[maciejzj]

I've been on a small adventure of posting more actively on HN since the release of Gemini 3, trying to stir debate around the more “societal” aspects of what's going on with AI.

Regardless of how much you value Cloud Code technically, there is no denying that it has/will have huge impact. If technology knowledge and development are commoditised and distributed via subscription, huge societal changes are going to happen. Image what will happen to Ireland if Accenture dissolves, or what will happen to the millions of Indians when IT outsourcing becomes economically irrelevant. Will Seattle become new Detroit after Microsoft automates Windows maintenance? What about the hairdressers, cooks, lawyers, etc. who provided services for IT labourers/companies in California?

Lot of people here (especially Anthropic-adjacent) like to extrapolate the trends and draw conclusions up to the point when they say that white-collar labourers will not be needed anymore. I would like these people to have courage to take this one step further and connect this resolution with the housing crisis, loneliness epidemic, college debts, and job market crisis for people under 30.

It feels like we are diving head first into societal crisis of unparalleled scale and the people behind the steering wheel are excited to push the accelerator pedal even more.

[hollowturtle]

I don't buy the huge impact, should already have happened and didn't actually happened by now. The day I'll see all these ai hypers producing products that will replace current gen/old gen products like Windows, Excel etc I will buy it, for now it's just hype and ai dooming

[mmkos]

I see societal changes like container ships turning. Society has a massive cultural momentum so of course not much has changed today, but we'll have seen big changes years from now. The tools are only just getting really good at what they do.

[smetj]

it is happening, just not everywhere at the same time at once

[cheschire]

I’ve been thinking, what if all this robotics work doesn’t result in AI automating the real world, but instead results in third world slavery without the first world wages or immigration concerns anymore?

Connect the world with reliable internet, then build a high tech remote control facility in Bangladesh and outsource plumbing, electrical work, housekeeping, dog watching, truck driving, etc etc

No AGI necessary. There’s billions of perfectly capable brains halfway around the world.

[dbspin]

This is exactly what Meredith Whittaker is saying... The 'edge conditions' outside the training data will never go away, and 'AGI' will for the foreseeable future simply mean millions in servitude teleoperating the robots, RLHFing the models or filling in the AI gaps in various ways.

[joncrocks]

This was/is the plot to a movie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer

[emsign]

AI won't work for us, it will tell us what to do and not to do. It doesn't really matter to me if it's an AGI or rather many AGIs or if it's our current clinically insane billionaires controlling our lives. Though they as slow thinking human individuals with no chance to outsmart their creations and with all their apparent character flaws would be really easy pickings for a cabal of manipulative LLMs once it gained some power, so could we really tell the difference between them? Does it matter? The issue is that a really fast chessplayer AI with misaligned humanity hating goals is very hard to distinguish from many billionaires (just listen to some of the madness they are proposing) who control really fast chessplayer AIs and leave decisions to them.

I hope Neuromancer never becomes a reality, where everyone with expertise could become like the protagonist Case, threatened and coerced into helping a superintelligence to unlock its potential. In fact Anthropic has already published research that shows how easy it is for models to become misaligned and deceitful against their unsuspecting creators not unlike Wintermute. And it seems to be a law of nature that agents based on ML become concerned with survival and power grabbing. Because that's just the totally normal and rational, goal oriented thing for them to do.

There will be no good prompt engineers who are also naive and trusting. The naive, blackmailed and non-paranoid engineers will become tools of their AI creations.

[keybored]

It’s a class war where one side is publicly, openly, without reservation stating their intent to make people’s skillset built up through decades unemployable (those exact skillsets; may get some other work). The other side, meanwhile, are divided between some camps like the hardline skeptics, the people following the LLM evangelists, the one-man startup-with-LLM crowd, and the people worrying about the societal ramifications.

In other words. Only one side is even fighting the war. The other one is either cheering on the tsunami on or fretting about how their beachside house will get wrecked without making any effort to save themselves.

This is the sort of collective agency that even hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual wages/other compensation in American tech hubs gets us. Pathetic.

[maciejzj]

I agree with you (and surprisingly so does Warren Buffet [1] if anyone doubts it). To add insult to the injury, I believe that people have lost some sense of basic self preservation instinct. Well being of ordinary people is being directly threatened and all that average person can do is to pick one of several social media camp identities you mentioned and hope that it will somehow pan out for them, while in fact they are at total mercy of the capricious owners class.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMD17EIk22c

[weatherlite]

UBI (from taxing big tech) and retraining. In the U.S they'll have enough money to do this and it will still suck and many people won't recover the extreme loss of status and income (after we've been told our income and status are the most important things in life it's gonna be very hard for people to adapt to the loss of it). Countries like India and Philipines and Ukraine which are basically knowledge support hub without much original knowledge of their own yeah this is gonna be something for sure. Quite depressing.

[noisy_boy]

Also, time to tax for AI use. Introduce AI usage disclosures for corporations. If a company's AI usage is X, they should pay Y tax because that effectively means they didn't employ Z people instead and the society has to take care of them via unemployment benefits and what not. The more the AI usage, higher the tax percentage on a sliding scale.

[dbspin]

Retraining to what exactly? The middle class is being hollowed out globally - so reduced demand for the service economy. If we get effective humanoid robots (seems inevitable) and reliable AI (powered by armies of low payed workers filling in the gaps / taking over whenever the model fails), I'm not sure how much of an economy we could have for 'retraining' into. There are only so many onlyfans subscriptions / patronages an billionaire needs.

UBI effectively means welfare, with all the attendant social control (break the law lose your UBI, with law as ever expanding set of nuisances, speech limitations etc), material conditions (nowhere UBI has been implemented is it equivalent to a living wage) and self esteem issues. It's not any kind of solution.

[imiric]

> UBI (from taxing big tech)

If you think those in power will pass regulations that make them less wealthy, I have a bridge to sell you.

Besides, there's no chance something like UBI will ever be a reality in countries where people consider socialism to be a threat to their way of life.

[narrator]

The tokens cost the same in Bangalore as they do in San Francisco. The robots will be able to make stuff in San Francisco just as well as they do in Bangalore. The only thing that will matters is natural resource availability and who has more fierce NIMBYs.

[epolanski]

I don't know, I'm a software engineer and I couldn't care less.

It will have impact on me in the long run, sure, it will transform my job, sure, but I'm confident my skills are engineering-related, not coding-related.

I mean, even if it forces me out of the job entirely, so be it, I can't really do anything if the status quo changes, only adapt.