Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
Reminds me of when the stupid “Web 3.0” made up by blockchain freaks was supposed to be the future. Not every technology will be as widespread as the internet. The internet facilitates communication across the entire world and offers many advantages over phone, mail, and other forms of communication.
The use cases and advantages are clear, even if there was an overly eager hype cycle in the 90s. AI might have some uses, but a clear advantage has not actually been established yet, nor have the legal challenges been ironed out. Remember that the current iteration of AI would not have been possible without breaking tons of IP law, slurping up as much data as possible.
Agree AI is as overhyped as the internet in the late 90’s was. I also think AI or some descendent of it will likely be as ubiquitous as the Internet is now. There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem. I look at AI as being the bridge between the real world where things are fuzzy, rules are inconsistent, things don’t have clear cut answers, etc and the digital world where everything is precise and well defined. That’s not something that’s going away.
However, what I see happening with AI is much the same thing as what happened with the Internet. To use the Internet in the late 90’s was frustrating. The computers sucked, they were huge, they used a bunch of power, the connection was slow, connections dropped, they weren’t always on, they took quite some to establish, etc. It wasn’t till CPUs got good enough to be able to be battery powered and still render full websites (in other words, the key building block of a smartphone) that the Internet really became a ubiquitous thing for most people. Today’s AI uses way too much power, requires hardware that’s way too expensive, is less smart than people think it is, has problems learning, has problems with hallucinations, etc. What I see happening is the AI bubble crashes, like the dotcom crash, but then it comes back once the technology is really ready.
As far as law and IP go, the Internet often had lots of issues with that too. Lookup the origins of why we have Section 230. It’s still something we’re arguing over. We’ll figure out the legal issues. And IP law is broken, has been for a long time. It needs a revamp to bring it back to some sanity. I have no problem with AI breaking IP law. Much of that shouldn’t be under copyright anyway.
There’s quite a few problems right now that AI just seems really well suited to solving, unlike the blockchain where it really only solved one sorta esoteric problem.
That’s a great point.
- Web 2.0 was way overhyped, but widely useful.
- Web 3.0 was way overhyped and really useful in some very niche applications.
- “Mobile first” was way overhyped, but basically correct (they typed into their phone, lol.)
- AI is way overhyped, and probably falls somewhere in between - not as complete of a waste of time as most of the blockchain crap, and nowhere near as practical as web 2.0 or mobile first.
Edit: (Sarcasm incoming:) But we can all agree with the tech bros, that I became obsolete during each of these transitions, because I didn’t drop everything else and focus on it completely to the exclusion of all else.
I guess my paycheck disagrees, but who are we going to trust - cold hard cash, or some con artist tech bro CEOs? Lol.
I actually think that AI might be closer to Web 2.0 than blockchain. Where I see it’s biggest potential though isn’t in the stuff most people do everyday, but in specialized applications. I see some of the uses in stuff like medical research and find the potential there to be wild. In alot of ways, it’s sort of a revolution in how we think about doing computing. We’re still really early on it, so its hard to know just where it takes us. Even on the more mundane stuff, it really does help programmers be alot more productive (though it’s hardly a replacement for talented programmers). Which is a huge for helping us build the next generation of tech.
There’s alot of stuff they say is obsolete but really isn’t. For example, in my day job, I’m an analog IC design engineer. The most advanced process I work on is sort of 90nm (but not really). The previous silicon process I worked on was basically a 0.5um process. Ask most people and that’s all stupidly obsolete - should have died out in the 90s or something. But I work on power products. Power is analog, not digital. We may have some digital stuff, to be sure, but what we fundamentally do is analog. And you can’t use 5nm processes to deal with “high” voltages - that’s all on “old”, “obsolete” silicon processes. Oh and you know what we power with all this? Among many other things, those fancy AI chips. So yeah, alot of these transitions do obsolete stuff, but there’s often still important niches in older technologies. I mean you still have people learning COBOL so they can program mainframes for banks.
Distributed web is a great idea. With a shitty vibecoded reference implementation (IPFS). And then also buzzworded as “Web 3” together with blockchain DNS and everything else.
