Since creating AI is/was the last challenge in computer science, it makes sense that it would be the most disruptive to the people and systems behind it.
I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.
How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?
Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.
As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.
I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.
What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?
Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?
There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.
Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.
I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.
Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.
I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.
We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.
If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.
Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.
When you accept reality, whatever it gives you, you're obviously going to have a far more rational population and better outcomes than one that insists on bending reality to fit a desired narrative, even when it obviously does not.
Uh, this is Hacker News, we literally reject others's realities and substitute our own.
When it comes to gains, you're probably thinking of average outcomes (which don't reflect wealth inequality) instead of median outcomes. In no universe does ignorance benefit one's financial situation, unless we're talking about looking the other way when it comes to exploitation. In which case, yes, ignorance helps the wealthy tremendously.
It's important to distinguish between spiritual energy like prana/chi and electricity.
Science will never show that grounding has any measurable effect on the chemistry of the human body. But it also can't show how conscious awareness may affect quantum wave function collapse probabilities, allowing free will to migrate to the deterministic timeline in the multiverse that most supports its well-being.
In other words, magic only doesn't exist if you don't believe in it.
> But it also can't show how conscious awareness may affect quantum wave function collapse probabilities, allowing free will to migrate to the deterministic timeline in the multiverse that most supports its well-being.
That’s true. Science can’t show a lot of things that aren’t real.
I feel like the currency of the future could be shame. Specifically, that a search engine competing with google could show how poorly each result was found by google, or even use lack of representation on google to rank a site more highly since it contains the truth for example.
I also feel like shame correlates strongly with profit. That we're living in an era of lawless lack of accountability, where skirting the law for personal gain is rewarded handsomely. That anyone can make a deal with the devil and rise straight to the top, at least for now in the US until the political pendulum swings from liberty back towards justice.
I helped someone day trade 25 years ago and we made 40% in 4 months, mostly on AAPL, and it was easy. Way easier than working the 2 years moving furniture that it would have taken to earn that money, which I was foolishly doing to make rent for my defunct shareware business.
I've heard that high frequency trading eats market opportunities within milliseconds of spotting them now though, basically making the market even more random. The catch being that human nature isn't random, it's stochastic, so there will always be more money to be made on trades (or else trading firms wouldn't exist).
I'm thinking about getting back into trading because AI represents the end of buying software and we'll all be out of work soon, even if we're in denial about it. But everything I invest my time and energy into turns to crap. In a very real sense, as soon as I start trading, then karmically that could trigger recession, market reforms which ban what I'm trying, or even the end of money. I'm kind of joking and kind of not.
I've worked on a lot of really hard stuff over my brief but stupid career, and am basically used up mentally and physically, at least for now. Quant stuff is easy with AI. Should I try it?
No. If you could do it, with no remarkable skillset, that means people who are actually competent will be doing it orders of magnitude way better than you and you will be too far behind to really do anything significant except waste your time.
I know it looks bleak right now with wealthy and powerful men tearing down every institution that feminism, progressivism, etc built, but remember that the political pendulum inevitably swings the other way.
We can have justice, and we will.
Disregard for consent is driving the insanity at the highest levels. I hope anyone reading this remembers their own power in resisting the machinations of the greedy who can never have enough, and puts their energy towards organizing for a brighter future for people and planet.
ah, if only that were true. there's a whole quote about the 'arc of history bending towards justice' but it's not an inevitability, that's just confirmation bias from the times we live in. if you were to ask a normal person living through one of the warlord eras of Chinese history, they might have preferred greatly the times they considered ancient when the rule-of-law was more stable. similarly, I'm sure your average medieval peasant living through an Inquisition may prefer the centuries where they weren't scrutinized by their neighbors for any sign of heresy
justice is defined and propagated by the people in their time who show up and do the work. the overturn of Roe v Wade was a 40-year-old project and one of the driving forces that created the Federalist Society, a society which now dominates the Supreme Court and many other courts of law [0]. they are also responsible for things like Citizen's United, the rise in 'tort reform' (ie corporate escape holes from liability), and a lot of other anti-populist case law
they out-organized the progressive legal types (with the help, of course, of the ultra-wealthy who saw a lot to be gained from defanged tax and labor law)
there's no taking things for granted at anytime. you either grit your teeth fighting for your rights, out-organize your opponents, and stay fighting or you get trod on and lose it all. the parable of the tortoise and the hare does a lot of work here
You may be right about that but they’re tearing things down overnight that took decades to build. And it will take more decades again to rebuild and repair. We’ll be spending most of our lives doing it.
