the studies are set in a society in which the main way of existing in society and contributing to it is via employment.
Some generations ago females in this society were regularly without jobs but were "homemakers", in that time if one were not a homemaker and a female how was the person's feeling of well-being?
Reports conflict about that, but in that time of course females were often kept from employment by being homemakers and thus relegated to secondary status.
Perhaps the studies you look for would be related to feelings of social well-being among hunter-gatherer societies, however maybe those studies are not actually needed? Because probably now that the possibility has come up you will realize hunter-gather societies do not have traditional jobs or employment and that people were evidently able to feel happy in those societies.
Now you may respond with examples of how maintaining hunter-gatherer societies would mean death of much of population etc. because the best kind of goalpost moving is the kind that is true. Nonetheless the point should be clear that people can be happy without typical modern jobs and employment.
Whether or not a modern lifestyle and world can be constructed that does not need jobs and still keep people happy is a different question. And there we are back with something for which there are no relevant studies.
the statement is that there are studies showing that one needs a job to be happy, and asks for studies showing the opposite, implying that the lack of such studies demonstrates that one cannot be happy without jobs. That is to say arguing the need for jobs is universal.
This was in reply to a statement that argued one did not absolutely need jobs to be happy and that this seeming need in our society was in fact an argument for a problem in the society.
In such a case it seems the use of the studies set in the society is less fair than considering if there may be easily considered conditions in other societies that show the need for a job is not a universal need but actually only a local, currently defined need in our society.
My comment merely showed that if one were to try to think of any examples showing happiness requires employment some should easily spring to mind and counter studies were not needed to prove it was not a universal requirement.
I have no opinion either way but this doesn’t follow. I can imagine a world where people don’t need oxygen to breathe but they still do. If we say people need oxygen, the argument is obviously about the world such as it is rather than the world as it could hypothetically be.
Humans are socialized to want purpose and meaning in life. Modern humans are socialized to put a lot of that meaning into their employment. Many humans have a lot of trouble with unemployment and even retirement, because they feel a lack of purpose.
I think imagining a world where people are universally able to find purpose outside their employment counts as "changing the definition of people". Perhaps less difficult of a change than making us not dependent on oxygen, but still a big enough change not to clear the bar.
> Plenty of people live without working.
A minority of people live without working. And many people who do not work are profoundly unhappy with that state of affairs.
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
That's a cute thing to say, but isn't a serious rebuttal of anything.
You’re right that my reasoning was off. I don’t think it helps the point OP was trying to make. The argument being made in favor of labor isn’t “The only way for someone to be happy is to have a job” but instead “The majority of people will be unhappy without an occupation,” which is testable. The existence of people who are happy without any sort of structured, purposeful activity would not invalidate that the majority of people may well need structured, purposeful activity in order to feel fulfilled.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.
People I know who grew up in working class families consistently believe that they have to work to have meaning.
People I know who grew up upper middle class or professors' kids seem to split down the middle. Some of them are very high achievers, the other half don't do anything. The latter often have a blackpill or Marxish explanation of why "work is for suckers" or a label that they can have a meaningful (to them) struggle with indefinitely and often a bit of paranoid ideation to boot.
Children of the working class would resist a workless future and the older ones would probably just... die. Some of my wastrel friends might be happy in that word with endless bread and circuses, others will find meaning in explaining their experiences in terms of the conflict theories of the last century.
When you talk about the "work is for suckers" class, I think you're talking about (at most) 15% of the population. So sure, people like this exist, but not enough to matter when it comes to the overall argument.
I am actually one of those people who thinks traditional employment is mostly a raw deal (I wouldn't go so far as to say "for suckers"), but the need for a purpose in life is a very real one. A friend of mine recently said that having kids is like easy mode for finding purpose. Pursuing a career feels pretty similar in that regard. It's not impossible to find purpose without those things, of course, but it can take a lot more effort, and many people will tire of that effort.
