The way we phrase anger with AI doesn't convey the structural realities of what's going on in the knowledge work chain. Gen Z aren't suddenly becoming anti-tech they are acting financially rationally to protect their own economic future.
In the past there was an implicit contract for white-collar employment that was based on the concept of earned experience through a period of manufacturing type work. You enter your profession by performing uninteresting, low-paying manufacturing tasks (such as, writing boilerplate type code or performing low-level quality assurance) while you gain domain expertise and gain the perspective necessary to perform high-value work at a higher level.
LLMs are now exceptionally good at consuming the 20% of an employees entry-level responsibilities.
What I see happening in the enterprise is that management is using AI to justify pulling the ladder up behind them and closing the door behind them. When a senior engineer's or senior analyst's productivity has increased by 30% due to using LLMs, the executive's response is typically not great, we have more time to work on bigger projects, but instead great, we can freeze junior hiring for 2 years.
The entry-level positions in the labor force are being automated, causing seriously low access to those roles for the Gen Z workforce. On the other hand, most senior-level positions are not being available to Gen Z workers as they lack the skills and experience required to qualify for those positions.
Stagnation in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is the direct result of having no entry or junior level employees to work underneath senior staff members, causing a bottleneck for seniors. Employees generating raw output with AI technology have to check the results (output) for accuracy before integrating into work systems and processes as there are no entry-level employees to provide assistance to senior workers.
Gen Z workers do not dislike the tool (AI) however, they do not like how the tool is being implemented and used currently. Currently, the implementation of AI is driven by cost cutting in terms of labor rather than being focused on providing training and developing Gen Z's human capital for future use.
Don't worry, it's a shiny tool at the moment. The electric screwdriver had its wow moment too.
I still haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie. If it wasn't made by a person, there is no 'personal'-ity to it. It's just bland.
Eventually things will slow and slide back to thoughtful first, crapload second.
I think AI movies (or shorts for that matter, since I am not aware of any feature length movie) currently are not bland, they are simply of very low quality because they are pushing the limits of the current technology. However by the time the technology catches up (might not be as soon as many expect), then nobody will care about them because it will not have personality.
3D movies were a huge shiny new tool for a while too. I hated them. They still exist but its not so in-your-face (pun!) like it was. Like hey we did a remake of the Godfather but in 3D!
I hope AI follows the same path and diminishes. Still available, but only where it make sense.
AI is making some degree of growth in Spotify IIRC.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music. It's like a hodgepodge of popular songs with little rhyme or reason. Very 'sloppy' but if they like it....
It's hard for me to confirm if they really are AI or not. But I'm willing to bet that (random Roblox game they're interested in today) == heavily AI made. Maybe there's some real human effort here or there but I have heavy suspicions.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music.
Didn't we all start as kids listening to music that is so formulaic that it could as well be AI-generated? A subset of people iteratively refines their music tastes and starts listening everything from bebop to obscure Canadian hardcore bands and will recognize quality in music.
But I am of the opinion that AI slop is displacing a lot of would-be beginner musicians and making it even harder for them to break out.
For better or worse, a lot of beginner artists were relying upon my nieces and their classmates) clicking on their music and sharing them for Spotify $$$.
For the past year, I think I've watched more AI generated video content than movies in terms of hours spent. Some of it is quite good (eg. Neuralwiz)! Granted, I watch very few movies, but still, I'd say this kind of counts.
Have you seen any recent mainstream movie made by "a person"? "Human made" is not the quality brand most people are looking for today. If authors are mentaly ill and have shitty personality, AI slop will be better.
Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
I think this time is different. I’m not Gen Z, yet once my kids are out of school, I’m planning to leave tech behind as much as possible.
When I started in tech, at the dawn of the internet, it was an exciting field full of hope and the promise to empower and enrich the lives of people. Tech now is largely the opposite.
Enshitification is making things progressively worse. tech companies are creating systems and tools with dark patterns abound to ensure you no longer own anything, are under constant surveillance, and populations at large are manipulated through the magic of propaganda and illusory truth. Even the productivity gains are perversely used to not give people more time through fewer work days/hours but to instead give them more work. People are losing their connection to others and the world around them.
Everyone tends to focus on Orwell’s 1984, but I find Fahrenheit 451 to be the more prescient book. I used to be annoyed by the book people’s choice to leave society and wait for it to collapse so they could help rebuild. In my mind, they should have been mounting an resistance. Fair to say I understand the book people’s perspective so much more now.
Some of them are quite happy! Others are miserable; many are abused. It's a high-control group, that raises its children to believe the outside world as a terrible, scary place, and they are the only safe place to be.
Many people are happy in cults, or they couldn't function. But that doesn't mean that the cults are, overall, a positive thing.
You frame this as if all technology is inherently good and anyone who opposes it is just dumb and wasting their time. People used to think Segways were dumb. They used to think 3D TVs were dumb. They used to think lobotomies were dumb. They used to think Xray shoe sizing was dumb. They used to think uranium in household appliances and toys was dumb.