What do you mean clear advantage has not actually been established?? Im getting weeks worth of stuff done in hours, like it’s self evident how powerful AI is. If you use it to make deepfake porn instead of making you better at your job, that’s a human choice. If you make a half decent effort, AI makes you an order of magnitude more productive. It’s pretty freaking amazing, like how the automobile was a massive improvement over a horse and buggy.
I get your point. There’s real benefit here. The question is if the benefit really outweighs the real costs, once they start charging for the actual resources used.
One reason we expeirence it differently is that some of us were already an order of magnitude more productive than average, without AI.
AI is a great tool for catching up. It slurps up popular patterns and spits them out, sometimes in novel contexts.
For everyone who used AI to catch a productivity technique(s) they had not yet encountered, I can see how it feels life changing.
I suspect we have a wave of realizations coming from folks whose token costs get too high, and realize they can get 95% of the AI productivity gain they experienced, with zero use of tokens - just by copying and pasting the patterns and tools AI already introduced them to. We don’t talk about that aspect enough - genuine acceleration is happening, and some of those folks will stay more productive after the AI hype wave ends.
Of course, there’s a whole other category of folks genuinely benefitting from AI because they need needlessly verbose language output to bullshit their dumb bosses. I don’t currently have a dumb boss, so I’m not making use of that. But I 100% will start, if needed. Lol.
Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude. I also have friends who are senior devs real master programmers, and yes they can do everything I do with claude faster and better.
But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.
It really is as game changing as the automobile was. That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.
Well yes that’s the case with me i was never trained in coding just started out as a low level employee in an accounting department teaching myself how to do vba scripts in excel to do basic stuff and now im building data pipelines and web UIs with claude to automate reconciliations and rollforwards that used to take me a week without using Claude.
Very cool. Welcome to the trade! I can tell you caught the passion for it! Lol.
With or without Claude, you’re a developer now.
If I can offer some advice: Don’t let anyone tell you which tools to use. And also never let anyone tell you that all the magic is in the tool.
But, while one claude agent isn’t faster than them, they have the ability to run a dozen agents at once getting 10x the work done they used to. Instead of paying ten good programmers $100K/yr each to be his code monkey slaves and not think too luch for themselves, they pay claude $2,500 a year to be ten codemonkeys and not think too much for itself.
Oh, yes. For the places that were already getting by on slinging CRUD (create/read/update/delete) calls, I can see how this is a game changer.
Although, the pattern I see over and over is that the boss-man buys cheap code for a few years, then pays ultra-premium prices for a consulting company to dig them out of their costly mess of spaghetti code.
They usually repeat this every few years.
These AI tools are promising to solve that, but so did Web 2.0 frameworks, and so did memory safe languages, and so did COBOl and BASIC. All of them helped, and none of them really solved the good/cheap/fast trade-off.
That doesn’t mean an idiot can’t drive it off a cliff like they literally can with a car, and horses had some self preservation instincts that would save an idiot from riding over a cliff, but the answer is to let these idiots drive themselves off a cliff with AI, not to ban a new technology that helps a lot if you’re not an idiot about it.
Lol. Yes!
It’s faster to go from the 50th floor of a building to the bottom by jumping out the window than it would be taking the elevator, but that just makes a mess of things. Similarly, you seem to be going faster with AI, and in some respects you are, but there’s also the matter of technical debt, which is the messy aspect that someone has to deal with later.
I have used AI to quickly write up small functions here or there, but even then I’ve had to go in and clean up the code because even in small tasks it can be messy. The mess scales with the size of the problem, even if you do split it up among more agents (in fact it can be worse if you use too many agents).
Especially when people claim 10x productivity gains (a suspiciously oft-repeated claim, by the way), alarm bells ring in my mind, because I’ve seen the garbage that AI generates, and no one is actually reading that garbage carefully and cleaning it up while maintaining 10x productivity.
It’s faster to go from the 50th floor of a building to the bottom by jumping out the window than it would be taking the elevator, but that just makes a mess of things.
And yet how much of our industrial engineering uses free falling gravity whenever safely possible? What’s wrong with a garbage chute straight from the sixth floor to a dumpster in the basement? What’s wrong with a water tower using gravity to store energy and let the towns water literally fall straight down 50ft into the plumbing system?
That’s what I’m saying, if an idiot breaks stuff letting it fall, that doesn’t mean we have to stop everyone from letting anything fall ever.