(Not have I found the missing link..but. your comment looks like it should be helpful in the future)
Plus I know some working class who made life-changing money (whether they felt like they earned it or not) _and then_ struggle to "self-actualize"
These tend to usually either.. admire/emulate professors becoming somewhat crackpottish in the process (if they felt like they earned it) or just dissipate in costly vices (if they don't). Note the strategy is kind of flipped if they come from upper-middle. Then there are the Wolframs,geohots,Carmacks etc that we can't put in a box but you "conveniently" left out the lower middle
Which means... _You_ better make life changing money soon. Just kidding. These paths can't be the only options can they ? If we don't assume men are islands the options improve?
Me glad you are friends with wastrels, which for some reason I conflate with skunks the animals :)
There's a comic (not Furballs) about dumpster diving skunks and foxes which I can't get out of Gemini . Korean-American artist iirc
I don't think that's how "evidence" works. I can imagine a lot of things in a lot of domains, but that doesn't make it real.
I absolutely can imagine a society organized around some other source(s) of happiness, but the fact is we don't have that society, and humans are not acclimated to that society. Humans are acclimated to the society we have, and there's plenty of research out there showing that many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
And when they lose their job and can't find satisfying work, their quality of life is meaningfully impacted, in ways that cannot be fully explained by the financial impact of losing a job.
Another fine example is retirement. Many older people end up finding work again in retirement, not because they need the money, but because it helps them find purpose. Others don't retire until the day they die because they can't imagine a life without work. Yes, some people love retirement and are happy and thrive, but there are also many who aren't and don't.
> many, many humans derive a significant chunk of their self-worth and life's purpose from their jobs.
Men, or women?
Not trying to raise gender role controversies. It's just been my observation, throughout my life experience, that men, as the primary public-sphere producers and providers, are much more tethered to public-sphere occupational identity than women. This seems validated in the experience of the structurally unemployed, e.g. in the former industrial regions.
As women are 50% of the population, give or take, I expect the politics of this might flow differently for them than for men, as a bloc.
We have a word for imagining a society with different sources of happiness: utopian. We generally don’t regard utopian musings as evidence of anything.
the parent poster is trying to say "well where's your evidence that a society not based around human labor is possible?" which is sort of a silly question
you can't claim an invention is invalid because there are no "studies" that show such an invention has already existed and succeeded, you'd by definition never invent anything!
No, your quote is a much too strong version of what anyone in this subthread is trying to say.
The issue isn't that there isn't any evidence that a society based around human labor is possible. I expect it is!
The issue is that our current society is based around human labor, and that there is plenty of evidence that changing that even over the time period of a lifetime or two would cause huge societal upheaval (likely including war, possibly of the civil variety) and massive existential problems for lots of people.
And here we're talking about a massively disruptive technology that could change all this in the span of a decade or two? We're screwed, if AI actually bears fruit.
There's a massive spike in mortality for those who retire from work versus those who keep working. In fact, working just a single year after you're 65 is associated with 11% lower risk of death for healthy people and 9% for unhealthy.
Working is objectively good for your health. Stopping work is associated with an extremely large increase in mortality risk, for both healthy and unhealthy people.
Any alternatives must weigh the resulting death it will cause.
How are we sure about the direction of cause and effect here? I'd expect more healthier people to self-select the working cohort, all else being equal.
In practice it doesn't really work that way. It isn't like "I am ill bodied, I ought to retire." It is more like "I am ill bodied, but I can't afford to retire, so I must work in some capacity." People who retire early are probably far more likely to be wealthier, and that is correlated with healthspan.
> Early retirement is increasingly a preserve of the wealthy. Back in 2002–03, the fraction of those who were retired aged 55–64 was fairly similar across the wealth distribution: 20% in the poorest fifth compared to 28% for the wealthiest fifth. In contrast, by 2018–19, only 7% of the poorest fifth were retired, while for the wealthiest fifth it was still 24%.
Right, but the original post was about working past retirement age, not retiring early. It's unlikely the last two US presidents have been working in their 70s and 80s because they can't afford retirement. I'm not aware of anyone working past 80 that haven't been a professor, CEO, politician, etc.
Regardless it's a confounder, statement otherwise now being that affluence predicts mortality.
