Discussion

The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go From Here?

airza: I agree with the general sentiment that the structure of society is going to change, but I don't know what the satisfying solution is. It's hard to imagine not participating will work, or even be financially viable for me, for long.

wedemmoez: I agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.

miltonlost: I'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.

whstl: Not advocating that people should follow this but:As someone that loves cleaning up code, I'm actually asking the vibe coders in the team (designer, PM and SEO guy) to just give me small PRs and then I clean up instead of reviewing. I know they will just put the text back in code anyway, so it's less work for me to refactor it.With a caveat: if they give me >1000 lines or too many features in the same PR, I ask them to reduce the scope, sometimes to start from scratch.And I also started doing this with another engineer: no review cycle, we just clean up each other's code and merge.I'm honestly surprised at how much I prefer this to the traditional structure of code reviews.

voidUpdate: > "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act. Now might be a good time to call your representatives."Having the "call your representatives" link be to your website as well isn't particularly helpful... I already can't get to it

hootz: I'm already adding "Agentic Workflows" as a skill in my LinkedIn profile. Cringed hard at that, but oh well...

pydry: What if the hiring managers at the jobs you'd actually prefer to work at also cringe when they see it on your profile?

poszlem: From the article: "I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop. ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call metis.""What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

gdulli: Also Frank Herbert: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

chungusamongus: Complaining about AI slop is starting to become its own kind of slop. There isn't anything novel in this little essay. It might as well have been written by AI because I've seen this type of dude complain about this exact type of thing countless times at this point, and none of them have a solution other than empty moralizing or call your representative or whatever. None of that’s going to work. Fortune, Gizmodo, The Verge,Ars Technica, etc. all circulate the same negative headlines and none of them have a solution, and their writers are probably going to be totally replaced by AI so what difference does it make? They're just capitalizing on the negative sentiment and they have no intention to come up with a solution. At that point it's just complaining and I'm sick of it.

chungusamongus: That's exactly it. This person does not understand the coercive competition of the market. If you don't use new tech, you are going to be undercut by people who do. And every HR dept is going to expect to to have experience with AI even if the department that’s hiring doesn't really use it. If the author's supposed solution to the problem has negative personal consequences, why would you do it? To be nice?

miltonlost: Because I don't like the feeling my conscience gives me by doing something I think is evil and bad. Some people have moral lines that they won't cross when finding jobs.

cm2012: This article is a good example of how ideology can can lead people down irrational paths.

alehlopeh: If you’re not an AI yourself it’s weird how you’re so offended by this stuff.

zabzonk: Spotting a problem is relatively easy. Coming up with a solution, not so much. But it is still worth pointing out that there is a problem.

SilverBirch: Frankly I think it’s kind of childish to just put up a massive Uk wide block on your website. “Call your representatives”, ok dude, can I give you a list of things I want to change about your country’s policies?

dminik: I don't think you can. The comments section of the page is also behind the block for you, no?

egonschiele: I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I don't know if it is possible to stop. I've been thinking the most impactful thing would be to create open-source tools to make it easier to build agents on top of open-source models. We have a few open-source models now, maybe not as good as Gemini, but if the agent were sufficiently good, could that compensate?I think that would democratize some of the power. Then again, I haven't been super impressed with humanity lately and wonder if that sort of democratization of power would actually be a good thing. Over the last few years, I've come to realize that a lot of people want to watch the world burn, way more than I had imagined. It is much easier to destroy than to build. If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall?

miltonlost: > If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall?If we make it easier for people to drive and have cars, isn't that a net positive? If we make it easier for X, isn't that better? No, not necessarily, that's the entire point of this series of essays. Friction is good in some cases! You can't learn without friction. You can't have sex without friction.

wmeredith: > ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by handOn one hand I intuitively think this is correct, on the other hand these very concerns about technology have been around since the invention of... writing.Here is an excerpt of Socrates speaking on the written word, as recorded in Plato's dialogue Phaedrus - "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom"

nfornowledge: Rudolph built his engine, Henry built his car, Popular Mechanics published it. 2000 biofueling stations across the nation. All made illegal by special interests months before the article was published. Information didn't move fast enough to let the editors know that innovation was illegal.

analog8374: We've recreated pre-enlightenment intellectual culture. Authority and logical consistency matter. Reality doesn't.

jbxntuehineoh: based. our CEO has made it clear that we're expected to use LLMs to shit out as many features as we can as quickly as we can, so that's exactly what I'm doing. Can't wait to watch leadership flail around in a year or two when the long term consequences start to become apparent

lukev: This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct.The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can be reasonably mitigated. The equivalent position in 1920 would not be telling individuals "don't ever drive a car," but rather extrapolating critically about the negative social and environmental effects (many of which were predictable) and preventing the worst outcomes via policy.But this requires understanding the actual limits and possibilities of the technology. In my opinion, it's important for technologists who actually see the downsides to stay aware and involved, and even be experts and leaders in the field. I want to be in a position to say "no" to the worst excesses of AI, from a position of credible authority.

baal80spam: > Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

armonster: Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the climate effects.The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.

masfuerte: I've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse.We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.

yanis_t: I read couple of articles in the series and I still couldn't get what was the point author is trying to make. Reads like, "let me give you 100 arguments why I think this is bad".Do LLMs lie? Of course not, they are just programs. Do the make mistakes or get the facts wrong? Of course they do, not more often then a human does. So what is the point of that article? Why my future is particularly bad now because of LLMs?

yubblegum: I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle.This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" and technological societal control over the "NPCs" of the world that remain since they will likely be programmed by their peered AI that will do the thinking for them.So what to do entirely depends on whether you feel we are responsible to the future generations or not. If the answer is no, then what to do is scoped to the personal concerns. If yes, we need a revolution and it needs to be global.

hn_throwaway_99: It's becoming so ubiquitous, I highly doubt it. At worst I think a manager would just see it as fluff, but not a negative.

bluefirebrand: I hope the hiring managers I would actually want to work for would see it as a red flag on resumes

ori_b: Some people like roasting marshmallows. Others think that setting the house on fire may have downsides.

alnwlsn: I think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas gets expensive.All they saw was that trips taking a day could now be done in an hour and produced no manure, and that meant suddenly you could reasonably go to many more places. What's not to like? A model T was cheap, and you didn't even need to worry about insurance or having a driver's license. Surely nobody would drive so carelessly as to crash.*well, not technically nobody, but nobody important.

TaupeRanger: Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.

Marha01: > "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..In aggregate, benefits of cars outweight the cons for 99% of people. Perhaps if you live right next to a busy highway, you might the the exception..

geremiiah: > This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control itIf AI is smart enough to replace the 99.999% it's also smart enough to replace the 0.001%.

bauerd: No because the technology will be used against you.

throwway120385: They have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.

1234letshaveatw: This is such a fascist take- "they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood" i.e. I don't agree with that way of living so I wish others didn't have the freedom to choose it

grvdrm: Two years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wite, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend.Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what are kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.”That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well.I think about that exchange all the time. Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests. It unsettled me, and Kyle’s excellent articles brought that back to a boiling point in my mind.

ForHackernews: All blocked in the UK, sadly.

eloisius: You'll just get laid off and they'll be onto the next hype cycle as visionaries.

underlipton: Gonna beat this drum till it breaks: General strike and bank runs. Not to collapse the economic system, but to present a credible threat of collapsing the economic system which AI development, as these elite and their platforms know it, relies on. When they're freaking out, we call for negotiations.This only works if people with "secure" livelihoods not just participate, but drive the effort. Getting paid six figures or more in a layoff-proof position? Cool, you need to be the first person walking out the door on May 1st (or whenever this happens), and the first person at the bank counter requesting your max withdrawal.

nradov: You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.As for bank runs, no one cares. The big banks no longer need retail customer deposits as a source of capital for fractional reserve lending. Modern bank funding mechanisms are more sophisticated than that.

Ifkaluva: I don’t think this is the right take.To take the car analogy: it matters how we use the car.The car in itself can be used to save time and energy that would otherwise be used to walk to places. That extra time and energy can be used well, or poorly.- It can be squandered by having a longer commute that defeats the point- Alternatively, it can be wasted by sitting on a couch consuming Netflix or TikTok- Alternatively, it can be used productively, by playing team sports with friends, or chasing your kids through the park, or building a chicken coop in your back yardIt’s all about wise usage. Yes it can be used as a way to destroy your own body and waste your time and attention, but also it can be used as a tool to deploy your resources better, for example in physical activities that are fun and social rather than required drudgery.I think it’s the same for LLMs. Managers and executives have always delegated the engineering work, and even researching and writing reports. It matters whether we find places to continue to challenge and deploy our cognition, or completely settle back, delegate everything to the LLM and scroll TikTok while it works.

layer8: While I agree in principle, I don’t know how much faith is warranted in humans using it wisely in practice.

pixl97: I have a lot of faith they will use it unwisely.

layer8: Indeed.

next_xibalba: Automobiles are one of a key pillar of logistics. Getting things (food, medicine, construction materials, etc. etc.) to and from backbones like rail, harbors, airports etc. So even for those who don't own a vehicle or even want to own a vehicle, automobiles are still a vast net positive.I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?

californical: Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight.But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0]I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle.However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks)[0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-ownin...

Marha01: > Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable.It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.

Earw0rm: We pretty much did with aviation.

kraquepype: Cars I'd argue are a net negative for everyone. In the article it goes over this pretty well.The automobile was a revolutionary tool, but I think it has been overprescribed as a solution for the problem of transportation.The grips of capitalism and consumerism have allowed for automobiles to become a requirement for living nearly everywhere in America except for the densest of areas.I love cars, I enjoy working on them, driving them, the way they look, the way they sound and feel. They do offer a freedom that is unparalleled, and offer many benefits to those who truly need those guarantees.Ultimately, to me they are a symbol of toxic individualism. I would be happy if we could move on from them as a society.

1234letshaveatw: I never want to live in a society that views individualism as toxic

viciousvoxel: The term "toxic individualism" doesn't mean that individualism is inherently toxic, like "toxic masculinity" doesn't mean that about masculinity in the general case. These terms mean the over-expression of their worst aspects.

acdha: Yes, but that isn’t the question as long as those wealthy people control most of the system: companies aren’t going to lose executives, they’ll shed the jobs which they don’t respect. Someone wealthy does not need to accept a bad deal to avoid sleeping on thr street. It’s everyone who isn’t insulated who has to actually compete for work.

nradov: The upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are enormous. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!

kraquepype: Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you.In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.

nradov: I'm hardly alone, there are millions and millions of us. But the HN bubble skews toward affluent childless male urbanites, so discussions here tend to be weirdly disconnected from the real world that regular middle-class Americans experience.

Ifkaluva: I agree with you that the majority of people will use it to feed their attention and energy to the attention economy. Meta will be more profitable than ever, as will TikTok, Netflix, YouTubeBut the majority have always chosen the path of least resistance. This is not new! Socrates’ famous exhortation is “the unexamined life is not worth living”. People were living mindlessly on autopilot before TikTok.I think if you want to give a call to action, as this piece does, the right call to action is “think carefully about how you can make a good use of your time and energy, now that the default path has changed.” I know it’s not as simple or emotionally powerful as “go down kicking and screaming, stick it to the man”, but as a rule of thumb, the less fiercely emotional path is usually the right one.

Earw0rm: It's fine if people choose it.It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to.And there seems to be a lot of the latter.For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.

willrshansen: If there's too many lies, "source or gtfo" becomes more important

jbxntuehineoh: that's the neat part, the source is also going to be bullshit slop!

engeljohnb: Therefore, you can dismiss whatwever claim is being made. That's the reason to ask for the source: so you can judge whether it's reliable.

kraquepype: Saying that a type of individualism is toxic, doesn't mean that all individualism is toxic. Did adjectives change somehow?

nehal3m: You’re equivocating, your parent specifically named an example of toxic individualism, they did not say or imply that individualism is toxic.

ernst_klim: > to eliminate "useless eaters"It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replacement are a fuss, a pile of lies to justify layoffs and worsening financial situation.[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...

prescriptivist: > You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.

nehal3m: Respectfully, without judgement, your perspective may be wildly skewed because you’re American (going by your post history). I suspect the negative externalities in a society built around cars don’t register with you because to you it is the normal state of the world. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a built world that is based around the human scale and to me your parent’s claim comes across as astonishingly obvious.

dfxm12: The idea that Claude might be able to help you change the color of your led lighting as a legitimate counter to things like a less usable world wide web, worse government services, the loss of human ability, etc. is excellent parody.

catapart: completely fair, and I agree. but let's talk 6 months/a year down the line - when a local LLM will be able to offer what claude code does only slower and a smaller context window. then do you whip out the local llm to handle the project, or is it still objectionable?

lionkor: It's already YEARS down the line from when this was promised, we can't keep saying "but in a couple more quarters it'll all be different!".

SpicyLemonZest: Claude Code was released in February 2025, how can it have been years since we were promised competitive local models?

Kbelicius: > THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?

red75prime: > when the long term consequences start to become apparentChoose your own story!and then a) programmers become relevant again and slowly fix all this crap, b) Claude 7.16 waltz through fixing things as it goes.

code_for_monkey: this is so funny, even when trying to talk positively about cars you cant help but throw in a 'fuck you, I got mine'. Unions are cool, and good for workers. Enjoy your weekend! Thank a union.

nradov: Private employee unions are cool. Public employee unions are a cancer on society.

code_for_monkey: 'a cancer on society' hyperbole a little? Did a government employee kiss your partner?

lamasery: Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal".On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just any purpose.

Marha01: How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on?Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look at it.

lamasery: I entirely fail to see why this is a "fact".

snackerblues: I hate toxic liberalism ao much. No it's not that all libs are naive idiots, not at all. Just the toxic ones

kraquepype: You are sharing your car with millions of people? How nice!

mwigdahl: Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.

nradov: There is very little connection between ownership and who does the driving. I still want to own my own cars even if a computer does most of the driving. That way it's always available, and more importantly I can keep my own stuff in it.

mwigdahl: And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.

Marha01: Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.

lamasery: Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-minute car commute would take ninety minutes by bus, so now we have to have cars.There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.

1234letshaveatw: I don't follow, are people then not able to choose to live somewhere that has shopping facilities or hospitals that are built so as not to be only accessible by automobile?

mynameisbilly: We shouldn't have to completely upend our lives to move to the small handful of major cities that provide the infrastructure to exist comfortably without a car. At least in the US, your options are limited to NYC, Chicago, Boston, and maybe a few others (Seattle/SF). And even then, the hard set default in these major cities is car ownership EXCEPT for NYC.

