I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.
Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.
And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?
How is anyone happy with this trajectory?!
Code quality does matter it’s just marketing people being shortsighted because their job is to react to the market. LLM gives a sense of « it’s kind of easy to build stuff, why bother loosing time with quality when I’m there at 80% in 20% of the time ? ».
There is compounding effects where given any big enough system this won’t scale, even Google did talks this week on this topic. So I guess you’re right, time will prove who’s right or wrong and what bet was the best with which consequence
Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.
But I might just be overly radicalised.
And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.
See Brave new world.
I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.
I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.
I know Altman has been going around selling visions of curing cancer and the like, but when he talks about standing up new DC or getting a new investment most of that is going towards LLMs, not cancer research.
The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.
I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"
I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.
> the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.
Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.
Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).
Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?
I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.
[1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/stop-using-junior-and-senior
Yes, the vast majority of people care about their jobs first rather than a theoretical future where mostly rich people colonize space. It's much easier to imagine yourself becoming poor than living in Mars.
1. Software devs are obviously going to have a better idea how to apply AI to software development compared to other fields. So of course the coding tools are going to be the first things made.
2. Formal verification makes the problem easier by allowing for iterative feedback (compilers, proofs, etc.)
The second argument is, I think, somewhat valid, but ignores that a lot of other professions also have similar verification systems even if they're a bit less rigorous. The first argument just explains why things are the way they are now, it's not indicative of the future. I don't want to fall into the trap of thinking that other jobs than mine require less cognitive horsepower or whatever, but I don't see what's particularly special about other jobs if it can do hard STEM stuff.
Recently I had to go through some building regulations and Claude's advices were catastrophic.
The thing that is truly mysterious to the managerial and ruling classes though... when everyone is unemployed, who will be able to afford to buy your junk? Whatever industry you're in, whatever it is you're selling, the people buying that have the money to buy it because they still have jobs. If you're cutting jobs at your company, that helps the bottom line, but every other company is doing the same thing. And they're laying off your customers.
Ah yes the small minded people worrying about their mortgages, purchasing power, and basically identity and social status. You know those small things we all work towards all of our lives.
The same holds for the individual without any dependants. It’s just less immediately apparent. Small-minded self-preservation is more respect worthy and rational than big-minded foolishness.
This doesn’t even get into how this is not about being against Progress but about being under the thumb of Capital. The entity that is holding the Progress mask.
I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote.
I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?
It's not too difficult to install a wall socket, but many things can go wrong, so people would normally call an electrician. In some jurisdictions you are not allowed to install it without a license, or probably you can install it only for yourself but not for anyone else if you don't have a license, and you need to call an inspector and check your work when you're done. Some other jurisdictions truly don't care, you can do whatever, and all the possible damage is on you.
Electricians are somewhat fungible, because you often don't care who will do the job for you, but the profession exists and they can pay their bills.
I wonder how far we are until, at least in some jurisdictions, a person won't be legally allowed to update the website that stores customers' data or processes payments without being a licensed software developer, and how rules, should they be adopted, will change our profession.
Hasn't this been the case since the power loom put hand weavers out of a job?
Thinking that "individual bargaining capability" capability is an especially useful thing for society as a whole is one of the things that has got us into the current Hobbesian mess
Coding was always power that you can have if you just read the freely available info but having access to a computer and internet is not free - if we can change this it would make democratized.
Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?
Of course, I don't think this is happening any time soon because I don't believe the hype machine. But if you do believe the hype machine, you should be honest about what you're facing.
Also, for what it's worth as a person that's written (and will continue to write) games and tools etc., there were already plenty of forces democratizing that (free engines, asset stores with reusable code and art, etc.) The difference was that there was still skill involved, and at the end of the day you were paying another human being for their effort if you bought or used pre-existing components. There's no skill in AI, not really.
Also, I'm really not that interested in playing a game created by AI, and judging from the reaction gamers and game developers have had to this technology, I don't think many people are. So, yay, you can make a game that has a tiny audience with zero satisfaction from having done something hard and learned something? Also it's likely going to be extremely derivative, because the AI can only really work with what it's been trained on.
Then they’ll raise the price.
Also your example with Ferrari is completely flawed, and I dont give a fuck about what investment bankers think or do. What are you even talking about here?
Please explain the first part more than you hand waved away to make a completely unrelated metaphorical case. What is the ability to create software if not software engineering? How are both different?
Works the other way too. Now a junior engineer can use AI to do much of what a middle manager had been doing in the past.
Frankly I think the middle manager ought to be WAY more worried than most.
AI doesn't make that learning and understanding easy but just allows people to skip it.
That doesn't mean democratization at all.
In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI?
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...
https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou...
I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.
I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.
AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.
So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S.
In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.
> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...
A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth.
In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.
I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.
China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).
I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.
No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.
LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).
In what way is this different to electricity?
I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing.
Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident.
In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.
I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring?
I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...
If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence.
If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay?
Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise.
That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.
I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.
I would be very conflicted, because the inherent purpose of a gun is its ability to harm people, regardless of whether any given concrete case constitutes a crime or not.
This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.
The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.
Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc.
The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal"
The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative.
Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature.
I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you.
I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.
We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.
Some reasoning is trained by reinforecement you could just finetune reasoning, people have had better results than you would expect by brute forcing inserting tokens to periodically say "wait, let me think."
Reinforcement trains things to produce better results, not move towards a specific correct result. There is no future answer to predict.
It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to.
The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means?
My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."
I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all.
I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either.
One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.
I would consider that apathy.
"Inevitable"
"Implications Of Predicting The Next Token"
https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...
Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about.
1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes
2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this?
3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should.
The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.
How exactly? Is this a version of trickle down economics I am unfamiliar with?
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question
How are the curious going to eat or have a roof over their heads? Or how are the curious going to pay for the tokens?
> civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe
Maybe, we ought to think real hard and slow about it?
This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume.
> What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question?
Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.
Breaking eggs to make omelette sounds good unless you're the egg. There's an excellent quote from Thomas Friedman: "when you get laid off, the unemployment rate is not 3.4%, it's a 100%". It's great to fantasize about future utopian abundance, but most people live in the present and most will be presently ground to powder. All technologies have a barbelling effect. Redistribution of surplus does not happen by default. The tumult and disruption may last a decade or more. And the fruits, if we make it to the other side, will not be for this generation to enjoy. The textile workers did not cheer for the loom, because they were not the ones that enjoyed the joy of cheap Uniqlo or H&M t-shirts.
On point 2: Many people derive meaning and identity from their work. Acquiring expertise, feeling useful, contributing to society, honing your craft are all things that leads to a good life. It could be that after AI we will all write poetry in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon, and paint in the evenings, but I don't think most people are like this, it's certainly not the way I am wired.
On point 3: "utopian AI is so good that words can't describe it so it can't and shouldn't be stopped". I do not think utopian abundance is guaranteed just by copy-pasting data centers across the globe. There is a non-negligible chance that things go really badly.
Lastly, I think the usage of the word "class" shouldn't automatically be linked to "Marxist ideology". This is cheap rhetoric: "class" --> associated with Marx --> communist loonies of the 20th century --> therefore disregard all argument presented.