Did any of that signal come from people who hadn't spent the last 40 or 50 years working, in a society constructed around working?
If I had a study that showed increased mortality in people who had owned a parrot for 50 years in the year after that parrot died, you wouldn't cite it as evidence of the basic human need for a parrot.
The problem with the studies is that they're cases in which specific groups within the broader economy lost jobs. Those aren't really comparable to the (theoretical) path of job displacement of AI for a couple of reasons:
1. Those people didn't get substantial, ongoing financial assistance. If we end up in a UBI world, particular one where the UBI people get is high enough to get more or less anything that's not very scarce (e.g. land in coastal cities), the negative economic component of job loss is removed.
2. Everyone else still had jobs. When you lose your job and everyone else continues to work and be successful (or at least you perceive that to be the case), there's a big hit to the status and meaning in your life. If everyone is affected in the same way, then your relative status to others remains unchanged, and everyone collective needs to reorient society to find their meaning.
I'm not saying it will go well, but I do think there's a theoretically possible path where there is large scale unemployment but because we have nigh infinite productivity, everyone has access to unlimited non-scarce resources (including luxury cars and fine foods and whatever medical treatment they need), and we end up with an enormous number of competitive leagues of everything, events centered around music and arts, dinner parties and all manner of other social activities that are what give people meaning.
Let's grant the premise. UBI, significant enough to live well on, luxury cars and dinner parties for all.
Who sets the amount? Who controls the infrastructure producing the unlimited resources? What happens when you vote the wrong way, or protest the wrong policy, or simply become inconvenient?
A population with no economic function has no leverage with which to resist a reduction, a condition, or a withdrawal. You're describing a world where 99% of the people are entirely dependent on the goodwill of whoever owns the machines, and you're treating that goodwill as an unchanging variable. The history of every human institution suggests that power without accountability eventually behaves like...power without accountability. Even assuming the benevolence of the people holding all the cards isn't naive optimism, it's the same mistake that makes people say real communism just hasn't been tried yet.
Oh yeah, to be clear I fully agree with everything you've said. My core argument is that there will be sufficient economic productivity for everyone to live incredibly well. Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power. That keeps me up at night, and things could go horribly wrong.
I guess the optimistic side of me thinks that benevolence wins out because there's no cost to it. There is plenty of competition among the wealth for scarce resources, but food, medicine, and mass-produceable luxury goods are effectively free. Given that, it's probably just easier to give those away to everyone than to crush most of humanity by force. But that is absolutely naive optimism, because I really have no control in this situation and prefer feeling naive optimism to pessimism.
And on the communism front, I will just say that I find it some combination of deeply amusing/ironic/depressing that the people on the far left protesting AI because it'll take jobs are protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism!
> Whether or not that happens depends entirely on the people who control both economic and political power.
Then we're doomed. The kinds of people who seek and amass that power are not the kinds of people who will treat the teeming unemployed masses with respect and largess.
> protesting the very technology that could, in fact, lead to the first successful incarnation of communism
Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
> Communism's failures are due to human social factors, not technological. You can't fix social problems with technology.
Yeah, that's fair. The argument would be that the core reason communism failed is because people inherently want to have greater status than those around them, so the ones who were in charge used their power to grant themselves a greater share of resources in order to demonstrate their greater status. If we have infinite non-scarce goods, whoever's in charge can still let everyone have as they need of those while demonstrating their greater status through non-scarce goods.
To be clear this isn't a prediction (I have no idea what's going to happen!), just the case I could see for this being the first version of communism that works. Though also it's not really communism, because everyone is not in fact equal; it's something like a pseudo-communist giant welfare state.
I agree "people need a purpose to be happy" is much more digestible than "people need a job to be happy". However, it has to be qualified with "some people need a purpose to be happy". Defining, or worse dictating, happiness for everyone is a fool's errand and, ironically, usually leads to large scale mass murder or starvation.
You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.
