The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
Much of the meaning we humans derive from work is tied to the value it provides to society. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding where it provides value to others/society is far more meaningful.
Presently some may say: AI is amazing I am much more productive, AI is just a tool or that AI empowers me. The irony is that this in itself shows the deficiency of AI. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you to NOT need to make you more productive. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for a human intermediary altogether that is the AI holy grail. Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now it is comfortable position financially or socially but your future you in just a few short months may be dramatically impacted.
I can well imagine the blood draining from peoples faces, the graduate coder who can no longer get on the job ladder. The law secretary whose dream job is being automated away, a dream dreamt from a young age. The journalist whose value has been substituted by a white text box connected to an AI model.
> AI is about centralisation of power
> So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things,
There are open source models and these will continue to keep abreast of new features. On device only models are likely to be available too. Both will be good enough especially for consumer use cases. Importantly it is not corporations alone that have access to AI. I for-see whole countries releasing their versions in an open source fashion and much more. After all you can't stop people applying linear algebra ;-)
There doesn't appear to be a moat for these organisations. HN users mention hopping from model to model like rabbits. The core mechanic is interchangeable.
There is a 'barrier to entry' of sorts that does exert some pressure or centralisation particularly at scale. It conveniently aligns well for large corporations and it is that GPU's are expensive and AI requires a lot of processing power. But it isn't the core issue.
Hardware is a different problem from software. Once the chores robot gets here, then what? Millions of houseworkers are now out of a job. Then how will you feel about AI?
> I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes
You're absolutely right, this is another face of this AI coin... We people are taught to do things and love doing them and we're scared it's going to be taken away from us. This is what I thought when writing about the man who cancelled CS course. He apparently predicted that learning algorithms solving won't make him happy because AI will do it for him
AI is just not that good. If it really made me more productive, why wouldn't I use it all the time? I'd get everything done before lunch and go home. Or I'd use it all day to do the work of 3 people and be on the fast track to promotions.
The problem is simply that it gets in the way. For things I know nothing about, AI is excellent. For things that I'm good at and have literally been doing for a decade+, I can just do it better and faster myself, and I'm tired of people who know nothing about my profession gaslighting me into thinking that LLMs do the same thing. And I'm really tired of people saying "oh AI is not good today, but it'll be good tomorrow so just start using them" -- fine, wake me up when it's good because I've been waiting and patiently testing every new SOTA model since 2023.
Just get the facts right, that's all I ask of tech execs. Why has AI become a religion?
> Or I'd use it all day to do the work of 3 people and be on the fast track to promotions.
Or, like execs want, you do work of 3 people, so we can fire two and get the bonus, plus maybe a 5% pay increase for you. "If someone is good at digging, give him a bigger shovel".
My impression is purely from a metrics perspective, people who were underperforming can really look like they are 3x as productive. AI is a real increase for them because it can do things they couldn't. It just gives them the ability to publish a thousand lines worth of PRs a day, which the regular and over performers have to review, but that shows up in THEIR metrics, not in the underperformer's metrics. If all you look at is metrics and KPIs and have no technical understanding, this looks amazing to you.
Most people I've worked with that were already some of the most productive before AI took off are still at the top, and AI didn't move the needle much for them. There's simply no way for them to do 3x the work.
I do not believe this is the main reason at all.
The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".
Much of the meaning we humans derive from work is tied to the value it provides to society. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding where it provides value to others/society is far more meaningful.
Presently some may say: AI is amazing I am much more productive, AI is just a tool or that AI empowers me. The irony is that this in itself shows the deficiency of AI. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you to NOT need to make you more productive. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for a human intermediary altogether that is the AI holy grail. Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now it is comfortable position financially or socially but your future you in just a few short months may be dramatically impacted.
I can well imagine the blood draining from peoples faces, the graduate coder who can no longer get on the job ladder. The law secretary whose dream job is being automated away, a dream dreamt from a young age. The journalist whose value has been substituted by a white text box connected to an AI model.