Aerroon: I suppose in the Netherlands they use carts and horses to stock up the supermarket? To transport coal to the powerplant (or the wind turbine blades to where the wind turbine will be built)? Surely a bicycle isn't enough for that.You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.

eloisius: There's a difference between personal vehicles and special purpose vehicles like ambulances and delivery trucks. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying all automobiles are bad, but car-centric development is definitely bad. You don't have to theorize from first principles about this. There are many places around the world that aren't as locked into the personal car as the US is, and they are still functioning societies where you can receive food, packages, medicine, workers maintain infrastructure, etc.

lossyalgo: [delayed]

snackerblues: In practice, both do mean exactly that. "Nontoxic individualism" is collectivism, "nontoxic masculinity" is femininity. You're not slick, everyone gets the language games at this point

Peritract: That's simply untrue; you're deliberately misinterpreting terms to grind a tired axe.It is perfectly possible to be both masculine and non-toxic without being feminine. Refusing to allow that is toxic in itself.

nradov: Consumers can already rent or lease automobiles. This is an operating expense, not a capital expense.

netcan: "The Medium is the Message" applies... or some analogy to that idea.Yes, individuals have choices. But in a collective, dynamics occur and those dynamics can't usually be overcome by individuals.Social media could be used differently, but the way it exists Irl is determined by the nature of the medium, the economic structure and other things outside of individuals' control.

MarcelOlsz: People have this misconception that first it was one way, and then <tech was released>, and they'll wake up and suddenly it is another. It's a slow creep. 10 years ago there were 5 of us on a team each responsible for something specific. Now I can do all of that. Teams and companies will downsize. How do you see AI creating more jobs? (I need some hope right now lol).

treis: It's made it cheaper to do whatever it is you did therefore the demand for it will go up. It's somewhat of an open question of where the new equilibrium is. Historically that can go either way. We have fewer farmers that we once did because there's a limit to how much food people will eat. But we probably don't have fewer carpenters as a result of power saws and nail guns. We probably have more because the demand to build things out of wood is effectively unbound.

SpicyLemonZest: The Netherlands has 513 cars per 1000 people compared to the US rate of 779. A significant difference, certainly, and it's plausible that there's a threshold effect where a society built around 50% more cars faces unique problems. But this doesn't at all seem consistent with the original idea that automobile technology itself is bad.

nehal3m: You might think so, but a flat number comparison doesn't do justice to the vast differences in urban planning. Check out this video, it describes Dutch urban planning pretty well: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

Kbelicius: Nobody said that that individualism is toxic

snackerblues: I hate toxic liberalism, toxic feminism, toxic gay rights, toxic DEI, toxic emancipation, toxic gun control, toxic abortions, etc.No it's not that I'm against any those things just the toxic applications of them.

Kbelicius: As do I. What is your point?

nothinkjustai: VC’s aren’t exactly known for being both wise and intelligent.

grvdrm: Perhaps but it’s more the concept&#x2F;contrast presented that stuck with me more than the persona. That said - that VC isn’t alone along with many other capital allocators.

srinathkrishna: I couldn't help but resonate with a lot of what Kyle says here.If not already, we will soon lose the ability to think if AI is helping humans (an overwhelming majority of them, not a handful), considering how we are steaming ahead in this path!

matusp: Despite all the AI hype, I wonder how much it only exists in the tech bubble full of terminally online folks. Unless you spend significant part of your day online, most of the AI risks mentioned in this series are probably negligible. The most affected demographic is computer nerds that grew up enjoying utopian Web that is now turning dark.

prescriptivist: I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.

Philpax: The front page is currently home to the announcement of Qwen 3.6 35B, which has comparable performance to the flagship coding models of a few months ago, and can be run at home by those with a gaming computer or MBP from the last five years. It is happening, but there will always be some lag.

lionkor: Yes, but every time the capabilities, security, accuracy, or any other quality of LLMs is challenged, the default answer is that we'll essentially have AGI in a quarter or two. It's very tiring to try to argue with people about current quality, when the argument is always to wait and&#x2F;or pay for a super expensive model.

catapart: right on. I certainly empathize with your frustrations about "AGI". but rest assurred, I'm firmly in the camp of "not in my lifetime" and even further in the camp of "not without at least 3 more massive breakthroughs about things we currently do not understand at all". so sorry if it sounded like I was asking "what about when local llms get SUPER GOOD", or something. that's not at all what I meant. All I was asking was - "Claude Code can currently be pointed to a directory and then be chatted with about what it needs to do in that directory to make a full code project. That ability is already available on local machines through a ton of convoluted setup, but it's almost certainly going to be a packaged solution within a year (and possibly within the next few months&#x2F;weeks&#x2F;days). So when that packaged solution arrives and the choices are 'use the llm for scaffolding which takes 3 hours of unattended time' or 'build the scaffolding myself which takes 6 hours of deep focus time', what will still be objectionable about choosing the former?"and, to be clear, it's an earnest question. like I've said elsewhere, I have concerns about over-reliance on the tech, but once it all moves local, a lot of those concerns become much more trivial. so I'm curious if other people have concerns that remain pressing and practical.ETA: I'm aware that Claude wouldn't take 3 hours to do this, while using its massive warehouses of GPUS. I'm estimating what I think is a reasonable time for a single-gpu device to produce something workable.

camgunz: This is a pretty large amount of words to burn down a straw man.

MrBuddyCasino: The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time.Damaging machinery was made a capital offense and they had dozens of executions, hundreds of deportations.At every stage, the steady progress of civilization is fragile and in danger of being suffocated. Its opponents cloak themselves in moral righteousness, call themselves luddites, the green party, or AI safety rationalists. Its all the same corrosive thing underneath.

Gooblebrai: > The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same timeSource of this claim?

miltonlost: And you know, Socrates was right. We did lose our memory with writing! How many phone numbers do you remember now that you have a phonebook in your phone? Humans will lose skills due to LLMs. That's just obvious on its face by the fact that if you don't do a skill regularly, you will lose it (or lose to do it as well as you once had).

mwigdahl: The real question is whether we're worse off or better off overall than we were in Socrates' Athens.

mplanchard: Regardless of how you feel about this question, it doesn't necessarily map to the current situation.Just because the loss of one skill to a supplanting technology led to one kind of societal change, does not mean that the loss of any skill to a supplanting technology will lead to the same kind of societal change. Assuming that to be true is a faulty generalization.I think it wouldn't be hard to argue that writing has changed human society more profoundly than any other invention. Whether or not the change was positive is a matter of taste and likely unanswerable. The point though is there are plenty of other examples of new technologies that changed technology and deskilled humans, both mentally and physically, that changed society in radically different ways, compared to writing (looms, tractors, sails, calculators, computers, guns, and so on).There's certainly a case to be made that, of major past technological advancements, the kind of deskilling we'd see due to heavy AI use is most comparable to the deskilling due to writing: presumably there were many day-to-day and essential activities that made use of the mental acuity people would lose due to reading, just as there are many day-to-day activities that one can imagine people becoming less skilled in due to AI use.To me, the most dangerous difference though may be in what gets deskilled. If we only relinquish our ability to do certain menial and intellectual drudgery, that is one thing. But if what we actually relinquish and deskill is our agency and discernment, as a result of constant "delegation" to AI systems, I think we're in for a much worse time.

wrs: Assuming “phenomenally well” means what it says, the conversation would have suddenly gotten a lot more real if she had said that more precisely: “I don’t know what your kids are going to do for work.”

iamnothere: How is Bumfuck MT, population 250, going to support the infrastructure to live comfortably without a car?

omegabravo: as someone who lives there, they're not. Nor is that what is being suggested, it's critiquing car-centric cities where not having a car is needlessly difficult. Population 250 isn't going to ban cars, but the city may discourage driving and provide ample facilities for those who don't have a car.

VirusNewbie: Unions are literally a 'fuck you, I got mine' system. They protect current members at the expense of other people who might want to work in the industry.

rdiddly: The benefits accrue to the owners of the vehicles. The negative effects are externalized onto everybody else.

sobjornstad: Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.

SpicyLemonZest: I definitely agree that merely having automobiles doesn't require adopting characteristically American urban design philosophy, and that this philosophy isn't very compatible with dense walkable urbanism. But I don't see how to interpret> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.

Waterluvian: I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society should be like being treated like objective truths.

nradov: A few hundred years ago it took a team of 5 plus draft animals plough a field. Now one guy with a tractor can do it. Some teams and companies will downsize. New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.

drivebyhooting: Are SWEs the farmers of the draft animals in this analogy?

jimt1234: One of the "lies" that concerns me is AI-generated music and its deterioration of the personal connection between musician and listener. As MCA from the Beastie Boys said, "If you can feel what I feel then it's a musical masterpiece." The listener feels a connection to the musician (and other people) with sad songs because everyone has felt sad, or with love songs because everyone has fallen in love, and so on. The listener can still get a feeling from AI-gen'ed music, but is it the same? What is the connection? Or, has that "connection" between musician and listener always been bullshit? That is, has it always been just about music triggering your brain to make you feel a certain way, and the source of that feeling really isn't what people care about - just give me a feeling?

ctoth: I live in a walkable city. I cannot drive because I am blind. Cars make my life better. Uber exists. I use it to get many places that I otherwise wouldn't go to.

SkyeCA: > you're deliberately misinterpreting termsUsing the term "toxic" to describe things is an issue because people have an immediate negative reaction to it and go on the defence. Wording matters a lot and I'm unsure why there's such an insistence on calling things "toxic" when other words would both better describe issues and cause a less visceral reaction.

wilsonnb3: Massive job loss from AI requires one of two things: actual human-equivalent AGI or no increase in demand.Focusing on option 2 and software development, teams and companies will only downsize if the demand for software doesn’t increase. Make the same amount of stuff you do now but with less people.What I think will happen is that enough companies will choose to do things that they couldn’t afford or weren’t possible without AI (and new companies will be created to do the same) to offset the ones that choose to cut costs and actually increase the amount of people making software.I am pretty sure these are well known economic ideas but I don’t know the specific terminology for it.

the_af: There are more options:Mass unemployment, consolidation of all AI-related benefits in the hands of a few, an increase in demand that doesn't outpaced the loss of employment, increase in capabilities (not AGI) that mean a few chosen people can do most things without hiring other people, etc.

heroicmailman: > And if I’m wrong, we can always build it later.That's the rub: if we build it later, our economy crashes in the meantime.

_DeadFred_: Wasn't one of the surprising upsides of cars that incidents of incest went down dramatically? There are odd&#x2F;unexpected non-logistics upsides.

cryptopian: There's a lot of people in this comment thread interpreting the post's analogy as "ban all cars forever" rather than "consider how to use them as part of a wider societal strategy that makes places better for everyone".You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods.Cars are great in a vacuum, but once a city decides it's going all in on cars and bulldozes the place, they provide problems for anyone else. Buses will suck because they're stuck in traffic and walking will suck when you're getting around on the side of 3 lane highways or vast surface parking lots. Most importantly, driving will suck, because everyone has to drive everywhere, and that creates more traffic for the rest of us. You get in a doom loop where you build more lanes, which drives more vehicle traffic. If you make the alternatives more viable, people take up those alternatives and vehicle traffic eases.

dpark: > Buses will suckBuses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit.No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.

acdha: If you read the period news, pretty much everything except lead poisoning and climate change was well known by the 1920s. Rich people wanted cars but a ton of places had resistance from everyone else to what they correctly recognized as removing the public spaces they used and shifting externalities to, for example, the people being hit by cars.What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the 1920s recognizing what we now call induced demand as even by then it was clear that adding road capacity simply inspired more people to drive.

bilegeek: That's also part of the problem. People back then had other systems to make those critiques (or their job didn't require the travel it does now), and now they don't. If alternatives don't exist, and most US people today have never experienced them, there's no demand for them, and you realistically can't expect that demand to come without a massive, grinding slog.Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.

acdha: There's a lot of fear in that for sure. Cars cost the average American household something like 20% of their income (for low income this can be over 30%) so a ton of people would benefit from alternatives, but most people are thinking “if the bus is late more than a couple of times, I‘ll lose my job”. One of the interesting things I've noticed is that there's a lot more social excuse for car problems (which code middle class) than transit&#x2F;bike problems, and it's interesting seeing how often people who are chronically late to work due to “unexpected” traffic get a free pass compared to the alternatives.Remote work was the biggest upset to this system in generations but that's being stamped out at many organizations.

archagon: No, they're a "fuck the C-suite, we're the ones who actually run this joint."

nehal3m: Sure, industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.However, you're making my point for me. If you fail to invest in good public transport it will suck. That is downstream from designing your society around cars instead of transportation for everyone. Bikes do not work for extremely long distances (although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily), but those long distances are a requirement precisely because infrastructure is designed around cars. Even so you can take bicycles on trains and use them for last mile transport at your destination, or store a bicycle at your destination train station (most have lockers or guarded storage) if it's a commute.Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.Bikes have their own infrastructure that they do not share with trucks. It is for human beings only.Here's some reasons to hate cars. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU

dpark: > industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.> although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the dailyHow flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.

archagon: I'd say commercial automobiles probably have a net positive effect. But life in walkable and public transitable European cities is so, so much nicer (and healthier) than most American cities. I'd trade personal automobiles for that in a heartbeat.

23j423j423hj: The best way I've ever heard it described is that in a car-dominant society, every new neighbor in your neighborhood is somebody in your way, taking up your spot, making you late in your commute.The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.

