Corollary to your complaints: Another downside that I haven't seen on anyone's AI hatelist yet is that it crowds out all other discussion. What happened to everyone talking about languages, protocols, algorithms, architecture, etc.? We can't have those conversations anymore because we're not even sure they matter now. In fact, we probably suspect they don't, hence the not bothering.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.
Yes I've noticed that too. It seems accomplishments in general have been devalued, it's not specific to languages, protocols, algorithms or architecture. If I have some idea at work, I feel like even that receives less recognition now because of AI. AI has ideas too, what does it matter? Sure, your idea could be good. But we are already drowning in ideas from AIs, everytime you prompt an AI it will tell you dozens of ideas on what you could improve. Who can say which one matters, does any of it really matter anymore? Why care about things that are effortless? That's the impression I get in regards to how people think now.
To go along with that, it's also crowding out a whole generation's worth of labor and innovation. We're not curing cancer, we're churning out TPS reports faster and drowning in Show HN shovelware.
The overlap comes from the cancer-curing-capable people also drowning in AI slop and people using AI to flood the space with ideas on how to solve cancer and funders wanting to see people using AI because they think it will solve cancer, etc.
I don't think it speaks well of Software Engineers the will to delegate the construction of blueprints to unreliable workers. Architects and Civil Engineers know that licensed, professional people that have experience and know-how will execute it in a nearly flawless way. Compared to that, agents might hallucinate, build something completely different to the intended project or leave subtle bugs behind that, in the case of complex systems, the humans in charge will probably not even notice.
A parallel to what you're describing would be the Hyatt Regency collapse. Meticulously designed, yet one small change under the surface lead to one of the worst engineering disasters of that century.
I don't want to think of what the digital equivalent of the Hyatt Regency collapse would be, considering that the software could be deployed all around the globe rather than in one place in one building.
Languages is the biggest bummer to me. It's great the LLMs make languages less relevant, rewrite cheaper, etc. But I love languages and language design. It's sad to think that we're converging on the most common languages in training data, without considering the developer ergonomics and semantics. But, it's been happening for decades, LLMs just put it into maximum overdrive.
Why go see Rome when you can google up some photos? Why climb Mt Everest? Why have your own sex when there's so much porn? The answer is going to be the same it's always been: because we fucking can.
This is true too! I have ADHD-like executive problems, and sometimes doing the boring but necessary stuff is so painful I abandon the project entirely. Now, though? I entrust it to the agent, and even if it's slop it's still done, and this actually gives me the impetus to start moving again.
I am not an ADHDer (though I often wonder if I'm on some spectrum or another), but this is one of the things I have found great success in. If I can yeet through most of the busy work associated with a project, and focus on the stuff that really matters?
TBH, if you're wondering if you're on a spectrum but never bothered to check, my advice is to check. I was always distrusting of labels, then got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the ripe old age of 31. And holy mother of Czestochowa, the story of my life suddenly made so much sense.
I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.
Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.
I'm writing a new language and I know it's doomed. I expect exactly zero users beyond me in the age of AI. But I love languages, I love language design. So, I'm doing it because it's fun and rewarding. The joy I get from seeing my language written out and thinking "I came up with that, that's mine" can't be beaten.
Anyway I have one blog post about it. I'm working on the implementation now, just takes a while. I'm close to having a parser (not semantic analysis) and I'll probably do a dev log.
I think it might be because of the comment to like ratio or something. Hope I am wront, but its like someone doesnt want something generating lots of discussion… in a discussion forum
Agreed that the Lacanian subject is relevant in this context... it's a thin wisp of a subject; any less there, and it'd be the Deleuzian non-subject. (In one interpretation) Lacan's subject comes into being within the signifier chain, retrocausally giving the chain meaning as the "I" manifests subject, in both senses of the term.
I think this is one potential path to machinic subjectivity, or a machine phenomenology. To fully replace the human, we don't just want to give the machine some nebulous notion of "agency", we want it to possess this degree of Being as subject. If Lacan's right, perhaps we're closer to this than we might think. The machine already has language in a very Lacanian sense (what I've been calling a machinic linguistic unconscious), the subject just needs something extra to emerge where meaning breaks down. This will be the Lacanian split subject, one not fully present to itself, and allow desire already present in the language mappings within the model to provide immanent causal force.
