitalist overlord.
100%! I don’t understand how this is a hard concept to grasp. I’ve been able to make productivity gains, sure, but who gives a fuck? Even if my productivity is the same, my QoL is still much improved when I’m not buried in mundanity.
The problem here is that the technology is owned by capitalist overlords.
And their goal isn’t improving your QoL. If that was the goal we would already enjoy 4 hour work week long time ago.
It’s improved mine. I save hours (that I didn’t really have anyhow) on meaningless tedium. I thought that was pretty obviously implied though?
Maybe it helps to say that this was in no way forced on me. The stuff my employer has done to “adapt AI” is laughable and seemed to be nothing more than lip service to the execs who want to slap that sticker on the product.
The gains for me personally have been strictly using it as a tool in niche situations. I prefer to do things the hard way when it’s for me but I’m not breaking my back for a corporation.
But how do you spend the time you saved?
Either you’re arguing in bad faith by nitpicking for some reason, or you are incredibly dense. Do I need to send you my calendar dude? I just freed up some time, maybe we can hop on a call and I can spell it out for you?
I dont understand. That seems like a perfectly reasonable question.
If gen AI has saved you a heap of time, how do you now use that time that was saved?
I work in government and part of my job is writing memos or documents that nobody will ever read but that some congressional mandate requires me to have on file. I absolutely offload that to AI so I can do my real job.
What a grotesque job this is.
This is another answer that misunderstands my question. It’s changed your job but has it improved the quality of life of the public served by your office ?
With ownership being as concentrated as it is now (more concentrated than during the guilded robber baron age), naturaly, most of the benefit flows to the biggest owners, and AI seems poised to deepen the wealth inequality further.
In a scenario without the insane wealth concentration, and with a dignified and decent economic floor being guaranteed universally, I would be in favor of any AI that does not burn our planet to a crisp and stink up the neighborhood with the gas turbine exhaust.
So in our world as it is, I have to be agaisnt the AI for the foreseeable future.
Not yet because people are still learning how to use it, but im literally ten times more organized than i was before i started using AI to automate notetaking planning calendaring all that.
I’m happy for you but isn’t really an answer.
“Not yet” isn’t an answer??
It’s a response but when provided as an answer to the question “is AI a net benefit to society” then it’s a “no”.
Ok so it’s still answer lmao
LLMs are like a dishwashers. You could wash all the dishes yourself and probably get them cleaner in less time, but it’s useful to let a machine do the work, even I though it’s mandatory inspect every single dish to make sure the machine got them clean enough and re-wash a certain percentage of them. Dishwashers are useful, but the world wouldn’t end if we didn’t have them. They also have the benefit of using less water than when do them yourself, which certainly isn’t the case with LLMs.
In the same line of thinking, this is why I hand wash my car, because the automatic car wash either does a bad job (touchless) or will scratch the paint up all over (brushes). Many people don’t care very much about their cars though, so why put in the effort?
I find unreliable tools to be one of the most infuriating parts of my job, and unfortunately my entire job has effectively pivoted to spending all day babysitting an AI that frequently ignores instructions and can’t learn without a ton of expensive fine-tuning training.
I don’t let AI touch any of my personal code I care about, and with how much of the code at work is written by AI, it’s pretty demoralizing. Why put in any effort designing something if it’s just going to get blown away by a coworker’s agent the next day?
Arguing with the AI over why its code review is wrong is also a whole other part of my day now…
The later section addresses this
The other question Suresh implicitly raises is: “How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?”
Part of the problem is AI isn’t a literal thing with a fixed definition. It’s more of a marketing term that translates into “I want you to buy this thing”. So some things are considered AI that are legitimately useful and others are not and then there’s the debate if wether it’s because it really is AI or if it is and AI just sucks.
In other words, corporate leadership is starting from the premise that AI has (or will) radically change the business, and they’re working backwards from that premise to find the evidence to support this article of faith.
This quote is quite funny in this context, because it’s literally what people do with AI. Half of the frontpage of lemmy is AI. The other half is people saying AI is bad with no realization of the irony, because they don’t see good AI. It’s like CGI. Everybody hates CGI, except they don’t. CGI is everywhere. They just hate bad CGI.