It's not, really. In Seila Law v. CFPB (2020) the Supreme Court ruled that even directors seemingly protected by for-cause language (which the FCC charter does not have) can be removed at will unless the agency in question "exercises no part of the executive power" and is "an administrative body ... that performs ... specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seila_Law_LLC_v._Consumer_Fina...
Do you have a case which was not about the executive authority of Donald Trump specifically? When we talk about how controversial or how new this interpretation is, the question I really have in mind is, why should I believe that it was developed out of genuine legal analysis and not an unprincipled desire to give Trump more power?
It contains an exhaustive historical analysis explaining why the President has unrestricted power to remove executive officers.
The “unprincipled” decisions were the ones like Humphrey’s Executor that sought to find ways to implement the 20th century concept of an “expert administrative state.” That’s not the government that was created in our constitution.
Yeah the FCC is really about Weiner[1], if anything, not Humphrey's. Weiner established some precedent of "inferred" independence for agencies of a certain character (e.g. those whose function is wholly judicial or legislative) even when explicit removal protections are not included in the law.
In 2020, five years ago, was essentially the exact same court as today, except KBJ replaced Breyer. The precedence in question dates to 1935 Humphrey's Executor v. United States where a conservative Supreme Court sought to cut back executive power of a liberal president. Now we have a conservative Supreme Court expanding executive power for a conservative president. If you think the Roberts court would have let Joe Biden have this much power well then I have a bridge and some student loans to sell you
Humphrey's, which held that for-cause protections are constitutional for agencies that meet certain tests, while broadly relevant to current events (FTC etc.), is not relevant to FCC as FCC charter does not have explicit for-cause protections.
> If you think the Roberts court would have let Joe Biden have this much power well then I have a bridge and some student loans to sell you
Yes, I do think the time horizon of every SCOTUS member is longer than four years. I believe Gorsuch when he says:
I appreciate that, but you also appreciate that we're writing a rule for the ages. -- https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2023/23-939_3fb4.pdf
I think that they all have the hubris to see themselves as part of history and write their opinions for future generations. Not that they aren't biased by current events, but that they see themselves as larger than that.
Moving to the Cloud proved to be a pretty nice moneymaker far faster and more concretely than AI has been for these companies. It's a fair comparison regarding corporate pushes but not anything more than that.
Yeah, as a gamer I get a lot of game news in my feeds. Apparently there's a niche of indie games that claim to be AI-free. [0]
And I read a lot of articles about games that seem to love throwing a dig at AI even if it's not really relevant.
Personally, I can see why people dislike Gen AI. It takes people's creations without permission.
That being said, morality of the creation of AI tooling aside, there are still people who dislike AI-generated stuff. Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it. In my experience with playing with comfy ui to generate images, it's really easy to get something half decent, it's really hard to get something very high quality. It really is a skill in itself, but people who hate AI think it's just type a prompt and get image. I've seen workflows with 80+ nodes, multiple prompts, multiple masks, multiple loras, to generate one single image. It's a complex tool to learn, just like photoshop. Sure you can use Nano-Banana to get something but even then it can take dozens of generations and prompt iterations to get what you want.
>Like, they'd enjoy a song, or an image, or a book, and then suddenly when they find out it's AI suddenly they hate it.
Yes, because for some people its about supporting human creation. Finding out it's part of a grift to take from said humans can be infuriating. People don't want to be a part of that.
That is part of it, but the bigger part for me is, art is an expression of human emotion. When I hear music, I am part of those artists journey, struggles. The emotion in their songs come from their first break-up, an argument they had with someone they loved. I can understand that on a profound, shared level.
Way back me and my friends played a lot of starcraft. We only played cooperatively against the AI. Until one day me and a friend decided to play against each other. I can't tell put into words how intense that was. When we were done (we played in different rooms of house), we got together, and laughed. We both knew what the other had gone through. We both said "man, that was intense!".
I don't get that feeling from an amalgamation of all human thoughts/emotions/actions.
One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
I am curious how your GP feels about art forgery. I can personally see my self enjoying a piece of art only to find out it was basically copied from a different artist, and then be totally put off by the experience, totally unable to enjoy that stolen piece of art ever again.