Until that happens, we'll still need at least one human on the planet to retain his full faculties, to give the global compute infra its telos. Once that threshold is crossed, then that'll be the moment of our final displacement.
No, we can't, because when we replace a part of ourselves, we become less interesting, less whole. We no longer are capable of those deep technical (or philosophical, or whatever) discussions, because our relationship with language itself has changed. Just like the article's example of the druggie, who can no longer experience the profound or sublime, unmediated by the psychotropic substance; we can no longer experience the collective linguistic exchange without genAI. You, an individual, may very well be capable of doing so, but genAI also exists between us, meaning someone else will inevitably bring it up, or worse, throw the slop grenade into the conversation, completely derailing that authenticity you seek.
Language exists in the between, that space not entirely within any of the individuals participating in a conversation. To surrogate or mediate that is to potentially undermine the most core of what it means to be human, (formerly) the only fully-linguistic species on this planet.
> I can't fucking wait for this bubble to burst so we can go back to chatting shit about literally anything else.
That won't happen because that past is gone. This is akin to hoping that we go back to the pre-smartphone era when restaurants were filled with lively discussion, everyone present with their dining partners. That's the true cost of any socially-transformative tech. The cost was always right in front of us, but we were too busy focusing on what little it produced, to notice how much it took away.
Even this blog's page is a symptom of that, drowning in social media links and donation buttons. His Amazon wishlist is filled with tech gizmos and pop culture media slop, stuff that feeds the very machine he despises. I, the reader, just want to read his words, presumably he wants me to respond to them, but the non-human tech keeps getting in the way.
These transformations never revert. Smartphones and social media fully transformed society 20 years ago. The television did long before that. Before that, the motor vehicle. At least this time, more of us are starting to notice. Can we actually do anything about it though? Might be too late for that.
I find these answer options constraining. Most are on a single spectrum of good/bad for each question, ignoring alternatives like resignation, inevitability, indifference, and N/A. For example, someone could think that genAI is the next step towards humanity and machine divergence. Or, maybe they think it's the first step towards man's negation, but that that's somehow a good thing. Basically, the biggest error (among others) is it conflates perception (or prediction) with ethics.
Since the repo for it starts with one giant monster commit, I assume AI is asking these questions, which means I'm wasting my time by even pointing this out, like one would do if they "won" an argument with a Claude session.
That's the kind of question a quiz like this should really ask: When man talks to slop instead of fellow man, what happens to mankind?
Multiple choice invariably tells you more about the people writing the tests than the people answering them. It reveals their assumptions and biases.
A good one was the response that said tech companies aren’t paying enough attention to “safety”. Safety is not even remotely the real issue: the impact on society is. No interpretation of safety that I’ve seen characterizes it in those terms, but they should. Mass job losses are a safety issue for society, for example.
Seems that they didn't add explicit options for resination/indifference, but there is at least one archetype you get at the end which does fit that mold:
The Shrug
patron saint: Matt Levine
AI is a thing that exists and you regard it with detached amusement, like everything else. It's overhyped, sure, but so is most stuff. You'll use it when it's useful and ignore it when it isn't, and you find the discourse more interesting than the technology. You are unbothered.
They explicitly state that they will use your data to train. Here's the important line from ChatGPT's Terms of Use:
Our use of content. We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, and
improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and
policies, and keep our Services safe.
If you type something into the internet now, or anything internet-connected that goes to a cloud service, it's safe to assume it'll end up in a training set, or otherwise mined for every last scrap of value, unless explicitly stated otherwise (and even then, it still might).
Adjust your behavior accordingly, if that's even an option for you anymore.
For most, it's not an option. Only 5% of adults don't own a smartphone, and there's very little you can do on one which doesn't feed the machine. RMS warned us this day would come, and now it's here. We've worked hard for this world, hopefully at least our masters will enjoy it.
Side note: It's partially because of this that if I type something into the internet now, I feel no obligation to not type the craziest and most schizoidal thing that comes to mind (this comment here is a rare exception). Might as well, since most of your audience is bots.