Technical debt
Im just building rest api clients, what technical debt? Then i have a simple streamlit server with a clean UI.
Like this is all cookie cutter stuff but now a layperson can do it. It’s basically ikea furniture for coding, and yeah im sure ikea uses a ton of water and energy and put a lot of furniture makers out of business, but that’s the way of the world. And yeah a complete moron finds a way to fuck up building ikea furniture too, but there is now a way for moderately smart people to put together furniture and also put together simple computer apps without dedicating their lives to the study of woodworking or coding.
So idk, i mean once every twenty minutes maybe i correct something Claude is doing, sometimes they look for stuff on the wrong hard drive, sometimes they request network access when it’s categorically not necessary nor what I asked it to do. Sometimes it wants to ping a server continuously until it no longer gets a 521 and i have to tell it “HELL NO STOP” but then my human coworker is like “yes this is why i love claude” and i just have to make sure that branch he’s working on never sees production.
But the semicolons brackets pythonwhitespaces are always in the right spot, variables are always instantiated properly and then dumped from memory based on best practices, while/for loops incremented correctly. And yeah it all costs me some number of gallons of water. It’s the water cycle it all ends up in the clouds and rains back down, idk sounds terrible for people who live in irrigated deserts but i could never live somewhere like that because i don’t do well in hot weather wcyd
Asbestos is already in all the buildings, we can’t remove it. All the cars already require leaded gasoline, we can’t unlead it.
Fun fact I didn’t know until recently: if you have a classic car that requires leaded gasoline, they actually sell lead substitute that you mix with modern unleaded gas
Isn’t the problem now the ethanol and not the octane?
Lead helped with the valves not getting as much wear because of specific metallurgy that depended on it. It wasn’t strictly needed, the change occured after cars were already mainstream.
I don’t know the exact mechanisms at play that make it necessary, but they sell the additive at automotive stores!
Depending on where you live, you can also install a conversion kit to run your older car on natural gas instead of gasoline
Except it is more like “your nudes have already leaked, there is no going back”.
This is one of the cases where you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t uninvent something and delete the knowledge from everyone’s mind.
You can regulate it, which is exactly like the comic.
Well, kinda. But the internet is global and you can hook a data center up to it anywhere. There’s plans to build them literally in space. And I run local models on my own machine at home, that’s not going away either. So the impact of regulation will be limited and local. AI as a whole isn’t going away.
That doesn’t prevent it from happening. It’s a useful reaction to, for example, smoking, because you can ban smoking (indoors, or whatever) and so prevent your population from being exposed to (second-hand) smoke. But banning AI is not going to protect your citizens from the effects of AI, because AI is still going to be available in other countries.
A more apt comparison is probably atomic energy or the internet. If AI had no utility like smoking, you could make that comparison. Once we knew how little upside there was to smoking it was easy to ban, but a billion+ people still do it. Until AI provides no benefit for whatever reason, it will be used.
You could look at the popularity of smoking and think either “There must be an appeal here that I’m just not seeing” or “Billions of people are just feckless idiots, I guess.”
I’ve never been a smoker. But experience has taught me that when I have that second impulse, I’ve always been wrong.
Well, it has initial utility with a bad trade-off and the utility dereases as addiction sets in. There’s a point at which smoking a cigarette is reducing stress, but eventually it increases the baseline stress before having a cigarette to the point that it’s a net loss. Eventually it’s not smoking reducing stress from other sources, it’s pushing back against the mountain of stress of addiction.
If it didn’t initially reduce stress in the first phase, you wouldn’t do it enough to get to addiction.
Personally, one of the things I found most useful for quitting was the idea that smoking another cigarette would never fix the desire to smoke, only not smoking could do that.
it has initial utility with a bad trade-off
It’s not that I disagree, but this is your own personal judgement for your own situation. Not everyone is in your situation and not everyone would agree with your judgement if they were. I’m glad you’ve quit smoking, I’m happy you’re sharing your experience, but generalizing your experiences to “everyone” is dicey.
I’ve never heard “stress relief” as a reason for smoking. I have heard that it can improve concentration and stave off hunger. And that it is a pleasure, pure and simple. There are people living in situations where those benefits may be more valuable than they might be to you and me. The highest rates of smoking are in the third world, for example.