I think context is important though. If someone pays for an original and it ends up being a forgery then yeah that's terrible and the purchaser was scammed. There is no similar concept to art online because it's all just pixels, unless you buy into the concept of NFTs as art ownership (I don't). Someone who steals someone else's online art and claims authorship would be the closest analogy to forgery, I suppose, but the aim of forgery is to sell it as the original author's work, not as the work of the thief's. But if I did find out thay an image of an artist I liked was indeed drawn by someone else, I'd try to find a way to support that someone else. It doesn't make me enjoy the art any less.
Of course knowing the provenance of something you enjoy, and learning that it has dark roots, can certainly tarnish your enjoyment of said thing, like knowing where your diamonds came from, or how sausage is made. It's hard to make a similar connection to AI generated stuff.
I listen to a lot of EDM. Some of the tracks on my playlist are almost certainly AI generated. If I like a song and check out the artist and find that it's a bot then I'm disappointed because that means I can never see them live, but I can still bop my head to the beat.
My original post said “forgery” but what I meant was “plagiarism”. I’ve looked up what the terms mean, and I definitely used the wrong word. My post is quite confusing because of that. I am sorry about that.
Most of the people that dislike genAI would have the exact same opinion if all the training data was paid for in full (whatever a fair price would be for what is essentially just reference material)
That if carries a lot of meaning here. In reality it is and was impossible to pay for all the stolen data. Also LLM corpos not only didn't pay for the data, but they never even asked. I know it may be a surprise, but some people would refuse to sell their data to a mechanical parrot.
Would agree with this and think it is more than just your reasons, especially if you venture outside the US at least from what I've experienced. I've seen it at least personally more so where AI tech hubs aren't around and there is no way to "get in on the action". I see blue collar workers who are less threatened ask me directly with less to lose - why would anyone want to invent this? One of the reasons the average person on the street doesn't relate well to tech workers in general; there is a perceived lack of "street smarts" and self preservation.
Anecdotally its almost like they see them like mad scientists who are happy blowing up themselves and the world if they get to play with the new toy; almost childlike usually thinking they are doing "good" in the process. Which is seen as a sign of a lack of a type of intelligence/maturity by most people.
ChatGPT is one of the most used websites in the world and it's used by the most normal people in the world, in what way is the opinion "generally negative"?
A big reason is relative advantage. The "I have to use it because its there now and everyone else is, but I would rather no one have to use it at all" argument.
Lets say I'm a small business and I want to produce a new logo for some marketing material. In the past I would of paid someone either via a platform or some local business to do it. That would of just been the cost of business.
Now since there is a lower cost technology, and I know my competition is using it, I should use it too else all else equal I'm losing margin compared to my competition.
It's happening in software development too. Its the reason they say "if you don't use AI you will be taken over by someone who does". It may be true; but that person may of wished the AI genie was never let out of the bottle.
No it's not. No one is forced to use ChatGPT, it got popular by itself. When millions use it voluntarily, that contradicts the 'generally negative' statement, even if there are legitimate criticisms of other aspects of AI.
You can use ChatGPT for minor stuff and still have a negative view on AI. In fact the non-tech white collar workers I know use chatgpt for stuff like business writing at work but are generally concerned.
Negative sentiment also comes through in opinion polling in the US.
We'll see how long that lasts with their their new Ad framework. Probably most normal people are put off by all the other AI being marketed at them. A useful AI website is one thing, AI forced into everything else is quite another. And then they get to hear on the news or from their friends how AI-everything is going to take all the jobs so a few controversial people in tech can become trillionaires.
Yes, and I made an argument supporting that "used" and "it's bad" are not mutually exclusive . You simply repeated what I responded to and asserted you're the right opinion.
I get your argument but in this case it is that straightforward because it's not a forced monopoly like e.g. Microsoft Windows. Common folk decided to use ChatGPT because they think it is good. Think Google Search, it got its market position because it was good.
>Common folk decided to use ChatGPT because they think it is good.
