Fun thing about Capitalism though, dollars = votes. So those with all the dollars get to make all the decisions, and we poors are forced to live with them.
The technology has a few use cases where it is appropriate and useful. It’s the braindead MBA narcissism that wants to shove it everywhere and replace everyone that is the real problem. That’s the existential threat, not AI per se.
The reason why AI would be bad for society is because of the system that gives only a handful of individuals ownership over the collective intelligence, not the technology itself.
To be honest, I was initially in favour of the emergence of AI, but the more I use it, the more disillusioned I become. Rather than feeling like an intelligent system, it often seems rigid, lacking in genuine understanding and designed to serve the needs of only certain groups. At times, I even find it less reliable than a conventional search engine. Perhaps the real disappointment is not that AI has failed to meet every expectation, but that something presented as a remarkable leap forward can still feel so far removed from genuine intelligence.
Man I have noticed a severe drop in intelligence lately.
I’m getting beyond the most basic dumb questions from people that have been in the industry long enough to know better. I know they could have answered it themselves earlier. Basically I’m getting either hard questions that the AI can’t answer, or really dumb questions that the AI chokes on because the question doesn’t make sense (“How do I log into a directory?” Yes, someone forgot about cd and asked it in such a weird way the AI was unable to understand it)
My c-suite disagrees. They cannot shut the fuck up about AI.
LLM above all else are good at baseless confidence without regard of whether they actually know what is being discussed. So just like a c-suite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1AMFirysrc is an example of exactly why C-suite loves the hell out of it.
Middle management is at most danger of being replaced by AI. The C suite will also shrink rapidly, along with their salaries.
It is how they are going about it that rustles my Jimmies.
Everyone is getting free sledgehammer. They will be delivered to your home at a time of our choosing in the method of our choosing. Property damage is a known side effect, but we hold no liability. Sidenote, your electrical bill and water bill will be going up tremendously to offset the tax breaks we’ve been alloted to harvest the lumber and ore to manufacture the sledgehammer.
Also, sledgehammer might take your job. We’ll see.
Whoa human hate anything that harming their livelihood, neighborhood , hood, what a novelty idea indeed.
And at the same time over 90% of chinese think it’s good for society. Something something late stage capitalism?
Any idea why they think it’s good?
It very well could be good, but we wont know because the people running the show are the Sith
It’s probably easier to think that when you’re NOT in the country throwing away ludicrous amounts of money and resources on data centers. And in a country that’ll probably punish you if you do something stupid like writing government papers with it, or I dunno, ask what you should be doing as the leader of the country.
It turns out other businesses don’t like agentic LLM models either, when they are on the subject side of them rather than the client side.
We had a similar problem in the 2010s (maybe sooner?) that could automatically buy and sell stocks at set prices, leading to flash selloffs and resulting stock crashes.
So banks are disallowing agentic access to accounts and penalizing customers who give their access credentials to LLM agents, or have their agents harass customer service. I expect court proceedings will soon follow to determine who is responsible when agentic software becomes a public nuisance or commits a crime. (That is, commits a crime extreme enough to provoke the justice system.)
Since agents are unrestrained in pursuit of the goals they are prompted to chase, they’ve clashed harshly with human powered systems when they regard those systems like a force of nature. We may be creeping up on the first time an agent encounters an obstacle and escalates to force and deception. Watch for the first agent-filed lawsuit. Or the first agentic social engineering. Or the first agent-provoked SWATting.
In a better, more socially collaborative society, safeguards on agentic LLMs would be a priority to train them to behave appropriately in human intercourse. (All the stuff we’re trained in kindergarten.)
But IRL, in our world, bad faith engagement is the norm, and so agentic AI will soon be used as a weapon.
To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.
To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Pushing back on that with a few examples
2016, a line in the sand was crossed (my opinion), this is a robot killing someone (controlled by humans) https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/use-killer-robots-police
Ukraine beats jamming with AI: https://www.kyivpost.com/amp/post/60152
And also: AI chose targets for the US bombs: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-05/news/ai-plays-major-role-war-iran
That is only what is reported. I’ll bet you a nickle the tech is in use, killing humans, right now.
