I can see where it's coming from. Putting it starkly, at a high level, the broad effect of AI is this:
devaluation of expertise,
whether in coding, or drawing, or music composition, or writing, or translation, or so many other areas.
College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally anyone. Sure, true expertise is still needed to "validate" (and train) the AI, etc, etc, but that's a small consolation.
Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.
No, expertise is more important when working with AI, because it can make mistakes. Expertise is the ability to predict, understand, and mitigate such mistakes.
In science for example, anyone can do an experiment about gravity. In fact millions of high school kids do every year. What makes an expert scientist is the ability to understand all the many ways such experiments can fail to accurately measure the underlying reality.
Or consider an AI writing a press release. A PR expert will catch nuances of wording that will confuse readers, or leave fodder for others to attack or mischaracterize the announcement.
College students know this because they are working with AI. And what makes them mad is the human-driven false notion that AI devalues expertise. AI looks like magic to non-experts. But it’s not, it’s more like a “junior engineer” or “PR intern” to people with actual expertise to evaluate its output.
You and I know this. The people making hiring decisions do not. Managers and CEOs are too enamored by the thought of reduced labor costs to see reason.
Facts don't matter, only what the person making the hiring decision believes to be true, or has been fed.
College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is, the hysteria is what is causing problems.
> College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is
I doubt it. If there was nothing behind the hysteria then there would be nothing to be afraid of.
If I was entry level I would be genuinely worried, because hysteria or not, I now have to compete with AI and prove I'm worth hiring. Not an easy thing to do.
So I don't think the anger is about not being able to find a job in the field today, it's about not being able to find one ever.
I agree with this (and the earlier comment about perceived expertise vs actual expertise), and I think it goes beyond hiring managers.
The core demoralizing fact is that when people perceive that AI can give results at least as good as human experts, they choose AI, because it is faster and/or cheaper.
Expertise is more important if you care about a good end result. People pushing for AI often don't care about the end result at all. They care about quantity over quality.
This can be really frustrating for someone who spent time getting experienced. They get hit twice. First they don't get a chance to do a job because "AI replaced you, sorry". Then they look at the result and what they see is low quality slop.
> Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.
I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in rust and just learn little pieces as I need to. My first couple results were not very great as I didn't know what I was doing, but I've learned enough about structuring good rust apps from the experimentations that I can crank out something pretty decent now.
The AI is so good at holding my hand that it has fundamentally changed how I approach unknown languages and stacks. I used to pick the best stack that I was proficient with for the job. Now I pick the best stack for the job, and become proficient in it. Pretty wild times we live in.
That's fair, I should have defined proficient a little better. By proficient I mean, I can read Rust code and roughly understand what it's doing. I understand idiomatic patterns, and can identify when something especially an AI, has gone against those. I am familiar with the toolings capabilities and limitations, and I can make use of them directly. I can write rust code without having to use AI, though I do still need to lean on documentation, but I don't consider that to be non-proficient as I am definitely at least proficient in C++, elixir, Ruby, JavaScript/type script, and a few others, having written many non-trivial applications in all of those over the last 20 years, and I still reference documentation all the time. I can look at a rust project's organization and infer details from it, and spot areas where things look janky. I can read and understand the details and code examples in the rust book without having to look up earlier sections on syntax and things like that. The point where I would consider myself proficient was when I was able to read the ownership sections and understand them.
Note that when I say proficient, I in no way mean mastery. It will take years to get to that point. Rust is still one of my weakest languages overall, but I've been surprised at how quickly I've been able to get up to speed with AI assistance.
At this point, nothing I've written with AI is something I don't think I could have written by hand if I had significantly more time to do so.
On a side note, one thing that I have not enjoyed about the Rust community, is a general attitude that rust is hard. I personally find rust to be a whole lot easier than c++ was/is. There's definitely a lot to learn around the ownership model, but it's not rocket science. One of the things I love about Rust is how expressive it is, without compromising on performance and developer empowerment. I'm not implying that this is what you did with your comment as I have no idea what your intentions or thoughts were, just making an observation that this is something I haven't liked.
AI is definitely not a silver bullet for anything, but it has bridged a gap that kept me from diving fully into rust in the past, which is that at the end of the day I need to actually ship something. I learn languages for fun, but also for practical use. A theoretical language that I never use is not interesting to me because it's not useful to me because I can't ship anything with it. AI lets me ship actually useful things for just myself as part of the learning process, and it also gives me a great opportunity to debug Rust code that I know the exact intention of. When trying to clone someone else's project and review or debug that, there's a massive upfront step of understanding what it's supposed to do. When it's my code AI generated, I know what it's supposed to do because the requirements/prompts came from my own mind. That's hugely powerful and something that a lot of other old school developers don't seem to understand yet.
I would frame it more that AI will cause the value of knowledge to plummet.
College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.
Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.
I see your point but it's the wrong framing I think. The etymology of education is “to train, mold, nurture”, “to draw out.". Task output can be emulated more cheaply, sure.
I see a few comments on here that read "why is everyone so ungrateful and hysterical about this exciting new technology?" And I don't understand why people are surprised by this. All a young person is going to hear is "We're disrupting the world, automating employment opportunities, automating art and other leisure, innovating misinformation vectors, and also we think this technology might doom humanity. I know we're from the same kinds of companies as the social media giants you already distrust, but still pls give billions of dollars thank"
Silicon Valley has really screwed up here. They are so obsessed with their own importance (this kit is so powerful it can destroy the world!) they have failed to sell/inform the average joe.
It’s a tool. And the next generation probably benefits from learning how to use it effectively.
A good start would have been them not calling this artificial intelligence at all. The hype is largely based on the term "AI" and if it really is simply a (very impressive) auto complete tool it isn't intelligence at all, though as you said can be a very useful tool.
It's amazing that there are people who still believe in "it's just autocomplete". It hasn't been true for a long time, but currently it's position that reveals complete lack of awareness how good AI has become. It has solved Erdos problem using novel approach. Constant moving of goalpost is recurring theme when discussing AI, but it's really impossible to move it so far that you can frame this achievement as "impressive autocomplete".
I would draw a distinction here. If its a tool (as the GP proposed), it is just fancy auto complete. If it isn't a tool and is instead solving problems in novel ways, inventing new things, etc then it is intelligence and not a tool.
It can't be both in my opinion. To be a tool it needs to be controllable and predictable, intelligences are neither. See humans, and really all living things, for plenty of examples where they can't be completely controlled or predicted.