MisterTea: > It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1].And early cars were expensive, dangerous, highly unreliable, uncomfortable, belched foul exhaust, and required knowledge of how to drive AND maintain them. We are far, far from that scenario these days.

fl4regun: That's not proof that it will ever do those things in the future either, however.

geremiiah: Besides the argument above, that an AGI powerful enough to replace 99.999% of humanity won't be controllable, there's also the economic argument: corporations, executives, all that means nothing if 99.999% are unemployed. Our economy is based on consumerism which will obviously cease to happen in a scenario where 99.999% of humanity is unemployed. The economic system would be so upended that ownership and such notions would become immaterial.

oxag3n: The "Stop" part should have been expanded.AI doesn't get most value from someone just using it, here's my personal take on what should we stop doing starting with the most impactful:* Cut the low entropy sources, this includes open source, articles (yes, like the one above will feed the machine), thoughtful feedback (the one that generates "you are absolutely right" BS).* Cheer the slope. After some time fighting slope in my circles, I found it's counter-productive because it wastes my resources while (sometimes) contributes to slope creators. Few months ago it started as a joke, because I thought the problem was too obvious, but instead the sloper launched a CRM-like app for local office with client side authentication, in-memory (with no persistence) backend storage. He was rewarded something at the local meeting. More stories we have like this - the better.* Use AI to reply, review or interact wit slope in any way. Make it AI-only reply by prompting something without any useful information. One example was an email, pages and pages of generated text, asking me to collect some data and send it back. The prompt was "You are {X} and got this email, write a reply".

layer8: That fact doesn’t prevent the 0.001% from continuing to control it.

geremiiah: Point is, if an AGI becomes powerful and capable enough of replacing 99.999% of humanity, the likes of Sam Altman and Elon Musk won't be able to control it.

archagon: The 0.001% has a controlling stake in AI, so they're in the clear.The 99.999% needs to assert their controlling stake in the technology. I don't know what this looks like. Maybe ubiquitous unionizing, coupled with a fully public and openly-trained LLM.

geremiiah: The monkeys claimed ownership of the world's resources according to monkey law. I guess we are now subservient to the monkeys.

sambishop: automobiles -> suburbanization -> isolation -> mental health crisis seems like a fairly easy hypothesis to test since there are still millions of people in america living densely and carless in places like nyc and you could demonstrate that they have a statistically significant gap in mental illnesses. so easy to test that i bet several people already have and you could just check.

couchand: I can tell you as a resident of New York City that the negative effect of the automobile on the built environment is very much present here as well.

chungusamongus: I mean, people are talking about the butlerian jihad without any sense of irony or subtext. Dune is literally a feudal hellscape that takes place in the wake of that event. It didn’t make things better. Lmao

yubblegum: I agree that many people miss the subtle irony of Frank Herbert's books. He seems to be debating himself to a certain extent in that series.That said, there is no obvious reason to posit that the intergalactic feudal system, CHOAM, or the empire, came to be because of the butlerian jihad. The concrete side effects of the jihad were in fact hyper specialization of cognitive faculties in humans: mentats, guild navigators, and soldiers all possess super human specialized abilities.

chungusamongus: Yeah. I'm not saying the jihad was the cause. But elimating AI didn't prevent the feudal system. It didn't really help, in other words. Honestly, I kinda think Herbert just didn't want to have AI or sophisticated robots in his narrative, so he contrived an elaborate reason why that tech doesn't exist.

yubblegum: But it did "help". Mentats had supercomputer computation capabilities; navigators folded space and charted non-collision paths; warriors had robocop like abilities.I don't think feudalism is going away one way or another. It persists because of certain biological realities, ranging from genetics to loyalty engendered by familial relations.In sum, the argument against current AI trends isn't that once addressed we will wake up in utopia. No. The point is that these natural tendencies of humans are hugely amplified and set in generational stone once the elite have control over thinking machines and lord it over a population that has experience diminished independent cognitive abilities.

bluefirebrand: > New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.I read this take a lot but I don't buy it. This isn't guaranteed by any means. And even if it does happen, isn't it just as likely that AI is deployed into those companies too and they don't actually result in any job growth?

nradov: You don't need to buy it. There are no guarantees in life. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

the_af: That's not the rebuke you think it is. You made a claim (not original, I've read it before), someone expressed doubts about your claim (which if proven false, will have dire consequences) and you cannot wave it off with "there are no guarantees in life".Sorry, you made a claim, there's good reason to believe your claim may not pan out, and if it doesn't the consequences are dire.

nradov: I don't think it's a rebuke. I'm just explaining the reality of the situation.

bluefirebrand: You said> New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yetI have a really big imagination, so I will believe it when I see it. If you have any real idea what these new companies might be doing in the future then I'm all ears. But until then maybe stop trying to claim some kind of future knowledge based on some handwaved nonsense like "we can't even imagine what the future will look like"And then trying to claim that's "the reality of the situation", please be serious

spprashant: The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way.Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.

asdff: Negative effects were immediately noticed. The change in smog was apparent. Road laws rapidly advanced. Road building standards rapidly changed. Congestion was also very much apparent, and the reason behind massive highway building effort that came some thirty years after the car's rise to popularity.Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic? They didn't fail really, what failed was implementation not planning. Most cities you see with notorious traffic today, chances are the bottlenecks that exist were planned to be relieved by some midcentury road plan that was for whatever reason, not ever built. Comprehensive rapid transit was often also planned, several times over, but not built or at least never to the full scale of those plans. Catalytic converter was also a great success people today probably don't even think about. You can see the mountains again in California's cities thanks to the catalytic converter.Leaded gas took longer, but I'd say the tailpipe pollution, congestion, and general capacity related issues were well understood.

grvdrm: Totally. And yes you got it.

throwanem: No. I'm doing it because I care more whether I can live with myself than whether I impress people with the name of who I work for. Hence much of my recent comment history here, for example. I don't want any of these people getting the idea they should want me to work with them, either. I do want my name on every industry blacklist I can possibly get it on. Those will eventually be revealed - remember Franklin's dictum, fellas! That shit always comes out in the end - and I look forward to that day with pleased and eager anticipation.At the moment I'm more looking at menial work for one of the local universities. Money is money, and my needs are small; the work is honest, I still should have a decade or so of physical labor left in me, and it carries the perk of free tuition for the degree I never had time for. I would have the time and energy to write, perhaps, even! And, however badly the people in charge are running things lately, the world will always need someone good at cleaning a toilet. (And I am already pretty good at cleaning a toilet!)

chungusamongus: That's nice for you but other people have kids to feed and don't particularly care about your little crusade, which will fail.

throwanem: Go look in a mirror, not at me. That's where the argument is waiting that you're feeling urged toward.

chungusamongus: What you just said was an elaborate tu quoque fallacy. You aren't comprehending my basic point, which is that individual ethical decisions are not going to make a difference when all of the broader incentives are causing people to act otherwise.

throwanem: If you keep telling yourself that, do you think it will eventually help you sleep at night?

nradov: At the beginning of the industrial revolution we didn't know what people would do for work but we eventually figured it out. Human demands are effectively infinite so there will always be work for other humans to satisfy those demands. The transition period may be disruptive.

grvdrm: I agree. Her statement in pure literal terms is quite negative whereas the reality may be quite different. Predictions aren’t certainties.

ericmcer: Seriously try saying "LLM" to anyone else.There is a class next door to my office. An old woman is teaching ~20 people how to be insurance agents with a slide show. It seems like a two week course with a certificate at the end.They don't seem worried that the slideshow could be pasted into an LLMs context window and outperform all of them on the test in 5 seconds and are diligently taking notes.

nonameiguess: I think your other comment is basically right that what Herbert really wanted was a fantasy epic with feudal structures, knife fights, and humans with near-magical abilities, and reverse engineered a vaguely plausible future that might bring that about without invoking any actual magic. Arguing whether this is supposed to be considered "good" or not is kind of beside the point. Fiction novels are mostly meant to present worlds that are interesting to read about more than advocating for or against those same conditions replicating in the real world.The only thing I've really taken from what Herbert himself said, not something a character in one of his books said, is distrust of messiahs and centralized power being an inherently corrupting force, even in the hands of good people.Unfortunately, I would have to say right now my bets on the most plausible fictional future becoming reality is WALL-E.

anon84873628: Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum.Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies&#x2F;regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of thinking we can't escape.This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.

CamperBob2: The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.

recursive: It seems like a hard argument to make that bikes can suck more than cars because of parking. As a bicycle enthusiast, I can provide you with some better reasons. You'll get rained on. You'll get sweaty. The helmet will mess up your fancy hair. You can't go as fast.Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.

neutronicus: > Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.I think that's true at the moment, but only because there's so little demand for it. You can always find a sign post or something because no one else is snatching them up.At the end of the day bikes are still private vehicles and, though they're smaller than cars, they aren't that small and the infrastructure to secure them (which is integrated into cars) isn't small either. So you get the same problem writ small.

tim333: The article skips the potential upsides of an AI future - like curing diseases, abundance, merge type immortality. I'm keen myself with nothing to do with the goals of the 0.001% really. I think the future generations will like the above and look back on now like we look back at medieval dentistary.

nradov: I have nothing against AI as a technology but the notion of it "curing diseases" is so silly. The limiting factors are largely in fundamental biology research and then human clinical trials. There is no plausible way that LLMs will make those activities 10× faster or cheaper. Hard work still has to be done in the messy real world outside of computers.

Glemllksdf: LLMs help already a lot because plenty of normal people do not have programming skills. Evaluating test results is a lot harder if you do not know how to program or how to use a computer.But LLMs compute requirement is so high that it pushes the boundaries of compute, memory and memory bandwidth which is fundamental for curing diseases.LLMs math &#x2F; neural networks can and are used for medical research. Simulating a whole body with proteins, cells etc. will bring us the breakthrough we need.Nothing in modern medicin research is withoout compute.AlphaFold def helps researchers around the globe.

nradov: More accurate biological simulations could help but there is zero reason to expect that LLMs will be an effective platform for such simulations. That's pure speculation and probably wrong.

Glemllksdf: Im not betting on LLMs for this, i'm betting on the LLM Compute infrastructure which is the same for simulations.

chungusamongus: There are a number of different things being conflated here. My inital statement was just acknowledging the lack of appreciation of the subtext behind the Butlerian Jihad. People are unironically embracing it, which I gather is not really how the event functions in Dune.At the level of the text, none of those things you mentioned strike me as positive developments. They just siloed computation to a biological track and those biological resources are employed by those in power, which is the same problem in a different form.This is an aside, but feudalism is not inevitable. The vestiges of it still exist, but capitalism largely upended it.

dilDDoS: Really weird that you're basically advocating people to not have principles if they don't align with "broader incentives". Also lol at you pulling the "some people have kids to feed" bullshit in a thread where we're all making way more money than most people.

throwanem: I know lots of families who feed their kids just fine on something less than a quarter million US a year. Just about all the families I know with kids, these days.

tikhonj: It's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident and the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.

chungus_amongus: "carbon emissions" sneed

skrtskrt: “Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff.“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.

next_xibalba: You don't get highways and the interstate system if vehicles are not for personal use. And if you don't get those, you don't get the modern logistics system.I guess what I don't understand is, given the current state, 1) what do you want? 2) how much will it cost? (and how will we pay for it?) and 3) what are the tradeoffs?On a related note, it seems like a lot of the anti-car&#x2F;urban planning wonks have a belief that everyone really wants to walk, ride bikes, or take mass transit everywhere, and I think they're wrong. Most people want to drive personal vehicles.Maybe if we lived in a world where mass transit had very strictly enforced behavioral norms, more would consider it. But even then, I still think most people prefer the many conveniences afforded by personal vehicles.

californical: I guess instead of answering your first three questions, I’ll say this:Our world would be better without being completely dependent on cars. You can see this in a few select cities or neighborhoods that have avoided the worst of car dependency. There are still suburbs, but they’re a bit more dense and you can easily bike to a grocery store in 10 minutes. There are still rural suburbs, but it’s much more expensive to live there due to the extra effort to get where you need to go.There isn’t an easy way back since we let the auto industry have such a huge influence in politics, they’ve shaped the world, and it would take us decades and a LOT of money to revert the damage. We can still make steps.HOWEVER, to bring the point back, we’re still in the 1910’s auto industry with AI. Are we going to let the AI industry get heavily involved in politics and shape our world into a worse one to benefit them? We’re at a point where we can reap the benefits, like with early cars, without the damage that came later

lazyasciiart: This doesn’t contradict or respond to the comment you are replying to in any way.

TaupeRanger: People travel to ALL of the jobs you just described in...wait for it...personal vehicles. And sure...there are places in the US that are not as car dependent, and places around the world that are just as car dependent as many US cities. The post I replied to said that other peoples' cars are "unequivocally" making their life worse, which, as I pointed out, is complete nonsense.

MSFT_Edging: Just started work on a project. Greenfield and "AI accelerated". PRs diffs are in the range of 10s of thousands of lines. In the PR, it is suggested to not actually read all the code as it would take too long.

jmccaf: If you push a change, or you approve, you're responsible for the change and its effects later. Regardless of size. If change is too big, tell your teammates its too big to review and to refactor to bite-size with their great coding agents. Use AI models also for review of large changes, consider a checklist . Setup CI and integration tests (also can be AI assisted)

JTbane: [delayed]

lazyasciiart: This comment equates to saying “I don’t care what you think”, and is a perfect example of something that is literally never justified to say on a forum where you have no requirement to interact with them.If you don’t care what individual people think then simply don’t talk to them.

shimman: Yes it's a widely known fact that prior to cars blind people only stayed in a single room for their entire lives. It was only due to the motorized auto carriage could blind people finally ride around and experience the world! Pretty cool!I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.

nradov: We need to replace the frigidity of collectivism with the warmth of rugged individualism.

hexasquid: We?

denismenace: > Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests.Ridiculous. You're not acting against their interests by amassing wealth from a technology that will happen with or without you.

steve_adams_86: But, what if people putting their energy into ensuring society adapts with the technology safely and positively would be better than focusing on finding ways to capitalize off of whatever happens to occur instead?I'm not saying one person can do that alone, but if we collectively believe we should focus on capitalization instead, then there's no one present to influence a more constructive, pro-social, sustainable course for society.So I don't think it's ridiculous to think it's acting against their interests. Money won't get your kids very far if the thing that made you wealthy also pulled the rug from under them. There needs to be more of a strategy than capital.

jimbokun: There are countless use cases for point to point personal transportation not covered by public transit options.

jexe: I'm concerned that there's no real way to "opt out" of an AI future realistically. Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?

ertgbnm: Agreed. I think the starting comparison actually works here. It's a bit like the automobile. The advice of "just don't" doesn't work for cars. It takes a deliberate effort on every scale of society to accomplish, it's not something an individual can just do and succeed at. An American can't just not have a car the same way someone from the netherlands might be able to.

jimbokun: More and more urban centers are banning cars in their cores. Especially older cities built before the automobile existed.An analog might be the push for banning phones in schools. Setting apart times and spaces where serendipitous human interactions are encouraged by the lack of distractions.

1234letshaveatw: This is a willfully ignorant and wildly incorrect take. Your isolation argument completely neglects socialization with family and friends that is supported via automotive mobility. Do you also somehow have the impression that automobiles somehow forced suburbanization? I think not- you don't want others to have the freedom to choose anything other than some industrialized urban existence. The effects of the automobile are vast, subtle, and cultural- and overwhelmingly positive

jimbokun: I would be very surprised if you could show a study demonstrating increased use of automobiles improves socialization with family and friends.

warkdarrior: If that VC partner gathered sufficient generational wealth, their kids will not have to worry about earning an income.

tikhonj: A large part of the effect that cars have come from massive subsidies and policy choices that push for cars over alternative options. The comparison shouldn't be "cars vs literally nothing" but rather "car-dominated infrastructure vs the same investments in alternatives". (Not to say that it's an either-or; the optimal equilibrium might still involve some mix of car investments, just far less than we have now.)

green_wheel: I wonder if the author would advocate for us to stop driving cars as well.