What is AI? Explain as if i just woke up from a coma. We don’t have flying cars, we have dumpster deloreans, but everyone is talking about AI. What is it?
AI is a vague term used colloquially to describe a variety of dissimilar and unrelated technologies each carrying a unique mixture of pros and cons.
So it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Like most things, meaning depends on context. In the most common context of “news about AI” we’re talking about generative AI: image/video generators, LLMs, and to a lesser degree coding assistants. If you want to know more about what these technologies share in common, look up what a “perceptron” is and how it works.
More generally AI could mean anything from a neural network based approach to problem solving, to a completely deterministic, hand coded heuristic. A pure decision tree could be AI in the case of video game NPCs, for example.
So it’s a new synonym for algorithm.
The utility of the term “AI” depends on what you’re trying to communicate.
AI is any compute model performing complex enough reasoning that the output does not always resemble the input. They are by definition non deterministic and the same ask can provide different outputs without being influenced by other inputs.
So its a lottery
No
Since that was a lazy question I decided to be lazy and just copy paste it into Gemini. Enjoy! I have no idea what the point of this is!
Artificial Intelligence isn’t a single technology; it has been a massive umbrella term since the 1950s. Broadly, it means creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.
If LLMs are just one tiny branch on the tree, here is what the rest of the tree looks like:
Machine Learning (ML): This is the engine driving most modern AI. Instead of a human programmer writing strict "if/then" rules, we feed the computer massive amounts of data and let it figure out the rules itself. This is what powers your Netflix recommendations, credit card fraud detection, and the algorithm deciding what you see on social media. Computer Vision: Teaching computers to "see" and interpret the visual world. This is how self-driving cars identify stop signs versus pedestrians, how your phone unlocks when it sees your face, and how medical software spots anomalies in X-rays faster than human doctors. Robotics: The physical application of AI. This isn't just mechanical engineering; it is the software that allows a machine to navigate the unpredictable, physical world. This covers everything from the Roomba vacuuming your floor to automated factory arms and those creepy, dog-like robots from Boston Dynamics. Natural Language Processing (NLP): This is the branch focused on understanding and generating human language. LLMs live here, but so do older, simpler technologies like spellcheck, Google Translate, and the early versions of Siri or Alexa. Expert Systems & Rule-Based AI: This is the older, "classic" AI. It relies on a massive database of human knowledge programmed as logical rules. When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion in 1997, it wasn't using an LLM; it was using raw computational power to calculate millions of possible moves and their outcomes based on strict rules. Predictive Analytics & Optimization: The invisible math running the modern world. This is AI used by logistics companies to find the absolute most efficient routes for delivery trucks, or by hedge funds to execute high-frequency stock trades based on market micro-fluctuations.I asked the question to demonstrate something. You didn’t want to participle in the discussion and that’s fine, but that doesn’t mean the question is “lazy”
I didn’t provide you with an answer to your question?
OK, but the point still stands if you allow that: It has become impossible to tell managers mesmerised by artificial intelligence that the tools are often not, in fact, helpful.
Sure, although I would phrase it I think a bit more pointedly: “it has become impossible to tell managers mesmerized by artificial intelligence that the tools are not, in fact, capable of what they imagine they are capable of.”
This points, rightly, at it being a failure on the part of the managers - not artificial intelligence. And God knows that’s spot fucking on.
It is a double edged sword.
If you’re already experienced developer and you use it skillfully, validate produced code it can help.
If you aren’t (and unfortunately everyone thinks they are better than they actually are), it actually can do the opposite, it can help generate a lot of junk code.
Now when working in a team usually majority of people aren’t that great developers typically there might be one or two star developers. The problem is that the other people will still use AI and generate MRs. Reviewing those is extremely time consuming and no one wants to do it. It’s weird to say what’s exactly wrong with those MRs they seem to do things but they seem to do things in a more complicated way.
The thing is that no one wants to review those MRs, everyone is afraid to point AI slop, so the quality of code goes down and even the people who previously were good are getting lost in the code themselves.
They have uses in certain circumstances. They also have lots of negative aspects (that are broader and more systematic, as far as I can see). I think in a net-benefit sense they are not, in fact, helpful (to an organisation, or to a society).