I hear that attitude about AI is much more positive in China. So people like him, in aggregate, could potentially be a danger and cause the US to give up the lead for the rest of century. Takes one bad election..
People who reject AI are a danger? Wow. This just sounds like setting up the foundation of narrative for having the government bail out these AI companies when bill finally comes due.
The narratives around the pressure to blindly accept AI is crazy. They try every angle from "you are a communist", to "you are too stupid".
I speculate it has a lot to do with surveillance capitalism. It's the same type of tactics that have been used for things like the banning of marijuana, or the health merits of cigarettes. Fear mongering and lying so a few robber Barron's can profiteer.
I think AI is useful. I think it was rolled out haphazardly similar to how people used to gargle radioactive isotopes or slather them on as after shave so others can profit quickly. There are so many issues with the technology that the press won't even cover yet because we all have to play stupid until trends emerge to report on otherwise billionaire defense contractors will send their figurative or possibly literal hit squads after us. We have to wait for the tumors to grow, the jaws to fall off before society will remember "maybe we shouldn't be slapping radioactive stuff all over ourselves so some wealthy white dude gets wealthier"
The future of ai is in small local models people pay 0 dollars to upgrade or use. Anything else is meritless exploitation and destruction. That's why the US will lose. Reality has a liberal bias. Tough pill for ai libertarians to swallow. So they mud fling.
Unfortunately it seems like the winds are blowing in the opposite direction - the German government for example is trying to move us to a 48-hour-week instead.
We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario.
I love the cognitive dissonance.
Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?
Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.
And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.
Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.
A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes.
His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong.
One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
If you can't see the difference between prior technological jumps and this current jump, you are part of the problem.
The world is changing quickly. Our most coveted defining traits - our minds - are under attack. This is a technology that seeks to replicate your thought processes and critical thinking and then to execute it at machine speeds.
If you think this is like the industrial revolution, you're actually right. We're still replacing animals with machines. But now we are the animals.
Anything other than a serious discussion about UBI or a post-labour economy is a joke. This is technology that aims to displace most of us.
The motorized tractor and other agricultural technologies aimed and did, in fact, “displace most of us” once upon a time. And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …
> And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …
You'll have even more time with your family when you are no longer a SWE, e.g.
When automation displaced farmer manual labour, it also led to new jobs opening up for that labour to flow into.
What new jobs/fields do you see developing out of AI tools and how they've been marketed so far?
Every step of automation across the history of humanity has led to a "concentration of power" in jobs/fields which required brainpower. AI is the technology coming for brainpower. Where do we go from there? Back to farming?
And when I say AI is coming for the brainpower, it's coming for it in two ways: directly where it takes our jobs and indirectly where a lot of people using it are seemingly getting dumber. Both are quite dangerous to our combined futures.
And remember if there aren't jobs, people probably won't just lay down and die.
It won't be Marvin saying, "Oh god I'm so depressed, what's the point?" We'll just start killing each other in massive numbers cause, well, if you can't create anything and there isn't enough for everyone, what else is there to do but fight over what there is
I mean, there is much more to life than work... so let's not pretend it's all about working.
Everyone in America is now fed and most children grow up spending a ton of time with both parents. This is because of automation greatly raising productivity and bringing costs down throughout the 20th century.
It's easy to think things are terrible, but they are actually insanely good. Just 100 years ago life was horrible for basically everyone by today's standards, now it's not.
AI will continue the trend, raise productivity and bring costs down. Now it's for white collar output, instead of manufacturing and agriculture.
The labor force disruption will be painful, as it always is, especially in a country without a strong social safety net, but things will be better on the other side because we just made a ton of work more efficient and can produce more with less.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water just because it affects us this time...
Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks.
The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job.
At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.
May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence.
I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs.
In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own.
People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.
You're totally right, I probably simplified the problem too much. At the same people don't just get randomly assigned to companies, and I know I would quickly switch if I would be working at a company which doesn't have this policy.
Incredibly sad how many people have no concept of collective achievement, or an understanding of what technological progress buys all of humanity. It always comes at a cost, and it's the reason we aren't dying of starvation and plague in a cold winter field at the age of 45.
Out of curiosity. How can you explain to a Gen z fresh graduate with 50k in student loans, 5 dollar gasoline (and rising), no healthcare, housing prices at an all time high, and competing with their entire age group for the honor of holding multiple minimum wage jobs that are below the survivability wage that they should feel a collective sense of achievement? UBI isn't coming and we have multiple individuals who own measurable percentages of all of the worlds wealth. Those same people are investing heavily in automating all work these young people could hope to provide while waxing poetic about changing laws and owning media companies with cold hard cash.
It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.
I would tell them this is the problem to fix. Taking your anger out on AI is the most shortsighted thing. When faced with a powerful new capability, disavowing the capability instead of enabling society to leverage it is absurd.
AI is fundamentally the automation of labor, and we can all see the incredible fruits we all reap from similar past leaps in capability.
Structure your society for a post-labor world. Don't halt the progress that has dramatically improved the human condition. To do so is a disservice to the species and all future humans - concretely, your own loved ones and especially your children.