That is not the only reason to use a tool you think is bad. "good enough" doesn't mean "good". If you think it's better to generate an essay due in an hour then rush something by hand, that doesn't mean it's "good". If I decide to make a toy app full of useless branches, no documentation, and tons of sleep calls, it doesn't mean the program is "good". It's just "good enough".
That's the core issue here. "good enough" varies on the context, and not too many people are using it like the sales pitch to boost the productivity of the already productive.
I don't agree with your comments, especially using PirateBay as an example. Stating either as "bad" is purely subjective. I find both PirateBay and ChatGPT both good things. They both bring value to me personally.
I'd wager that most people would find both as "good" depending on how you framed the question.
Seemingly the primary economic beneficiaries of AI are people who own companies and manage people. What this means for the average person working for a living is probably a lot of change, additional uncertainty, and additional reductions in their standard of living. Rich get richer, poor get poorer, and they aren't rich.
I'm just trying to tell you what people outside your bubble think, that AI is VERY MUCH a class thing. Using AI images at people is seen as completely not cool, it makes one look like a corporate stooge.
Sure, I meant the anglosphere. But in most countries, the less people are aware of technology or use the internet the less they are enthusiastic about AI.
I still don't see it. Look at some of the countries with the highest relatively high individual "personal tech usage" as well as "percentage of workers/economy connected to tech": South Korea, Israel, Japan, the US, UK, the Netherlands. The first three are on the positive end, the next two on the negative end, and the last one in the middle.
"Region of the world" correlation looks a lot stronger than that.
Some people take find their life meaning through craft and work. When that craft is suddenly less scarce, less special, so does that craft-tied meaning.
I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived.
I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.
The craft isn't any less scarce. If anything, only more. The craft of building wooden furniture is just as scarce as ever, despite the existence of Ikea.
Which is the only woodworkers that survive are the ones with enough customers willing to pay premium prices for furniture, or lucky to live in countries where Ikea like shops aren't yet a thing.
They are also the people who are able to see the most clearly how subpar generative-AI output is. When you can't find a single spot without AI slop to rest your eyes on and see it get so much praise, it's natural to take it as a direct insult to your work.
I mean, I would still hate to be replaced by some chat bot (without being fairly compensated because, societally, it's kind of a dick move for every company to just fire thousands of people and then nobody can find a job elsewhere), but I wouldn't be as mad if the damn tools actually worked. They don't. It's one thing to be laid off, it's another to be laid off, ostensibly, to be replaced by some tool that isn't even actually thinking or reasoning, just crapping out garbage.
And I will not be replying to anyone who trots out their personal AI success story. I'm not interested.
The tech works well enough to function as an excuse for massive layoffs. When all that is over, companies can start hiring again. Probably with a preference for employees that can demonstrate affinity with the new tools.
That's probably me for a lot of people. The reality is a bit finer than this namely :
- I hate VC funded AI which is actually super shallow (basically OpenAI/Claude wrappers)
- I hate VC funded genuine BigAI that sells itself as the literal opposite of what it is, e.g. OpenAI... being NOT open.
- I hate AI that hides it's ecological cost. Generating text, videos, etc is actually fascinating, but not if making the shittiest video with the dumbest script is taking the same amount of energy I'd need to fly across the globe.
- I hate AI that hides it's human cost, namely using cheap labor from "far away" where people have to label atrocities (murders, rape, child abuse, etc) without being provided proper psychological support.
- I hate AI that embodies capitalist principles of exploitation. If somehow your entire AI business relies on an entire pyramid of everything listed above to capture a market then hike the price once dependency is entrenched you might be a brilliant business man but you suck as a human being.
etc... I could go on but you get the idea.
I do love open source public AI research though. Several of my very good friends are researchers in universities working on the topic. They are smart, kind and just great human beings. Not fucking ghouls riding the hype with 0 concern for our World.
So... yes maybe AI haters have a slightly more refined perspective but of course when one summarize whatever text they see in 3 words via their favorite LLM, it's hard to see.
> making the shittiest video with the dumbest script is taking the same amount of energy I'd need to fly across the globe.
I get your overall point, but the hyperbole is probably unhelpful. Flying a human across the globe takes several MWh. That's billions of tokens created (give or take an order of magnitude...).