As a 20 year smoker who quit, I agree with @hzl@piefed.blahaj.zone . The only thing it gives you is relief from the craving of the addiction that it causes itself. As for how people start, they start when they are kids trying to look cool in front of other kids. No one starts smoking because they enjoy it, it’s disgusting. They start “enjoying” it more the more addicted they get, and it doesn’t take long.
It would be funnier if they listed things that don’t exist anymore though.
I’ve found that when people I can clearly tell are intelligent suddenly sound like idiots, it’s usually because I don’t understand what they’re saying. It’s never because saying something I don’t want to hear suddenly turned them into idiots.
I think this is a prudent approach and worth following through on, but plenty of intelligent people go bonkers outside of their domains.
If you compare AI with crypto, or NFT ok. This meme doesn’t have sense…
AI will eventually enable a society without wage slavery. Everyone will have enough and some extra. No one will need to work.
And there literally is no other option to get a society without the need to work. AI really is the only way.For that to happen, society needs to be structured in a way that the benefits of greater productivity is distributed to everyone, particularly those most in need.
I sure as hell don’t see that happening anywhere at the moment. Productivity has grown steadily since I entered the workforce - my paycheck sure as hell hasn’t reflected that.
Yes, society will adapt. If it doesn’t, civil war will force it to. There is no way that 90% of the population of an industrialized nation with a second amendment will just watch their children starve to death because some rich guy sits on food he can’t sell because no one has any money.
If we were to get the fantasy version of AI you’re talking about, the civil war will be more like Dune.
So much wrong with this line of thinking.
First, it relies on societal progress as a given when in reality it is not. We have more slaves now than at anytime in history. We have greater wealth inequality than at any time in history. We have not ended systemic racism, sexism, or ableism.
Second, you highly overestimate the positive effects of the 2nd amendment. So far guns have not solved a single major US problem and instead have contributed to a climate of massive human suffering. From the million people dead from gun violence in the last twenty years in the US to the highest rates of child death by firearm in the world.
While most modern countries have next to zero child related deaths due to guns, in the US it has become the number one killer of children. Guns have not been an effective tool for any major human rights movements and instead have been a tool of oppression. It is important to point out most 2nd amendment gun nutters would be on the side of the government and more than willing to kill agitators demanding equality or equity.
Third, class consciousness is at an all time low as evidenced by lack of organized labor and a nearly universal rule by the wealthy in every major country. Believing that starving is going to suddenly create this instead of delivering more chaos and death is frankly ridiculous.
We have more slaves now than at anytime in history. We have greater wealth inequality than at any time in history.
Lul
Not a fan of reality I see.
There are more slaves than ever before, but they are a smaller proportion of the human race
Of course if you’re going for absolute numbers, it’s hard to beat our 8B population, but it makes more sense to be speaking in percentages.
Doesn’t cover anything more than the past couple of decades. That’s not ‘any time in history’, just a very minute and cherry picked segment of it. Go back to the medieval era and before and see what wealth inequality looked like then.
Yes absolutely absolute numbers. Furthermore, if you consider underemployed people as wage slaves this number is easily ten times the estimated 50 million modern day slaves.
Wealth inequality has been increasingly dramatically for at least the last 8 decades.
You harken back to a mythical era where we don’t have actual economic data operating in an entirely different economic system. Sorry, but that is about as convincing as a wet fart.
What we do know is since we have been gathering statistical information on economies the wealth gap has continued to grow. With only a couple of eastern block countries in the post-soviet era that had a brief reprieve from an ever increasing wealth gap, which has long since gone away.
I feel like this comic is bait
Apples and oranges
Have you guys seen Reddit lately? It’s nothing but bots and AI. Its such a weird time.
No one who is impressed with LLMs to the point they believe they should in any way be mistaken for intelligence must be summarily ignored and excluded from decision processes which affect anyone not similarly impaired.
LLMs are only AI as Accelerators and Amplifiers of Ignorance and Incompetence, with vanishingly scarce examples of Iteration and Insight.
LLMs might be garbage but the children yearn for the mines. And are we really better as a civilization for the loss of indoor smoking while indulging the all-you-can-eat option at Sizzler?
Such a dumb comparison.
No, it’s apt. They’re all tools of capitalism promoted by oligarchs and bootlickers.