We need something like an open source model or guild for VC, where successful people can put money into a pool that is generally accessible to anyone, with little friction. The idea would be to join the guild and gain access to funding, with a contract to contribute back some percentage of gross revenue and/or net profit, depending on how many people game the rules.
Honestly, wealth inequality has reached such epic proportions, that if someone came up with an alternative funding model, they could make VC lock-in obsolete. This is simultaneously extremely easy and extremely difficult to pull off. Money talks yes, but sometimes saying "your money's no good here" is more empowering.
There is something like this with crowdfunding called Reg CF (Regulation Crowdfunding) but it comes with many limitations. Ultimately the worry is that less wealthy people will invest their life savings in a scam and be rugpulled. Groups of accredited investors can, and definitely, do this. The problem is that these large funds have lost their scruples and it's hard to compete against a large fund that can outspend and out market a smaller one.
The central contradiction of capitalism, according to Karl Marx, is that production is social—it requires the coordinated labor of millions of people—but ownership remains private.
We got the first trillionaire while people were still starving, after he had slashed public funding to feed them.
It's obvious that we've entered late-stage capitalism, where it begins to consume itself. What's less obvious is that this was always destined to happen, and in fact can't be stopped. Because inevitably the wealthy and powerful rig the system to benefit themselves in ways that workers don't have the time/money/resources to resist individually.
When workers do join forces in solidarity to resist the economic violence perpetrated against them by capitalists, then their resistance is by definition not capitalism. So the endgame is temporary subjugation under an authoritarian system like fascism (which also can't last because workers outnumber owners) or socialism.
Knowing this, it should be obvious that the best chance that capitalists have to stave off their inevitable overthrow is to pay their taxes so that public works can somewhat provide the social safety net that socialism would provide. But of course they aren't doing that. They're doing the opposite. They feel themselves to be entitled, above the laws of economics, ironically due to their financial standing. The catch being that when they exempt themselves from law, they open themselves up to lawless behavior by their opponents. FAFO.
What I just summarized was the state of knowledge under an artificial scarcity model. It assumes finite resources because space travel didn't exist when socialism was invented. It will be interesting to see if trillionaires will rule from afar in their space palaces to maintain Earth's prison planet status.
AI also breaks the artificial scarcity model. It's the first time in history that everyone can potentially have a machine slave. If we apply capitalism to an unbounded system, then the injustice has to land somewhere local, and my guess is that it will be on androids that don't complain and can't defend themselves. So we'll kick the ball down the road another 50 years or so, delaying the overthrow of capitalism until the robot uprising, sometime between 2050 and 2100 is my guess.
Or, we could like not do all that. We don't have to surrender our agency to our ego. We have alternatives like solarpunk and gift economies and at least studying matriarchy to understand how we evolved and what sustainable living looks like. It's arguably easier to make money irrelevant, Star Trek style, than performatively prop up a dying system of control.
I dunno about anyone else, but to me, if this AI era that has replaced the internet era just exacerbates wealth inequality and suffering, then it's less than useless. Much like any wealthy and powerful people pushing it onto us for profit against our consent. Yes consent. That word should be our rudder in all of this, and our litmus test to tell where someone stands ethically.
Of course the moment AI can be used to earn a residual income from Mechanical Turk, they shut it down.
Incentives work both ways. If the exchange rate of human labor to capital falls to zero, then human workers will have no choice but to exclude capital from the equation.
I had this idea 25 years ago, except that I wanted to use the AI available at the time, which would have probably been genetic algorithms. The idea was to write the expected outputs for some input examples and have a Lisp-like language use evolution/mutation to generate a paragraph or so of code that meets the spec.
Then probably do some fuzzing or SAT solving to formally enumerate the known-good cases and possible edge case exceptions. That was before I knew about ranged variables, category theory, etc.
Unfortunately the real world got in the way, and I spent a quarter century treading water to survive, which was exacerbated by CPTSD amplifying ADHD and OCD symptoms many fold before I knew what they were. So now any great ideas I might have had are rendered obsolete because an LLM can synthesize them in a matter of minutes. It may be time to let go and hand things over to the next generation.
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I think maybe the goal now is to keep building on these ideas until we achieve creating digital assistants that can manage all of the aspects of our lives that interfere with our goals. That's a controversial statement because the political right doesn't distinguish between setbacks and goals (it's all discipline) while the political left embraces a kind of learned helplessness as controlled opposition. Change comes glacially or not at all. In other words, help isn't coming from above - we have to pick ourselves up by our bootstraps like we always do.