You can't say a technology isn't improving life for humans, what, just 4 years into the introduction of the technology? That is not even the blink of an eye.
Does literally no one look at things from a historical perspective? The history of automation is right there on the Internet, for you to peruse at will.
I don't have anger against AI. I am a disgusted by the companies rolling it out.
UBI also won't fix things. A post ai world that the us tech ceos want us to imagine is not a utopia. The us manufacturers almost nothing on the world scale. Our biggest contributors to the world economy were things like farm goods(which are in peril), fuel (which most countries are trying to phase out for environmental and recent geopolitical issues), software which will be commoditized through AI. Anything the us can manufacture China can do better, cheaper, and faster. It's not been in our culture for decades, and our infrastructure is shoddy.and will be shoddier once data centers spin up and more wealth is concentrated to people who do not pay any taxes.
GenZ and those coming after have no chance at a sustainable life if the billionaires get what they are asking for. Also in a capitalist society asking them to sacrifice their lives for the good of others is hilarious. Especially if there is no foreseeable good to come after.
This is actually a solid comment because ideally it would be the case. I think it's the opposite though. The problem with LLMs is they are marketed not as a collective achievement. They are at their heart a tool which should belong to collective humanity. We should all be getting dividends from them and they should be collectively owned. But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
Of course no one sees it as a collective achievement when the announcements are aimed at either scaring people about how even the team behind them is worried about releasing it or for CEOs to replace workers.
Artemis II, at least in the states, was an example of people genuinely feeling collective achievement. There is absolutely no reason this AI moment couldn't be that. Instead though the companies involved have explicitly chosen fear and capital as their marketing tools. We should be seeing this as an incredible time but those involved do not want us to and plan to keep the spoils for themselves so we shouldn't.
Throughout history, automation has rarely been "marketed" as a collective achievement. That doesn't make it not one.
> But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
And labor automation, which is the single most valuable thing any technology can do. But if your answer is "kill the technology" instead of "structure society to live with it," of course you will experience pain.
Interest on the national debt now costs over $1T/yr - 14% of the budget. Trump is talking about cutting social security. The reason the US economy is in a death spiral is because of moving jobs overseas, both physical and outsourcing. Wages that should have gone to US workers to be spent in the US economy are now being used to boost overseas economies like India instead.
"AI" is an achievement alright (so was designing a nuclear bomb), but if it is allowed to further gut the middle class, lowering wages, and hence spending (and tax receipts, to extent that matters any more) then it will only hasten the spiraling of the US economy down the toilet.
Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics.
It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI.
You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
AI is fundamentally automation of labor, and to be opposed to AI instead of preparing our systems for a post-labor world is dangerously misguided - especially with historical context on what automation of labor has done for humanity.
Well, yes, but if humans need to stay in the loop (as most previous automations of labor), it is also moving the means of production into the hands of a small number of tech companies. In 2010 or 2020, anyone with a laptop could create a startup. It might be the case that in 2030, you could only do so if the major frontier model providers allow you to do so and do not make it so expensive that it's only usable by entrenched players.
I am not fundamentally against AI, on the contrary, but I think the models should be in the hands of the wider population (i.e. open weight models), so that everyone has the means of production and can benefit from the automation. Also, it would only be fair, since the models are trained on the collective output of humanity. Of course, there are several barriers currently. There are pretty good open models, but running the near-frontier versions requires a lot of capital in the form of GPUs.
AI (even if pseudo-AI) is already a huge productivity multiplier and becoming better... but due to demand also becoming more expensive. And if things keep going this way, only corporations with deep pockets and the top 1% will be able to afford it upfront.
I wish Gen Z channeled their anger into making distributed AI instead of turning their backs on the problem or doing protests that will get nowhere since Boomers are still the biggest voting block.
small + local + distributed
Where is the Gen Z hacker movement? The very few into AI are all sellouts wishing they could join a big lab.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
I worry and feel so much for people younger than me. As someone who entered the workforce during the GFC things were hard, but I always felt like you could make smart decisions, make decent money and build a decent life. Additionally there were plenty of interesting jobs out there around this time that required real skill and effort which you could become an expert in.
Software was really hard pre-2010. You actually had to study it because there was no AI, no stackoverflow, no NPM, etc, etc. You had to learn how to write code the hard way, typically from people who already knew how or text books, and more importantly, learn how to solve real problems often applying maths (i.e. you couldn't import a library to find the shortest path in a graph).
Similarly video editing, graphic design, 3d modelling, music production, were some other fields which were really hard. Again, there was no YouTube tutorials or AI and even the software itself was so limited compared to what we have today. You had to spend years learning the craft which meant the skill difference between those who had put years into their thing and those who had not was enormous.
I miss that world so much... I liked not being good at things and finding people who had what seemed like inhuman talent at things. I had a friend who was insanely good at graphic design and the stuff they'd send me would blow me away. The level of detail and precision didn't even seem possible to me. But now I can generate something almost just as good with AI.
Other examples would be how people who spent years practising music are now indistinguishable from someone with AI. Or how people who spent years learning blender are producing models which are indistinguishable from someone with a Meshy subscription.