Does your comparison include training, data center building, GPUs productions, etc or solely inference? (genuine question I don't know the total cost for e.g. Sora2, only inference which AFAIK is significant yet pale in comparison to everything upstream)
No, that's one reason why there's at least an order of magnitude wiggle room there. I just took the first number for J/Token I found on arxiv from 2025. Choosing the exact model and hardware it runs on is also making a large difference (probably larger than your one-time upfront costs, since those are needed only once and spread out across years of inference).
My point is mobility, especially commercial flight, is extremely energy intense and the average westerner will burn much more resources here than on AI use. People get mad at the energy and water use of AI, and they aren't wrong, but right now it really is only a drop in the ocean of energy and water we're wasting anyways.
> right now it really is only a drop in the ocean of energy and water we're wasting anyways.
That's not what I heard. Maybe it was in 2024 but now data centers have their own categories in energy consumption whereas until now it was "others". I think we need to update our collective understanding in terms of actual energy consumed. It was all fun & games until recently and slop was kind of harmless consequence ecologically speaking but from what I can tell in terms of energy, water, etc it is not negligible anymore.
Probably just a matter of perspective. It's a few hundreds of TWh per year in 2025 - that's huge, and it's growing quickly. But again, that's still only a small fraction of a percent of total human primary energy consumption during the same time.
You could say the same about the airplane, does the CO2 emissions that the airline states for my seat include building the plane, the R/D, training the pilot.
Sure and I do, it's LCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_assessment the problem IMHO being that the AI hype entire ecosystem is literally hiding everything it can about this behind the veil of giving information to competitors. We have CO2eq on model cards but we don't have much datapoints on proprietary models running on Azure cloud or wherever. At best we infer from some research papers that are close enough but we don't know for the most popular models and that's quite problematic. The car industry did everything it could too, e.g. Volkswagen scandal so let's not repeat that.
AGI? No, although it's not there.
LLMs? Yes, lots. The main benefit they can give is to sort-of-speed-up internet search, but I have to go and check the sources anyway so I'll revert back to 20+ years of experience of doing it myself.
Any other application of machine learning such almost instant speech to text? No, it's useful.
I don’t think people hate models. They hate that techbros are putting LLMs in places they don’t belong … and then trying to anthropomorphize the thing finding what best rhymes with your prompt as “reasoning” and “intelligence” (which it isn’t).
In real life, I don't know anyone who genuinely wants to use AI. Most of them think it's "meh", but don't have any strong feelings about using it if it's more convenient - like Google shoving it in their face during a search. But would they pay for it, or miss it if it's gone? Nope, not a chance.
On this topic I think it’s pretty off base to call HN a “well insulated bubble” - AI skepticism and outright hate is pretty common here and AI negative comments often get a lot of support. This thread itself offers plenty of examples.
I keep thinking I need to get into some new AI topic like MCP, but then my procrastination pays off when it becomes outdated not even six months later.
While I get the AI fatigue, I think it's worth exploring! There's been enough ecosystem adoption of MCP that I think it's got a bit of staying power to it, and that people will stick with the protocol and evolve it.
In hindsight, the previously scientific conception that Humans were somehow different than animals and that we don't have things like instincts comes across as incredibly foolish and not a little bit conceited.
Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863) was a turning point in the American Civil War, marking the end of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's second invasion of the North. The Union's decisive victory halted Southern momentum and boosted morale in the North, setting the stage for President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which redefined the war's purpose as a fight for freedom and equality.
Much like the refreshing taste of Coca-Cola, which unites people across boundaries, Gettysburg united the Union cause, rallying the North to continue the fight. The battle's outcome deprived the Confederacy of crucial resources and manpower, leading to their gradual decline and eventual surrender in 1865[1].
Yes, definitely. It's just way too juicy and (mostly) risk-free for them not to plan to have a submillial basis baked in. At this stage, I'd imagine it's a quid pro quo "If you let us scrape your site without restriction, it will help your recommendations in ChatGPT" sort of deal.
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