And now the narrative has shifted to doing things fast without understanding. Otherwise you’ll be antiquated and outclassed.
It is true. I feel left behind—like I don’t belong in a world infested with ai slop.
We are in a period of magical thinking. Absent of learning process, people have shifted towards the idea of innate skill. It’s a false idea.
It happened before LLMs. Take the tech industry’s enamoration with unicorns. At it’s peak during the 2010s, they were all searching for the magical nerd who could mash away at a keyboard. Then miraculously produce a billion dollar magic box that spews rainbows and pixie dust.
That person does not exist. That person is the work of millions of people of varying skill type and level doing their day job. But the corporate driven world needed its wunderkind.
LLMs have made this idea believable for anyone. What if you had a magic box that could make you perform like a unicorn yourself. What if others had a magical box that could make the average or below-average person perform like a unicorn that you think you are.
I suspect people had become demoralized by all this magical unicorn stuff. Who really is that smart. Nobody. The world is average by definition. Can we all drop the charade? Nobody is that special.
The corporate rat race has caused credential inflation, as generations of people today stepped over each other to put up a facade of being the most outstanding employee you’ll ever hire. The reality is most of us are average pretending to be above the standard deviation. What a stupid thing.
I suspect this has caused silent collapse of morale that nobody wants to talk about. Doing so would be to concede defeat, and make yourself vulnerable in a bizarro world that revolves around capitalist sharks smelling blood in the water. I think people are tired of the autodidact slog that corporations have offset to your personal time. People got tired of having to learn to be a supergenius unicorn in order to put food on the table. People are scared that others might suddenly get a magic bean that will make themselves less competitive anymore.
What has gotten me about the recent decade of change is the devaluation of creativity.
I have an art degree but work in tech (and am a working artist, but that’s beside the point) and being able to approach complex problems creatively sets a person apart from other people in a very positive way. My team at my day job is made of four different people with unique perspectives and when building something new, we all test it because we all notice different things and end up having different suggestions for ways to improve it.
However, things don’t always work, and that’s the other half of creativity: identifying and dreaming up methods to work around processes that do not function correctly without creating negative impacts to users and other folks involved in the project.
And in another ten years it’s eminently possible that I’ll be working with a person in their 20’s who cannot function without putting a prompt into a machine.
It started over a decade ago, maybe more. In my 20’s I hung out with people who had studied computer science at some very prestigious schools. The typical “I vote for the right, because I’m very smart and should be allowed to do whatever I want”-types.
Their attitude was that you should never learn anything that you’re not making money from or is getting paid to learn, because they thought the brain has limited space.
Gonna be unpopular here but here it goes anyway.
The promotion of free thought and “using your brain” was a remnant of lies told to you in your childhood. We are (correctly to a degree) associating this with AI because it is the current evolution of working class control. However, it is not unique in its goal. You are an adult now. You are seeing the reality of living under a capitalist society and what it rewards. It rewards serving capital. You were supposed to stop thinking after you entered the workforce. As your parents and grandparents did.
Your parents and grandparents experienced this in similar ways. Sometimes the carrot and sometimes the stick. But, we romanticize the past so we focus on previous generations “having it easier”. And, again, there is truth to this, clearly. The material conditions of the current and upcoming generations have declined. But, this is only because the ruling class of society has grown more confident in their ability to distract and corral it’s laboring class.
For no generation in recent history have we been encouraged to “use our brains” or “think freely”. That was all nonsense they told you while you grew up. There was just a lot more carrot previously than there was the stick. The bread and circus was better maintained. So, there was really no reason for most of population to keep thinking. They accepted their single family home and ignored the few that suffered.
AI is not primarily used to keep you from thinking. No, the systems that existed before it worked and are working quite well for that. It may have that side effect and it’s welcome for the capitalist class. But AI is meant primarily to empower “the stick” with constant surveillance and control over each and every individual that dares to ask what happened to “the carrots”.
AI is more about the ruling class being able to say “yeah, you can see how things are. But, you can’t do anything about it.”
And they’re wrong. Their confidence will be their undoing.