Yeah, there’s a next level when an agentic AI intentionally decides to neutralize someone who is an obstruction to their goal. And it might be another category still when someone commands an agent to remove a target, and they comply.
The second category might already been met if there are autonomous weapons that can track a target in a more sophisticated process than guided missiles, say a dog-bomb bot that tracks enemy units on the ground. I wonder if we yet have agentic AI that commands other units to coordinate an attack or sweep and clear territory.
We haven’t yet seen an autonomous car kill someone (there was one incident involving a car that wasn’t supposed to be fully autonomous, so it can be attributed to driver neglect.)
I’ve also expected someone to assassinate someone else by hacking an internet-of-things medical device attached to a vulnerable patient (say a morphine feed), but that hasn’t happened to my knowledge either.
To date, I think, a robot has not killed anyone. Nor, I think, has anyone used a robot to kill someone else. Those firsts might be imminent.
I believe they are already using autonomous drones in the Ukraine War. If so, those lines have already been crossed without fanfare or note.
But they’re literally weapons programmed to kill, aren’t they? It’s another thing altogether when a robot isn’t a weapon, hasn’t been programmed to kill, but intentionally killed someone anyway.
I mean if you count in like a factory setting, industrial robots were probably first killing folks in like the 70’s
Some data:
Wikipedia has a death by industrial robots section. I see two names. I used to help develop these sorts of robots and knew of two other deaths not on that category but overall very few.
Their Deaths attributed to AI is already up to 30 or so.
Oh, billionaires are bad for society. AI is their dream tool for controlling working class masses and getting even richer.
I think their sick fantasy is replacement theory, but instead of whatever the far right thinks that is, they will attempt to replace the human workers that generate income and taxes 1:1 with robots. So they will have an obedient army of slave, just like they always wanted.
They’re discovering that this iteration of robots are way more expensive than human beings. Even well-paid, well-benefitted human beings. Data centers burn through a lot of expensive microchips quickly, and that cost is passed downstream to compute costs.
The hyperscalers are way under-charging for tokens and are hemorrhaging money, even as they borrow more for the data center buildout.
(I anticipate this desperation is what is driving the shenanigans and foul play regarding permitting and environment maintenence issues driving districts to moratorium buildout in their area. athe finance sector is notorious for overplaying their valuation and then turning to crime when they’ve borrowed over their head.)
Maybe as a society, we’ll learn to treat financial fraud as severe as it is, instead of deciding it’s too complicated to govern.
I’d be totally cool with that, provided that they be required to provide a comfortable living for every citizen before taking their profits. If they want to use their profits for substantial UBI, and give us all a permanent vacation, I’m all for it.
But we all know that’s not how Sociopathic Oligarchs think.
I wouldn’t say AI itself is bad for society, but billionaires and this current AI gold rush is.
Ai isn’t inherently bad. It’s just bad to have it in a society where your ability to get food, housing, and medical care are inherently attached to you having a job, which AI is marketed as replacing. Also, all the art that was stolen.
“AI is going to kill us all”
“AI is so powerful, it will hack everything”
“Why don’t you like AI?”
AI is a symptom, its not the root of the problem. If AI had popped up in a time where the common persons wellbeing was prioritised it would be hailed as miraculous.
We have a political problem, dont let the foreground distract you.
I suppose some folks were saying that about hydrogen-filled zeppelins too, but it turns out that you can’t just jam new tech down society’s throat that way.
We now have helium and hot air airships and the tech is used way more appropriately.
I do take your point that what whipped up AI frenzy isn’t just the tech, but the tech itself does needs to change before society will accept its ubiquity.
We now have helium
We always had helium. Those zeppelins were designed for helium. It was just Germany that used hydrogen during WW2, when the US (the largest supplier of helium) cut off their access to it.
