Ultimately you end up with either going for totalitarianism (either to arrest development in the status quo, maintain a state of anarcho primitivism or technocratic tedium) or we resist that and break out by trying to forge forward into some unknown unchartered territory.

In practice we have no choice but to aim for the unknown and hope. Can't lie and say I can see what the way through all this is though.

I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.

https://www.disruptingjapan.com/the-real-luddites-would-have...

Here's the problem: you can't.

First, people have disagreements, often very fundamental ones, over what "benefits us all". There's no way to resolve many such disagreements short of brute force.

Second, "enforce"--note the last five letters of that word--means some people are given the power to do things to other people that, if anyone else did them, would be crimes. Throw you in jail, fine you, restrict the things you can do. Indeed, that's how David Friedman, whose "The Machinery of Freedom" is worth reading, defines a government. And the problem is that government still has to be done by humans, and humans can't be trusted with the power to do such things.

Ultimately the only defense we have is to not give other people such power. Not governments, not tech giants, nobody. But that requires a degree of foresight that most people don't have, or don't want to take the time to exercise, particularly not if something juicy is in front of them. How many people back when Facebook first started would have been willing to simply not use it--because they foresaw that in a couple of decades, Facebook would become a huge monster that nobody knows how to rein in? If my own personal circle is any guide, the answer is "not enough to matter"--of all the people I know, I am the only one who does not use Facebook and never has. And even I didn't refuse to use it back when it first started because I saw what things would be like today--I just had an instinctive reaction against it and listened to that reaction, and then watched the trainwreck slowly develop over the years since.

So we're stuck. Even if we end up deciding that, for example, the government will break up the tech giants, slap huge fines on Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc., maybe confiscate a bunch of their property, maybe even make them do a bunch of community service, possibly even some of them serve some jail time--it will still be just other humans doing things to them that no humans can be trusted to do. It won't fix the root problem. It will just kick the can down the road a little longer.

What needs to change is the system in which that technology exists inside, because otherwise removing technology will still keep us on the same trajectory to the same destination, only much slower and possibly with much more pain.

What we're seeing right now with layoffs and everything else is simply an acceleration of our current trajectory. We were going to get here, AI just got us here a few decades ahead of schedule.

For once, however, we have a technology that could let us change this trajectory. I've said this before, but the capital class held so much power because it took a lot of people, and hence a lot of capital, to take on large endeavors that created new wealth. But things were rigged such that those who provided the capital also captured most of that new wealth.

Now, just as AI lets companies (i.e. capital) do the same things with fewer people, it also lets people do the work of entire companies by themselves... i.e. without capital. That is a big enough shift in power dynamics to alter the trajectory in previously inconceivable ways.

I lived in places without any of those and I wouldn't want to do it again.

Now its been 20 years later. The technology is mature and many of the patents have expired, but GMO has done absolutely nothing to solve world hunger.

True during the mainframe. Not true during the PC age. Perhaps true again during frontier model / data center ago. Maybe not true again when hostable open weights models become efficient and good enough.

My theory is that AI and robotics have the potential to break capitalism as we know it. We will probably reach a point where machines will be better than humans at pretty much anything and there will be almost no need for workers who just do a job (like most of us). But if nobody has money to buy things then there is no point in producing anything. Not sure where this will be going but I am pretty sure the capitalists will not voluntarily share the gains.

In theory all this progress should be great and exciting for humanity but without changing the system there may be dark times coming for most of us. I always have to think of Marshall Brain's "Manna" story. It may be a spot on prediction of things to come.

I have to very regularly remind myself many people genuinely believe this shit and are not straight up evil/maniacs, it's getting harder

Technology is not a good-only or evil-only thing. You have use cases that are beneficial and you have use cases that is not benefical. The technology in by itself isn't what makes things worse. Even many thousand years ago, humans used weapons to bash in other humans. Remember the Ötzi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi#Body he was killed by arrows, most logically from someone else shooting at him (at around 3230 BC). Nuclear energy is used as weapon or source for generation of energy (or rather, transformation of energy). And so on and so forth.

IMO the biggest question has less to do about technology, but distribution of wealth and possibilities. I think oligarchs need to be impossible; right now they are causing a ton of problems. Technology also creates problems, I agree on that, but I would not subscribe to a "technology makes everything worse". That does not seem to be a realistic assessment.

So you're not really complaining about technology making things worse. You're complaining about wealth inequality, which is a direct result of the mode of production and the organization of the economy.

Internet access should, at this point, be basically free. The best Internet in the country is municipal broadband. It's better and it's cheaper. It's owned by the town, city or county that it's in, which means it's owned by citizens of that municpality.