I mean, tokens are passed as input to a model, which then outputs the next most-likely token. At the heart of it, that's the technology right? Why is it so silly to call that autocomplete? Because it's capable of impressive things?
I don't actually think its silly to call it auto complete.
Personally I could see it being either one. The LLM companies have drastically underfunded projects for things like interoperability. As long as inference is a black box we don't know whether its text prediction as a fancy tool or if something crazier has emerged that could be considered intelligent, self aware, conscious, etc. The former is easily assumed by the architecture, the latter seem far fetched but we simply can't know.
Precisely. Calling it autocomplete when it's capable of completing tasks that have nothing to do with autocomplete is silly. If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete". What makes it double silly is that you can't really exclude that human intelligence is a stochastic process.
You're making an assumption that there is no difference between intelligence and auto complete with sufficient resources and learned patterns to complete tasks a human might do.
There may not be a difference there, I don't know but I wouldn't assume that intelligence is nothing more than sufficiently complex auto complete.
I'm not making that assumption. Specifically - I'm not making any assumption about nature of human intelligence, including not making assumption that it's not stochastic process. You exclude possibility that it is stochastic process without any good reason for it (wanting to call AI complex auto complete while keeping human intelligence completely safe from that label really is not good reason).
But that's their whole pitch: Altman is, last I heard, still insisting that they're going to have an AGI—in the sense of a "strong AI", capable of ushering in the supposed Singularity—by the end of the decade.
To be clear, I completely agree that we'd be better off as a society if they referred to all the LLMs as LLMs, and not as AI, but that's completely antithetical to their intentions and beliefs.
Because the first three sound completely awesome and the latter two are basically propaganda. "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet. These same people would probably riot if social media was made to disappear.
As everything regarding college campuses opinion nowadays, it's down to politics. It's not about AI, it's about how this comes in a time in which Silicon Valley is aligning itself with a right-wing government.
This explains why when China shows up with progress the news are actually well received, why opposition to data centers aligns itself with left-wing ethos (environmental, minorities) even if it, on its face, has a ridiculous impact on either, why there's more concern for job losses the closer the industry align with the left (Anyone curious about what financial advisors think of AI? No?), why the technology is seemingly at the same time absolutely useless and the end of white collar jobs, and thus a disaster either way, etc etc.
There are a lot of real valid concerns, it's an incredibly serious matter, if anything it needs more political attention, but the current discourse is a complete flood of utter idiocy and doesn't deserve respect, nor attention.
I think to most people, "you won't have to work any more" sounds like a good thing, except in our current society, it means "oh by the way, you and your children will starve".
Yeah I absolutely agree, if you ask me Andrew Yang should be getting calls about every day now, and UBI should be getting mentioned far more, but none of that is happening.
Opposing technology has a godawful track record and for some reason there's focus on that rather than tackling the actual problems. I bet that behind closed doors, directives are laughing at college students. Why, they are basically playing misdirection for them! It's fantastic for business.
The US can barely agree to fund food stamps for poor people with jobs. And we’ve got the richest man in the world screaming about welfare. The idea that UBI will save us as we aggregate more power and wealth to a few CEOs is a fantasy.
> "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet
I agree. And now I'm to trust the same people with even more money and control over global data dissemination? No thanks
> It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
> he very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
It's not literally him as an individual saying it this once, it's the large amount of it in total.
There's people who go around bothering flat earthers, but despite flat earthers claiming the contrary, they're quite small in number. No mass media effort, no corporate propaganda, no CEOs mentioning all the time.
The largest it ever got were things like the netflix shows. These are pretty illustrative; All of the big attention is not so much on "these people must be convinced of the roundedness of the planet" and more on the dissection of why these people refuse to accept something that is quite easy to prove across a wide variety of otherwise unconnected experiments.
However, the amount of money and energy spent on trying to convince people that “AI will take jobs”, by parties who would benefit from it, implies that these parties maybe don’t fully believe it, or believe that it needs to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I am certain that I am winning, I sure don’t need to yell it from mountain tops. Unless my winning depends on everyone believing it.
I understood the intention of the statement and actually agree with it mostly. My point was just about the line of reasoning. But then again I also mostly agree that "AI" will make many jobs superfluous. People like Schmidt don't just try to announce that into reality; their point is about speeding up the process as they are invested in it and benefit from it happening earlier than if things would just progress naturally.
AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, it'll eventually end up subjugated military by the robots of a country that did invest in AI.
"But the commies will do it" is just an old hat version of what I just described.
And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore.
The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their money afterwards.
For the smaller states, nuclear weapons have universally been not worth it. The only two "losers" right now are Ukraine and Iran, neither of which would be in the position to use their nuclear weapons had they retained/obtained them.
Anyone who's paid attention to these recent wars has seen the actual military development be lower tech weapons. Cheap drones rather than million dollar missiles.
With regard to "AI weaponry": First, AI weapons are broadly a dumb idea. Second: As mentioned, nuclear weapons exist. AI isn't going to magically stop [insert western country] from obliterating China if China were to send their army of wunderwaffe robots.
> At the same time, the team is developing simulation and modelling environments for testing solutions, AI infrastructure for rapid system deployment, and tools that can be immediately integrated into military units.
The drones are currently one of the major forces in the war. The AI tech is so nondescript that your quote is the entire content in the article you link.
The problem with nuclear deterrance is that it is a game theory divide-by-zero error.
For a state like Ukraine, whether they retained their nuclear weapons is irrelevant; They'd never use them against Russia because the retaliation will always be more severe, whether they target Moscow directly or mere "tactical" use, Ukraine would lose the nuclear exchange.
And Russia hasn't used it's nukes despite Ukraine not having any nor being under anyone's nuclear umbrella. The threat of sanctions has (thus far) been sufficient.
You're looking in a mirror and seeing somebody who never read a history book. Every single powerful nation that exists today was built upon war and invasion of some groups by other groups.
Eric Schmidt also raped a woman forty years younger than him, the students were objecting to that as much as the AI. Maybe don't schedule public speaking events after being accused of rape if you don't want to get booed.
It's up to you to choose to who to believe about what happened on the yacht in the gulf of Mexico, the seventy year old billionaire cheating on his wife, or the thirty year old woman who accused him of forcible rape. There was some form of financial settlement, but it's still in private arbitration.
The public documents said: “He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me. I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”
The point is that student activists handed out flyers about this in advance, so the crowd was aware.
The presumption of innocence is for courts of law.
The court of public opinion has no such rules.
If we, the people, see a credible accusation against someone who seems like the type of person who might be guilty of it, we are free to call it like we see it.