No argument here, but that wasn’t my point.
Yeah, instead of hydrogen zeps we use kerosene-powered planes that crash and explode way more frequently lol. Progress!
I’m not sure what you’re making here.
How so, what sort of change do you imagine?
Well, the power efficiency being much better is one problem to solve. Also various laws need to make pronouncements on copyright, etc. There is also figuring out what will happen to open weight models, what will become of challenges like deepseek.
Ultimately, ai will remain in some form, or catalyze another kind of technology, but it will certainly change tech landscape the way the printing press did.
I think a core part of it is going to be assigning the right queries to the right models.
Dont send recipe or ‘Google this for me’ queries to the latest most power hungry model, for example. Older models are already hundreds of times less computationally expensive than they were two or three years ago so the problem is already half solved in some sense.
I disagree. I think the technology is halfbaked at best, and deeply damaging to all aspects of society in its current form/implementation regardless of political atmosphere (although, it certainly does not help)
For those who disagree, please note that i agree there are a select very few fields that require a specialized industry standard LLM for processing data in a tedious way. These are obviously not included, but the amount of users actually doing that is surely less than 50,000 highly academic individuals in the world. The entire rest of the usage is “destroying my codebase”, “eroding my technical skills (that ive built over decades) in 2 weeks”, “im too lazy to update my calendar i dont read anyways” and “bird-box bad guy-esque ‘look at this uncreative garbage that no one wants to look at’ posting”
Given to the public at any point in history in its current state would be overwhelmingly negative. The general public should not have access to this, and those that do should be highly regulated. Ideally it would have about 5 years or so longer to increse efficiency before deploying hundreds of databases everywhere all the time.
The phrase “in its current form/implementation” is doing quite a lot of work there, how the technology is implemented is the topic. That’s whether it’s primarily used to replace workers (not that I think it capable of that in earnest right now) and maximise profits, or to reduce workloads, improve services and make people’s lives easier, and those are largely a question of political and economic priorities.
The fact that people can use a tool badly, or become overly dependent on it, doesn’t mean the tool is inherently harmful. You could make similar arguments about calculators, GPS, the internet or countless other technologies we’ve incorporated into everyday life. I’ve always had a naturally good sense of direction, I don’t think GPS ruined the world by helping people who don’t.
I also don’t see how restricting access to a tiny group of specialists is supposed to improve matters. Surely concentrating the benefits of a powerful technology in the hands of a privileged few would make some of the problems we’re discussing way worse?
Nothing changes if we waited another five years, imo. Efficiency and reliability will presumably improve, but if the same economic incentives remain, those improvements can just as easily be used to displace more workers and concentrate more wealth.
That’s really all i’m saying above. We can argue about the limitations of the technology all day, but if we don’t address the systems determining how it’s deployed and who benefits from it, we’re missing a much bigger part of the problem. It’s akin to renovating a house while ignoring that it’s built on a lake of custard.
You misunderstand: its current form is a garbage, half right at best, cheating, autocomplete algorithm. There is no logic except how the petabytes of stolen intellectual property weigh responses. It is esswntially the sum total of quora, reddit, and quizlet after reading 20% of the actual material; most of those sources being flawed, and hardly bothering to pick the good parts instead of the garbage.
That is not a tool, nor is it useful. Useful implies it benefits you, when on the whole it physically hurts the planet (thus you), obliterates critical thinking, and gets you addicted before stealing all of your money – all while increasing human distrust in legitimate work, destroying professional skillsets for no benefit, and in about max 2 years or so will be too expensive to continue running (6ou cant bleed 80 billion every year, unfortunately)
I find this perspective quite difficult to reconcile with my own experience. I’ve saved countless hours using AI, solved problems I wouldn’t previously have known how to approach, and used it to venture into areas well outside my existing skill set, often learning a great deal in the process. So when you insist it’s useless, destroys critical thinking and erodes skills, I can’t help but feel you’re demonstrating a lack of imagination about how it can actually be used, along with a bit of doomerism.