It depends on the tool to be honest. If it’s Claude code and you’re a programmer, sure that’s helpful. But often it’s an “agentic workflow engine” that’s been developed in house that’s complete garbage, or a chatbot that doesn’t know anything telling you that it can’t answer your question that was put together by your company. These custom tools are almost always not helpful.
Doctorow knows this as well, he writes about this crap constantly and has broken them down by user type in other pieces.
I was talking about roof sheathing with the latest chat gpt.
It was confident the joists should go above the sheathing.
You might want a 2nd opinion, did you ask Grok?
LLMs seem to be pretty bad at home improvement sort of questions in my experience. I suspect they don’t have a team of carpenters they use to RL the models, like they do for software engineers, etc
Software is easier because you can basically ‘inspect the house’ and the ‘home inspector’ via software.
Harder to do that with a house. Also a lot of different rules based on locality.
Reminder it doesn’t know anything.
It is just mimicking text it has been programmed for.
For it to be “good” at mimicking home improvement, it’s source needed to be full of home improvement talk. The best carpenters, plumbers, whatever aren’t on reddit, or wherever talking shop. They’re working, or making OSHA jokes at the bar.
How do people work? Are there ones born knowing how to use a hacksaw?
Mostly tradies are learning by hands-on apprenticeship with a master. All that discussion is not on the internet.
How did anyone ever learn anything before chatgpt?
Personally I would ask my aunt and she would be wrong.
The better question is how will anyone ever learn after ChatGPT
I can’t be the only one who will have a hard time for me to trust any professional who became qualified after 2023.
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I work in construction and so far I must admit that I have no idea what the hype is about.
But I have decades of experience, meaning I don’t know shit about anything BUT I know how to quickly find usefull information in the codes or in pertinents books.
If I were younger I might have fallen into the trap. If so I would probably be in jail by now, because in my tests I’ve seen LLM be dangerously wrong.
Vibe construction
AI has been helpful for my job, sure, but the cost in terms of societal damage is so great it makes me wish AI were never created.
^ This. This is the actual truth of it. You can always find a 500 person company that does a shit job at forced integration and you can find a 2000 user company that tied all their systems together and moved at paces that made everyone sick with risk. You can find individuals who tried to make copilot write micron code (horrible) and who used claude to write ansible code (~magic)
I love Doctorow, I read most of his stuff, I recently read Reverse Centaur, it had its informed moments. It made some strong points that stand out as to where using AI makes sense. It also has some perspective issues, being written by someone who focused on case studies with the worst possible outcomes. A lot of the same problems in this article.
AI can, in the right circumstances with the right needs, remove many manhours of tedious shitty labor, or it can be used by shitty people to vacantly crap out slop 24x7. It’s only as useful as its implementation/workload.
But what never gets better is the societal and ecological impact. The slop pouring into journalism, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the scams running with perfect English vocabulary. The shitty AF water and electricity usage. The corporate bribery. Those are along for the ride by default.
If AI went away, right this very moment, my job would grind to a snail’s pace for months while we once again pivot back to another way improved but not unlike we did prior. We would have a man-century of meetings on how to recreate all the processes affordably. We are doing more now with fewer people, but they’re paying more in tokens + labor. This is not to say that any of us would be horribly sad.
This article is based on a case study by one guy on a 500-person company that didn’t want to implement AI and did a poor job of implementing it. Yeah, many of us work for some place like that and some of us work for places that got it working. That’s the reason for the big divide. It’s not always a delusional asshole lying about it working, it’s about it working when engineers who have the right workload use it to solve their needs. Still too fucking expensive on all accounts.
AI is not worth the investment. It’s not worth the money. It’s not worth the damage. But the argument that it doesn’t do anything because you see it do jack shit somewhere doesn’t hold up to even light scrutiny.
And ecological
I see a lot of useless people creating a ton of busy work that just becomes an unbearable workload for the people under them. Working in manufacturing environments which (you aren’t gonna believe this) are all horrifically understaffed is bad enough. Now i get to watch good workers get buried under Solvace/Fabriq/etc checklists and Leading2Lean/PerformOEE/etc task lists and spreadsheets and meetings to discuss kpis and metrics.
I need a new line of work
Yeah, right. My boss gave me a bunch of risk assessments to read through and let slip that AI had ‘helped’ produce them. So I said I’d get AI to summarise them. All this vast computing power and climate damage is being used for bullshit.