Naturally, this can lead to problems: after all, who is "credible" and who "seems like they might be guilty" can be (and very much have been) subject to a lot of bigotry. This is why we have the rules we do in courts of law. But anyone trying to enforce actual legal court rules on public online discussions generally just ends up looking like a jerk.
You could just as easily say blame wealth for the rape accusations; there's much more incentive to make fake rape accusations of rich men than of poor men.
There's also a higher chance that wealthy perpetrators of sexual violence are under-represented in data. There's no denying the relationship between the 'justice' system and the wealthy. Case in point: Judge Persky in the Brock Turner trial.
There really isn’t that much incentive to accuse a much wealthier man of rape. Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.
If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.
> Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.
"So"? The fact that someone is alleged of rape and doesn't lose their invited speech is hardly evidence of injustice. Allegations are not convictions nor proof of guilt.
It seems you are against the presumption of innocence. This presumption is itself a cornerstone of justice, not the opposite.
Note that I was not speaking on the guilt or innocence of any specific person, just pointing out that when it comes to committing sexual violence the incentives to make accusations don’t appear to actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.
> actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.
I think the opposite is true. Accusing someone of rape is often very bad for the accused person, even if the claim is never substantiated. False rape accusations are defamatory.
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle.
This is not a legal forum. (In either the literal "this is an internet forum" sense, or the broader "place for discussion" sense.)
If you want to defend your techbro idols of charges far, far too many of their brethren are unquestionably guilty of, you're going to need a stronger argument than "you're not allowed to say you think he's guilty unless a court agrees with you!!"
AI has a net negative perception in surveys across the US. It’s so unpopular that AI data center development is less popular than a nuclear power plant.
Yes I’d say this is more than representative of “every person” sentiment.
> Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill.
And what exactly are we supposed to do? Just try to ship alternatives to big tech slop? Actively try to work against them? Publish cracked software so they stop earning money?
Genuinely asking, as I'm not sure sure indie developers are the ones who should try to work against these enormous corporations, it's typically the job of the government to ensure society works and is fair, but they seem to currently be on the side of big tech, so indie developers can't realistically do anything about it, unless I'm missing what you're asking for here.
Agreed. The most effective efforts aren't going to come from indie developers. They aren't software issues, more regulatory. Busting up big tech into "baby bells" is the number one thing that needs to be done.
But now that we have essentially "boilerplate for free", I hope the degoogle/demeta/etc and self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble. But that'll probably take real AI and not slop based addiction machines.
> self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble
I love self-hosting, been doing it myself for quite some time already, and also notice a slight uptick among friends and acquaintances also interested in the same. When it comes to businesses, the ones that didn't already host their data in Europe/EU, are now desperately moving the data, but almost none of them go on-prem/self-hosted, for the typical reasons.
So, while there is a slight uptick, I'm not sure this is the "local stacks" moment, and also not sure that's actually what the public wants. I sometimes dream of setting up a company basically focused on helping people do more self-hosting in various ways, but after looking into it more, I always end up with the feeling that people typically don't actually want self-hosting, most people don't seem to care where the data lives. That'd be such a dream business though, so it's hard to let go of the idea :)
There is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this?
To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?
I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time?
But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?
Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.
Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.
Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?
So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?
you are overthinking. most of these students had hard time getting a job or didn't get a job yet. they have 100K+ loan to pay. only thing AI has successfully done so far is replacing human labor.
Everyone is being told they have to use AI to get ahead, so they do.
They're still not going to get a job, and if they have a job, they're still going to get laid off no matter how hard they use AI, because the AI can also use AI.
We're being told there's no room for humans in the future.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI is also influencing how people talk/write. I felt like I used it is not x it is y a couple of times recently and not sure whether I am just being more aware of it or if it is becoming a part of my own writing pattern because of LLMs.
I noticed something similar. Phrases I have noticed that Claude likes using are "... is doing major work ..." and "... worth pulling apart ...". Unfortunately, some of these have subconsciously become part of my own writing style as I noticed recently. English is not my mother tongue, so I'm pretty sure that I inherited these from Claude.
my best friend is a high school english teacher. he said the worst part is kids keep hearing 'it's inevitable,' the complete integration of AI into every facet of life and thinking is gonna happen no matter what anyone says or does. this is the most manipulative and untrue thing anyone could say to a kid scared of a certain kind of future. its it's own kind of misinformation to tell people that something that will take an exorbitant amount of man power, coordination, resourcing, and experimentation to execute on is 'inevitable.'
he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.
In my 20+ years of career it has definitely felt the most tyrannical rollout of a technology I ever experienced.
Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic.
AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.
I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.
>AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.
The only part here with which I disagree is that I feel very similarly about the smartphone.
To some extent, I also think the global mood around Silicon Valley has soured. I remember just starting university when Facebook was taking off in the UK, and there was genuine buzz and excitement around being able to keep up with all your old friends. Years marched on and we started to uncover all the problems with social media, and their carelessness around their own impacts to society, so most people I know who were excited in 2010 were desperately finding ways not to be there.
Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.
Social media aren't disruptive, things like Facebook and Twitter worked great with chronological feeds. Same with YouTube. God, I miss pre-2012 YouTube when things mostly just got popular organically.
Once they started to have algorithmic feeds and those algorithms got tuned for maximum engagement at the detriment of every other factor, that's when things started to spiral downward.
Watching people push this stuff like this (in the face of clear public disapproval) feels like watching Uncut Gems.
You can tell that they know the music is about to stop and they're all desperate to find a chair. They didn't update their playbook for the next generation and now their cards are showing.
I would be disappointed if someone took the completion of my degree and the ceremony behind it as an opportunity to push their business. There’s enough advertisements on the internet; We don't need ads in our universities, too.
"AI" is so bad that people dont have the time to hate it directly, and there lives are such that pragmatism forces them to identify exactly what the source of the problems in the world is,well at least when it stands up and blithers out loud strait at them.
I saw Dr. Fauci give a commencement speech over the weekend and was cheered for warning people about the massive increase in misinformation/disinformation, how AI is enabling it, and that they need to use their critical thinking skills when confronted with it.
>AI will surveil you and profile you like never before!!
Then they get surprised why they get booed. Even personally, I don’t think I met any person IRL that sees AI in a positive way. The only people who cheer for it are the techbros-AI-wrappers who want to sell you some slop SaaS, or the ones who benefit from its market manipulation and price gouging.