OP, your feelings of alienation are not unique to living in a world of AI. They are just being allowed to be realized without any distractions because of the degree of hubris that AI has given the capitalist/ruling class. It is a good thing in a way. Allow it to give you clarity and class consciousness where your parents lacked. It is through this class struggle we can free ourselves from this alienation you are describing.
Edit: Appreciate the upvotes. Have been use to downvotes anytime I try to explain why AI feels so awful. It’s not just AI.
I do agree with what you’ve said here, and you’ve said it very eloquently. But for the sake of my understanding I’m going to play devil’s advocate.
Does a capitalist society really benefit from discouraging free thought? And is to do so a conscious decision by the ruling class, or is it just the nature of the system in general? Libraries, bookshops and newspapers have existed for a long time, and information flows quite freely on the internet. I hate AI, but I struggle to imagine some shadowy cabal created it with the goal to dumb down the population; that feels more like an insidious side effect. Obviously it was created with profit in mind though, and organisations are only to happy to replace workers with AI if it’ll save them some money. The fact that it’s available to the public feels like a way to appease the general population and get us used to its existence more than anything. So we gain some small ‘benefit’ from it whilst it replaces us in the workplace.
Society doesn’t benefit. The people in charge of society do benefit.
Someone who has nothing likes change, because change is how you get something. Once you’re a billionaire…well, you now have a couple billion incentives to keep everything exactly how it is. How it was when you made it to the top.
So it’s a fight between society and the elites. Once the balance of power tips in the favor of the elites, society begins to stagnate. In some cases, because at a certain point getting more billions won’t make a dent in your power the same way that removing money from the working class and making them more desperate and dependent does.
Carlin can answer this.
The major thing that has changed since he said this is that people are noticing now and people are caring and most importantly people are organizing.
I’ve had this sense that all these data centers being built will eventually be these deserted mega complexes. Some not even being completely built. Once the bubble pops. It’ll be some real dystopian/backroom type shit until they get repurposed into something else.
I feel ya. My single straw that I hold on is: They’re losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.
I already felt like I don’t belong in this world before AI, and now AI hits even worse. Fuck that shit. :c If you want someone to talk, I’m here btw. :/
Yeah, it’s a tough feeling to live with. I feel out of place, too, and despite my best efforts, people just seem to… go away.
Hit me up anytime if you need to talk.
If you want someone to talk, I’m here btw. :/
Thanks so much for your kind words. There was some upside to this lol.
I have left my boring IT job that forced me to use AI and ship ridiculously fast. I vastly improved my fitness now and started working in outdoor adventures. It’s quite fun too.
They’re losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.
Ikr. I’m eagerly waiting for it.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
I have left my boring IT job that forced me to use AI and ship ridiculously fast. I vastly improved my fitness now and started working in outdoor adventures. It’s quite fun too.
Wholesome story and message of the day.
I eventually just accepted my out of place-ness. Just doing one day at a time and focusing on my health. Kind of waiting for something to change and keeping myself entertained and being mildly productive in the meantime.
We’re still here. What you’re describing as missing is still here. We have lives, experiences and wants that may differ, but we exist and the people we love and respect are also here. Here is the world.
True. The people around you IRL become an echo chamber and fool you into thinking that it is missing nowadays.
So many send me ai slop in chats, go on endless speeches about how they wrote an email, created a poster in 1 minute with chatgpt etc.
I started working on a side project recently with a dev on the condition that he would code without llms. We were aiming for very generous deadlines. But the quality and style of the code were horrible and inconsistent. It was as if each change was written by an amnesiac or a different intern who didn’t read the rest of the code.
I confronted him about it and he admitted to using llms from the start. Turns out he was spending 20-30 min a day generating ai slop and creating PRs. His response was “who cares the code is readable and it works.”
The response to that is “it’s not readable and it isn’t consistent, which is going to turn this into a nightmare when something breaks later and the code needs to be reviewed or revised”
Anyone who has ever had to support code for even a year after it goes live should have some experience dealing with the results of poor earlier choices and leaning on “it works, that means it’s good”.
Software design, hell even basic scripting, does not end at the minimum viable product, treating it as such is a recipe for future disaster. These sorts of people will lean on “well I’ll have the AI fix it”, ignoring that they’re effectively playing tech debt russian roulette with multiple bullets in the revolver cylinder.
with slide rule, stopwatch, machine, and automation the destroyed pride in manual labor.