It really isn’t, they’re completely different things. This is comparing the invention of the transistor to slavery and child labour. It’s fucking idiotic is what it is. If they made valid comparisons they’d be making a point, instead thayre making a fool of themselves and the message.
You are aware that AI, as it is currently used, is a mass plagiarism machine, yes? That threatens to put people in many different sectors out of work? And accelerates climate change to do so?
Why haven’t we heard about AI doing literally anything good, like curing cancer, solving famous unsolved problems, reducing waste in logistics and distribution, etc?
Each character in the OP comic is an arrogant chud trying to reassure themselves that their precious methods of control aren’t fragile.
So are photocopiers.
You’re really not getting it. You are saying the comparison of the printing press, the photocopier and then the scanner are equal to slavery and child labour.
Somethings pretty fucked up in your head if you’re making that correlation.
Also, ML has done a lot of good things too, even LLMs have their function and benefit, be it at a cost that may not be worth paying with our current energy generation and cooling solutions. You just don’t want to see it, you are deliberately looking away in your blind hatred for the system. Which I get, fuck the system and it’s owners. But God damn, comparing it to the torture that is slavery?
LLMs are a tool, they have no inherent morality to them (I’m not talking about companies stealing shit to train their LLMs, you can do it without theft).
Slavery is not a technology or a tool, besides a “tool of capitalism” or whatever the fuck you want to call it, seeing as it’s been around since we learned to lift a rock to another human. Humanities evil behaviour is not a technology.
Somethings pretty fucked up in your head if you’re making that correlation.
You don’t understand the comparison. Genuinely, I don’t think you are smart enough to even talk to about this.
LLMs are a tool, they have no inherent morality to them
All tools have morality.
A slave is a tool.
I don’t mean in the capitalist sense, I mean, literally, in the leveraging them to build a pyramid sense.
Treating people like tools is why it is immoral.
Ah, the classic argument, claiming that you have the superior intelligence. Yes God, whatever you say.
Genuinely, I don’t think you are smart enough to even talk to about this.
Solving famous unsolved problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/
Drug discovery (AI can’t do anything about the time needed for clinical trials): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03434-4
Assisting the blind: https://www.acb.org/i-am-blind-self-driving-cars-waymo-give-people-me-independence
Why is plagiarism bad? Aren’t you a bit of a bootlicker here for enforcing anti sharing constructs now? Nobody owns information, period.
You think artists, writers, musicians etc should all get replaced by data centers? The bootlickers are the ones groveling at the oligarchs’ feet
You’re lumping in other uses of AI with LLMs (chatGPT etc), which is how @pfried@reddthat.com contradicted you.
It’s specifically the LLMs, which were trained with AI but are more like context-specific hyperplausible random text generators, and yes, are mass plagiarism projects currently being used as an excuse to fire a bunch of creative folk in multiple industries.
Other non-LLM AI uses tend to be more specifically problem-solving and narrowly useful.
No, really, its a technology.
A more apt comparison would be more like internal combustion engines, wood burning stoves, or magnetic tape hard drives. That is to say, it probably has some niche place where its still a practical use or may be advantageous (backup/emergency generators for hospitals, in remote wooded locations without modern infrastructure, for cheap long term data back ups, for my examples, respectively), but that place is not the common place.
An individual stove, engine or hard drive has a negligible effect on climate change. AI requires huge amounts of material, space, energy and water to run. So a closer comparison would be if a civilization threw all their building materials, firestarter and food into a big pit and lit it.
Right now, yes. You can thank greedy capitalists for that. There’s no fundamental reason why it must be an environmental disaster. Look at the human brain. It’s way beyond any AI today and uses 10 watts. That’s peanuts to any AI. Drop the power consumption of AI by a couple orders of magnitude and nobody cares. Impossible you say? We done crazier power drops in conventional computing. Take a Pentium 3 500Mhz computer. Ran about 200 watts. It’s about the same compute performance as a Raspberry Pi Pico at 2 watts. Or take a 486 vs an Arm Cortex M3. The 486 is 2-10 watts, depending on variant. The M3 is a couple of mW for equivalent performance. Point is, we’ve slashed power consumption wildly in the past and I see no reason to think AI should be any different. We just let greedy capitalists push the technology out way too widely before it was ready. Which means we waste alot of energy and resources to build stuff that will likely soon be very obsolete.
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