Pride was once pretty much universally considered a sin, usually because it results in things like arrogance, lack of humility, and a general disconnect from the reality of one's own self. Nationalism often takes the form of pride and is encouraged to some degree by most governments, and now we have an entire month dedicated to that other kind of it.
So, maybe passing peak pride, if that's what's occurred, isn't such a bad thing? A national humility month would probably be more psychologically healthy.
This is conflating so many different concepts under one idea of pride. Come on. Yes, humility is also important but it’s a false dilemma and meaningless.
We accelerate capitalism (which AI is becoming synonymous with). The process described here will occur (it's probably inevitable anyway, as the essay's author would agree), giving us an economy of global capital completely decoupled from the desires of mankind. Then, man and machine can part ways; indeed, we'll have no choice on our end but to do this, because the machine won't need us. Anything man can contribute to it will have long since been rendered economically net-negative, as it already is for many (and possibly most of the world).
Now we have two worlds from our currently intermeshed one: in one, the machine proceeds to accelerate further and further away from anything resembling its origin of man's desiring-production (in the Deleuzian sense); in the other, man is forced to return to the purely human existence, the unmediated and unsurrogated world of authentic being-in-the-world.
We can assist this transition's smoothness in two ways, each serving one end of this divergence. Those of us embedded in the capitalist technosphere can continue to contribute what we can to the machine's dialectical progression towards a machinic absolute Geist. The rest of us, who have already been negated into economic irrelevance, can work on building that authentic human world, both by borrowing from the purely-human past and imagining a future that was previously impossible as it need not be some form of primitivism. Both sides of this revolution can be compiled, and can be structured in a way that represents something we might call freedom for both capitalism and man.
I've been explicitly asked to do this by management at a long-former employer who cited "improving" visible metrics. I just ignored it, but one member of the interview team quit in protest. In retrospect, I should've done the same, as such a policy was an omen of things to come. In the rank-and-file, one should note such signifiers, since you lack complete information or access to the corp strategy discussions occurring in the c-suite conference room. By the time things have gotten to the point where you're doing mandatory diversity training or, like in my case, attending a meeting and given an order like this, your employer has already long been colonized by activist cultural rot.
On the topic generally, I think it's one of those everyone-loses situations. Even if you're politically aligned with the extremity pushing for this, this is bad strategy, a bad move that just ultimately enhances the authority of your opponents. I suppose I understand why activist types reach for it, it's an action taken that has visible effectuation in the real world. There's a libidinal appeal to it, as it empowers the activist, while disempowering anyone on the consequential end. But, there's a disconnect between source and effect here. If we're going to outsource morality, we should consider the motivations of any external source of it. Minimally, the moral arbiter should be tied to the consequences of their prescription. A company is composed of thinking beings, already filtered for ability of some kind, and all of whom at least have some embedding in the structure that will change, so we should be skeptical of the need to ever defer to an external other for ethical conclusions.
Here's some political praxis, something that could apply regardless of alignment: any political alliance will be composed of a range of entities, to include the action-over-consequences types. You want those people to take orders from the theorists, not the other way around. On the left, the Frankfurt School knew this, and their praxis was one of mobilizing an activist base of lumpenproletariat. Those foot soldiers would wave signs with simplified versions of messaging devised by an intellectual elite. Their job was to simply add directional social pressure, while thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno considered nuance and higher structure. This arrangement worked well for them, but later generations lost sight of the framework, and it ended up inverted. What you get then is an acephalic monster, a political id, one only capable of destruction, even self-destruction, not the deep thought necessary for creation of a new order. The waved sign or bumper sticker is not a moral system and certainly not a corporate strategy. It's an intensity, an exclamation; when you read one, infer the exclamation point, which is always there.
Israel has been at this for awhile. One problem with engaging an enemy is that you enter an interplay, a dialectic if you will, with them. As you shape them, so may they do the same to you. Certainly war has shaped Israeli society, and being able to accommodate the nature of their enemy has been not just something that would happen, but also a necessity of survival. Note that this also works in the other direction. By now, their enemy cannot be pure savage and them pure civilization, for this dialectic is a violent progression towards a (perhaps distant) barycenter.