The Tech Powers That Be has told these young adults that AI will disrupt the job market that they are entering. Maybe decimate white collar work. Granted, maybe this was mostly a few years ago because the ecstatic celebration among the cream of the crop of the parasites seems to have cooled down, maybe because they figured out that telling everyone in office jobs that their tech was supposed to make their lives worse was a bad strategy. But still, that was a narrative that has stuck. So these kinds of people drill that non-consentual thought into young adults’ brain. Then the same kind come to their office job graduation ceremony and take the opportunity to hype AI? Yeah, they struck a nerve that they manufactured themselves.
Two possible conclusions to draw from that.
1. Their social brains are so atrophried and withered from the daily sycophancy (occupational hazard of being very high up on the corporate ladder) that they honestly thought that grads would be happy about AI disrupting the job market (the commoners love when stocks go up?)
2. Signalling to investors that AI Is Still Happening at every damn opportunity is more important than pissing off the people you are supposed to give an inspirational speech to
200 years ago people would have booed the industrial revolution. They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits.
> They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil
Come on, we're all adults and well-aware that if companies find a way to make people more productive, it just means they'll expect more, not that we'll get more free-time.
Both sides are at fault here, no? A consumer could work part-time and live as well or even much better as someone 50 years ago, but they largely don't want to. I do concede of course that housing is a bit limiting factor here and my "just adapt your lifestyle" doesn't fully hold.
In most places with any sort of economic opportunity, I have a very hard time believing that part time earnings would get you housing on par with a full time earner in 1976.
They cant. Tech workers are just disconnected from real wages. Most people I know spend easily 40-60% of their monthly income on rent alone (if you're in University it'll be easily 80%+), all work full time. And thats in Europe, where living costs usually are much lower than in America. Some people just never leave their privileged circle and assume most people could get there somehow. I for sure couldn't afford a 50% pay cut.
(4000€ pre tax, ~2500€ post tax) This doesnt even get me a good flat in Germany.
Not everyone characterizes AI as "liberation from toil," and many are skeptical that any "equitable distribution of benefits" will occur in the first place. That's the point.
This post is delusional. There nothing liberating about generative AI and folks aren't investing hundreds of billions because they think it will liberate people.
I've noticed, as a student, that many college students - particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost. I understand the disdain for trying to inject the concept everywhere, and like any new technology, it's apt to be used where it is unneeded, and mentioned when it is irrelevant.
But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.
> You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up
Watch them :)
Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.
And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.
But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).
Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.
Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.
Everybody pays the price for AI, but relatively few benefit.
Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.
Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.
> particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost.
What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.
Maybe they see it eradicating their job prospects and being used to cheat and invalidate their hard studying by others who want an insane productivity boost? That’s not fair to them if others are cheating and they’re learning properly.
They weren't even against it!
They were the users of the new tech. They wanted regulation and a cut of the increased productivity.
They were a nascent labour movement asking for things you and I take for granted.
The responses at the time was, of course, violent reprisal.
They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.
That paper appears to be yet another case of social scientists not understanding that correlation isn't causation. They demonstrate a trend in a noisy dataset of some very specific forms of injury and then declare it was the industrial revolution which caused it. But their analysis can't show that.
i think 'shake things up' is a doing a lot of work to minimize the impact this tool will have for this demographic in particular. especially for non-STEM college students, so in theory students who read/write a lot and therefore are probably sick of reading a lot of mid-tier, averaging slop.
I find my hatred of AI to be incredibly rational, and the cultlike veneration of the “insane productivity boost” it gives you to be truly irrational (whether or not that boost actually exists).
Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.
As a software engineer I am so deeply ashamed of how quick so many in the field have done a complete 180 on "productivity cannot be measured by lines of code" to wearing lines of code like a badge of honour.
It's similar to the hype around the "internet revolution", the "microservices revolution", all the "codeless" solutions over the decades...
Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.
Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).
I can see where it's coming from. Putting it starkly, at a high level, the broad effect of AI is this:
whether in coding, or drawing, or music composition, or writing, or translation, or so many other areas.College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally anyone. Sure, true expertise is still needed to "validate" (and train) the AI, etc, etc, but that's a small consolation.
Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.
No, expertise is more important when working with AI, because it can make mistakes. Expertise is the ability to predict, understand, and mitigate such mistakes.
In science for example, anyone can do an experiment about gravity. In fact millions of high school kids do every year. What makes an expert scientist is the ability to understand all the many ways such experiments can fail to accurately measure the underlying reality.
Or consider an AI writing a press release. A PR expert will catch nuances of wording that will confuse readers, or leave fodder for others to attack or mischaracterize the announcement.
College students know this because they are working with AI. And what makes them mad is the human-driven false notion that AI devalues expertise. AI looks like magic to non-experts. But it’s not, it’s more like a “junior engineer” or “PR intern” to people with actual expertise to evaluate its output.
You and I know this. The people making hiring decisions do not. Managers and CEOs are too enamored by the thought of reduced labor costs to see reason.
Facts don't matter, only what the person making the hiring decision believes to be true, or has been fed.
College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is, the hysteria is what is causing problems.
> College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is
I doubt it. If there was nothing behind the hysteria then there would be nothing to be afraid of.
If I was entry level I would be genuinely worried, because hysteria or not, I now have to compete with AI and prove I'm worth hiring. Not an easy thing to do.
So I don't think the anger is about not being able to find a job in the field today, it's about not being able to find one ever.
I agree with this (and the earlier comment about perceived expertise vs actual expertise), and I think it goes beyond hiring managers.
The core demoralizing fact is that when people perceive that AI can give results at least as good as human experts, they choose AI, because it is faster and/or cheaper.
Expertise is more important if you care about a good end result. People pushing for AI often don't care about the end result at all. They care about quantity over quality.
This can be really frustrating for someone who spent time getting experienced. They get hit twice. First they don't get a chance to do a job because "AI replaced you, sorry". Then they look at the result and what they see is low quality slop.
> Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.
I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in rust and just learn little pieces as I need to. My first couple results were not very great as I didn't know what I was doing, but I've learned enough about structuring good rust apps from the experimentations that I can crank out something pretty decent now.
The AI is so good at holding my hand that it has fundamentally changed how I approach unknown languages and stacks. I used to pick the best stack that I was proficient with for the job. Now I pick the best stack for the job, and become proficient in it. Pretty wild times we live in.
> and become proficient in it
From reading your comment, I suspect you are not becoming as proficient as you might think.
