Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone’s pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson’s voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?
If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.
As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they’re actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don’t leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you’re not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.
But I noticed right away that I couldn’t justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.
I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.
At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM’s versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM’s start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.
Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They’re literally planning for what they’re going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization… in five years. I wish I was kidding.
Wait til we get started about Sonic.
The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.
Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.
Do you honestly think your choice of words in this post led to you being heard and understood? Or do you think that everyone is just being mean bullies? THiiiiiiink hard about this one.
And coming soon to a developed nation near you!
As an aside, some people with issues have used the falling birthrates around the world as an excuse to push for far-right, draconian policies regulating people’s bodies like banning birth-control, criminalizing abortions, and lowered age-of-consent laws.
We need to all make it very clear when this shit comes up that the problem has far more to do with economics and infrastructure than any social moral failing. We need better heathcare and safety nets so couples can afford to have a baby. We need lowered housing costs so people aren’t afraid they will have to raise a family in a single-bedroom studio apartment. We need paid time off and parental leave. We need mass-transit so a family with two working parents don’t also have to afford two cars. It’s fucking ASBURD how much American families are getting fleeced.
If our policies and politics actually cared about taking care of our future, they would be making it easier for families to have babies and adjusting the world, not still expecting people to have to work two-jobs for twenty years to save up enough for a downpayment on a shitty house.
It doesn’t matter where it came from, if you’re steeped in this kind of language it’s a massive signpost that you’ve handicapped your own intellectual abilities in a profound way. Healthy, normal people with regulated feelings and stable perspectives grounded in reality do not frequent the communities that use this kind of language.
It’s a red flag that will always make the outside world laugh and reject what you have to say, and if your instinct is to retreat back into the places that use this language, you are going to absolutely SUFFER in life, this is a warning coming from a place of compassion, you HAVE to believe me.
I am a well educated person who uses these forums and many others with regularity and I have many opinions on tech after working in both marketing and the tech sector for a long time.
That out of the way, I will simply skip over any comment that says “normies” unironically. Especially over and over.
This isn’t fucking 4chan, communicate like a human like the rest of us. You don’t get out of being one of us. I don’t even know your take because it’s so distracting and immature and condescending.
My partner’s family from Philippines grew up in a home without appliances like refrigerators, like many, many people in developing countries.
So while now they have every modern convenience, old habits die hard and stomachs seem to adapt to even the most adverse conditions of foodstuffs.
Not mine. I love their cooking but can only eat food that I’ve seen opened or cooked in front of me. They will legitimately leave meat dishes out on the table for two days or more and then simply “reheat” and consider it good to serve. The cabinets are full of things like mayo, cheese dips, opened gravies and open bottles of fruit juice.
I have had some of the very worst food poisoning in my life from inadvertently eating something there like chicken salad that I thought was fresh, but made with hard-boiled eggs that had been sitting on a counter in summer heat for several days that a “friend” brought over so they “wouldn’t waste.”
Of course I’m the only one that gets sick, so I’m the “special one” that everyone now thinks has some terminal illness and treats me like a hospice patient.
Fact is, for it to work as a placebo, you need to believe it will work.
What’s even wilder is you don’t have to consciously believe it, you can unconsciously believe it and it will still work! Doctors will routinely prescribe placebos and be very open about the fact that it’s just a placebo, that there is no chemical compound in the medication.
And yet, the act of taking a pill from a bottle seems to trigger something. Recent research has actually identified part of this mechanism in rat brains. There really is a part of the brain that can be tricked into releasing a set of chemicals that relieve pain, reduce inflammation and create better moods. Someday we might have a placebo pill that actually has medication in it. Wildly convoluted how the brain works.
I stopped listening to this bullshit when we had one party openly wanting to roll us back to the dark ages, allowing raped children to die and rolling back the civil rights… and another who just wanted like, healthcare mid populism. If you think it’s extremist to think we need to push back on fascism at all costs then we have nothing to talk about, there is no compromise with hate. That’s literally what they want. You are playing right into their tricks.
See, I agree with you on everything here, and I even used to hold this same position:
But I don’t think intellectual cowardice / laziness explains all centrists.
I really, really wanted to be charitable, as a former conservative, as someone who grew up in the deep rural south surrounded by hardline conservatives, and then flipped a hard 180-degree later in life, I figured my own unique perspective allowed me to see both sides.
Then the fire nation attacked.
And by that I mean covid happened, and with it came off a lot of masks. Now I believe that not only is centrism intellectual laziness, so is ALL political dysfunction. It’s as close as I will get to a twinge of centerism myself, that I have seen into the hearts of people and have seen that they share a common factor that unites us all: laziness.
It’s too broad of a term, and would take an essay to define properly in this context, but at heart it’s what drives everyone, a desire to avoid challenge.
Learning and becoming politically astute to even a grade-school level takes some amount of effort and self-improvement and betterment and study and acceptance of new ideas, and we have left the age of self-challenge. Just look at the state of video games with quest markers to do anything, and 30-second popular video clips for the shortest of attention spans, or make a comment more than three paragraphs in a popular forum if you need evidence that people are not out to challenge themselves broadly. They set into a position that feels comfortable based on who they’re around and who validates them, and they generally stay there. We don’t celebrate people changing their minds, if anything people treat it with shame, and not without good reason. I have been shouted out of leftist spaces for saying I used to be right-wing in some of my views. (Purity testing appears to be another common trait.)
Who and what exactly are you talking about? It’s nearly impossible to have an intelligent conversation when it’s all hand waving and vibes. Have some balls, what’s on your mind.
Otherwise people should think ahead.
The vast majority of people are thinking ahead when they get a loan to get an education. The rest of your comment is telling people with problems “fuck you, got mine” and I’m done with it. Enjoy your block. Enjoy your blessings and enjoy being hateful to people who had different luck in life, I’m sure abandoning human decency will really help in everything you do.
ITT people conflating liberalism with centerism.
Exterminate… feed and provide healthcare, you know, same thing.
edit: i realized that I had blocked the user below in another thread because they are obtuse, unkind and stupid. I won’t get any answers from them unless I unblock them. Oh well. What’s for lunch.
we’re talking centrists here, not liberals, not moderates, there’s a DISTINCT difference.
The vast majority of so-called centrists are people who just don’t like stress of having a hard stance. That’s why they piss off people on both sides. Impassioned people who understand that progress is a fight need fighters to join them don’t like someone saying that they need to compromise when there are lives and futures on the line. People who see the larger picture are going to be a lot more committed and able to weather criticism.
But most centrists think that they can somehow ride the line between the two and avoid being condemned by either side. This is a thing people do in many circumstances not just politics, and it always makes both sides mad. It’s just a very basic human social faux-paux to think that you can appeal to principled people with a butchered version of their ideals.
This entire post will age poorly if we ever transition out of this incredibly self-indulgent and wasteful period of human civilization.
We should have walkable neighborhoods, mass transit of gleaming efficiency, bike lanes as priority, we should be encouraging socializing and creating spaces for people to gather that aren’t profit-driven, but with plans to create comfort and recreation to better the people and foster a sense of belonging to a community. It’s absurd we all live in places with lots of people but have no sense of belonging to a community. This goes against literally millions of years of our own evolutionary history. We NEED community to function and have healthy minds.
I mean, it’s not likely to happen. But maybe when the next great apocalyptic event happens the survivors can try to remake things with a little more planning. After the whole period of darkness and cannibalism of course.