There's just no reason to dedicate yourself to anything anymore and even if you did you're probably not going to get a job anyway.
I am a hardcore AI doomer, but assuming the doom scenario isn't on the table and we simply see a concentration in wealth and mass white-collar job losses, I know I'd probably be fine or maybe even benefit from that because I grew up in a time where it was hard but very much possible to acquire a talent and use it to build wealth. Gen Z on the other hand stand no chance.
Today's job market feels corrupt and product of pure luck. You either get extremely lucky and somehow land a good job, or know someone who can get you through the door. In the last year I've interview some insanely talented people from the best universities and we have decided not to employ them because we just don't need to. It's honestly hard for me to comprehend being that motivated and working that hard to struggle to even find an entry level job at the relatively mediocre company I work for...
We need to question if more productivity is always good. It seems to me the way that productivity is distributed is essential. If it's largely just corporations benefitting from the productivity gains then we're creating a world that's not suitable for humans. This will create a world in which productivity, and therefore wealth, will concentrate to fewer and fewer people, whilst the average person struggles to find ways to demonstrate their employability. If AI is creating a world that is much richer by some metrics, but much poorer by most the average person cares about, then is it even a technology worth having? Why would Gen Z consent to this world we're building and not seek to overthrow (rightly imo) those who have created it? Technology is suppose to make our lives better not make them harder and financially suppress us.
Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
The AI is for the "billionaires". The billionaires do not give AI to their own kids, just like how they don't give them phones, social media or a games console until they are old enough.
AI psychosis is real and the billionaires who own the AI chatbots know this.
This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."
make no mistake, this is not "resentment" this is a collapse of faith, which having recently experienced myself, is what happens when the expectation is that the frog should do the right thing™, and climb out, stoke the fire (just a little bit), and climb back in the pot
For AI researchers, it is an understanding of what "intelligence" is and the emergence of an autonomous system that surpasses all human capabilities that learns over time.
For most AI labs like OpenAI and their investors, it used to mean an intelligent system that surpasses all human capabilities at economically useful work, then it meant $100B dollars of profits, now it is an IPO.
For Big Tech, it is digital employees and AI data-centers to "streamline" operations.
To everyone else, it is mass job displacement and unemployment.
For GenZ, it is "permanent underclass".
So it depends on who you are talking to and varies. Therefore "AGI" at this point is meaningless.
> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment.
> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology...
31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".
I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.
Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.
"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.
But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.
There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net benefit to all eventually while hand-waving the details.
> Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture.
I really love this comparison. Everyone bitches about Ikea, but at the end of the day unless you're rich as fuck then "buying new furniture" means either Ikea or some other shop that adopted exactly the same business model, because we all know that the price/quality ratio is unbeatable. Ikea furniture can easily outlive you as long as you pick the correct product for your use case. "I put my fat ass on a dining table that's explicitly marketed for light distributed load and it broke in half, boo-hoo Ikea bad" like no shit, if you need a table you can stand on then choose one with extra support beams, Ikea has these too. "But if you disassemble and reassemble Ikea it falls apart" okay cool but the cost of transporting old furniture to your new house is often higher than just buying new furniture anyway. Not to mention that the chances that your old furniture will match your new house are pretty much zero.
This translates to engineers not being able to grasp the concept of "good enough" where end user doesn't care about quality improvements beyond certain threshold. Cue the audiophiles remaining perplexed to this day why nobody uses 24-bit FLAC.
Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.
That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.
It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.
> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"
Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.
> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both.
Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.
Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.
* xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.
The way we phrase anger with AI doesn't convey the structural realities of what's going on in the knowledge work chain. Gen Z aren't suddenly becoming anti-tech they are acting financially rationally to protect their own economic future.
In the past there was an implicit contract for white-collar employment that was based on the concept of earned experience through a period of manufacturing type work. You enter your profession by performing uninteresting, low-paying manufacturing tasks (such as, writing boilerplate type code or performing low-level quality assurance) while you gain domain expertise and gain the perspective necessary to perform high-value work at a higher level.
LLMs are now exceptionally good at consuming the 20% of an employees entry-level responsibilities.
What I see happening in the enterprise is that management is using AI to justify pulling the ladder up behind them and closing the door behind them. When a senior engineer's or senior analyst's productivity has increased by 30% due to using LLMs, the executive's response is typically not great, we have more time to work on bigger projects, but instead great, we can freeze junior hiring for 2 years.
The entry-level positions in the labor force are being automated, causing seriously low access to those roles for the Gen Z workforce. On the other hand, most senior-level positions are not being available to Gen Z workers as they lack the skills and experience required to qualify for those positions.
Stagnation in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is the direct result of having no entry or junior level employees to work underneath senior staff members, causing a bottleneck for seniors. Employees generating raw output with AI technology have to check the results (output) for accuracy before integrating into work systems and processes as there are no entry-level employees to provide assistance to senior workers.