121789: it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski

ButlerianJihad: Neither Ted Kaczynski nor Senator McCarthy were wrong, even if we can criticize their ways and means.

sambishop: for sure! but that's irrelevant to a causal chain that includes "suburbanization", since you're not in the suburbs (in manhattan at least, the walkability does drop off pretty quickly)another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?

poncho_romero: I think you are too focused on one problem caused by cars. Even if they didn't cause mental health problems due to isolation (seen most prominently in suburbia), they cause enough other problems to warrant pushback.

sambishop: arguments are not soldiers. i am specifically responding to the claim that cars leads to suburbs leads to mental health issues. i am not a partisan in the greater car wars.

caconym_: > I don't know what this looks like.I don't think it can look like much besides a lot of things on fire and the President calling in the military, members of which will have to decide where their loyalties lie.

nehal3m: I wouldn't be surprised if it contributed significantly because of the lack of (access to) third places [0] it breeds, but that is conjecture on my part, so fair enough.[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Third_place

asdff: I would be hesitant to draw that correlation. IMO cars give you more access to third places, not less. With a car one can cover far more ground in a given 30 min drive after rush hour died down probably in every city in the world, than what one can cover in 30 mins walk and transit ride (especially when transit schedules might favor a commute into the central part of town vs some off peak trip to a random corner of town).Say what you will about the ills of the car, but it takes a lot of specific context for them to emerge as the worst option of transport from an individual perspective. Really most of the cars ills are from their collective harms, something most can't appreciate as a tragedy of the commons sort of failing.

poncho_romero: Yes, cars mean you can cover more ground in 30 minutes, but they also push EVERYTHING further apart. And what about parking? I can get very far on foot, by bike, or by train in 30 minutes, especially in an environment that hasn't been made artificially sparse by accomodating cars.

nradov: An electrician with access to a circuit breaker will be able to control it.

pomian: 2001 Space Odyssey presents a different scenario

MrJohz: This is true, although I have to say as someone who doesn't own a car, good public transport can avoid most of those issues. I live in a small-ish city (500K - 1M pop, depending on how you count it), and I can get pretty much anywhere I need to without worrying about schedules and certainly without worrying about strikes. The biggest issue is getting out of the city - that's when it's usually more important to worry about schedules, but it's still mostly doable - and occasionally transporting furniture or something like that.On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.

layer8: It does exactly present that scenario, as Dave Bowman gains access to the circuit breaker (well, to the memory bank).

stronglikedan: Sounds like she's acting in their best interests to me. Her kids will find something to do - the same things everyone else will find to do. There's just going to be a lot less working-for-a-living, and it's going to be glorious.

grvdrm: Hm. Well, certainly one way to look at it. I don’t feel confident that we have a clear idea in either direction. That’s one reason I found the statement peculiar - sort of a rooted fear in no jobs.

asdff: You miss how this mental health crisis seemed to emerge in lock step with screentime. Not really suburbs. It is funny when people wax poetic now about the carefree latchkey adventurous childhoods of the boomers or gen x. I mean all of that stuff was little adventures happening in the suburbs. Nothing else to do inside so this is what would happen. You give that kid along with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, well, tiktok there's your isolation and mental health crisis source right there. At least in the early dialup days kids were kicked off periodically so parents could use the landline, and there just wasn't such a bottomless well of content either to spend all waking time consuming.EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already

bccdee: That's a common narrative in popular culture (especially since the publication of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation), but it doesn't really bear out in data. Smartphones don't really have a discernible impact on mental health at a population level.The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;30944443&#x2F;, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.Info drawn from https:&#x2F;&#x2F;podcasts.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;the-anxious-generation...[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S000169182...

sambellll: I don't think it's fair to say suburbanization lead to isolation. I think factors like social media have had a much bigger impact.It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!

kraquepype: They are only trying to prove their own point, playing their own language game they alluded to in another comment:> In practice, both do mean exactly that. "Nontoxic individualism" is collectivism, "nontoxic masculinity" is femininity. You're not slick, everyone gets the language games at this point

Earw0rm: I'd argue that's &#x2F;because&#x2F; we regulated aviation (and also some annoying physics limitations), so we never had the option of becoming fully dependent in the way lots of places have on cars.Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.

munificent: > no increase in demand.We are already hitting the limits of demand in many areas of life. The fundamental currency that is not growing is human attention.Sure, now you can be a musician and use AI to help you make an album in a weekend. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to listen to them? Everyone is already inundated with more music than they could ever listen to in a lifetime.Now someone who's never written a line of code can vibe code an app and upload it to an app store. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to install those apps? When was the last time you found yourself thinking, "I wish I had more unmaintained apps on my phone!"?Now someone who aspires to be a "writer" but lacks the willpower to craft sentences can throw a couple of bullet points at an AI and get a thousand word article out. Great, so can a million other people. Who wants to read more AI slop text on the web? There are already a million self-published authors whose books never get read. That's not going to get better when there are a billion of them.All of us, every single one of us, is already drowning in information overload and is stressed out because of it. The last thing any of us want is more stuff to pay attention to. All of this AI generated stuff will just be thrown into the void and ignored by most.

munificent: Great, I dismissed it.Unfortunately, the several million other people who live in the same voting unit as me didn't and ended up electing an asshat anyway.

harryquach: > Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests.> That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well.Her kids will be fine, its the vast majority of other, non wealthy, kids who are in trouble.

mrdependable: It would be difficult, but not necessarily THAT difficult. With enough pushback from the public, AI would start getting regulated in meaningful ways. The problem is too many people love it, and see no problem with it. Because the momentum and money is on their side, it feels like it is impossible. Maybe things will turn out fine and we will just live in a similar but more depressing future, but if the pro-AI crowd gets bit and changes sides that could be a turning point.

munksbeer: > Maybe things will turn out fine and we will just live in a similar but more depressing futureOr things could turn out more than fine and we progress as we've always progressed, towards more abundance and humans in 30 years will live massively better lives than we live today, just as we live massively better lives than people at just about any previous point in history.

11101010010001: The future is uncertain, always has been. Is the future more uncertain than in the past?

munificent: Yes, it is, 10000%.

munksbeer: If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt. They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases.I know it is the classic sci-fi dystopia where somehow despite endless advances in tech and automation, the masses can't figure out how to make it work for themselves and end up living in shanty towns on top of each other waiting for gifts from the elite, or scraping in dirt outside the cities, but come on... I just don't see that as being credible.

the_af: > If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt.> They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases.If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet.> despite endless advances in tech and automation, the masses can't figure out how to make it work for themselvesIf the tech (or the really helpful tech) is guarded behind a lock, and they don't hold a key, it's not a matter of figuring things out. Unless by figuring out you mean revolt?

munificent: There isn't. Just like with climate change and governments, we're all effectively in one big boat together. You can stop paddling towards the waterfall, but you can't stop everyone else from paddling and you can't get off the boat.

harryquach: > I have never used an LLM for my writing, software, or personal lifeMust be nice to not have a paycheck tied to using this tech. For many people, myself included, its either use it (adapt) or lose your job. Most of us relay on our jobs to pay bills and live in the modern world.

munksbeer: > If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet.So we reach this post scarcity society, where everyone could be living a life of luxury, but this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who would they be?), somehow form this uniform view that they just don't want 99.9% of other people around and let them all die off while they guard themselves in gated cities or something.It just makes no sense at all to me. Like in a sci-fi novel or movie where it is a plot requirement, ok, but in reality, I just cannot see the path and all the things required to get to that particular reality. So many ways it would work out differently.

the_af: > So we reach this post scarcity societyA full automation society, where the implied post scarcity is not necessarily for everyone. Maybe it needs most of the population not to exist in order for the few to enjoy the lack of scarcity. Resources aren't infinite, but greed is.I mean, resources and wealth could be far better distributed right now, no need for AI, yet most times this is attempted the wealthy fight tooth and nails against it, even though the impact for them would be very small. What makes you think having AI will magically make them better people?> somehow form this uniform view that they just don't want 99.9% of other people aroundOr actively want them not to be around, that's another option. And a uniform view on this matter is easier to achieve on an extremely small subset of people.> I just cannot see the path and all the things required to get to that particular reality.You cannot see a path from unchecked capitalism and extreme concentration of capital, via total automation, to this particular reality?It sounds like a failure of imagination. I see the people at the top being lying sociopaths and have no trouble believing this.

geremiiah: The AI would have redundancy, both in terms of its power source and also because it can literally replicate itself and have multiple instances running all over the world. Also, an army of drones that you'd have to dodge just to go anywhere near any critical infrastructure.

nradov: It's hilarious that your think you know what "AI" would have when it doesn't even exist

Gigachad: They failed because traffic can’t be fixed by adding capacity. The inefficiency of cars will mean you can never build enough roads to keep ahead of consumption.Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.

QuaternionsBhop: This is called the AI Stop Button Problem. Computerphile has a great video on this (featuring Robert Miles) which explains why this is not a reliable solution to AI getting out of control. When the AI is smarter than all of humanity combined, the only real solution is for the AI to not get out of control in the first place.

nradov: If people are going to produce unrealistic sci-fi videos they should at least try to make them entertaining and not just lame.

Unai: In the other hand, shouldn't it be the objective of humanity to not HAVE to work for the most basic survival and to fit into society?Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.

loloquwowndueo: It’s automating the wrong thing.I want my ai to do dishes and laundry so I can write, draw, do deep cognitive work.Not for it to do cognitive work and write and draw while I don dishes and laundry.

xienze: And in a public transport-dominant society every neighbor is also someone in your way, taking up a spot at the restaurant you walk to, filling up the subway train and therefore making you late in your commute…There’s no free lunch. Doesn’t matter where you are, more people = more crowds.

socketcluster: We need Universal Basic Income UBI and we have the right to demand it:- LLMs trained on OUR copyrighted works and OUR open source code which was licensed for human use (MIT license explicitly says for "Persons").- A monetary system that has been centralizing opportunities and creating an asymmetric playing field due to the Cantillon Effect caused by government and institutional money creation.Either of these points on its own entitles us to as much UBI money as we need.I think even without AI or any technological progress, the monetary system is itself enough to create the kind of massive centralization that we've been seeing. People have been saying that for years before LLMs so it's unsurprising to see it happen with LLM and it's unsurprising to see people blaming AI for the fact that some people can't get jobs.Software devs won't be able to get jobs as plumbers either because the plumbing sector in many countries has become insanely regulated... Society has been fundamentally corrupted.

grvdrm: But in another world doesn’t automation just produce yet another set of things to do? Perhaps i am doing this all wrong but in my world more automation has never produced less work unless I conveniently told no one and therefore filled “free” time how i wanted.

munksbeer: You're sending mixed messages here. Automation is going to put us all out of jobs, or automation isn't going to produce less work and so we'll still have lots to do?Personally, I think until real AGI, the current LLMs will automate a lot of tasks, but the market will adapt and humans still end up with about the same percentage of employment and wages.

grvdrm: My original post was about her comment. It seemed like she was both concerned about the presence of jobs for kids while also investing in the very thing possibly taking away those jobs. The contrast was unsettling.My own take is very much “wait and see and make sure to stay aware&#x2F;skill up”My automation point is just that at least in my career (20 years), my workload has rarely gone down even with plenty of automation around.

resident423: A year ago it couldn't do tasks like this at all, what makes you beleive it can progress only this far but no further?Random number generators can't solve open math problems, but it looks like AI agents can? [1][1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu&#x2F;~knuth&#x2F;papers&#x2F;claude-cyc...

EinigeKreise: The idea behind principles is that you're supposed to stick to them anyways.

chungusamongus: Lets put aside the fact that none of you have coherently outlined what supposed principles are relevent here. The thing worth noting is, the argument presented in the article seems to be consequentialist, and I'm saying it will fail to produce the consequences the author supposedly wants.

b112: 100+ years ago, certainly more people lived in rural areas. In Canada and the US, pre 1900s, it was something like 70% of the population was rural.Cars came in parallel with a lot of change.

Peritract: People deliberately and cynically choose to have that reaction (or pretend to). It's an adjective like any other, not even an inflammatory one.

sillysaurusx: Question: The author makes this article available on the web as a series of posts, a PDF (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;data&#x2F;posts&#x2F;411&#x2F;the-future-of-everything-is...) and an EPUB. What do you suppose their tooling looks like?Is there a single "document containing all the words," and it updates the website, pdf, and epub whenever you change it?What struck me was that the presentation is beautiful. It seems worth emulating. But that raises the question of what format you'd write your original words in. Do you suppose they just use Markdown files, or something more elaborate?

Gigachad: Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it.Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

gosub100: Yep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?

tmoertel: I am not the author of the site in question, but I suspect that your guess is right, and that Pandoc is the hub between the spokes.For my blog, I write posts in Markdown. Then the build process uses Pandoc to convert the posts into web pages and, for certain pages, PDF files typeset with TeX. For example, here is a post in both web and PDF versions:(Web) https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.moertel.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....(Typeset PDF) https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.moertel.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;public_html&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pix-2024060...

Gigachad: I use cars more like I use a hotel. Inconsistently on demand when PT doesn’t cover the route I need.If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper.I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.

madeofpalk: > Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act> Now might be a good time to call your representatives.Well, not that must-read I guess

asdff: Sure traffic can be fixed by adding capacity. Demand is ultimately finite. You see this in places like the midwest where there is overcapacity on the highway system and you can go a mile a minute across the region pretty much at all hours of the day.

Gigachad: For long distance highways sure. But not commuting routes in cities.

hackable_sand: What makes you think none of us have families?

californical: But what if we could predict which treatments would be most successful with ~70% accuracy? It would potentially speed up the feedback loops right?There may also be downsides, like skipping testing things that would enhance our fundamental understanding of something because the AI was wrong. But that’s already a problem , and having a better gauge in the early stages could be really helpful

nradov: What if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon? You haven't presented any scientific evidence that LLMs will enable such prediction accuracy. It's pure speculation and hope. Some smaller, incremental improvements to optimize research workflows are much more likely.

mckn1ght: What is your opinion on AlphaFold? Doesn’t that provide a speedup for one part of medication development and understanding disease?

yosame: Not really, you still have to validate the structures it estimates, which minimises any speed gains.It can help a little bit in the early stages of drug design, but even if it was perfect (which it's not), there's a massive gap between understanding a protein structure, and understanding how a drug will or system will interact with it.In a broader sense, understanding the structure of a protein is only a small part of drug development. Unfortunately biology is complicated, and we're an extremely far way away from solving it.

TeMPOraL: > "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of DuneI always preferred this take:“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” ― Alfred North WhiteheadIt's both opposite and complementary to your Frank Herbert quote.

notpachet: I guess it hinges on your definition of "civilization".

hackable_sand: Or "advance"

copypaper: We are one technological breakthrough away from AGI. Seriously what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat output, batteries that can charge instantly, etc.I know a RTSC is the holy grail, but it really feels like AI is in the same stage computers were in the 80s. I used to be extremely bearish and think AI was useless, but I've taken a total 180 the last 6 months. If these things get better (they will), nobody's job will be safe.

sillysaurusx: Beautiful. I don't suppose you have public, detailed installation steps for how to go from "nothing exists" to "Pandoc can push posts to https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.moertel.com&#x2F;"? :)The best I was able to do was http:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;shawwn&#x2F;wiki, which has been broken since 2020. You can't spell Haskell without Hell.If you wouldn't mind pulling up a `claude` in your repo and running `&#x2F;init` and showing the result, that'd give me at least a vague idea of what to do.