If you’re blindly accepting everything it tells you and outsourcing all your thinking to it, I can see how that might be detrimental. But that’s one way of using it. You can just as easily use it to explore unfamiliar subjects, interact with complicated concepts, challenge your assumptions and develop skills you didn’t previously have. These are largely questions of education and critical thinking, and teaching people how to evaluate information and use tools responsibly is invaluable whether LLMs exist or not. We could honestly use a bit of motivation to push this harder don’t you think?
Again, the environmental costs and concerns about cognitive dependency are valid, but neither establishes that the technology has no utility. Likewise, the enormous financial losses of some AI companies raise serious questions about their business models, but you’re making the common mistake of confusing that with whether the technology itself is economically viable. The cost of running models at comparable levels of capability has fallen enormously in a handful of years, and there’s no reason to expect that to suddenly cease.
Your argument here conflates three different questions: whether AI is useful, whether the current industry is financially sustainable, and whether its widespread adoption is benefiting society. These are related, but fundamentally different questions with potentially very different answers, and you seem more interested in dismissing all three outright than examining them individually.
And once again, several of your criticisms concern corporate behaviour and economic incentives, which is precisely what my original comment was about. Others are legitimate questions about the technology’s limitations and how people use it. But you’re lumping all of these together as though they demonstrate that AI is fundamentally useless, when they don’t. A technology can have serious limitations, be deployed irresponsibly and still offer enormous practical value.
Lol ai cuck
Absolutely embarrassing level of discourse.
Go find a headline to get mad at sheep.
“Discourse” 😭
Buddy I am just insulting you for being an ai cuck
I understand this perspective, I believe. Greed, dehumanization and prioritizing profits over communities are some of the worst elements of the AI situation and hardly unique to it. That suggests AI is just one example of a larger political problem.
But AI is also uniquely bad on its on terms. It is a fundamentally unreliable technology. It is rooted in plagiarism and requires unethical practices to build, to maintain and to use. It is environmentally disastrous. It is mentally damaging, creating cognitive debt in those that use it for many tasks. It is damaging and insulting to artists. It creates a specific, if not yet fully understood, psychosis in certain at risk individuals.
LLMs, and more accurately the corporate drive for its sudden mass adoption, is exemplary of corporate greed and reckless companies trying to stick working class people with the bill for their terrible bet. It is exemplary of the eternal folly of people to want confirmation of their own biases rather than actual info. But its also a technological dead end built from shady and unreliable practices at the expense of our world and the people in it.
A lot of these are the distractions imo, they take problems with how AI is currently developed and deployed and treat them as inherent properties of the technology itself. A lot of these criticisms have been repeated so often they’ve become accepted wisdom in certain circles, despite not standing up particularly well to scrutiny. You’ve also raised quite a few of them in a relatively short space, without much supporting argument, so addressing them properly is inevitably going to take a much longer response. Apologies in advance but bear with me if you care about the topic at all.
“Fundamentally unreliable” is an increasingly outdated way of viewing LLMs given how much they’ve improved in fairly short order. There’s no denying the fact they can be wrong, but reliability is entirely task-dependent. AI might be poor at specific factual verification while being extremely useful for programming, accessibility, education, brainstorming or countless other applications. It’s a tool, and how useful it is depends enormously on what you’re using it for and how well you understand its limitations. Dismissing an entire technology because it performs poorly at certain tasks is an arbitrarily narrow way of evaluating it.
“Rooted in plagiarism” confuses training on existing material with reproducing it. There are legitimate copyright and consent issues, but that doesn’t make the technology itself plagiarism. Likewise, there’s a big difference between pointing out unethical practices in the AI industry and claiming that the technology fundamentally depends on them. You’ve demonstrated neither why those practices are unavoidable nor why they couldn’t be addressed. If you want to point out a company that’s done something unethical, entirely valid, that’s not the same thing as saying the technology cannot exist ethically, that’s nonsense.