That's fair, I should have defined proficient a little better. By proficient I mean, I can read Rust code and roughly understand what it's doing. I understand idiomatic patterns, and can identify when something especially an AI, has gone against those. I am familiar with the toolings capabilities and limitations, and I can make use of them directly. I can write rust code without having to use AI, though I do still need to lean on documentation, but I don't consider that to be non-proficient as I am definitely at least proficient in C++, elixir, Ruby, JavaScript/type script, and a few others, having written many non-trivial applications in all of those over the last 20 years, and I still reference documentation all the time. I can look at a rust project's organization and infer details from it, and spot areas where things look janky. I can read and understand the details and code examples in the rust book without having to look up earlier sections on syntax and things like that. The point where I would consider myself proficient was when I was able to read the ownership sections and understand them.
Note that when I say proficient, I in no way mean mastery. It will take years to get to that point. Rust is still one of my weakest languages overall, but I've been surprised at how quickly I've been able to get up to speed with AI assistance.
At this point, nothing I've written with AI is something I don't think I could have written by hand if I had significantly more time to do so.
On a side note, one thing that I have not enjoyed about the Rust community, is a general attitude that rust is hard. I personally find rust to be a whole lot easier than c++ was/is. There's definitely a lot to learn around the ownership model, but it's not rocket science. One of the things I love about Rust is how expressive it is, without compromising on performance and developer empowerment. I'm not implying that this is what you did with your comment as I have no idea what your intentions or thoughts were, just making an observation that this is something I haven't liked.
AI is definitely not a silver bullet for anything, but it has bridged a gap that kept me from diving fully into rust in the past, which is that at the end of the day I need to actually ship something. I learn languages for fun, but also for practical use. A theoretical language that I never use is not interesting to me because it's not useful to me because I can't ship anything with it. AI lets me ship actually useful things for just myself as part of the learning process, and it also gives me a great opportunity to debug Rust code that I know the exact intention of. When trying to clone someone else's project and review or debug that, there's a massive upfront step of understanding what it's supposed to do. When it's my code AI generated, I know what it's supposed to do because the requirements/prompts came from my own mind. That's hugely powerful and something that a lot of other old school developers don't seem to understand yet.
I would frame it more that AI will cause the value of knowledge to plummet.
College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.
Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.
I see your point but it's the wrong framing I think. The etymology of education is “to train, mold, nurture”, “to draw out.". Task output can be emulated more cheaply, sure.
Good. Why wouldn't you boo at a net loss for your own personal security?
Especially the folks who are graduating. All they can see is 'Juniors no longer wanted' and 'Seniors also can count their days' everywhere.
Why can't they be as excited as people already invested into Datacenters? /s
They can be hired as Data-Center-Guard against Anti-AI Terrorism soon to come?
Don't forget the boom boom collars to prevent thoughts of arson.
I see a few comments on here that read "why is everyone so ungrateful and hysterical about this exciting new technology?" And I don't understand why people are surprised by this. All a young person is going to hear is "We're disrupting the world, automating employment opportunities, automating art and other leisure, innovating misinformation vectors, and also we think this technology might doom humanity. I know we're from the same kinds of companies as the social media giants you already distrust, but still pls give billions of dollars thank"
Silicon Valley has really screwed up here. They are so obsessed with their own importance (this kit is so powerful it can destroy the world!) they have failed to sell/inform the average joe.
It’s a tool. And the next generation probably benefits from learning how to use it effectively.
The hype has gotten in the way of reality.
It's a tool explicitly designed to deprofrssionalize and commodify "knowledge work" - i.e. the thing people go to college to learn to do.
A good start would have been them not calling this artificial intelligence at all. The hype is largely based on the term "AI" and if it really is simply a (very impressive) auto complete tool it isn't intelligence at all, though as you said can be a very useful tool.
It's amazing that there are people who still believe in "it's just autocomplete". It hasn't been true for a long time, but currently it's position that reveals complete lack of awareness how good AI has become. It has solved Erdos problem using novel approach. Constant moving of goalpost is recurring theme when discussing AI, but it's really impossible to move it so far that you can frame this achievement as "impressive autocomplete".
I would draw a distinction here. If its a tool (as the GP proposed), it is just fancy auto complete. If it isn't a tool and is instead solving problems in novel ways, inventing new things, etc then it is intelligence and not a tool.
It can't be both in my opinion. To be a tool it needs to be controllable and predictable, intelligences are neither. See humans, and really all living things, for plenty of examples where they can't be completely controlled or predicted.
I mean, tokens are passed as input to a model, which then outputs the next most-likely token. At the heart of it, that's the technology right? Why is it so silly to call that autocomplete? Because it's capable of impressive things?
I don't actually think its silly to call it auto complete.
Personally I could see it being either one. The LLM companies have drastically underfunded projects for things like interoperability. As long as inference is a black box we don't know whether its text prediction as a fancy tool or if something crazier has emerged that could be considered intelligent, self aware, conscious, etc. The former is easily assumed by the architecture, the latter seem far fetched but we simply can't know.
> Because it's capable of impressive things?
Precisely. Calling it autocomplete when it's capable of completing tasks that have nothing to do with autocomplete is silly. If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete". What makes it double silly is that you can't really exclude that human intelligence is a stochastic process.
You're making an assumption that there is no difference between intelligence and auto complete with sufficient resources and learned patterns to complete tasks a human might do.
There may not be a difference there, I don't know but I wouldn't assume that intelligence is nothing more than sufficiently complex auto complete.
I'm not making that assumption. Specifically - I'm not making any assumption about nature of human intelligence, including not making assumption that it's not stochastic process. You exclude possibility that it is stochastic process without any good reason for it (wanting to call AI complex auto complete while keeping human intelligence completely safe from that label really is not good reason).
But that's their whole pitch: Altman is, last I heard, still insisting that they're going to have an AGI—in the sense of a "strong AI", capable of ushering in the supposed Singularity—by the end of the decade.
To be clear, I completely agree that we'd be better off as a society if they referred to all the LLMs as LLMs, and not as AI, but that's completely antithetical to their intentions and beliefs.
Because the first three sound completely awesome and the latter two are basically propaganda. "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet. These same people would probably riot if social media was made to disappear.
As everything regarding college campuses opinion nowadays, it's down to politics. It's not about AI, it's about how this comes in a time in which Silicon Valley is aligning itself with a right-wing government.
This explains why when China shows up with progress the news are actually well received, why opposition to data centers aligns itself with left-wing ethos (environmental, minorities) even if it, on its face, has a ridiculous impact on either, why there's more concern for job losses the closer the industry align with the left (Anyone curious about what financial advisors think of AI? No?), why the technology is seemingly at the same time absolutely useless and the end of white collar jobs, and thus a disaster either way, etc etc.