Now, with AI, they want to destroy pride in mental labor.
The subjugation of the working class remains the goal.
Yes, when you start reading history and giving attention to traditional crafts you realize that this process of theft, enslavement and alienation has been going on for very long already. Trying to kill your inner factory clock is hard, even when you have the chance!
When I was young television was run to inform and educate. Programmes for children and adults ran at natural speeds taking their time to unfold ideas. Then business graduates took over and everything was fast and flashy but said nothing anymore. Then later the internet came and at first it was run by the technical people who had designed it and there were personal websites on any interest you might have and newsgroups where people from all over the world took time to help others in their own area of expertise. Then the business graduates took over and everything was bright and fast, ill informed and run only for profit or to profile the user which is the same thing but worse. The repeated trend here is clear and common, people who are able to create things very often have a notion of acting for the good of society. When these things do well they are overrun by a different sort of person, one who has no feeling for the common good or wellbeing, one who in fact often disdains it and is motivated only by greed and will without conscience ruin anything good for profit. The second sort of person should be identified and nullified and corrected and the first type allowed to flourish and not the reverse as is the case in the world we have allowed to grow up around us.
I am cut from my company because im a junior dev that still needs to learn :/
Here is my encouragement to go and learn something new! Try something computers can’t do yet, like cooking or playing an instrument. The learning by remembering information era is long gone, but there is the opportunity to learn skills robots cant mimic yet.
For sure. I have learned the basics of mountaineering, cooking and fermenting foods. I make sourdough bread, sprouts, and natto at home. And it’s so meditative. 😄
Oh yeah, once you get started in the kitchen, if you enjoy it there’s no end. I’ve been teaching myself how to make greek/Mediterranean food lately and I’m trying to get my hands on a specific ice cream maker that works with equipment I already have.
Seriouseats dot com has probably been the biggest help in teaching my self to cook.
Likely why I have taken up sewing and leatherworking. Just working with your hands is very liberating. Making real material things for others; that I can see the product of my labor - it is significantly more fulfilling than any type of wage labor could provide.
You know you can use AI to help you learn right? Think about all the things you want to learn but feels too deep or daunting to start.
AI can summarize for you. It can translate to English that you can understand and give you examples. You can ask it questions you might be embarrassed to ask actual people.
And you can do it all right now for free. Knowledge is at its most accessible right now. It’s in your interest to utilize it.
This exactly. Ask AI questions you wouldn’t know who to ask to. Researching a niche history subject and have a question? Not everybody’s actively going to school or knows a history major. Ask AI and it will do it’s best to give you an answer, maybe it’ll find something you missed. There is the risk of AI being wrong, but there’s the risk of a history major being wrong too. Verify the answer if you’re paranoid, but I think AI’s at the point where it can help people learn more efficiently if it’s used correctly.
Do this with a Local AI and you get the added benefit of not worrying about wasting water or “burning down rainforests”.
You can ask it questions you might be embarrassed to ask actual people
lol. Reminds me of the Subnautica 2 drama. A CEO has a rich guy breakdown and asks Chatgpt how to avoid paying the developers of that game after it becomes a huge success. Chatgpt gives him a failed plan which gets him sued.
And all his embarrassing deleted conversations with chatgpt were retrieved by police.
Yea. Just don’t ask AI how to void legally binding contracts.
Or actually listen to your lawyers after you run it by them.
To me there’s a world of difference between that and asking LLMs too teach you how to knit.
If you learn from an AI you’ll learn like an AI. Which is to say shallow, disjointed, incoherent, and mostly wrong.
But hey, at least you burn down an acre of rain forest each class!
If you learn from an AI you’ll learn like an AI. Which is to say shallow, disjointed, incoherent, and mostly wrong.
Feel free to give an example. But how would that be different from learning via a book, magazine, or YouTube video?
You don’t need to take everything it says as gospel, just like you’d cross reference any Google search of importance.
The market is f up so I have less time catching up to other people no matter how rude it may sounds to others if I don’t these things I won’t able to knowledge - maxing as fast as these people who already are at the top eating again and again as debt rising of ours 🙃
