If unemployment leads to death, there are many more things wrong than just AI. Why get mad at AI instead of at capitalism. This is nonsensical.

> Tobacco/Soda Industry Playbook

Except both of those succeeded in destroying health for decades, whereas AI had like a 2 year run before all the datacenter madness came to light.

> My current stance is not undoing things to zero,

This does not at all answer my question, my question is about the past not the present. The author is arguing to resist AI, what if resisting cars had worked? This is my question.

A world without steam engines, cars, computers, printing presses.

Oh man how did we ever survive calculators.

1. Reducing/replacing/automating highly complex work is fundamentally a good thing, it might be the case that society is not ready for the consequences of it, those are two separate things. Concluding that millions of people will die, is simply hyperbole.

2. Saying that AI is not intelligent is at best a non-sequitur but more likely intended misrepresentation and goalpost moving

3. The environmental harm of AI, however significant, is ultimately public knowledge and 100% clear in the public discourse around the current implementation of AI. This says nothing about AI in the general sense, only how we produce it today. This is like preventing cars from becoming a thing because they produce CO2. Do you think the world would be better off if cars were never invented?

None of this is about the 'artistic properties of their words', it is precisely about the core content being objectionable.

> I do not come to you with clean hands. > I am not here to dictate morality

These two things contradict eachother.

> My primary focus here will be software development > Environmental Harm > Stanley Tucci

These three things also contradict eachother.

> If we lived in a post-scarcity

Maybe this is your real problem, and you're just confusing cause and effect.

> We need to resist “AI” so that thousands, perhaps millions of people do not die

Hyperbole.

> Look up the “Eliza effect”. Even the weakest conceivable program like this was seductive. These new ones are masters of seduction.

Sounds like software development alright.

This person has a familiar name, I'm sure he is amazing at something. This blog is not the peak of his work.

EDIT:

> I quote “AI” to emphasize that these things are not intelligent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Regardless of how evil gigantic companies can be, or what the ideal world should look like: from a pure usability perspective, windows is top of the list.

If I got 5$ every time a linux/mac enthousiasts has to tell me they just cannot run something, and proposing a myriad of workarounds to stick to their ideology, I could buy an apple vision pro and let it collect dust in the corner of my basement.

I've also never claimed that "you can't question the quality of AI output because quality of software is [partly] subjective". I'm not sure how you got there. I am simply saying that "quality" is an ill defined term and this is why we might see so much divergence when discussing AI code "quality".

You can absolutely evaluate code quality objectively, e.g performance, bugs, crashes.

You could read it as quality in the operational correctness sense, but just as well in the software architectural design sense. My comment indeed applies to only one of those.

However, why judge correctness as a "cringe on quality", rather than just objectively saying its producing errors. This is why my response is in the software direction.

Besides all the other mentioned points, I think a good remaining less-discussed point is that quality in software has always been in the eye of the beholder. You may very well see the AI output as low quality, I may not, and its not necessarily clear who is right or wrong, because there was always little precedent in objectively evaluating code quality.

This is a long standing issue, and was never resolved before AI happened, and the coming of AI has not really changed things, except that AI is under a magnifying glass obviously. How do we objectively measure the quality of code? There's some general consensus on things, but surprisingly little is true professional agreed upon consensus.

If I can make up a figure, I would guess 95% of software engineering quality rhetoric, and craftmanship advice, is just strongly held opinions.

This is not something I can prove, but if I look at the (still ongoing.....) debates on very basic ideas like clean code, and the reactions from also-great programmers like Carmack, Blow & Muratori, it is clear to me that there is little consensus on even the fundamentals of software design.

If all these people can produce excellent working software while disagreeing on these fundamentals (of quality), it means we do not yet understand what the fundamentals are.

No, that is not how representation works. The representative represents, i.e they act in the absence of the citizen. They are not the human equivalent of an email broker.

> representatives are only consumers themselves

No, they are informed experts, or have informed experts at their disposal, to deeply understand the subject matter at hand so they can weigh it against the broad wishes of whom they represent. Furthermore, they have the time and responsibility to use their knowledge wisely.

> but dictators who step up and act for the people

I'm not sure why you keep bringing up dictators. Dictators don't step up and act for the people, that's what representatives do in a democracy. Are you from the US by chance? In that case I can understand why this concept is new.

> consumers love nothing more than protecting market incumbents

This is like saying: consumers sure did love dying from polio before the vaccine was invented.

This is a straw man. Consumers are represented by representatives who should have their interests in mind, e.g the consumer votes for someone who in turn votes for outcomes. This means that there can absolutely be a difference in knowledge between the government and its citizens, and so no, they are not the exact same thing. One group is trying to do their job of being a citizen, while the other group should be doing their job of representing the interests of the citizens that voted on them in whatever is relevant. One job clearly should not involve making sure your privacy isn't constantly and covertly violated by foreign nationals, and one job clearly should. Which is which is an exercise for the reader.

> but in a functioning market

Great! Where can I find me one of those?

This is why governments exist.

Indeed I would be, but I don't, so I'm not.

What I'm saying is that nobody understands either creativity or intelligence, and people keep listing behavior that they think can only be displayed by something that has those qualities. Yet, whenever we build a system that displays this behavior, all of a sudden, those qualities are NOT attributed because we now understand how to achieve this, the curtain has fallen, the magic is gone, and we do not assign the qualities we believe are human to something that is not magic, lest we reduce ourselves to the machines in front of us, losing the things that make us unique.

That is the shifting of goalposts, its not me who's doing it. There's a wiki page for it, its called "the AI effect": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

From (highly upvoted) parent:

> LLMs are text-prediction engines. They are not Artificial Intelligence, and shouldn’t not be treated in any form or fashion as if they possess intelligence > LLM-based “AI” ....

Hardly neutral statements, hardly accurate statements, yet highly upvoted. LLMs are AI, there is nothing to gain by pretending it isn't because of some secondary motive or opinion someone has.

> LLM has solved enough problems that almost nobody has the view you ridicule here

I think I have just shown you the parent literally claims LLMs are not AI, and do not possess intelligence.

> but there are still many who think LLM are thinking just like humans and that you can trust them just like humans.

I don't think many people think that, especially on HN, for two reasons:

1. Most high profile AI tools have immediately visible disclaimers saying, more or less, "AI makes mistakes". 2. People don't trust humans either, if anything people trust the AI more because it is not human.

People may be incorrectly worshipping LLMs, but they are doing it precisely because it is not human. If you put chatgpt behind a believable chatbox so people would actually think it was human, they would be much more skeptical.

Of the vast uncertainties and philosophical exercises that we must face to bridge the chasm between where we are now, and where we will be when we understand intelligence, I can take comfort in claiming, with 100% accuracy, that our biology is not based on technology invented by Google in 2017.