There are a lot of real valid concerns, it's an incredibly serious matter, if anything it needs more political attention, but the current discourse is a complete flood of utter idiocy and doesn't deserve respect, nor attention.
I think to most people, "you won't have to work any more" sounds like a good thing, except in our current society, it means "oh by the way, you and your children will starve".
Yeah I absolutely agree, if you ask me Andrew Yang should be getting calls about every day now, and UBI should be getting mentioned far more, but none of that is happening.
Opposing technology has a godawful track record and for some reason there's focus on that rather than tackling the actual problems. I bet that behind closed doors, directives are laughing at college students. Why, they are basically playing misdirection for them! It's fantastic for business.
The US can barely agree to fund food stamps for poor people with jobs. And we’ve got the richest man in the world screaming about welfare. The idea that UBI will save us as we aggregate more power and wealth to a few CEOs is a fantasy.
"you won't have to work any more at our company"
> "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet
I agree. And now I'm to trust the same people with even more money and control over global data dissemination? No thanks
I’m reasonably certain that Schmidt anticipated that reaction after the first speaker was booed.
It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
> It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
> he very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
It's not literally him as an individual saying it this once, it's the large amount of it in total.
There's people who go around bothering flat earthers, but despite flat earthers claiming the contrary, they're quite small in number. No mass media effort, no corporate propaganda, no CEOs mentioning all the time.
The largest it ever got were things like the netflix shows. These are pretty illustrative; All of the big attention is not so much on "these people must be convinced of the roundedness of the planet" and more on the dissection of why these people refuse to accept something that is quite easy to prove across a wide variety of otherwise unconnected experiments.
You’re right that it doesn’t prove anything.
However, the amount of money and energy spent on trying to convince people that “AI will take jobs”, by parties who would benefit from it, implies that these parties maybe don’t fully believe it, or believe that it needs to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I am certain that I am winning, I sure don’t need to yell it from mountain tops. Unless my winning depends on everyone believing it.
I understood the intention of the statement and actually agree with it mostly. My point was just about the line of reasoning. But then again I also mostly agree that "AI" will make many jobs superfluous. People like Schmidt don't just try to announce that into reality; their point is about speeding up the process as they are invested in it and benefit from it happening earlier than if things would just progress naturally.
AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, it'll eventually end up subjugated military by the robots of a country that did invest in AI.
"But the commies will do it" is just an old hat version of what I just described.
And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore.
The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their money afterwards.
For the smaller states, nuclear weapons have universally been not worth it. The only two "losers" right now are Ukraine and Iran, neither of which would be in the position to use their nuclear weapons had they retained/obtained them.
Anyone who's paid attention to these recent wars has seen the actual military development be lower tech weapons. Cheap drones rather than million dollar missiles.
With regard to "AI weaponry": First, AI weapons are broadly a dumb idea. Second: As mentioned, nuclear weapons exist. AI isn't going to magically stop [insert western country] from obliterating China if China were to send their army of wunderwaffe robots.
You are not up to date about AI weapons.
March 30, 2026: https://thedefender.media/en/2026/03/fedorov-shared-info-abo...
> At the same time, the team is developing simulation and modelling environments for testing solutions, AI infrastructure for rapid system deployment, and tools that can be immediately integrated into military units.
The drones are currently one of the major forces in the war. The AI tech is so nondescript that your quote is the entire content in the article you link.
Drones need operators.
So how are AI weapons a broadly dumb idea?
You don't think an attacker will think twice if the prey also has nuclear weapons?
The problem with nuclear deterrance is that it is a game theory divide-by-zero error.
For a state like Ukraine, whether they retained their nuclear weapons is irrelevant; They'd never use them against Russia because the retaliation will always be more severe, whether they target Moscow directly or mere "tactical" use, Ukraine would lose the nuclear exchange.
And Russia hasn't used it's nukes despite Ukraine not having any nor being under anyone's nuclear umbrella. The threat of sanctions has (thus far) been sufficient.
> AI is inevitable in the sense that if a country rejects the development of AI, [AI inevitabilism premise]
Actually, it’s possible other countries don’t have our counterproductively-murderous instincts. You’re looking in a mirror and you fear yourself.
You're looking in a mirror and seeing somebody who never read a history book. Every single powerful nation that exists today was built upon war and invasion of some groups by other groups.
Eric Schmidt also raped a woman forty years younger than him, the students were objecting to that as much as the AI. Maybe don't schedule public speaking events after being accused of rape if you don't want to get booed.
Is "accused of rape" and "raped" the same in your mind?
It's up to you to choose to who to believe about what happened on the yacht in the gulf of Mexico, the seventy year old billionaire cheating on his wife, or the thirty year old woman who accused him of forcible rape. There was some form of financial settlement, but it's still in private arbitration.
The public documents said: “He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me. I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”
The point is that student activists handed out flyers about this in advance, so the crowd was aware.
If I blindly believe all accusations, will it lead to a better world?
"don't be evil"
What about the presumption of innocence? The case is in open court now, AFAIU.
Can someone who downvoted parent's comment explain what's wrong with the presumption of innocence in their opinion?
The presumption of innocence is for courts of law.
The court of public opinion has no such rules.
If we, the people, see a credible accusation against someone who seems like the type of person who might be guilty of it, we are free to call it like we see it.
Naturally, this can lead to problems: after all, who is "credible" and who "seems like they might be guilty" can be (and very much have been) subject to a lot of bigotry. This is why we have the rules we do in courts of law. But anyone trying to enforce actual legal court rules on public online discussions generally just ends up looking like a jerk.
A lot of people enjoy the moonlight dancing on pitchforks. It's captivating! It shows strength! Presumption of innocence is meh.
You are equating accusation of rape with rape. I shouldn't have to point out there is a big difference.
Until convictions of rape are justly meted out, you’ll have to stomach accusations taking justice’s place. Justice won’t just sleep.
Blame wealth for making the corruption of the courts too damn obvious. Now they’re not taken seriously.
You could just as easily say blame wealth for the rape accusations; there's much more incentive to make fake rape accusations of rich men than of poor men.
There's also a higher chance that wealthy perpetrators of sexual violence are under-represented in data. There's no denying the relationship between the 'justice' system and the wealthy. Case in point: Judge Persky in the Brock Turner trial.
There really isn’t that much incentive to accuse a much wealthier man of rape. Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.
If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.
> Famously, justice is rarely (if ever) metered out when the accused person is wealthy and influential. This guy (allegedly) violently raped a woman on his boat and he still gets a speaking gig, so.