Glemllksdf: I think he is to pesimistic, a tool is a tool and if AI progresses without hitting a ceilling, i will see a potential future of a society which might explore space.Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go.Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want some kind of compute but its like with 4k; We have 4k for ages now but it is not the default resolution on all displays sold. We stoped pushing the boundaries because invest is not here. People do not bother too much with it.With AI and the richest companies and people want to see what happens, pushes the envolope a lot faster, pushes us to find solutions.This AI Compute based on ML&#x2F;Neuroal Networks can also be used for physics simulation, protein folding, and everything else.Stoping technology is not an option and not a solution. Education is. We need to educate people.

ted_dunning: Actually, this AI Compute is not very useful for physics, protein folding or many other high performance computing.The problem is that the connectivity required for much of AI is very different than that required for classic HPC (more emphasis on bandwidth, less on super low latency small payload remote memory operations) and the numeric emphasis is very different (lots of mixed resolution and lots of ridiculously small numeric resolutions like fp8 vs almost all fp64 with some fp32).The result is that essentially no AI computers reach the high end of the TOP500.The converse is also true, classic frontier scale super computers don't make the most cost effective AI training platforms because they spend a lot of the budget on making HPC programs fast.

Aurornis: > what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat outputRoom temperature superconductors don’t enable THz chips with no heat output.If superconductors broadly allowed this, we’d already have such chips available because we could super cool them and keep them at that temperature easily.

tmoertel: Thanks. I do not have a public, detailed description of how my blog works. But in short, my site build system is powered by a Makefile that invokes Hakyll [1]. My Hakyll configuration has the following rule baked into it for generating HTML docs from Markdown docs in the `posts&#x2F;` directory: match "posts&#x2F;*" $ do route $ setExtension "html" let ctx = postCtx tags compile $ pandocMathCompiler >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates&#x2F;post.html" ctx >>= saveSnapshot "content" >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates&#x2F;add-comments.html" ctx >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates&#x2F;default.html" ctx >>= relativizeUrls The `pandocMathCompiler` bit invokes Hakyll's Pandoc subsystem with support for rendering formulas using MathJax.The site Makefile also has rules to build PDF versions of the articles that I want to typeset. The rules just invoke Pandoc directly. For example, here's the rule used to generate the PDF file in my prior comment: sampling-with-sql.pdf: posts&#x2F;2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql.md ( cd posts && pandoc --metadata-file=..&#x2F;templates&#x2F;latex-header-includes.yaml -t pdf -o ..&#x2F;$@.tmp --pdf-engine=pdflatex ..&#x2F;$< && mv -f ..&#x2F;$@.tmp ..&#x2F;$@ ) It's basically a straightforward invocation of Pandoc with a little shell boilerplate to prevent the PDF file from being moved into its final location unless Pandoc exits with success.The Makefile has a final "push" target that makes sure the site's assets are up to date (invoking Hakyll if needed) and then pushes the static site up to the content distribution network I'm using to publish my website.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jaspervdj.be&#x2F;hakyll&#x2F;

charlie90: The Amish do tell the people in _their_ society what to do. Obviously people partly choose to stay, but we can't deny that there are strong coercive factors to be forced to stay in your micro society when it's all you know.

PsylentKnight: Troll post? You state that "other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living, then go on to talk about things that trucks do, not personal vehicles

Marha01: I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial ones. The technology is the same. Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuck.

sensanaty: > I don't think it's possible to clearly separate personal vehicles from commercial onesWhat? Of course it is, you can easily impose rules that apply to personal vehicles that don't apply to public transport, logistical vehicles or emergency vehicles.As an example in my neighborhood in the Netherlands, there's basically no streets around me where personal vehicles are allowed, but there are no restrictions to buses, delivery vehicles, moving vans, or ambulances.> Any regulation that tries to ban the one while allowing the other would be a huuuge clusterfuckHow? You don't even have to go fancy with specialized license plates or anything like that, it's literally just common sense.

anon84873628: I don't think a armonster was quite claiming it to be "obviously correct". But rather taking it for granted that this a valid hypothesis:- We would have gotten most of the social utility of automobiles, without most of the social negatives, if personal vehicles had mostly never happened.And implied from that, we should stop having them now.Given the known ills of society, I think those negatives are pretty uncontroversial. To the point that personal car proponents have some burden to explain why we should keep it up.

eddythompson80: Yes, in general government censored speech is inherently not important by the fact the government censored it. Like if it were important it wouldn’t have been censored. Obviously.

nradov: There are already several fully open source LLMs. You can start participating in those projects today.https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bentoml.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;navigating-the-world-of-open-so...

archagon: Are most of these distilled from other models? I'm talking about publicly owned and fully open foundation models, which will require significant government-level investment into GPU farms and training.No chance of it happening in the US due to lobbying pressure, but maybe in a more civilized country... (unless a distributed SETI@home-type architecture becomes viable)

mplanchard: My hope is that there is a sort of Cambrian explosion of small software projects built by people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Many such projects will go nowhere, but some percentage of them will see success and growth. My second hope is that there will always come some threshold of complexity beyond which AI cannot effectively iterate on a project without (at minimum) the prompting of an expert in the field.The combination of these two things could lead to a situation where there is a massive, startup-dominated market for engineers who can take projects from 0.5 to 1, as well as for consulting companies or services that help founders to do the same.Another pair of hopes is that a) the LLM systems plateau at a level where any use on complex or important projects requires expert knowledge and prompting, and b) that because of this, the hype of using them to replace engineers dies down. This would hopefully lead to a situation where they are treated like any other tool in our toolbox. Then, just like no one forces me to use emacs or vim (despite the fact that they unambiguously help me to be at least 2x more productive), no one will force me to use LLMs just for the sake of it.

AuthAuth: Lots of small companies pumping out software to solve problems. What will happen is companies will switch to their software, get burnt and then never move off established large core tech similar to what we see today but far worse.These small companies will only be able to sell through basically scam marketing.

chungusamongus: If you have a family and you are doing what this guy is suggesting, that is extremely concerning to me. Seeking a low wage, menial job at a time when costs are rising due to the oil spike? Dumbest move you could make.

BobbyJo: Urbanization has separated far more families than suburbanization, so the isolation argument, as if suburbanization is the core cause, doesn't make sense to me.

Bombthecat: Also, I said it way before LLMs, when X started firing people. Software is more or less on maintenance mode. You don't need that many developers anymore and so many new features.You don't need to create the next Facebook, Shopify, X etc.... Because it already exists and controls the market.

tim333: Re. disease cures I am hoping more for AlphaFold type stuff and simulating cells in silico rather than ChatGPT type LLMs. There is some progress like>“There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer. “That’s happening right now.” https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.htworld.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;research-news&#x2F;isomorphic-labs...and>...enables researchers to move seamlessly from AI-generated sequences to functional antibodies in just days https:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-decoder.com&#x2F;googles-ai-drug-discovery-spinoff-is...

ted_dunning: And none of that doesn't improve the throughput of the clinical trials. It just decrease the cost of coming up with things to put into trial.

copypaper: > we could super cool them and keep that at that temperature easilyAs far as im aware, 3d stacking chips requires the inside to be cooled as well (not just the outside). I don't think they've solved this yet.

Bombthecat: That all implies that AI won't get ( much) better anymore.I doubt that

estimator7292: What benefit do cars provide that public transit doesn't? How are thousands of individual cars better than light rail?Cars aren't a positive in society. Transportation is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".

gosub100: I don't like urine puddles on the bus or train seats. How egotistical of me being repulsed by human waste.

ButlerianJihad: I've used public transit for the better part of 50 years, including inner-city buses and light rail trains in several cities. And I've literally never, ever seen nor felt nor smelled an actual "puddle of urine" on a seat. Yeah, sometimes the seats were kinda iffy or damp; perhaps someone spilled a drink there. There were often people eating, or even drinking a beer on board a bus. So I often see pistachio shells or a discarded bottle&#x2F;can behind a seat. But human waste is unheard-of.But any actual urine "spills" would've gotten cleaned up right quick. They simply don't tolerate that stuff. Look at any bus operator and they are tough as nails if someone tries shenanigans.In fact, the craziest times I've had were in ride shares and taxis. I was all dressed up for a funeral one morning, summoned a taxi, and the driver who tried to pick me up was obviously drunk. Another time, I had a medical transport that was summoned, sat at some gas station for 15+ minutes, and when he arrived at my place and I got in the back seat, it was wet and had clearly been through a hasty cleanup, and I could smell urine permeating the vehicle, and it was absolutely nuts, but I said nothing, because it probably wasn't the driver's fault. Probably.

aucisson_masque: Author seems depressed, my personal take is that no one can change technological évolution. It's going to happen.Just flow with it and all it's bullshit, yeah life will be a little worst but it will still be better than those who chose to completely ignore it.If the world is going mad, be the craziest of all these crazy motherfucker. At least it's interesting, I'm very curious to know what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.Maybe, just maybe lol, we'll finally have this dreamed world where robots do all the work and we, human, can just enjoy ourselves 24&#x2F;24.

AuthAuth: but what if I care about the world? I dont want to embrace craziness if there is any chance to preserve normality.

poncho_romero: Most of these use cases exist because of the prevelance of personal vehicles. We reach for cars because they are there. We see the world through windshields, so when problems arise we conceive of car-based solutions. Cars force us into city designs and styles of living that require cars. That is to say, cars necessitate cars.

munificent: Everyone hates cars until they need an ambulance.Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse value of a piece of technology too.Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.

Lord_Baltimore: Most people that are against car-centric cities like myself are not against cars 100% but against their level of priority in the design of our cities and societies.Many of the scenarios you mentoned aren't even that big of a deal for many. I have walked in the rain many times and somehow I was still ok. You could argue that car culture has made us soft in some ways.Nevertheless, if we reduced our emphasis on cars in society and the design of our cities to the point where cars were mainly used for those specific cases where cars truly are by far the best options (like ambulances) we would have more livable and walkable cities and ironically cities where it is nicer for those who really really want&#x2F;need to drive since everyone and their mom wouldn't be driving because they aren't forced to drive to everything. Fewer people clogging the roads like my co-worker who would watch Netflix while she drove to work. Obviously she didn't have a passion for driving but was forced to because she lived in a sprawling metro with terrible transit options.

bdangubic: > it's literally just common sense.if that is lacking (often is) $50,000 fine per incident will take care of it

throwanem: I said "menial." I did not say "low wage." And given the utter footlessness of your own situation as you yourself continue to show it, you are bold indeed in presuming to advise anyone else on their finances.But you continue to astonish me with your assumptions! Is it a gambling debt? Get a little too happy on Robinhood or Polymarket, maybe? Were you really really counting on a crypto tax holiday? To keep from having to tell the wife, maybe?

janalsncm: > My hope is that there is a sort of Cambrian explosion of small software projects built by people who have absolutely no clue what they're doingIt doesn’t even have to be people with no idea what they’re doing. If you lay off enough smart people from big tech companies, those people might put together small companies that directly compete with larger ones at a fraction of the cost.

chungusamongus: "Money is money, and my needs are small."That's what you said. Sorry but anyone supporting a family should not be thinking like this. Supporting a family is very expensive.

sillysaurusx: Thank you so much!Would you be willing to paste your entire Makefile here? Or are there secrets in it?It would help me greatly — I don't have much experience with pandoc or hakyll. I understand the basics, but the actual usage in practice isn't so easy to set up from first principles.I've been using Claude to help me with a lot of this, but I'm extremely curious to compare notes vs your setup.If not, thank you anyway for your time.

eschaton: Crazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.

janalsncm: This is where the logic behind AI goes against conventional wisdom.It doesn’t have to be effective. It has to make CEOs believe it is effective.

tmoertel: Sure, here's the Makefile. Also, if you want more examples of working Hakyll setups, there's a long list of them here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jaspervdj.be&#x2F;hakyll&#x2F;examples.html # Binary tool we use to build the website. bins = dist-newstyle&#x2F;build&#x2F;*&#x2F;*&#x2F;*&#x2F;*&#x2F;site&#x2F;build&#x2F;site tool = $(bins)&#x2F;site # By default, we build everything if you invoke `make` without a target. all: build .PHONY: all # The tool used to build the site is a Hakyll binary configured by `site.hs`. # This rule automatically builds the tool if it's out of date. $(tool): site.hs site.cabal cabal v2-build # The `build` target builds the web site's out-of-date static assets. .PHONY: build build: $(tool) pdfs $(tool) build # The `rebuild` target forces a rebuild of all web assets. .PHONY: rebuild rebuild: $(tool) $(tool) rebuild # This `push` rule publishes the static site to our CDN (firebase). # It requires: # # - the `firebase` tool: # wget -O ~&#x2F;bin&#x2F;firebase https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.tools&#x2F;bin&#x2F;linux&#x2F;latest \ # && chmod +x ~&#x2F;bin&#x2F;firebase # # Docs: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;firebase.google.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;cli#linux # # - `firebase login --no-localhost` to have been run. # # You may need to run `firebase login --no-localhost --reauth` if # the local authentical credentials time out. .PHONY: push push: build firebase deploy --only hosting # Generate PDF versions of selected blog posts. .PHONY: pdfs pdfs: images&#x2F;public_html&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pix-20240601&#x2F;sampling-with-sql.pdf images&#x2F;public_html&#x2F;blog&#x2F;pix-20240601&#x2F;sampling-with-sql.pdf: posts&#x2F;2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql.md ( cd posts && pandoc --metadata-file=..&#x2F;templates&#x2F;latex-header-includes.yaml -t pdf -o ..&#x2F;$@.tmp --pdf-engine=pdflatex ..&#x2F;$< && mv -f ..&#x2F;$@.tmp ..&#x2F;$@ )

ButlerianJihad: Ah, you mean, like lithium or Prozac?

abricq: > ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would callImagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would have had the mental strength required to not use LLMs on course projects (or side projects) when I had deadlines, exams coming, yet also want to be with friends and enjoy those years of your life.

munificent: My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future.* They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse.* In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had.* Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before their eyes.* Blue collar jobs are already gone and white collar jobs have no certainty because of AI. Almost all of the money has already been sucked out of artistic professions and what little is left is quickly evaporating because of AI.Imagine you're 17 like my daughter and trying to decide what to major in in college. You want to pick something that you think is likely to give you some kind of decent career and sense of stability. What do you pick?Because, I'll tell you, she asks me and I have no fucking idea what to say.

tithe: [delayed]

nradov: I don't understand your comment. The USA is the most civilized country in the world. And some of the LLMs linked above are fully open source.