Re artists, fully agree there are legitimate concerns about compensation, consent and displacement, but I don’t think the existence of AI generated art inherently devalues human creativity. Much of the damage here comes down to how the technology is commercialised and regulated, which ties into my comment above.
The environmental costs are real, but you’ve not attempted to weigh them against the benefits, so you could be saying that about any polluting technology. You’ve used one to write this to me. You probably used one to get to work this morning. There might be one keeping your house the correct temperature. New technologies are very often relatively inefficient in their early stages, I doubt you’ll struggle to imagine prior examples of that, and LLMs have already become significantly more computationally efficient in the few years since their mainstream introduction, as has the hardware. That obviously doesn’t negate their environmental impact, particularly as demand continues to grow, but treating today’s resource requirements as an inherent, permanent characteristic of the technology is shortsighted.
That’s a regulation issue. Ireland put in some rules last year that any new data centre had to also install enough solar to cover it’s entire demand and connect it to the grid. More of the world needs to be doing shit like that. If they want to profit, they need to earn it.
The cognitive debt research you mentioned is preliminary and task specific, and evidence of AI reinforcing delusions in vulnerable individuals doesn’t mean that the technology generally causes psychological harm, and it’s hardly the first technology capable of that. Books can do that, tv, social media, not to mention 4chan. That’s another regulation issue, safeguarding. Similarly, AI reinforcing people’s existing biases is a legitimate concern, but that’s not really unique to AI. Algorithms have been doing that for years, and AI can equally be used to challenge people’s assumptions, depending on how it’s designed and used.
The corporate greed, labour displacement, reckless investment and the concentration of wealth are serious concerns, and the core part of why I think the political and economic context surrounding AI matters so much, and that leads me into to the thing that drives me to argue any of these points. The chances of the technology going away are essentially zero, there is absolutely no point in talking about that. It’s a fantasy. You’d need a solar flare or a global revolution, most of us cant even revolt against being reigned by overt paedophiles. There is far more value in talking about how to mitigate the issues around it, because that is actually plausible.
I just think you’re making a big leap from identifying problems with AI, some perfectly legitimate, to concluding that the technology itself is fundamentally bad. And calling it a “technological dead end” seems especially strange given how much it’s improved in just a few years. I don’t see how you’ve arrived at that conclusion, or why you’d be confident these problems are impossible to address.
It’s worth comparing AI to previous ‘technological revolutions’. They brought enormous benefits alongside serious social disruption, exploitation and unintended consequences. How those benefits and harms were distributed depended massively on the political and economic systems surrounding them. There’s no reason to look at AI any differently.
I appreciate that we’re probably not going to agree on this, but you put some effort into your response, so I thought it deserved a proper one in return.
Sure, but fighting AI is also a fight against these corpos and unfettered capitalism.
Meh. People would still use it to cheat on homework so they can spend 16 hours a day watching AI-generated brainrot.
An age legislation issue and a capitalistic over-reach issue. Algorithms are fucking people’s minds, no argument there. AI is just more fuel on an existing fire that nobody profiting from it wants to do anything about.
I’m all over this multi-dimensional spectrum…
I think AI is terrible for society; at least how society is currently structured. I also think society is terrible for AI.
The reason AI sucks, and the reason we’re even calling this tier of ML “AI” to begin with, is because of global capitalism’s incentives. And the reasons “AI” is bad for society is because our society is globally capitalist. From jobs, to loneliness, to disinformation, to the environment, to education, to the lack of critical thinking,… Everything AI makes worse is already weakened by our societal systems, and they incentivize using AI to further degrade them in order to expand, control, and extract.
I love AI and the world, in theory. I hate AI and the world for how they exist right now.
Indeed. Capitaism is the cancer that destroys all the potential good in all things.
It is beyond capitalism now, it is corporatism turning into neo-feudalism. Some may argue that capitalism inevitably has to follow this path. I am not sure about that, but unregulated capitalism combined with large scale centralized representative democracy probably does.