"So"? The fact that someone is alleged of rape and doesn't lose their invited speech is hardly evidence of injustice. Allegations are not convictions nor proof of guilt.
It seems you are against the presumption of innocence. This presumption is itself a cornerstone of justice, not the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence
Note that I was not speaking on the guilt or innocence of any specific person, just pointing out that when it comes to committing sexual violence the incentives to make accusations don’t appear to actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.
> actually mete out as is claimed because the people who are accused rarely, if ever, have any actual negative consequences.
I think the opposite is true. Accusing someone of rape is often very bad for the accused person, even if the claim is never substantiated. False rape accusations are defamatory.
Then we are at an impasse, because here is a guy who has been accused of rape actively doing a speaking gig, so…
The presumption of innocence is a legal principle.
This is not a legal forum. (In either the literal "this is an internet forum" sense, or the broader "place for discussion" sense.)
If you want to defend your techbro idols of charges far, far too many of their brethren are unquestionably guilty of, you're going to need a stronger argument than "you're not allowed to say you think he's guilty unless a court agrees with you!!"
It isn’t every day that Big Tech execs get to hear the truth of everyperson sentiment.
I don't think college campuses are exactly representative of "everyperson sentiment".
There was a time in which they deserved some respect, as a result of free exchange of ideas among intellectuals. That's far behind by now.
AI has a net negative perception in surveys across the US. It’s so unpopular that AI data center development is less popular than a nuclear power plant.
Yes I’d say this is more than representative of “every person” sentiment.
Culture War topics about college campus value systems are irrelevant here.
It's about time rich morons stop being treated as intellectuals just because they are rich.
Yeah, maybe they should listen for once. Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill.
> Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill.
And what exactly are we supposed to do? Just try to ship alternatives to big tech slop? Actively try to work against them? Publish cracked software so they stop earning money?
Genuinely asking, as I'm not sure sure indie developers are the ones who should try to work against these enormous corporations, it's typically the job of the government to ensure society works and is fair, but they seem to currently be on the side of big tech, so indie developers can't realistically do anything about it, unless I'm missing what you're asking for here.
Agreed. The most effective efforts aren't going to come from indie developers. They aren't software issues, more regulatory. Busting up big tech into "baby bells" is the number one thing that needs to be done.
But now that we have essentially "boilerplate for free", I hope the degoogle/demeta/etc and self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble. But that'll probably take real AI and not slop based addiction machines.
> self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble
I love self-hosting, been doing it myself for quite some time already, and also notice a slight uptick among friends and acquaintances also interested in the same. When it comes to businesses, the ones that didn't already host their data in Europe/EU, are now desperately moving the data, but almost none of them go on-prem/self-hosted, for the typical reasons.
So, while there is a slight uptick, I'm not sure this is the "local stacks" moment, and also not sure that's actually what the public wants. I sometimes dream of setting up a company basically focused on helping people do more self-hosting in various ways, but after looking into it more, I always end up with the feeling that people typically don't actually want self-hosting, most people don't seem to care where the data lives. That'd be such a dream business though, so it's hard to let go of the idea :)
The only ones that need to hear the truth are the speakers not realizing they are first to go in civil uprising over mass unemployment
There is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this?
To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?
I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time? But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?
Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.
Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.
Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?
So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?
you are overthinking. most of these students had hard time getting a job or didn't get a job yet. they have 100K+ loan to pay. only thing AI has successfully done so far is replacing human labor.
Yes its more difficult now they are not students.
Would you say that the same students who are protesting AI have used AI to graduate? Its ok either way.
Edits - condensing the questions:
1) Are these protests reflective of the majority of students?
2) Do the majority of students use LLMs regularly in education?
Given the above questions what change in education and change in personal AI use might we see?
Everyone is being told they have to use AI to get ahead, so they do.
They're still not going to get a job, and if they have a job, they're still going to get laid off no matter how hard they use AI, because the AI can also use AI.
We're being told there's no room for humans in the future.
The friction at these commencements is a reaction to the macroeconomic consequences not the technology itself.
Noticing it more on YouTube too - scripts that are definitely AI. Tons of it’s not z it’s y
I wouldn't be surprised if AI is also influencing how people talk/write. I felt like I used it is not x it is y a couple of times recently and not sure whether I am just being more aware of it or if it is becoming a part of my own writing pattern because of LLMs.
I noticed something similar. Phrases I have noticed that Claude likes using are "... is doing major work ..." and "... worth pulling apart ...". Unfortunately, some of these have subconsciously become part of my own writing style as I noticed recently. English is not my mother tongue, so I'm pretty sure that I inherited these from Claude.
I don't think this person was trolling when in conversation they said "load-bearing" and "real". It is AI brain rot.
Come in without a login / cookies. It's like 60-70% AI now. It's crazy!
Not actually what this is about (but I was hoping it was because that'd be hilarious).
Warms my heart. Tech executives and politicians need to be put in their place.
my best friend is a high school english teacher. he said the worst part is kids keep hearing 'it's inevitable,' the complete integration of AI into every facet of life and thinking is gonna happen no matter what anyone says or does. this is the most manipulative and untrue thing anyone could say to a kid scared of a certain kind of future. its it's own kind of misinformation to tell people that something that will take an exorbitant amount of man power, coordination, resourcing, and experimentation to execute on is 'inevitable.'
he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.
In my 20+ years of career it has definitely felt the most tyrannical rollout of a technology I ever experienced.
Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic.
AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.
I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.
>AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.
The only part here with which I disagree is that I feel very similarly about the smartphone.
To some extent, I also think the global mood around Silicon Valley has soured. I remember just starting university when Facebook was taking off in the UK, and there was genuine buzz and excitement around being able to keep up with all your old friends. Years marched on and we started to uncover all the problems with social media, and their carelessness around their own impacts to society, so most people I know who were excited in 2010 were desperately finding ways not to be there.
Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.
Social media aren't disruptive, things like Facebook and Twitter worked great with chronological feeds. Same with YouTube. God, I miss pre-2012 YouTube when things mostly just got popular organically.
Once they started to have algorithmic feeds and those algorithms got tuned for maximum engagement at the detriment of every other factor, that's when things started to spiral downward.
Extremely sober take. And rare. Couldn't agree more.
Watching people push this stuff like this (in the face of clear public disapproval) feels like watching Uncut Gems.
You can tell that they know the music is about to stop and they're all desperate to find a chair. They didn't update their playbook for the next generation and now their cards are showing.