Gen Z workers do not dislike the tool (AI) however, they do not like how the tool is being implemented and used currently. Currently, the implementation of AI is driven by cost cutting in terms of labor rather than being focused on providing training and developing Gen Z's human capital for future use.
I want the world to go back to the way it was before, so I’m going to boycott it.
Sue me, I have that right.
Don't worry, it's a shiny tool at the moment. The electric screwdriver had its wow moment too.
I still haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie. If it wasn't made by a person, there is no 'personal'-ity to it. It's just bland.
Eventually things will slow and slide back to thoughtful first, crapload second.
> haven't found a single person willing to go to the movies, and watch an AI movie
The last 27 marvel movies might as well have been written by ai, plenty of people have been to see those.
And they've been financially failing as well lately.
I think AI movies (or shorts for that matter, since I am not aware of any feature length movie) currently are not bland, they are simply of very low quality because they are pushing the limits of the current technology. However by the time the technology catches up (might not be as soon as many expect), then nobody will care about them because it will not have personality.
3D movies were a huge shiny new tool for a while too. I hated them. They still exist but its not so in-your-face (pun!) like it was. Like hey we did a remake of the Godfather but in 3D!
I hope AI follows the same path and diminishes. Still available, but only where it make sense.
AI is making some degree of growth in Spotify IIRC.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music. It's like a hodgepodge of popular songs with little rhyme or reason. Very 'sloppy' but if they like it....
It's hard for me to confirm if they really are AI or not. But I'm willing to bet that (random Roblox game they're interested in today) == heavily AI made. Maybe there's some real human effort here or there but I have heavy suspicions.
I feel like a lot of the stuff my nieces listen to are AI music.
Didn't we all start as kids listening to music that is so formulaic that it could as well be AI-generated? A subset of people iteratively refines their music tastes and starts listening everything from bebop to obscure Canadian hardcore bands and will recognize quality in music.
I'm not of the opinion that art is dead.
But I am of the opinion that AI slop is displacing a lot of would-be beginner musicians and making it even harder for them to break out.
For better or worse, a lot of beginner artists were relying upon my nieces and their classmates) clicking on their music and sharing them for Spotify $$$.
For the past year, I think I've watched more AI generated video content than movies in terms of hours spent. Some of it is quite good (eg. Neuralwiz)! Granted, I watch very few movies, but still, I'd say this kind of counts.
I think I watched more Italian Brainrot than all other video content combined
Have you seen any recent mainstream movie made by "a person"? "Human made" is not the quality brand most people are looking for today. If authors are mentaly ill and have shitty personality, AI slop will be better.
please don't speak of the mentality I'll like we are subhuman.
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Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
I think this time is different. I’m not Gen Z, yet once my kids are out of school, I’m planning to leave tech behind as much as possible.
When I started in tech, at the dawn of the internet, it was an exciting field full of hope and the promise to empower and enrich the lives of people. Tech now is largely the opposite.
Enshitification is making things progressively worse. tech companies are creating systems and tools with dark patterns abound to ensure you no longer own anything, are under constant surveillance, and populations at large are manipulated through the magic of propaganda and illusory truth. Even the productivity gains are perversely used to not give people more time through fewer work days/hours but to instead give them more work. People are losing their connection to others and the world around them.
Everyone tends to focus on Orwell’s 1984, but I find Fahrenheit 451 to be the more prescient book. I used to be annoyed by the book people’s choice to leave society and wait for it to collapse so they could help rebuild. In my mind, they should have been mounting an resistance. Fair to say I understand the book people’s perspective so much more now.
The amish seem to be quite happy.
The Amish are a cult.
Some of them are quite happy! Others are miserable; many are abused. It's a high-control group, that raises its children to believe the outside world as a terrible, scary place, and they are the only safe place to be.
Many people are happy in cults, or they couldn't function. But that doesn't mean that the cults are, overall, a positive thing.
You mean "OK". Or did you see evidence that they are specifically quite happy?
Seasonality of mood and behavior in the Old Order Amish (Raheja & al), shows reduced rates of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Amish population.
So at least they are quite happy during winter.
You frame this as if all technology is inherently good and anyone who opposes it is just dumb and wasting their time. People used to think Segways were dumb. They used to think 3D TVs were dumb. They used to think lobotomies were dumb. They used to think Xray shoe sizing was dumb. They used to think uranium in household appliances and toys was dumb.
And they were all right.
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I hear that attitude about AI is much more positive in China. So people like him, in aggregate, could potentially be a danger and cause the US to give up the lead for the rest of century. Takes one bad election..
People who reject AI are a danger? Wow. This just sounds like setting up the foundation of narrative for having the government bail out these AI companies when bill finally comes due.
The narratives around the pressure to blindly accept AI is crazy. They try every angle from "you are a communist", to "you are too stupid".
I speculate it has a lot to do with surveillance capitalism. It's the same type of tactics that have been used for things like the banning of marijuana, or the health merits of cigarettes. Fear mongering and lying so a few robber Barron's can profiteer.