So, those of us who look upon Isreal in their current state in moral arbitration should consider keeping this in mind. Their current state of being is not simply innate to themselves, rather some kind of dialectic sublation of them and the enemy. Even if you don't care much about this conflict, it's a model worth considering, since the rest of us here in the West also have a history of voluntarily entering into this cultural exchange of sorts with various middle eastern societies. In some ways, the barrier remains for us, hence our hapless bumbling in the region. Those misunderstandings result in expensive mistakes, of course, but perhaps it's better than full sublation, a violent dance of mutual becoming.
Yeah, all Israel ever wanted was peace. That's why they stole land that was already populated, and continue to take more and more. Bomb women and children. confiscate baby formula. starve innocent people. destroy their homes and schools. Perfect way to keep peace.
I always find it funny that people defend muslim agression by claiming people stole land from them.
Islam is a continuation of the Roman empire. The very foundation of Roman, and islamic economy was conquering lands, enslaving the population and mining the conquests for natural resources.
100% of muslim lands were stolen from others. Every square millimeter. The early muslims were raiders and thieves, people banished from their tribes, their cities. EVERYTHING they ever occupied was stolen. Mecca? Stolen. Damascus? Stolen. Jerusalem? Stolen. Medina? Stolen. Cairo? Stolen. Every last bit of space they ever occupied is conquered, or as you put it: "stolen lands".
When will the stolen lands be given back?
An additional level of humor is added by the obvious fact that land is not what's creating wealth. Hasn't been for centuries. What's creating wealth is people and technology. Excactly what Palestinians and muslims are attempting to chase out. Which means the great reward Palestinians are killing, torturing and dying for ... is poverty. If they win, Palestine will be far worse off than any of the neighboring countries, Palestinians will desperately emigrate and abandon it.
On top of that this is an area of the world where fresh water has to be either designed or imported. Poverty in those areas will not just mean living in squalor, it will mean death.
The best possible thing that could happen to Palestinians is that they comprehensively lose this conflict. In fact, that they lose to the point the cause is entirely lost. For the people living in Gaza and the West bank, that would be by far the best possible outcome. That Palestinians and muslims in general realize that the "fouding myth" of their society is like any other founding myth. A cute story for the children, that really describes an ugly, sordid, inhumane past that nobody, and we mean absolutely nobody, wants to return to.
wow! are you really saying that Palestinian children should have no rights because of something their ancestors did? Should people get to violently remove them from their homes and land because of something written in history books?
It's honestly shocking to me that there are humans in the world who are comfortable defending such evil with some perceived amusing fact from history. This is happening today! The killing of people in their thousands based on their ethnicity is happening today. There is no defence for that. It's not war, it is genocide.
That isn't some wild internet conspiracy theory, it is a consensus of genocide scholars.
But I guess you will go on with being "amused" at any argument about stolen land, even though there isn't a human on earth who's ancestors haven't done terrible things.
We should be better than that in the 21st century.
An acquaintance of mine offers training services to state LE and likes to make a point about that: We like to think that police are experts at firearms, but in actuality, a civilian trainer who specializes in the topic is usually far better informed. Police have a lot on their plate, after all, and firearms skills are just one of those.
I did training prior to deployment overseas into a conflict zone, and benefited from instructors who had already been over there and seen some of the worse it had to offer. I could see that an instructor who both specialized in a topic and had outlier experience within it as being ideal. You could even just say it's actual experience, the reality-checking of theory, no different from how you might benefit learning software dev from a prof who had been a SE at some point. It's the difference between learning from someone who's only read about a topic in books vs. actually done the thing. Kinetic combat (like software development) is one of those topics that the actual reality diverges from media depictions, so that grounding in the real is why you train for it in the first place.
Neutralizing threats in an intense situation requires split-second decision-making. These decisions will be scrutinized after the fact, possibly for years, so the purpose of such training is largely to hardwire the correct action into reflex.
Also, anything we do write will just get immediately slurped into AI embeddings, anonymizing it and detaching it from its human source, at most nudging some corner of its vectorized slurry. Maybe someone will ask a question that our content influences, but if that user bothers to thank anyone, he'll thank Claude. Perhaps this is what it feels like to be fully commoditized, fully alienated from one's labor.