Why AI dream is a non sense and will die

This is partially true, and only if the customer can become as subjectively efficient by directly leveraging AI rather than through your company.

But you’re not mentioning one crucial aspect: accountability. Who’s liable? I know LLMs are not and neither are their providers. The entire system (company) is BASED on the assumption each of its components (departments), as well as any external systems (other companies in the supply chain) are accountable for their deliverables, whether tangible or intangible, in time and space. It all ceases to exist if you take the human out of the loop.

Agency commoditization can only go so far. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is this: Are we (humans) actually complacent enough to adjust our quality, security, safety, timeliness, and adequacy expectations to “the best Anthropic can deliver at any given moment, whatever the consequences”? If the answer is affirmative, then no human in the loop will be needed at least until the avalanche of the piled up consequences roars down on us (your “waiting out” point). Unfortunately, this isn’t an unlikely scenario, and no one can predict with certainty how long it will take to come full circle.

It is exactly the scenario Xe was describing on her blog

I love that article and I feel there is a lot of truth there.

on the other side, clients are talking to chat bots that dont have any empathy and most of the time offer little help. it gives the idea the company doesnt care about humanity anymore - only cash

This is just the continuation of a trend started by capitalism; diffusion of accountability. Employees are just following orders, shareholders are too many, distant and shielded by limited liability. And if a company become too big to fail, the government will bail it out anyway. What was holding the firms from turning 100% evil were the humans at each levels at the firm and their conscience, now AI is taking those away.

I’m afraid what you’re describing in not capitalism, but corporatism. Those are two different systems. This is not a forum on political philosophies, but since you mention it (free market) capitalism is the exact opposite of what you’re describing.

In actual capitalism this could open a window of opportunity for those who are not “evil” to compete over the customer base with the ones perceived as evil. We’ll see how that unfolds. The fearmongering and the cry for regulating AI are a clear sign of the first movers trying to remain the only players in the market, and unlike in actual capitalism, the final word will be the one of the government.

I certainly hope so; however, recent history did not boost my confidence.

100% agree. IMHO, the role of the government here is not to regulate in a technical sense, but to enforce anti-trust laws.

That was great. Particularly, the speculative conclusion just before the actual conclusion feels not-so-speculative to me:

Maybe the problem isn’t the AI tools, but the way they are deployed, who benefits from them, and what those benefits really are. Maybe the problem isn’t the rampant scraping, but the culture of taking without giving anything back that ends up with groups providing critical infrastructure like FFmpeg, GNOME, Gitea, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the United Nations having to resort to increasingly desperate measures to maintain uptime.

Maybe the problem really is winner-take-all capitalism.

(perhaps the “maybe” is a bit of facetiousness here, I’m only somewhat familiar with Xe)

I spent like 20 mins trying to comment on this earlier and couldn’t get my thoughts straight. I still can’t, but in short I hope there will be more and more people spending more time offline. A lot of people are addicted to a lot of completely useless (and harmful) tech. Best I can sum it up is that, pipe dream or not, I hope that what I call “tech-for-tech’s sake” loses popularity.

I’ve being revolting a bit myself for the past while. At the risk of sounding like a “I don’t own a TV” people from the 90s, I ditched my smartphone eight months ago with zero regrets and no desire to go back. I say this because once I’m outside, that’s it, I have no choice but to be disconnected. I carry around a flip phone so family and friends can still get in touch in an emergency. But holy crap did I ever not realize just how many people are walking around, crossing the street even, with their eyes glued to their phones.

Well, since the “AI dream” is by any definition a political/economic one there’s no way to have any other kind of thread. And in my view “free market capitalism” is far more of a nonsense dream than any part of this AI thing. My sense is most of the people hanging around here are technological determinists, even some of those reading the blog post above and nodding their heads in agreement, and fundamentally think ultimately this will all be decided by the capability of the AI models these companies are able or unable to produce, most hoping they will fail. But I think this is a mistake, they are already succeeding and the state of the economy and job market proves this. The power loom was a failure if you expected it to genuinely replace master craftsmen, but that was never the goal. History, including of the luddite movement, shows that these issues are settled above all by political forces (some are the same that burn crosses).

Well, a dream or not, it was what helped us emerge from the middle ages and feudalism and what built the greatest civilization ever, and that’s despite all the other isms, and despite the constant interference of the state and its bureaucracy.

What was the goal? The creation of wealth? So? Are we really worse off b/c we no longer wear tailor made suits our ancestors could afford only a couple of times over their entire lifetime (I’m referring to what the linked post says here)? And I don’t understand the nostalgia point here. Or is it unwillingness to accept change?

Besides, the argument with clothes doesn’t fully hold. The loom has never replaced the craftsman. The industry gradually replaced one type of market expectations with another which is what I was talking about. Today we have both types of products and people who truly care about wearing clothes that suit them perfectly will still have them made by craftsmen. Same with shoes. And that’s not even prohibitively expensive. But in practical sense, to most people the clothes they can buy today far better match their actual needs which are not exclusively (or at all) related to taste or durability.

Now that’s some loaded ideological statement having nothing to do with either the original post or my reply.

At the risk of sounding stupid here, what am I missing around the state of the economy, and more crucially, the job market? Are there are a whole bunch of job trees growing jobs I’m just not aware of? Or are you saying the opposite?

I also don’t understand arriving at the conclusion that people here are making arguments against the capability of the models/technology. @OndrejValenta’s theory relies exactly on them being extremely capable, to the point where many people will remove themselves from tech and work in fields it doesn’t touch (as much). At least that’s how I read it.

Personally, I don’t want the technology to fail, I want the major companies behind it to fail. Is this what you’re talking about? I’m not sure there is proof that they still can’t, but I’m not very well versed on the economy. I think it’s good technology that is being rolled out incredibly irresponsibly. And this is nothing new to tech. A lot of arguments get framed around AI, but Silicone Valley was already massively problematic, AI is more of a catalyst for many of those pushing back.

Mostly I’m eagerly waiting for the hype to die down and for it to become just a thing that is used and not jammed into every product.