I am genuinely starting to fear an almost universal dumbing down of humanity as a result of AI. It feels like so many people have just stopped caring about what they do or what they create. They no longer believe they need to know what they are doing or care about the results. The machines will do the knowing and caring for them. Or they won't - but what they produce without knowing or caring will be good enough to tick whatever boxes are necessary so it doesn't matter.
Over the years I have enjoyed many deep and interesting technical discussions online - both here on HN and elsewhere. I can't help feeling that those discussions have also all but disappeared over the past few months - alongside high quality free material that some experts have kindly given away but increasingly no longer do. I rarely find myself contributing any more because there is little on any of my usual online hangouts that is interesting enough to spark a deep technical discussion any more. It's 90% AI stuff - either written about AI or (usually poorly) written by AI - and most of the discussions that do initially catch my interest at all seem to end being very negative and depressing. (I appreciate the irony that I'm perpetuating that cycle right now. Looking through my relatively sparse recent contributions to HN is actually quite depressing. Although at least I actually am getting out more!)
I wouldn't mind so much if I believed the hype about the benefits of AI-generated work and thought that overall this period would be a net win for humanity. Unfortunately I don't really believe that. I fear the LLM era will eventually be remembered for producing tools that could do average/routine tasks quickly and to an acceptable standard but that were actually used to (try to) do good/innovative tasks with substandard results. But by the time enough decision-makers realise this it might be too late and the damage might already be done and hard to reverse.
I have similar fears. I honestly think that this may be the mechanism by which the global capital order falls into a version of late-Soviet decay and collapse -- a major boon to the oligarchs, just as it was in Russia.
Just as the production and service bureaucracy of the USSR ceased to care about the value of their work (so long as they technically fulfilled their plan), we are possibly headed for a world where all the "real economy" workers (in manufacturing, logistics, etc.) will be guided by the output knowledge workers and managers driving AI, who are being judged by yet more management using AI, who are ultimately judged by investors using AI and the whole thing gets disconnected from any actual ground truth -- just as planning did in the Soviet case.
When the whole thing collapses, somebody will be around to pick up the pieces (and valuable capital equipment, land, etc.) for pennies on the dollar. I suspect the kernel of whatever comes next will come from China, but also suspect it will bear more than a passing resemblance to Putin's Russia -- a small clique of rentier-gangster kingpins semi-legally seizing everything in sight and cobbling together an autocratic oligarchy that creaks along without meaningful challenge.
Silhouette · · focus · HN ↗
Over the years I have enjoyed many deep and interesting technical discussions online - both here on HN and elsewhere. I can't help feeling that those discussions have also all but disappeared over the past few months - alongside high quality free material that some experts have kindly given away but increasingly no longer do. I rarely find myself contributing any more because there is little on any of my usual online hangouts that is interesting enough to spark a deep technical discussion any more. It's 90% AI stuff - either written about AI or (usually poorly) written by AI - and most of the discussions that do initially catch my interest at all seem to end being very negative and depressing. (I appreciate the irony that I'm perpetuating that cycle right now. Looking through my relatively sparse recent contributions to HN is actually quite depressing. Although at least I actually am getting out more!)
I wouldn't mind so much if I believed the hype about the benefits of AI-generated work and thought that overall this period would be a net win for humanity. Unfortunately I don't really believe that. I fear the LLM era will eventually be remembered for producing tools that could do average/routine tasks quickly and to an acceptable standard but that were actually used to (try to) do good/innovative tasks with substandard results. But by the time enough decision-makers realise this it might be too late and the damage might already be done and hard to reverse.
ElevenLathe · · focus · HN ↗
Just as the production and service bureaucracy of the USSR ceased to care about the value of their work (so long as they technically fulfilled their plan), we are possibly headed for a world where all the "real economy" workers (in manufacturing, logistics, etc.) will be guided by the output knowledge workers and managers driving AI, who are being judged by yet more management using AI, who are ultimately judged by investors using AI and the whole thing gets disconnected from any actual ground truth -- just as planning did in the Soviet case.
When the whole thing collapses, somebody will be around to pick up the pieces (and valuable capital equipment, land, etc.) for pennies on the dollar. I suspect the kernel of whatever comes next will come from China, but also suspect it will bear more than a passing resemblance to Putin's Russia -- a small clique of rentier-gangster kingpins semi-legally seizing everything in sight and cobbling together an autocratic oligarchy that creaks along without meaningful challenge.
jollyllama · · focus · HN ↗
We were already on track for that anyway. This just adds an interesting twist to it.