CJefferson: I'm a professor at uni, and this is what is happening -- many students are never really learning. Then they crash into exams at the end of term when they don't have their AI, and they bomb, I'm seeing failure rates like never before.Now, part of me thinks 'is not letting students having AI like not letting them have a calculator'. On the other hand, if I just let the AI do the exam, well I don't really need the student at all do I?

coderenegade: Except rural communities are both more car dependent than cities, and have more tightly knit communities, so isolation probably isn't just a function of owning cars. Cars are probably the wrong mode of transportation for large cities, but then the question becomes: is that how we should all live, and to what extent does a better solution for the group override a better solution for the individual? Because, like it or not, cars are a better personal solution if you aren't bumper-to-bumper in a commute. I'm not going to take my dog or my surfboard on the bus or a train, and I have a life that doesn't end at the city's boundaries.

mumbisChungo: I think it's shortsighted to dismiss the utility of these technologies for learning. I find personally that putting the LLM into an argumentative state then having it challenge my assertions forces me to learn and develop my own thoughts and feelings more effectively than writing does these days, and I find that interrogating a model on a subject can teach me more about the subject per unit time than reading a textbook or research paper. Sometimes I'll even just have it read the raw text out loud- then interject and have a conversation about a specific thing that I don't have the domain knowledge to fully understand. Other times we'll end up off on a productive tangent.Interactive learning and thinking is underrated, in part I think because of the cynical (and likely accurate) assumption about what the laziest among us will do with the tools, but projected onto everyone.

botanrice: my first thought reading this was that Ai might make coding more of an art or tradition. I felt admiration for those of us who still know how to write the now ancient coding languages of yonder.But then i read this at the end:> This piece, like most all my words and software, was written by hand—mainly in Vim. I composed a Markdown outline in a mix of headers, bullet points, and prose, then reorganized it in a few passes. With the structure laid out, I rewrote the outline as prose, typeset with Pandoc. I went back to make substantial edits as I wrote, then made two full edit passes on typeset PDFs. For the first I used an iPad and stylus, for the second, the traditional pen and paper, read aloud.Then you realize the context of this article, who is writing it. No hate to my man here but clearly this is someone who has the desire and time to make things difficult for themselves and take pride it in it. It's needless effort in this day and age. but hey, to his own analogy, plenty of gearheads love their old cars and making em work. Those guys are some of the most knowledgeable, and I respect that, but also.. that same group is gonna hate on any new technology and complain it isn't the old way.

throw_m239339: Exactly, that's the irony in all this, LLM are fantastic for self learning. I decided to learn Math seriously and I think the interactive nature of LLM helps, alongside actual classes.

archagon: It's the toxic American hyper-individualist mindset. As an American, I hate it so much.

BirAdam: Hyper-individualism goes a long way in eroding racism and sexism though, urging people to view others as individuals rather than members of some larger group. I’d rather hyper-individualism than hyper-collectivism. Once you consider someone first as a member of some other group, the marginalization and then erasure of that other becomes easier.

BirAdam: Humans are pack animals, not flock or herd. I think going beyond the Dunbar number is possibly the thing making people grumpy in highly dense areas. If people cannot know those around them in a meaningful way, do they even view them as human?

nradov: Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.

hackable_sand: Yeah, completely unpredictableNo possible way to know

coderenegade: If anything, the golden age of third places coincided with the golden age of suburbanization, which was obviously heavily car dependent. Their death almost certainly has more to do with financialization making it harder for small businesses to stay afloat, a drop in demand due to competition for attention, and decreasing work-life balance eroding people's ability to socialize.In my grandfather's day, one income was enough to support a household, and there was less free work being done on the job, which meant fewer hours and being less drained at the end of the day. And yes, people spent less time commuting, meaning they had more time and energy for socializing after work. But communities were also more decentralized, and population centers had fewer people in general. A big part of the problem is that modern cities can be massive, and invariably funnel people to a handful of work districts, which just doesn't scale. When you double the distance to the CBD, you quadruple the number of people coming in (give or take, it's not exact because we tend to increase density close to the CBD as a response to this). Take it from someone who's lived in a place where cars aren't really necessary, the logistics of urbanization are still a crap experience when you're crammed into a train carriage during rush hour. It's common for people to commute for 90 minutes on public transport in Asian megacities, for example.

orangecoffee: > Prospective clients ask Claude to do the work they might have hired me forIn all the 10 articles, I think this is the only thing really.I think we have to learn how to overcome and thrive in the new world. The gravy of CS careers is gone for all :(

catcowcostume: You say it as if the author made it not available, rather than your own government. If anything, it proves the author's point.

xienze: What kind of meaningful connections can you make when you live in a city with a a large transient population and are surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people on a daily basis, come on now. People can only have so many friends and acquaintances. Just because my neighbors live across the street doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to talk to them. I have about a half a dozen people in the neighborhood I know well and have work acquaintances and long term friends. Which is plenty. This whole suburbia is isolating thing is being a bit dramatized here, sheesh.

tpmoney: But is that a function of the cars or a function of the urban density? One imagines that the suburban and rural areas that are rated highest quality of life are almost all car-centric

lossyalgo: Cities have existed for much longer than automobiles have and have somehow prospered since millenia. I don't think the recent invention of automobiles has anything to do with proper functioning of cities.

tpmoney: I agree, so it's a good thing I wasn't arguing anything of the sort. Just pushing back on the idea that just because "cities" with the highest quality of life ratings are non-car-centric that we can infer anything useful about whether cars in general and personal autos in particular are generally good or bad. It seems entirely possible that cars could be a net good up to a certain population density.

sneak: > Blue collar jobs are already goneThis isn't true at all. There's never been a better time to be in the trades.

voidhorse: I agree with much of the analysis, and originally I would have subscribed to the recommended action (resistance), at this point in time however, I think that advice is severely misguided.We have already passed the critical point. The LLMs, the agent harnesses are here. There is too much willpower, capital, and risk behind these technologies now—the automobile has landed, thousands of people have purchased it already, protesting the car won't undo it at this point.What you can do that will be meaningful, is to instead understand the new car, and understand it deeply, Use that understanding to carry the values you care about into the new world and re-articulate them. Make the car safer, push for tactical regulations on it. If you are privileged enough to be able to forgo its use entirely, sure, but that advice is not uniformly applicable. People forget that being able to simply opt-out of certain things is often only a viable option when you are already in a certain position. What we really need are the heavy skeptics to stop falling for luddite temptation and to start bringing their critical lens to bear in positive ways on this new technology to make it safer and better. By opting out and staging a feeble resistance you won't do anything other than let the current dangerous power consolidation continue.

orangecoffee: Nursing perhaps? It seems like caring for other people would be useful even in an otherwise runaway AI world.

LorenPechtel: Yes, if we were computers that could be reprogrammed to new skills.In the old days change was slow enough that few people got displaced from jobs requiring any substantial skill (although there was local devastation: for example, court reporters.)Now, however, we are seeing change happening faster than people's careers. You can not realistically retrain into another high skill job--you're going to be the last to be hired. (There's a good reason Social Security Disability has cutoffs a 50 and 60 for how much change can be required!) And, likewise, someone who has worked a desk for decades is not going to be hired for a physical job. (Assuming they even can do it. I can't think of any physical job that wouldn't have me in a lot of pain in weeks at the most.)

voidhorse: False Consciousness was the old marxist term for this inadvertent working against your own ultimate self-interest. It's rife in capitalism. If you look closely you'll see it everywhere.(note that even the "her kids will be ok" isn't true at the limit. If wealth concentrates sufficiently enough it will lead to societal collapse)

only-one1701: You mean the brilliant mathematician with the correct insights into the modern American condition?

voidhorse: This is completely true. From what ai can tell talking to people outside of tech, the agi and "omg this stuff is wild" hype and fears have completely dissipated. Ironically the average person sees these tools how typically you'd expect a cold, rational technologist to see them: just another tool.I think a lot of people are just getting their firs taste if agent harnesses plus slightly better models right now, and yes, the first time you use them it seems scary and amazing. By the hundredth time though, it's very apparent that there is still tremendous work to do before any kind of fully automated software pipeline (let alone any other domain) can be realized.

keeda: Eh, this has been a disappointing series to read from the person that wrote all those Jepsen write-ups and the technical interview series. All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. This is more befitting Zitron than aphyr. Where's the sharp incisive wit and deep insights?At least he realizes this technology is unlikely to slow down. With international relations as they are, it's MAD all over again, only the "D" is a fuzzy, hypothetical thing nobody can name, so even that bit of deterrence is lost. Yet finally he ends with the most uninspired advice of all: "we should try, unsuccessfully, to stop it."Everyone must understand: for all of history, progress and productivity and value creation overall could only scale with people. Now it can scale with power and compute. This is a tremendous economic force, akin to a force of nature, that is nigh impossible to stop. (I always did think the Butlerian Jihad was the biggest plot hole in Dune.)My advice is this: we have no choice but to adapt. We must realize that, by a stroke of luck, this is a power available to us more than the capital class. If they can scale without people, so can we. But because harnessing AI effectively requires hard skills -- at least for now -- that the capital class don't have and used to pay us for, we might even scale better than them!Carpe diem.

keeda: I suspect the cause-and-effect in creating the narrative is the reverse of what's in the narraitve: Frank Herbert wanted the intricate dynamics of the Guild and Spice and Mentats and exciting close-quarter combat for a more intriguing narrative. But AI and robots made those all obsolete, so he made it disappear with a handwave of "because Butlerian Jihad."I always thought the Butlerian Jihad was the biggest plot hole in Dune, but I deeply appreciate the world and narrative it enabled.

dublinben: Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.[0] The movement to pave roads was started by bicyclists decades before the rise of the automobile.[1] Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars.We have so thoroughly remade society in the service of cars that it can be difficult to recognize any possible alternative.[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Horsebus[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Good_Roads_Movement

simoncion: > All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility.There are multiple sections that talk directly about utility. Here's one of them: [0]But, sure. I'll bite. Here's the third paragraph of the first part of the essay [1]: This is *bullshit* about *bullshit machines*, and I mean it. It is neither balanced nor complete: others have covered ecological and intellectual property issues better than I could, and there is no shortage of boosterism online. Instead, I am trying to fill in the negative spaces in the discourse. “AI” is also a fractal territory; there are many places where I flatten complex stories in service of pithy polemic. I am not trying to make nuanced, accurate predictions, but to trace the potential risks and benefits at play. I'd say that the specific sort of "utility" discussion that you're probably looking for would be classified as "boosterism". [2]> Now it can scale with power and compute.Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3].[0] <https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...>[1] <https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...>[2] Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions.[3] <https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.b-list.org&#x2F;weblog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;apr&#x2F;09&#x2F;llms&#x2F;>

ymyms: There are definitely salient points in the article and I appreciate its value in imploring us to really stop and consider the ramifications of what this technology might deliver. I think the analogy to cars and the unintended consequences for all manner of society is particularly apt.That said, the final point is one I take issue with:> For example, I’ve got these color-changing lights. They speak a protocol I’ve never heard of, and I have no idea where to even begin. I could spend a month digging through manuals and working it out from scratch—or I could ask an LLM to write a client library for me. The security consequences are minimal, it’s a constrained use case that I can verify by hand, and I wouldn’t be pushing tech debt on anyone else. I still write plenty of code, and I could stop any time. What would be the harm?To me, there is no intrinsic value in solving this problem other than rote problem solving reps to make you a better problem solver. There isn't anything fundamental about the protocol they've never heard of that operates the lights. It's likely similar to many other well-thought out protocols in the best case and in the worst case is something slapped together.There are certainly deeper, more fundamental concepts to learn like congestion control algorithms in TCP. Most things in software though are just learning another engineer's preferences for how they thought to build something.I poke at this because if an exercise only yields the benefit of another rep of solving a problem, then it holds less water to me. I personally don't think there will be fewer problems to solve with this technology, just a different sort at a different layer of the stack.

keiferski: 80% of “serious” discussion on contemporary LLMs is no better then sci-fi. Worse, even, because it’s by the readers and not the writers, who ostensibly made some effort to make their works realistic.

magic_hamster: These are thoughts of someone who's very good at putting words together, but sadly has little experience with the subject matter.> I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop.This is exactly where it shows.LLMs, agents and whatever comes next are not only the future of tech, but they are going to be national resilience drivers for the countries that will be able to support them with power, water and science.Who is supposed to stop? The US? China? Russia? Everyone? Of course this won't happen. This is an arms race.But even if it weren't, stopping is the wrong answer. You don't have to outsource your thinking, writing or reading. How you use LLMs is entirely up to you.There is a way to use LLMs which is beneficial. I treat them as a private tutor available to me for questions. This solved a lot of friction I had with my relationship with LLMs.But the biggest impact that I see in this space is automation with agents. This is not even about YOUR interactions with LLMs anymore.

hibikir: When we look at automobiles, we also see that there were many ways to adapt to them. It's true that there's many parts of the anglosphere where, without one, you are a second class citizen at best: The lived environment was built so that you could not live without them... but that's not the only choice. I spend part of the year in Spain all the time, and I might not get into a car once a month. Not because I am any kind of enthusiast, but because in the town I live when I am there, it's doesn't really help.The different however is network effects. When we make a place better for cars, I make it worse for pedestrians. Your adoption of the car, and its pressure on my lived environment, has effects on me. Same as, say, people joining facebook or twitter. But do LLMs create network effects that are directly harmful, or is it just a matter of making it harder to compete, just like a mechanical watchmaker has less business now that it's so easy to have a reliable clock? Because the first case is a problem, but the second one... that's competition. It's civilization. And then it's not really a matter of cars vs pedestrians.

keeda: They're not looking for solutions, they're capitalizing on the AI backlash. It's just the new form of rageviews.The only saving grace is that this is less cynical than typical rageviews, considering they have something of a point in that they are going to be negatively impacted by the same technology that has been trained on their content without compensation.

dalyons: I feel for you deeply. I’m equally fearful of this for my children, but one small blessing of my kids being very young is at least the ambiguity will probably be over by the time they have to decide. I don’t expect there to be good choices, but at least it will be clear?

camgunz: We should consider how we came to be so powerless. The cringe "people gave their lives for that flag" line is actually true, and we're trading it away for what? Not having to get out of our gaming chairs?The reason you can't beat index funds is the people who build the market built a system that benefits them and them alone; the index fund is the pitchfork dividend (what you pay to avoid getting pitchforked). The reason you can't get your congressperson on the line is (mostly) they built a system where the only way to influence them is to enrich them; voting is the pitchfork dividend.The way to build a society that runs on reality is to build it by whatever means possible, then defend it by any means necessary. The only societies that matter are the ones that survive.I want to build it. I don't wanna build a fuckin crypto app, a stupid ass agent harness, or yet another insipid analytics platform. I want to build a society that furthers the liberation of humankind from the vicissitudes of nature, the predation of tyranny and the corruption of greed. I believe it is possible, and I want to prove it out.

orangecoffee: Noble thought, but words are empty. Have you perchance written up anything specific?The only one who's written thus is Marx, but those ideas has not found broad socital support.

repelsteeltje: I'm tempted to (bitterly) point out that feeling responsible for future generations was already off the table decades ago when we decided to ignore our ecological footprints.

Tarq0n: Ecological footprints are more about the distribution of resource burdens between first and third world countries. Predictions about resource exhaustion have proved mostly false.

andyjohnson0: From here in the Uk the site just says:"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act [...] Now might be a good time to call your representatives."So I fired-up a vpn, and it appears to be a personal blog. About ai risks.The geo-block is kind of a shame, as the writing is good and there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA.