I think AI is useful. I think it was rolled out haphazardly similar to how people used to gargle radioactive isotopes or slather them on as after shave so others can profit quickly. There are so many issues with the technology that the press won't even cover yet because we all have to play stupid until trends emerge to report on otherwise billionaire defense contractors will send their figurative or possibly literal hit squads after us. We have to wait for the tumors to grow, the jaws to fall off before society will remember "maybe we shouldn't be slapping radioactive stuff all over ourselves so some wealthy white dude gets wealthier"
The future of ai is in small local models people pay 0 dollars to upgrade or use. Anything else is meritless exploitation and destruction. That's why the US will lose. Reality has a liberal bias. Tough pill for ai libertarians to swallow. So they mud fling.
oh, I think the AI users are communists.
after all, they think that a) they have a right to my property and b) creativity and hard work are dead
The actual study doesn’t compare between generations. So I’ve know way of knowing if GenZs attitudes are much different comparatively.
Interesting results regardless when they compare the shift of 2025 to 2026
Eventually it will dawn on most people that it is time once again to shorten the standard work week. Until then it's all talking in circles.
Unfortunately it seems like the winds are blowing in the opposite direction - the German government for example is trying to move us to a 48-hour-week instead.
We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario.
I love the cognitive dissonance.
Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?
Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.
And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life.
Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
AI would be able to clue you in on the logical fallacy you're committing.
A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable.
A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes.
His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong.
One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
If you can't see the difference between prior technological jumps and this current jump, you are part of the problem.
The world is changing quickly. Our most coveted defining traits - our minds - are under attack. This is a technology that seeks to replicate your thought processes and critical thinking and then to execute it at machine speeds.
If you think this is like the industrial revolution, you're actually right. We're still replacing animals with machines. But now we are the animals.
Anything other than a serious discussion about UBI or a post-labour economy is a joke. This is technology that aims to displace most of us.
The motorized tractor and other agricultural technologies aimed and did, in fact, “displace most of us” once upon a time. And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …
> And now, because I’m not a farmer, I get to spend much more time with my family, in recreational pursuits, sleeping, …
You'll have even more time with your family when you are no longer a SWE, e.g.
When automation displaced farmer manual labour, it also led to new jobs opening up for that labour to flow into.
What new jobs/fields do you see developing out of AI tools and how they've been marketed so far?
Every step of automation across the history of humanity has led to a "concentration of power" in jobs/fields which required brainpower. AI is the technology coming for brainpower. Where do we go from there? Back to farming?
And when I say AI is coming for the brainpower, it's coming for it in two ways: directly where it takes our jobs and indirectly where a lot of people using it are seemingly getting dumber. Both are quite dangerous to our combined futures.
And remember if there aren't jobs, people probably won't just lay down and die.
It won't be Marvin saying, "Oh god I'm so depressed, what's the point?" We'll just start killing each other in massive numbers cause, well, if you can't create anything and there isn't enough for everyone, what else is there to do but fight over what there is
I mean, there is much more to life than work... so let's not pretend it's all about working.
Everyone in America is now fed and most children grow up spending a ton of time with both parents. This is because of automation greatly raising productivity and bringing costs down throughout the 20th century.
It's easy to think things are terrible, but they are actually insanely good. Just 100 years ago life was horrible for basically everyone by today's standards, now it's not.
AI will continue the trend, raise productivity and bring costs down. Now it's for white collar output, instead of manufacturing and agriculture.
The labor force disruption will be painful, as it always is, especially in a country without a strong social safety net, but things will be better on the other side because we just made a ton of work more efficient and can produce more with less.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water just because it affects us this time...
Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks.
The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job.
At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.
> less intelligent people have been left behind
May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence.
I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs.
In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own.
People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.
You're totally right, I probably simplified the problem too much. At the same people don't just get randomly assigned to companies, and I know I would quickly switch if I would be working at a company which doesn't have this policy.
Token cost or token demand?
Incredibly sad how many people have no concept of collective achievement, or an understanding of what technological progress buys all of humanity. It always comes at a cost, and it's the reason we aren't dying of starvation and plague in a cold winter field at the age of 45.
I guess cynicism is trendy.
Out of curiosity. How can you explain to a Gen z fresh graduate with 50k in student loans, 5 dollar gasoline (and rising), no healthcare, housing prices at an all time high, and competing with their entire age group for the honor of holding multiple minimum wage jobs that are below the survivability wage that they should feel a collective sense of achievement? UBI isn't coming and we have multiple individuals who own measurable percentages of all of the worlds wealth. Those same people are investing heavily in automating all work these young people could hope to provide while waxing poetic about changing laws and owning media companies with cold hard cash.
It's not an anomalous sense of cynicism, hundreds of thousands of people are looking at their options and feeling hopeless. I'm glad I am not in that camp. The reason I'm not is because I was born sooner than they were. I don't blame them at all, it's looking a lot like the generation after them is cannon fodder if things trend the way they are now.
> UBI isn't coming
I would tell them this is the problem to fix. Taking your anger out on AI is the most shortsighted thing. When faced with a powerful new capability, disavowing the capability instead of enabling society to leverage it is absurd.