That’s all an LLM is, a gas-powered bullshit firehose.
Well I wouldn’t recommend data & analytics right now, if you treasure your sanity.
Imagine tech debt accumulated over decades absolutely skyrocketing because LLM can generate thousands of lines of SQL or Python that noone understands.I mean, I’m sure the same applies to all tech sectors and likely worse. I do admit it also helps us fix and uncover some old and buried bugs. It’s just not used with any sort of care or long term plan.
I’m a long term contractor. Process engineer and Certified Quality Engineer with up to date ASQ. I can technically go anywhere but i really love manufacturing processes.
Hate to day it, but every industry has turned into that. At least in my anecdotal experience and my network’s anecdotal experience, useless people using AI to create shit that means extra work for others is happening everywhere. Not saying you should stay in manufacturing if you hate it, but just be aware that you probably won’t be leaving that issue behind.
If AI data centers drastically accelerate us towards a point of no return for climate change, then they will in fact have “changed everything”.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re already past the point of no return.
The climate is changing more drastically every year. Hurricanes and typhoons are more severe and the season lasts longer than just a couple years ago. Thunderstorms are more severe, with longer and hotter periods between them and fewer regular rain events. Ocean currents are changing and stopping, meaning the flows that sea life use aren’t there. There is no longer a constant polar ice cap on the north pole.
We will not be staying under 2°C average warming, which was the target back in 2010.
The question isn’t where the point of no return is - we’ve been beyond those the whole time. The question is how bad we want to let it get. Ever fraction of a degree extra warming means worse impacts.
Agree that less than +2°C is unlikely (though not completely impossible). But still, better that than +2.5°C, etc.
Ehhhh, I’m sure it will be fine. 😎
In the near future an ai company will turn on their ASI and ask it what to do about climate change and it will say “first off shut me down, second off eat the rich” and only then will we know we did it
The Author’s Note section of State of Fear, Michael Crichton made numerous predictions that some of which have come true thus far.
It was published in 2004
One of which is that any climate change related legislation implemented by one party, will eventually overturned / reversed when the other party takes power.
Nothing is more inherently political than our shared physical environment, and nothing is more ill served by allegiance to a single political party. Precisely because the environment is shared it cannot be managed by one faction according to its own economic or aesthetic preferences. Sooner or later, the opposing faction will take power, and previous policies will be reversed. Stable management of the environment requires recognition that all preferences have their place: snowmobilers and fly fishermen, dirt bikers and hikers, devel-opers and preservationists. These preferences are at odds, and their incompatibility cannot be avoided. But resolving incompatible goals is a true function of politics
He also predicted that in around 2100, people will be far richer, use lots of energy than ever before, and the global population will be much smaller.
This unfortunately, I’m sick tech broligarchs and billionaire broligarchs and broligarch billionaires ruining everything
In this way AI reminds me of when Elon was saying we should build a giant vacuum tube instead of a train in California.
They all pretend this AI god that they’re sure will surface will solve the climate crisis partially because they already know what needs to be done and don’t want to do it. They’d rather baffle you with bullshit instead of trying to fix the problem.
It’s also notable that MBAs tend to be people who are into the networking versus the work and they will follow the trends wherever they leave because that’s what good monkeys do.
This unfortunately, MBAs are the worst, too many of them simp for the billionaire broligarchs
I work at a university and manage large teams of students. Without exception, each time I have hired a business student, they have had a fantastic interview and then contributed nothing to the team. In most cases, they stayed long enough to create a resume entry and then went on to the next “bigger” thing. I don’t discriminate against hiring from them, but I do not advertise job openings in their circles anymore.
AI is changing everything… Mostly to bad, that’s the part they keep.
But it IS changing everything, and not in a good way
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: if all the corporate leaders believe it will change everything and, in a fit of FOMO, force it into every corner of our lives, then everything will be changed. But not so much because of what AI can do, as because of a mass delusion among the LinkedIn types.
It’s changing a lot of things, but many of them in only relatively minor ways. It’s not affecting e.g. food supply systems in a significant way - it might be screwing up the management structures of companies involved, but that will be repairable fairly quickly…
AI is changing everything. Its not a lie, its absolute truth.
The problem is the changes are fuckawful terrible for everyone and everything.