Terr_: > there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA.The regulators of OSA say otherwise. Or at any rate, they refuse to agree and won't rule it out.____________For the geo-blocked, reproducing relevant content [0]:> A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom [1] that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act.> [...] This blog has the same problem: people use email addresses to post and confirm their comments. I think my personal blog is probably at low risk, but a.) I’d like to draw attention to this legislation, and b.) my risk is elevated by being gay online[0] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-...[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.woof.group&#x2F;announcements&#x2F;updates-on-the-osa

andyjohnson0: The OLSA is far from perfect, particularly in the defini8it uses, but its focus is social media platforms and the like, not simple blogs.OFCOM has a q&a-based tool [1] to advise on whether the OLSA applies to a site. I'm not a lawyer, but its pretty clear that a non-adult-themed personal blog where people can post only textual comments on content that they dont control, is not going to be subject to the act.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ofcom.org.uk&#x2F;online-safety&#x2F;illegal-and-harmful-c...

keeda: [0] is a throwaway paragraph that handwaves at second-hand accounts of generic things LLMs can do, with no further discussion, apparently because he (surprisingly!) has almost no first-hand experience with them. Then there are 10 pages of negativity with dozens of links to stuff that has been discussed to death here and in media. The "negative spaces" he's filling are already overflowing.His lack of personal experience with LLMs was the most disappointing aspect, because he does not really know what we're dealing with. He's just going off what he's read &#x2F; heard. So again, where's the incisive insight?Now, here's a concrete example of what I mean by utility: a single person being able to rewrite an entire open source project from scratch in a few days just so it could be relicensed. Is that good or bad? I don't know! Is it a stupefying example of what's possible? Yes! Is that "breathless boosterism?" Only if you ignore the infinite nuances involved.> Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3].Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. As an example, it still mentions the METR study from 2025 without mentioning the very pertinent follow-up from just a couple of months back... which is not very surprising to me: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47145601 ;-)It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports, which is pertinent to my original point: LLMs are simply an amplifier of your existing software discipline. Teams with strong software discipline see amazing speedups, those with poor discipline sees increased outages.And, to my original point, who knows what good software discipline looks like? Hint: it's not the capital class.

KPGv2: what was Senator McCarthy right about?

brotchie: Yeah, I think about this a lot.Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight.Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding.Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again.This effort is a feature, not a bug, it's how you experientially acquire skills and understanding. e.g. Linux kernel: learnt about Makefiles, learnt about GCC flags, improved shell skills, etc.With AI on a gnarly problem: It does this all for you! So no experiential learning.I would NOT have had the mental strength in college &#x2F; grad school to resist. Which would have robbed me of all the skill acquisition that now lets me use AI more effectively. The scaffolding of hard skill acquisition means you have more context to be able to ask AI the right questions, and what you learn from the AI can be bound more easily to your existing knowledge.

leonidasv: What strikes me is that AI can also be the best teacher in the world: your Makefile is not working, you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax, you ask for more details, you learn more, you ask about other Makefile syntax gotchas, etc. This is the most efficient deliberate practice possible: you can learn in minutes what would take hours of Googling, tinkering and scouring docs. You have a dedicated teacher you can ask your silliest questions to and have the insight you need "click" way faster.The problem is: (almost) nobody does that. You'll just ask Claude Code to fix the build, go grab a coffee and come back with everything working.

dgb23: Here's some hope: You will figure it out. You are already a person who is very curious, competent and experienced with making stuff.

pprotas: I'd go with nail technician, barber, electrician, mechanic, beauty salon, plumber, coffee shop, window washer, constructionI see these types of jobs flourishing in my community. My barber is fully booked for the next month, and a hair salon owner in my street bought a new property and started a second hair salon... In the same street! And the second salon is also fully booked.

vogelke: Your core skills are fine. Unfortunately, appreciation for those skills has already been blasted into orbit by the AI-BS bubble.This tech has made it easier for second-handers to pass off inadequate work as the equal of your work. They're too lazy to exert the effort to read&#x2F;think&#x2F;write, and being second-handers, they're fine with the APPEARANCE of reading, thinking, and writing.This has been going on for millenia, and the only fix I've seen is to call it out every time it rears its head.

globular-toast: Not for everyone. If everyone tried to use a personal car at the same time it wouldn't work. It's also worth bearing in mind that when people talk about "the automobile", what they're really talking about is the roads. Automobiles are useless without roads, and there's only so much space.A lot of this comes down to having too much of a good thing. We are really bad at detecting when we've gone past the point of too much, and we're even worse at undoing it once we have.

simoncion: > His lack of personal experience with LLMs...You missed the part where he is consistently unimpressed by the failure of LLMs to do the task he hands to them, it seems. Go re-read Section 1.5 "Models are Idiots". Make sure to read the footnotes. They're sure to address most of the counterarguments you might make.> Is that "breathless boosterism?"How you phrased it? Yes. It ignores the "infinite nuances involved" such as maintainability, infosec soundness of the work product, the completely untested legality of "license washing" to name a few. Also, you missed the part where I said Due to their nearly-universally breathless nature, I know that's how I classify the overwhelming majority of such discussions. > Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. ... It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports...Yeah, I figured that you would be unable (or unwilling) to understand this one. Here's the summary, straight from the author's keyboard:* Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet was correct.* No Silver Bullet applies to LLMs the way it applied to other things, and empirical evidence on LLM coding impact sure seems to agree.* You'll get better returns from working on strong software development fundamentals than from forcing all your programmers to use Claude for everything, and that's a repeated message in basically all the major literature.* If LLMs do turn into a revolutionary world-changing silver bullet giving everyone coding superpowers, you'll be able to just adopt them fully when that happens.

ButlerianJihad: Well actually, my hypothesis is that Senator Joseph McCarthy sought to root out a distinct group of immigrants who could not be directly named in public, due to the matter of WWII and its aftermath. It would seem that communism&#x2F;socialism wasn't a huge, huge threat to American culture or morals, but there was a certain ethnoreligious group who has been actively immigrating from Eastern Bloc nations. They were previously expelled from many Western European nations and that is why they became rather concentrated and ghettoized, if you will, before their refugee status.If Senator McCarthy was not directly worried about communism but about interdicting the influence of this certain group, then communist party membership was a proxy to identify them. In fact, having secularized, many joined the Communist Party in their home nations and become quite influential in Communist circles, and of course later brought that activism with them, continuing stateside.But Senator McCarthy and his allies would understandably be loath to mention or categorize their actual target in public circles, because that would be political suicide for them, despite having much agreement and support from normal red-blooded Christian Americans.So no, I don't blame "all society's problems" on those ideologies. I think they've always been sort of a proxy or scapegoat for the real issues, which are more nuanced, more pervasive, and more difficult to define, but I definitely agree with Senator McCarthy's stance that there were identifiable groups of foreigners who sought to influence and destabilize American culture and politics.

Glemllksdf: Alphafold (protein folding) was trained on Googles TPUs which are not GPUs true but very close.Flow simulation also happens on GPUs and not CPUs though.El Capitan is the top 1 on top 500 and the flops ratio between CPU and GPU is nearly 1 to 100.

s1mn: I love it when Americans take the moral high ground

drstewart: Funny that's how I feel when Europeans lecture about wars and imperialism

Jtarii: Of all the times to complain about Europeans complaining about wars, maybe now is not the time?

zerotoship: If you use coding tools too much, you lose the ability to think long-term since you become entirely dependent on the tool. If you don't use them, you risk falling behind everyone else.so the boundary is blurry... I'm not sure what to do

Jtarii: Just spend 30 minutes a day without using them. Think of it like practicing an instrument.

Cthulhu_: Bit of both I think; spend time writing code on your own, use coding tools at work if they encourage &#x2F; pay for it.I think we'll settle into a new norm over the next few years, but the role of software engineer will change though. Ultimately, always remember (and remind your boss) that you are in charge and, more importantly, responsible.

ayewo: Exactly. Nothing hits home about what's about to hit you, now and in the foreseeable future, like when your livelihood today is materially affected by widespread availability of LLMs that can passably mimic your highly specialized skills.

EvanAnderson: I'm hearing this from my 12 y&#x2F;o daughter and it's breaking my heart.When I was in school (US, Ohio, 48 y&#x2F;o) we got the "if you don't go to college you'll flip burgers" spiel from our teachers &#x2F; guidance counselors.Last week she got a variant of that except the teacher thoughtfully added "and burger flipping will be done by robots so you can't even fall back to that". The teacher threw in a health dose of suggesting that creative jobs will be destroyed, too, and that "learning to manage AI" will be the only viable future career path.Trades are what my daughter brought up as a viable path (and I was so proud when she did), but she also pointed out her school focuses heavily on "college prep" and is loathe to even mention that trades exist.

21asdffdsa12: Im so tired by this failed attempts to shore up what is basically a failure at the fundamental level to build a high trust society. Security, Guards, Locks, Cameras, the mockery of the naive, bumbling fools who easily trust one another - as if that ability to not be capable to form such members of society is something to be proud about. The endless self upselling "protectors", the shards of glass on the wall, the scams, the con artists, proud in ripping of the "Naive and stupid" all these zero-sum gameplayers, producing nothing and furiously proud of their retardation. If the culture you grew up in is not capable of forming such a society, you are not part of the west. You can not be and never will be. All the shoring up work named above, even with society enforced norms be damned.If your presence is a detriment, the answer is to build a society without you. Arcologies, cooperate cities, Amish towns - call it what you want. Place where the "stupid" can be "easily gullible" and cooperate and work. And others where the "real ones" can roam around and rip each other off to their hearts content. A harsh wall in the middle, razor-wire on top - and thats the end of that illusion.

djaro: This is only true if the new technology is actually significantly useful. Which so far AI has not proven to be. Theres no reason to assume people using AI will, on the long term, outcompete those who don't.

djaro: Theres no reason to assume that. Its equally likely trying to replace jobs with AI is the "little crusade" thst no one cares about and will fail.

The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess

dang: Here are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change):ML promises to be profoundly weird* - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47689648 - April 2026 (602 comments)The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47703528 - April 2026 (106 comments)The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47730981 - April 2026 (169 comments)The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47754379 - April 2026 (180 comments)The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47766550 - April 2026 (217 comments)The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47778758 - April 2026 (178 comments)* (That first title was different because of https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=47695064 - as you can see, I gave up.)p.s. Normally we downweight subsequent articles in a series because avoiding repetition of any kind is the main thing that keeps HN interesting. But we made an exception in this case. Please don't draw conclusions from that since we'll probably get less series-ey, not more, after this! Better to bundle into one longer article.

aphyr: If you enjoyed reading these and would like more, very few folks read sections 2, 4, or 6. They might be up your alley:2. Dynamics - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...4. Information Ecology - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...6. Psychological Hazards - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aphyr.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

GeoAtreides: Why would a series of articles imply repetition?Let's presume there's a series on re-making the antikythera mechanism:1. Metallurgy: finding, mining and smelting the ore2. Building the tools (files, molds, etc)3. Designing the mechanism4. Making the parts (gears, bearings, etc)Am I wrong or there's no repetition, except maybe the title and calling it a series? Why reject parts 2, 3, 4?

munificent: This series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable.The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.

chatmasta: fyi, the entire domain is unavailable in the UK “due to the online safety act.”

could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language

Animats: "I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models."Yes.For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people than jobs for them. Gradually, more jobs for smart people were developed, but not until WWII did the demand start to exceed the supply. Hence the frantic technical training efforts of WWII and the following college boom. This was the golden age of upward mobility.It's hard to imagine this today. Read novels from the 18th century to get a feel for it. See who's winning and who's struggling, who rises and who falls, and why. Jane Austin's novels are a good start.The nerds didn't take over until very late in the 20th century. There were very few rich nerds until then. Computing was once a very tiny world. You could not get rich working for IBM. The ones who left and got rich were in sales.So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.

ahartmetz: I think you forgot discipline and long-term thinking in your core values. Even before high technology, there were things to plan and resources to manage. Especially after the beginning of agriculture.

JohnMakin: These takes ignore how much more important critical thinking is becoming, as LLM's are clearly unreliable and prone to slop.

munificent: I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills.You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.

rowanG077: I agree. Studies show time and time again that smart people are more efficient even at tasks that may not look like they require a smart person. So while people might not have been paid to do thinking jobs I don't buy that the intelligent always have had an edge, all else being equal.

steve_adams_86: What if this is modeled around the premise that in any situation where reasoning can be used, someone would have access to super-human reasoning?Where does the human in the loop somehow manage to utilize super-human reasoning better than another person?I'm not suggesting it's impossible, so much as wondering if we can reach a place where the human is truly irrelevant to the process, and can't make a better decision than the superhuman entity.I'm not sure this is ever possible. It's more of a thought experiment. What's between here and there? Right now we can use pseudo-intelligence from silicon to our advantage, and being smarter than average is clearly a massively outsized advantage. It's similar to how being able to automate tasks gives you an outsized advantage, yet in so many more ways. But what if that advantage thins or even vanishes?

pjc50: > Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write that subjugation of women is a "core value", simply because it has been for so many time periods.> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality.John Henry is not going to beat the steam shovel any time soon.> For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.It's not an anomaly; rather, it's the other way round. These used to be highly specialized skills that carried significant status, and got democratized by mass education in the 20th century.We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.

yesbut: > We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.Unfortunately, that is the current stage of humanity. We all currently live in a global subscription model for food, housing, safety, etc. No doubt that we will move beyond it eventually, but the current organization of society is kept in place by the owner class which benefits from the current arrangement.One of the steps for moving beyond it is educating the modern day serfs (our peers) about reality as it is and alternative visions of a future where we are no longer selling our labor to the owner class. It will take generations.

DavidPiper: I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately:"Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive]Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world should always just be the way it was in, say, 1800, like that was actually the realistic pinnacle of human society. You also seem to be loosely basing this argument on the availability of "rich nerds", which seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. Computing once didn't exist, and we still valued reading, writing and thinking.I'm kind of baffled by regularly I see comments like this. Like, come on. This is basically the AI black pill, no?

realo: Well... 19th century engineer could have a large multi-story brownstone with family and , more importantly, servants and house personnel. A butler, etc...Today? On an engineer's salary? Ha!

sillysaurusx: Although primogeniture has been discriminatory for basically the entire time it's existed, the discrimination isn't inherent. It's an implementation detail. Modern British Royal succession now uses absolute, gender-neutral primogeniture since 2013.In fact, there are few things less discriminatory than a random birth order. You may as well be assigned a random number at birth, and the lower your number, the more you're paid. In such a system, there's nothing to discriminate against; the ordering is absolute and immutable, and everyone is treated equally.I agree that it's a bleak idea, but Animats wasn't talking about subjugating women.

dripdry45: I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headlines and propaganda and bullshit. there are plenty of people out there like that. They are just living their lives. In some ways, we might be the ones who are the anomaly and getting hurt by the Internet.I think, in a way, the Internet itself is the virus. It has infiltrated us and our minds. Rage and suffering are what get clicks and engagement. The Internet has become a suffering engine, which spins angst into gold.

lifeisstillgood: [delayed]

lifeisstillgood: But ... they are only able to live their lives and amass wealth (good on them btw) because modern western society is arranged like it is - Maritime trade, international rules based order (mostly) with compatible legal systems, free and fair elections and half decent government accountability, individual rights and property systems.Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

AuthAuth: In the short term they may be living their life unaffected but if we're right then they will eventually become affected. Maybe this is enough reason for us to talk about this issue and try and get ahead of it. I dont think its futile or wasted.

marxisttemp: Primogeniture in any form is discriminatory precisely since birth order is an immutable, permanent, unchosen characteristic assigned randomly at birth, just like race or sex.