AI is fundamentally the automation of labor, and we can all see the incredible fruits we all reap from similar past leaps in capability.
Structure your society for a post-labor world. Don't halt the progress that has dramatically improved the human condition. To do so is a disservice to the species and all future humans - concretely, your own loved ones and especially your children.
Quit your job if you believe this. After all your salary is holding back the glorious future!!
> Don't halt the progress that has dramatically improved the human condition.
You clearly accept this as Progress, but isn't the core debate here that it doesn't improve life for humans?
You can't say a technology isn't improving life for humans, what, just 4 years into the introduction of the technology? That is not even the blink of an eye.
Does literally no one look at things from a historical perspective? The history of automation is right there on the Internet, for you to peruse at will.
What makes you so confident that it is improving life for humans? Are you seeing any specific signs yet?
I don't have anger against AI. I am a disgusted by the companies rolling it out.
UBI also won't fix things. A post ai world that the us tech ceos want us to imagine is not a utopia. The us manufacturers almost nothing on the world scale. Our biggest contributors to the world economy were things like farm goods(which are in peril), fuel (which most countries are trying to phase out for environmental and recent geopolitical issues), software which will be commoditized through AI. Anything the us can manufacture China can do better, cheaper, and faster. It's not been in our culture for decades, and our infrastructure is shoddy.and will be shoddier once data centers spin up and more wealth is concentrated to people who do not pay any taxes.
GenZ and those coming after have no chance at a sustainable life if the billionaires get what they are asking for. Also in a capitalist society asking them to sacrifice their lives for the good of others is hilarious. Especially if there is no foreseeable good to come after.
This is actually a solid comment because ideally it would be the case. I think it's the opposite though. The problem with LLMs is they are marketed not as a collective achievement. They are at their heart a tool which should belong to collective humanity. We should all be getting dividends from them and they should be collectively owned. But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
Of course no one sees it as a collective achievement when the announcements are aimed at either scaring people about how even the team behind them is worried about releasing it or for CEOs to replace workers.
Artemis II, at least in the states, was an example of people genuinely feeling collective achievement. There is absolutely no reason this AI moment couldn't be that. Instead though the companies involved have explicitly chosen fear and capital as their marketing tools. We should be seeing this as an incredible time but those involved do not want us to and plan to keep the spoils for themselves so we shouldn't.
Throughout history, automation has rarely been "marketed" as a collective achievement. That doesn't make it not one.
> But instead we're seeing them explicitly marketed as tools for capital centralization.
And labor automation, which is the single most valuable thing any technology can do. But if your answer is "kill the technology" instead of "structure society to live with it," of course you will experience pain.
Interest on the national debt now costs over $1T/yr - 14% of the budget. Trump is talking about cutting social security. The reason the US economy is in a death spiral is because of moving jobs overseas, both physical and outsourcing. Wages that should have gone to US workers to be spent in the US economy are now being used to boost overseas economies like India instead.
"AI" is an achievement alright (so was designing a nuclear bomb), but if it is allowed to further gut the middle class, lowering wages, and hence spending (and tax receipts, to extent that matters any more) then it will only hasten the spiraling of the US economy down the toilet.
Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics.
It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI.
You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
AI is fundamentally automation of labor, and to be opposed to AI instead of preparing our systems for a post-labor world is dangerously misguided - especially with historical context on what automation of labor has done for humanity.
AI is fundamentally automation of labor,
Well, yes, but if humans need to stay in the loop (as most previous automations of labor), it is also moving the means of production into the hands of a small number of tech companies. In 2010 or 2020, anyone with a laptop could create a startup. It might be the case that in 2030, you could only do so if the major frontier model providers allow you to do so and do not make it so expensive that it's only usable by entrenched players.
I am not fundamentally against AI, on the contrary, but I think the models should be in the hands of the wider population (i.e. open weight models), so that everyone has the means of production and can benefit from the automation. Also, it would only be fair, since the models are trained on the collective output of humanity. Of course, there are several barriers currently. There are pretty good open models, but running the near-frontier versions requires a lot of capital in the form of GPUs.
AI (even if pseudo-AI) is already a huge productivity multiplier and becoming better... but due to demand also becoming more expensive. And if things keep going this way, only corporations with deep pockets and the top 1% will be able to afford it upfront.
I wish Gen Z channeled their anger into making distributed AI instead of turning their backs on the problem or doing protests that will get nowhere since Boomers are still the biggest voting block.
small + local + distributed
Where is the Gen Z hacker movement? The very few into AI are all sellouts wishing they could join a big lab.
I just wish we would stop calling LLMs AI.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
To what end?
I think he means the generalisation of the subcategory to the category.
I worry and feel so much for people younger than me. As someone who entered the workforce during the GFC things were hard, but I always felt like you could make smart decisions, make decent money and build a decent life. Additionally there were plenty of interesting jobs out there around this time that required real skill and effort which you could become an expert in.
Software was really hard pre-2010. You actually had to study it because there was no AI, no stackoverflow, no NPM, etc, etc. You had to learn how to write code the hard way, typically from people who already knew how or text books, and more importantly, learn how to solve real problems often applying maths (i.e. you couldn't import a library to find the shortest path in a graph).