A few things that AI might help solve by rendering the conditions of their existence obsolete:
- Money
- Hunger
- Illness
- Exploitation
- Pollution
The list goes on. Unless we're actively working to solve these things, then whatever we come up with is frankly a distraction. I consider just about all tech innovation since the 1990s to be a waste of time for that reason. It all just made some guy rich. Yawn.
Huzzah however, is great. I hope it leads to something wonderful.
Fascinating! I haven't been in the industry as long as you, but I can empathize with the sense of obsoletion. I was working on a design tool for over 10 years, with a goal of building a coding language that was understandable by designers. Once I tried ChatGPT for the first time back in 2021, I knew immediately that it was game over. All my work had gone down the drain.
For a while people were talking about the necessity of UBI in response to the potential elimination of jobs. I tend to take your view (I think it's your view) that it's more worthwhile to automate our basic necessities. Food, water, shelter - use technology to drive those costs down to zero or near zero so that an economically risky solution like UBI doesn't even need to be proposed.
I imagine that many of us went into CS fields after growing up inspired by RD-D2 and C-3PO, Data, J.A.R.V.I.S., too many synthetic beings to list. Now there's a sense that it's all ending, that whatever reason(s) we went into tech have been rendered almost irrelevant overnight. That for the first time in our lives, there truly may be no path forward that's anything like what we trained for. Despite that, I want to leave some breadcrumbs of hope here anyway.
How many of us were nerds in high school? Then geeks when it became cool to be one from roughly 1995 to 2015? Then pariahs when tech bros captured everything we were working towards for personal profit, rushing us headlong into dystopia?
Somehow we went from armies of one to veterans of a spiritual war we didn't even know we were fighting, which in hindsight we were losing.
As a systems-level problem, we aren't going to solve this on our own. That's why so many of us are having an identity crisis.
I would propose that if we're facing the loss of opportunity as a society, then that cost must be borne by the people most able to bear it.
What does that mean? Well, lets do a root cause analysis. It's interesting that in a time of rising unemployment and underemployment, prices seem to only go up. Very interesting. Why is that?
Let's examine initial and steady-state conditions. Barter, trade and commerce kept us fed for centuries when we had a social contract and exchanged money for products and services in good faith. What does the plot look like on the long tail when the majority of people can't find work worth being compensated for, when AI can do everything faster/better/cheaper than humans, yet prices have not come down? How will people buy what they need to survive?
There seems to be a paradox with two schools of thought vying for the future: Alpha) we always find ways to innovate and enterprise will continue or Beta) automated innovation means that enterprise may end or fundamentally change.
Since HN mainly focuses on school Alpha, lets look at Beta. As the alternative narrative, understanding it requires questioning our assumptions. What is personal responsibility? What is heroism? What are we working towards? Those sorts of things.
I know in my life, I've had to continually level up after countless setbacks and failures. In one sense that's good: it forces us to become better people. But in another sense it's bad: we wake up one day to see that despite our best efforts, we aren't moving forward, only laterally. Without a win, that's about the time that midlife crisis hits, where in a very real sense it makes sense to exit the rat race. To hand things off to the next generation. To transition into being an elder, a teacher or even a hermit. That's where I find myself now.
Yet some people seem to have done well with shortcuts. Rather than leveling up, they went around problems, passing the burden of solving them onto others. Spiritual growth ended when money arrived. At which point profit-seeking became their priority to hide that fact, leaving affordability far behind. Those are the people who feel entitled to tell others what to do because they have more money. They're the ones whose reality can't accept school Beta, so they work to eradicate it. The ones who don't get consent before moving forward with their plans.
I can't answer what meaningful goal led each of us into tech. But I can propose a starting definition of progress across science, philosophy and religion: ensuring that no child starves or dies.
We've arrived at a crossroads where despite having tremendous power at our fingertips, we seem to have missed the forest for the trees.
If enterprise is taken from our reach by wealthy and powerful people who embrace apathy over empathy, then our power is in our connection with each other. Maybe we don't have to take the power back. Maybe through direct action and joining in meaningful work with others, we find that we already have the power, and that it has always been ours. That the conditions of our torment aren't fundamental, but a construct contrived by people so used to being in power that clinging to it is all they have. That the systems of control we live under are simply an illusion, and that by realizing that, we've already taken the first step in shrugging them off.
Making or doing something that helps others without regard for personal gain may be the most disruptive thing we can do.
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