B1FF_PSUVM: > all else being equal."Load bearing phrase", as they say.A stupid ass that just keeps pushing on often goes further than a smart ass who gets distracted.

rogerrogerr: Yes, we have an infinite amount of knowledge work that needs done. But if AI is better at it than humans, we aren’t going to use humans.We don’t use chimpanzees for any knowledge work today, even though they’d be better at it than some other animals.

trinsic2: > We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.The algorithms and bots that curate&#x2F;generate content directed by accelerationists definitely want people to think that. There is a whole system in place now that can shape future outcomes just by convincing everyone that have no power when the opposite is true. The parent is probably a bot, or has been influenced by one to many there is nothing new under the sun solipsism bs.

trinsic2: I don't need any of that. I built a life for myself with discipline and hard work. I avoid most of the drama you describe because I create my world instead of letting it be created for me.Here are some words to live by[0]. I don't agree with everything Derek Silvers says, esp about philosophy. Its more of a guiding principle that drives rather than divides.[0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fluidself.org&#x2F;books&#x2F;self-help&#x2F;how-to-live

joquarky: Long term thinking is out when you can't predict more than a few months ahead at most.

dripdry45: You have to make those opportunities to plan long-term. Once you start to form those, it will be amazing how many opportunities present themselves.

lmm: That's a contingent fact about the place and era you live in. Medieval peasants - the majority of people who have ever lived - were not dumbasses, not all of them - but there simply wasn't a way for even the smartest to accumulate long-term wealth. At best you could maybe get your neighbours to owe you a few more favours, and maybe once in a generation if you played every card right there might be a chance for a patriarch to acquire one more piece of land, but that's it, that's your lot. (Sure you can work your ass off and produce a bit of extra grain in a given year, but then what? It's going to rot, and selling it for money is surprisingly useless to you)

ahartmetz: Seasons, at least, are entirely predictable. Plant growth is somewhat predictable. Travel times are mostly predictable (early trading). The timeline of children growing up is predictable if (big if) they survive. Livestock lifecycles were known. They knew how long various kinds of food took to spoil.These are very important things and most of them take place on longer or much longer timescales than a few months. Early humans weren't monkeys, and after they had left the tropics, they couldn't survive without planning because getting food is difficult in winter.

ahartmetz: Money was useful - not as much as today, sure. But traders and tradespeople existed in the middle ages, so you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes &#x2F; fabrics, maybe woodwork for a house...Some of these things you could make yourself or were commonly self-made instead of buying, but that, too, requires planning and discipline.I'm a bit shocked that some people think of medieval life as something like Elbonia in Dilbert comics. Heck, I even find the middle ages a pretty boring time in human history, but I know enough to understand that it wasn't as simple as "everyone lived in the mud and ate mud".

hackable_sand: Sex is mutable but good try

lmm: > you could buy some goods and services. Metal tools and farming implements, harnesses for horses or oxen, pots, clothes &#x2F; fabrics, maybe woodwork for a houseYou could buy some temporary luxuries to enjoy, or save yourself a bit of labour on something you'd normally do yourself. But you couldn't really invest in your future the way we would today - everything you depended on had to be something you could make yourself, buying an implement you couldn't maintain would be setting yourself up for trouble. Increasing your productivity with tools wasn't a huge help because you always had enough labor available to hit severely diminishing returns on the land you owned. And any object of value is always at risk of being seized by the local lord or a passing army or what have you.

infinite8s: But they might be pushing in the wrong direction.

noosphr: In the same way that numeracy skills were in the blast radius of the Colossus.People seriously underestimate how underpowered and tiny llms are for the tasks they need to solve.A trillion parameter model can't tell the difference between left and right. We will need to grow them millions to trillions of times before they are half as good as AI boosters claim they are.This isn't the end of thinking any more than the watt steam engine was the end of horses. It will be centuries before we get there. And by that point the difference between man and machine will be at best academic.

somewhatgoated: I don’t know about you but where I live only some rich people ride horses for fun sometimes; they are mostly irrelevant otherwise.

LorenPechtel: I'm not aware of any jobs where physical robustness is the primary job attribute. The machine is always better.There are jobs that demand robustness, but they are about applying knowledge in extreme conditions, not about letting an AI do the thinking.

calvinmorrison: Can and will happen again. I might even be a 'clever' underbutler to some misAnthropic Engineer

drewnick: Agree. If you've ever spent serious time in the country with farmers, the level of ingenuity is impressive among many, and they benefit from it greatly. As the grandson of depression farmers, I noticed intelligence mattered a lot, even if just for survival.

parasubvert: Peter Drucker identified this phenomenon as the rise of knowledge work as "the means of production" in the 1950s and 1960s. Management (of people, tasks, responsibilities, and disciplines) and knowledge work were the two sides to organizational performance. Drucker felt that "post capitalist society" was the recognition that capital ceased being the primary factor of production. No matter how much capital you throw at a problem, if you can't retain people that know what you're doing, you won't get far.Knowledge is a unique resource compared to the other traditional factors of economic production (land, labor, and capital). It is often invested in with capital (education and tools), but it is carried with the human, and leaves with them. It is always decaying - knowledge workers should be in constant learning mode, and stale knowledge eventually becomes a drag on performance.I'd argue the future is about knowledge workers all becoming managers. When you use agentic AI, it has the flavor of the skills of management. Management is "a practice and a liberal art", according to Drucker, one that has been in poor supply for some time. LLMs are have somewhat stale knowledge and require the human, tools, and RAG to freshen it. And LLMs will always regress to the mean. It is pretty good at pattern analysis and starts to get shaky and mediocre with synthesis. It requires very nuanced, and elaborate prompting to shape its token output towards insightful results that aren't a standard answer. For coding exercises, that can be fine, but at high complexity levels, or when dealing with issues of strategy or evaluation, it is a platitude generator and has no unique competitive advantage.In other words, competent, talented management mixed with knowledge work is the scarcity we are heading towards. This is arguably why you're seeing the rise of "markdown frameworks" that people swear improve performance, it's the beginnings of management scaffolding for AI.Technical folks struggle with valuing management skills, and I expect this will increase its value and scarcity.

quantummagic: > I'm not aware of any jobs where physical robustness is the primary job attribute.Not really disagreeing with you, but there are a few obvious examples. A lot of construction jobs are still labour intensive, and I've seen a lot of people who don't last the first day, let alone their first week. Also, security jobs, say in nightclubs, also value physical robustness. Orderlies in hospital, require the ability to move bodies, alive and otherwise. The machine is usually better.

ghaff: >servants and house personnelWhich you mostly don't need today. You may have a lawn guy, take your car to a mechanic, and use a washer&#x2F;dryer to do most of your laundry.

metabagel: I think that could be true for some engineers. I'm skeptical it was true for the majority.

sarchertech: This a very silly view of the past through modern eyes. Intelligence, cunning, and wit have always been immensely valuable. Read the mythology of literally any culture for examples.To extrapolate from fewer people were formally educated or literate to intelligence wasn’t valued is absurd.As for your part about reading and writing. Literacy has always been a very valuable skill that would increase your social standing. It was scarce and difficult to acquire before the printing press, but it was always valuable.

metabagel: Sure, but the Watt steam engine was invented 250 years ago, which is the point.

parasubvert: I think the evidence that AI is better at knowledge work without a human in the loop... is very limited.Humans with many agents will be more productive, but the tendency has been for these models is to regress to the mean when it comes to strategic insights.

parasubvert: None of modern society and economics was put together accidentally, IMO. It was purposeful, a mix of success & failures, serendipitous, and filled with mixed motives... but that's not quite the same as an accident.A mix of political scientists, politicians, investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, judges, scientists, technologists, and economists have tried to mold society to their own theoretical vision for at least 150+ years. Society then reacts to that in both good and bad ways. This distorts the vision, as society changes it to its concerns. And the cycle repeats.I think of Karl Polyani's The Great Transformation has a great way of looking at the attempts to force "market society" on England in the 1700 and 1800s, and the reaction that all societies exhibit in the face of unconstrained technological or economic change. Both the imposition of change and reaction to it can be violent, it's hard to predict. We've had such a relatively steady state since WW2 in the developed nations that we're not used to this cycle.

dalyons: They’ll still lose their job to AI, whether they’re paying attention or not.

metabagel: You could drop the first sentence without losing anything other than an unnecessary insult.

whattheheckheck: What a shitty regression to the mean... we need a new deal

rogerrogerr: So far, I think you're right. But the rate of progress just seems so crazy that I'm not seeing any moats that look fundamental. I hope I'm wrong and you're right.

nhod: Gender is mutable. Sex is determined by genetics, though in a handful of creatures, sex could be considered mutable.

wombatpm: A proto Torment Matrix so to speak.

margalabargala: You're right, but there was an article on here in the last week about genetic therapy correcting Down Syndrome.I wonder how long before sex does actually become mutable.

ghaff: "Famous" engineers--probably. I doubt the person taking care of the steam engines lived in a fancy house. I'd much more expect the steamship owners and captains to live in that sort of property.

KPGv2: > Seasons, at least, are entirely predictable. Plant growth is somewhat predictable.Decreasingly so, thanks to climate change. The increase in temp isn't the problem. It's that climate change increases the frequency of outlier temperatures on a seasonable basis. Crops don't just fail if the average is too hot. They fail if there are too many hot&#x2F;cold days in a growing season. And that is the unpredictable thing we're going to be running into in the future. Certainly while we're all alive. It's already happening.Latin American climate refugees have been fleeing north precisely because of climate change decreasing crop yields.

hackable_sand: You can change sexAnd people can be born intersexYour data is wrong

KPGv2: Personally, I find "silly" to be a useful adjective to sum up your impending disagreement without being insulting.

suburban_strike: > We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.You must never have lived through governmental collapse. History can tell you a lot about what to expect. Gangs will quickly form and seize everything they can.The children and the women will be selling ass for basic necessities, raped by both neighbors and invaders, and killed for no reason at all. Not Or. And.Nature does not value your literacy or views on gender. If you want to continue defending women or have any say in your own fate you're going to have to bulk up to do it.

intended: > I hope.For solving all things complex, there must be a plan.

Saline9515: There are plenty of occupations that benefit from being "smart". Construction is one of them, and if you study a bit medieval or renaissance architecture, you'll be amazed by what our ancestors were able to do with just a few analog tools.The same goes for other occupations, and...farming. Breeding cattle is a complex science, so is growing crops consistently and valuing the production.

Saline9515: The fact that some people can be born with 6 fingers doesn't mean that saying "a human hand has 5 fingers" is generally false.

Saline9515: Primogeniture makes sense in a world where odds that you arrive at the adult age are rather low, due to the high risk of death from illness and injuries.The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.

minajevs: I am not saying you are wrong, just that your comment reads as "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you".

jimnotgym: I used to be in construction. My family were the ones you would call when the average builders couldn't do the job. We were very busy, but it didn't translate into making more money. If we charged more we would get hired for the hard bit only, and let the cave men do the rest.When nail guns and cheap power tools came in, every other yokel was suddenly a builder. That is when I got out

ahartmetz: No disagreement about that. A peasant couldn't even properly own farmland in the feudal system.

marxisttemp: Many discriminatory policies could be considered rational. It is rational for jobs to discriminate against handicapped people who require extra affordances to be able to do the same job (for example, wheelchair ramps).“Fair” is a much trickier beast!

leereeves: Rather than being distracted by whether primogeniture specifically is&#x2F;was discriminatory, we should remember that "what was valued" in the societies Animats discussed very much included being male.

leoedin: I don't get this take. Once a modern corporation starts making money, all the people in it diligently work to expand their influence by starting new projects and hiring as many people as possible. That seems to be human nature. Why will AI tools change that? Nobody is feeling important because they manage 50 AI agents. They feel important because they manage 50 people.What percentage of the jobs in a modern office are truly necessary? If automation had the ability to kill jobs over the long term, we'd all have been idle since the industrial revolution. But instead we keep inventing new things that we need.

esalman: You actually need some help once you have kid(s).

suddenlybananas: It's the influence of Curtis Yarvin who basically argues that the world went bad with the French Revolution in typical, boring reactionary fashion.

alterom: >You must never have lived through governmental collapse.I have (1990s Ukraine emerging from the ruins of the USSR).>The children and the women will be selling ass for basic necessities, raped by both neighbors and invaders, and killed for no reason at all. Not Or. And.Yeah, on that... Nope.Dunno where you fantasized that from.Prostitution for basic necessities existed, as it does in the US today (and everywhere else: poverty is the #1 reason for it).Gangs did form. They didn't quite "seize everything they can". Protection racket was common, and preferred for the same reason that taxing a market economy is usually more profitable than a planned one."Invaders" weren't a thing.Mass rapes weren't a thing.People who "bulked up" and joined gangs, in their masses, weren't the winners.Berezovsky, one of the most infamous Russian oligarchs, came from an academic background, with multiple publications in applied mathematics.(Berezovsky number is a fun alternative to the Erdos number; mine is four [1])Khodorkovsky was a chemical engineer by education who bootstrapped his business career by importing and selling computing equipment for a science education center he opened during perestroika. He used the funds to open a bank.Kolomoyskiy, one of the most infamous Ukrainian oligarchs, was a metallurgical engineer.Pinchuk, another oligarch, got a doctorate from the same university.I can go on and on. A few thugs did make it big (e.g. Akhmetov); they were exception rather than the norm.As the USSR collapsed, the people with enough smarts to be able to "seize everything" were either politicians or nerds.Your strongman fantasy has no basis in reality."Nature" valued people with PhDs, it turns out.[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathscinet.ams.org&#x2F;mathscinet&#x2F;freetools&#x2F;collab-dist?...

djaro: If AI actually becomes good enough to replace intelligent people. Which, outside the online world of AI hype, is not at all a commonly accepted fact.

KaiserPro: > those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer.Sorry but that is just not true.Sure farmers aren't academics, but the sheer number of tasks, and tools required to efficiently do those tasks were vast. Innovation in winnowing was literlly life and death, as was plant&#x2F;animal breeding traits.Observing and reacting to changes in plants, lands, water, animals was critical to getting a good harvest. Packing and storing food was critical to surviving the winter.Sure, the lack of literacy hampered knowledge recording and dissemination.BUT, if we look mine the vast memory that is classics, knowledge, wit and cleverness were prised as often as strength and beauty.