Similarly video editing, graphic design, 3d modelling, music production, were some other fields which were really hard. Again, there was no YouTube tutorials or AI and even the software itself was so limited compared to what we have today. You had to spend years learning the craft which meant the skill difference between those who had put years into their thing and those who had not was enormous.
I miss that world so much... I liked not being good at things and finding people who had what seemed like inhuman talent at things. I had a friend who was insanely good at graphic design and the stuff they'd send me would blow me away. The level of detail and precision didn't even seem possible to me. But now I can generate something almost just as good with AI.
Other examples would be how people who spent years practising music are now indistinguishable from someone with AI. Or how people who spent years learning blender are producing models which are indistinguishable from someone with a Meshy subscription.
There's just no reason to dedicate yourself to anything anymore and even if you did you're probably not going to get a job anyway.
I am a hardcore AI doomer, but assuming the doom scenario isn't on the table and we simply see a concentration in wealth and mass white-collar job losses, I know I'd probably be fine or maybe even benefit from that because I grew up in a time where it was hard but very much possible to acquire a talent and use it to build wealth. Gen Z on the other hand stand no chance.
Today's job market feels corrupt and product of pure luck. You either get extremely lucky and somehow land a good job, or know someone who can get you through the door. In the last year I've interview some insanely talented people from the best universities and we have decided not to employ them because we just don't need to. It's honestly hard for me to comprehend being that motivated and working that hard to struggle to even find an entry level job at the relatively mediocre company I work for...
We need to question if more productivity is always good. It seems to me the way that productivity is distributed is essential. If it's largely just corporations benefitting from the productivity gains then we're creating a world that's not suitable for humans. This will create a world in which productivity, and therefore wealth, will concentrate to fewer and fewer people, whilst the average person struggles to find ways to demonstrate their employability. If AI is creating a world that is much richer by some metrics, but much poorer by most the average person cares about, then is it even a technology worth having? Why would Gen Z consent to this world we're building and not seek to overthrow (rightly imo) those who have created it? Technology is suppose to make our lives better not make them harder and financially suppress us.
They can still do gig works for training AI until AI replaces all the gig workers.
No one cares about GenZ or any others, the AI is for the billionaires.
Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
Too big to fail. If big tech fails, America goes down with it so it will never happen. Other people will pay the price.
Not Apple
But Sam Altman told me that AI is about to replace most of the employees, so the data center GPUs will just be funding themselves.
The AI is for the "billionaires". The billionaires do not give AI to their own kids, just like how they don't give them phones, social media or a games console until they are old enough.
AI psychosis is real and the billionaires who own the AI chatbots know this.
This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."
make no mistake, this is not "resentment" this is a collapse of faith, which having recently experienced myself, is what happens when the expectation is that the frog should do the right thing™, and climb out, stoke the fire (just a little bit), and climb back in the pot
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This is AGI.
Care to explain?
It depends on who you talk to:
For AI researchers, it is an understanding of what "intelligence" is and the emergence of an autonomous system that surpasses all human capabilities that learns over time.
For most AI labs like OpenAI and their investors, it used to mean an intelligent system that surpasses all human capabilities at economically useful work, then it meant $100B dollars of profits, now it is an IPO.
For Big Tech, it is digital employees and AI data-centers to "streamline" operations.
To everyone else, it is mass job displacement and unemployment.
For GenZ, it is "permanent underclass".
So it depends on who you are talking to and varies. Therefore "AGI" at this point is meaningless.
> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment.
Sell NVIDIA!!!
> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology...
31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".
I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.
Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.
"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.
But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.
There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.
The other recurring theme is a mantra along the lines of "ends justify the means" when it comes to building data centers and all the consequences of that in the present, for some promise that AI will somehow have a net benefit to all eventually while hand-waving the details.
> Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture.
I really love this comparison. Everyone bitches about Ikea, but at the end of the day unless you're rich as fuck then "buying new furniture" means either Ikea or some other shop that adopted exactly the same business model, because we all know that the price/quality ratio is unbeatable. Ikea furniture can easily outlive you as long as you pick the correct product for your use case. "I put my fat ass on a dining table that's explicitly marketed for light distributed load and it broke in half, boo-hoo Ikea bad" like no shit, if you need a table you can stand on then choose one with extra support beams, Ikea has these too. "But if you disassemble and reassemble Ikea it falls apart" okay cool but the cost of transporting old furniture to your new house is often higher than just buying new furniture anyway. Not to mention that the chances that your old furniture will match your new house are pretty much zero.
This translates to engineers not being able to grasp the concept of "good enough" where end user doesn't care about quality improvements beyond certain threshold. Cue the audiophiles remaining perplexed to this day why nobody uses 24-bit FLAC.
Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.
That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.
It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.
> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"
Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.
> Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.
What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both.
Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill.
Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now.
* xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.
> Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit.
Where did you get this notion? Did you hallucinate it?
> Where did you get this notion?
Thirty-one percent being smaller than half.
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