Instead what we have in most of the country are national ISPs like Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum and AT&T and the prices are sky high. They are only sky high so somebody far away can continue to extract profit from something that's already built and not that expensive to build.

You will get lied to by people saying national ISPs have an economy of scale. Well, if that were true, why is municipal broadband so (relatively) better and cheaper? Why would there be state laws that make municipal broadband illegal? Why would national ISPs lobby for such laws?

Tons of us called for common sense guard rails and a little bit of actual intention as we rolled out LLM’s, but we were all shouted down as “luddites” who were “obstructing progress.”

We all knew this was coming. It’s been incredibly frustrating knowing how preventable so much of it has been and will continue to be.

Edit: these responses are absurd. Banning GPU’s…? What are you on about? Who said anything about stopping or banning LLM’s? Did none of you see “guardrails”? “A little bit of actual intention”? Where are you getting these extreme interpretations?

I’m talking basic regulatory framework stuff. Regulations around disclosure, usage, access, etc. you know, all the stuff we neglected and are now paying for with social media in droves? We have done this song and dance so many times. No one is going to take away your precious robot helper, we’re just saying “maybe we should think about this for more than two seconds and not be completely blinded by dollar signs.” I mean people have literally died in my state because Zuckerberg wants to save a few bucks building his data center.

It feels like AI evangelists come out the woodwork seething if anybody even implies you shouldn’t be allowed to do literally whatever you want at all times.

You shouldn't blame technology. You should blame the maniacs that have latched on to it as a way of extending their power. You should blame the government for their failures of regulation. You should blame the media for failing to cover this obvious problem.

The people who want to subjugate you are the problem.

The dashboard got announced publicly and just about everyone's usage went up by 100%-200% almost immediately and hasn't come back down, but nothing I'm tracking shows any increase in output since then. We absolutely saw productivity gains a few months ago, but it feels like now people are just burning tokens for the sake of it.

On top of that, as a reaction to the rising costs, we've now gone from unlimited token use to every engineer now having a monthly token budget of $600. I get why that was done, but we're a publicly traded US tech company worth 10s of billions of dollars. We're not hurting for money and the knock on effects are just crazy. For example, I had an engineer in sprint planning say about a large migration type ticket, "Can we hold that ticket until the end of the month? I don't want to burn through all my tokens this early in the month." I just cannot imagine that that's the culture that our executive team was trying to cultivate when they first purchased these tools.

I'm not anti-AI and actually really enjoy using AI for development, but over and over I've watched business leaders shoot themselves in the foot trying to force more AI use on their employees in pursuit of ever increasing productivity. I just keep thinking that there's no way that any productivity gains we've seen from the forced, tracked AI usage are enough to offset the productivity lost from anxiety and churn caused by the unrealistic productivity expectations, vanity metrics, and mass layoffs that have come along with increased AI adoption.

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/

Only if you assume in good faith that the point is to evaluate employees for productivity on some stated goal for the company or role. If you try to view the metric from other possible positions, the one I think fits best is the promotion of token consumption by all means. This is useful for signaling to the broader market that AI is profitable and merits more investment, and may be part of a deal between them and whoever they're buying tokens from. It makes more sense to me that Meta would be more interested in leveraging its control over people to manipulate the state of the world, market, and general sentiment than having them work on stable, well-established and market-dominant software services that really only need to be kept chugging along. Isn't mass-manipulation their whole business? Why wouldn't they use their employees and internal structure to contribute?

It seems like a common conclusion from a management that wants to push for AI adoption. I doubt it’s super effective, but we’ll see how it turns out.

The ones with 10 hour shifts and mandatory overtime? Yea, I don't think it's the _line_ that's making them miserable.

> Partially automated cashier did the same thing.

I've not once heard anyone in the service industry make this complaint.

> as the efficiency benefits are too important.

You can squeeze every last drop of productivity from your employees. In the short term this may even evidence profits. In the long term it only works if you hold a monopoly position.

I can’t believe I read this sentence, lol.

800k is the ability to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Do you see so many people lamenting the days when this was possible? So many memes about the lifestyle Homer Simpson could provide, and may modern families can’t? 800k makes it possible.

It’s a huge lifestyle upgrade, especially if your partner wants to do something artistic, academic, or otherwise less profitable.

>2021 was the first crack. The comps went crazy, half the industry turned over, and the ones who didn't felt a bitter sting where it became blatantly clear that all the new arrivals were just in it for the $$$, and the companies were willing to pay for the backfills but not to reward the loyalty of the missionaries.

Also SVB collapsed in late 2022, notice that AI hype started right after.

working class is replaceable. So is the "executive" class. Only the billionaire/epstein class will prevail in this hyper capitalistic society.