Short-term: oh boy. Long-term: phew.
I would be disappointed if someone took the completion of my degree and the ceremony behind it as an opportunity to push their business. There’s enough advertisements on the internet; We don't need ads in our universities, too.
I think the tech downward spiral is described quite well by the way we went from a historical Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford to this.
Related:
Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674
The kids are alright!
"AI" is so bad that people dont have the time to hate it directly, and there lives are such that pragmatism forces them to identify exactly what the source of the problems in the world is,well at least when it stands up and blithers out loud strait at them.
It really highlights the disconnect between these executives and reality.
I saw Dr. Fauci give a commencement speech over the weekend and was cheered for warning people about the massive increase in misinformation/disinformation, how AI is enabling it, and that they need to use their critical thinking skills when confronted with it.
>AI will take your job!!
>AI will lower your wages!!
>AI will be used to track you!!
>AI will surveil you and profile you like never before!!
Then they get surprised why they get booed. Even personally, I don’t think I met any person IRL that sees AI in a positive way. The only people who cheer for it are the techbros-AI-wrappers who want to sell you some slop SaaS, or the ones who benefit from its market manipulation and price gouging.
These people are so high on their own farts they completely lost the ability to think outside of their billionaires bubbles
Reporter: “Seems to have struck a nerve”
The Tech Powers That Be has told these young adults that AI will disrupt the job market that they are entering. Maybe decimate white collar work. Granted, maybe this was mostly a few years ago because the ecstatic celebration among the cream of the crop of the parasites seems to have cooled down, maybe because they figured out that telling everyone in office jobs that their tech was supposed to make their lives worse was a bad strategy. But still, that was a narrative that has stuck. So these kinds of people drill that non-consentual thought into young adults’ brain. Then the same kind come to their office job graduation ceremony and take the opportunity to hype AI? Yeah, they struck a nerve that they manufactured themselves.
Two possible conclusions to draw from that.
1. Their social brains are so atrophried and withered from the daily sycophancy (occupational hazard of being very high up on the corporate ladder) that they honestly thought that grads would be happy about AI disrupting the job market (the commoners love when stocks go up?)
2. Signalling to investors that AI Is Still Happening at every damn opportunity is more important than pissing off the people you are supposed to give an inspirational speech to
200 years ago people would have booed the industrial revolution. They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits.
I agree with your premise, but let's not pretend we did a good job equitably distributing the benefits of the industrial revolution
Once liberated from toil, how are these kids going to pay for rent?
Turns out the industrial revolution doomed us for short term luxury in the grand scheme of things.
> They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil
Come on, we're all adults and well-aware that if companies find a way to make people more productive, it just means they'll expect more, not that we'll get more free-time.
Both sides are at fault here, no? A consumer could work part-time and live as well or even much better as someone 50 years ago, but they largely don't want to. I do concede of course that housing is a bit limiting factor here and my "just adapt your lifestyle" doesn't fully hold.
Can they?
In most places with any sort of economic opportunity, I have a very hard time believing that part time earnings would get you housing on par with a full time earner in 1976.
They cant. Tech workers are just disconnected from real wages. Most people I know spend easily 40-60% of their monthly income on rent alone (if you're in University it'll be easily 80%+), all work full time. And thats in Europe, where living costs usually are much lower than in America. Some people just never leave their privileged circle and assume most people could get there somehow. I for sure couldn't afford a 50% pay cut. (4000€ pre tax, ~2500€ post tax) This doesnt even get me a good flat in Germany.
Not everyone characterizes AI as "liberation from toil," and many are skeptical that any "equitable distribution of benefits" will occur in the first place. That's the point.
This post is delusional. There nothing liberating about generative AI and folks aren't investing hundreds of billions because they think it will liberate people.
> cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits
Why would you think that will happen? You seem aware of, for instance, the Industrial Revolution and what it has ultimately resulted in.
In France and Russia there also had been revolutions. They have found a way to distribute.
I've noticed, as a student, that many college students - particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost. I understand the disdain for trying to inject the concept everywhere, and like any new technology, it's apt to be used where it is unneeded, and mentioned when it is irrelevant.
But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.
> You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up
Watch them :)
Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.
And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.
But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).
Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.
Something I've noticed as a general trend is that tech news has seemed to breed an optimistic fandom, that technology for the sake of technology must be good. It's exciting and dramatic, it's science fiction becoming reality. Concerns about needing to adapt around it are diminished even when it could be devastating (losing their job) to those involved, and it's unlikely much assistance will be given to "just" retrain.
Everybody pays the price for AI, but relatively few benefit.
Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.
Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.
> energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations
I've heard so many different takes on this. Where did you get this information?
https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from...
If AI were a country, it'd be 12th place in the world for energy consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
It's gone up considerably since last time I looked. Jeez.
I use AI a lot for development, but I am not sure why students should "embrace" the new technology made to take the job they are studying for.
> particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost.
What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.
Maybe they see it eradicating their job prospects and being used to cheat and invalidate their hard studying by others who want an insane productivity boost? That’s not fair to them if others are cheating and they’re learning properly.
You do realize luddites were people made unemployable and impoverished by new technology? Calling them luddites just proves their point.
They weren't even against it! They were the users of the new tech. They wanted regulation and a cut of the increased productivity. They were a nascent labour movement asking for things you and I take for granted. The responses at the time was, of course, violent reprisal.
They weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.
And many didn't, but either way I'm not surprised that students don't like the idea of becoming sweatshop workers.
"Yes, and", to see young children literally worked to death, getting crushed in machines.
They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted.
Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/
How did you come to believe that the industrial revolution in England caused a drop in life expectancy?
That paper appears to be yet another case of social scientists not understanding that correlation isn't causation. They demonstrate a trend in a noisy dataset of some very specific forms of injury and then declare it was the industrial revolution which caused it. But their analysis can't show that.
i think 'shake things up' is a doing a lot of work to minimize the impact this tool will have for this demographic in particular. especially for non-STEM college students, so in theory students who read/write a lot and therefore are probably sick of reading a lot of mid-tier, averaging slop.
I find my hatred of AI to be incredibly rational, and the cultlike veneration of the “insane productivity boost” it gives you to be truly irrational (whether or not that boost actually exists).
Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.
As a software engineer I am so deeply ashamed of how quick so many in the field have done a complete 180 on "productivity cannot be measured by lines of code" to wearing lines of code like a badge of honour.
It's similar to the hype around the "internet revolution", the "microservices revolution", all the "codeless" solutions over the decades...
Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.
Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).