> The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching its metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone.

Not true at all. If you have a robotic servant that can "do everything" for anywhere close to an affordable amount for even a middle-class person, please post a link and specify what it can do.

There a big gap between a tool that can spew out large amounts of code and something you trust to not screw up your house. Once I can tell a robot to do a simple plumbing task in my house, I'll believe in this metamorphosis you're talking about.

> robotic servants that can do everything for everyone.

Why do people keep positing this? The robots get better every year, but they don't get better fast enough to make me think there will be a robot servant doing anything for anyone in my lifetime. As has been the case for the past fifty years or so, they're either hyperspecialized or remote controlled by people, and neither of those spell doom for the economy.

Well even 40k spent 20k years living like the jetsons... There are no analogs for our future. That's one of the core problems here, you have powerful individuals who identify with and aspire to sci-fi, while living in denial of reality. I would argue someone like Musk is more blue pilled and in the Matrix than they think they are...

I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine

Translation: I've never picked potatoes for a living

This is so closely related to a comment I just made https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49470026 that I am going to just risk and repost it.

> This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.

.... 3 responses ....

> Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial. I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...

Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").

Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace

Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."

My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.

Love.

Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.

To wit: Our love of self is so closely tied to our output and if we have no output do we have value?

Edit: tl;dr - I am not sure I understand the point of anything anymore and many others feel the same way. I do not think this is some "existential crisis" I believe it is a logical conclusion to draw given the evidence presented by the day and age we live in.

Or, we can go back to reality and observe that people are not obsolete and all human work was not eradicates

Then we can take down monopolies, tax large corporations, regulate them, empower anti white colar crime agencies again and regulate finance.

That will actually do. Bullshitters and sociopaths are too empowered. That is an issue, and acute one.

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Totally. The combination of "we're taking your work to build your replacement and we can't stop" from Dario and Sam, to AI being non-consentually shoved into every app surface by Microsoft and Google - I was anti-AI for a long time.

What changed it? Actually spending a weekend with Claude Code building personal projects I had wanted to for the last 2 years, which also makes it obvious that we can solve sustainability issues using this tech.

Also seeing the open models reach the frontier and knowing the above ass-hats aren't going to end up with a monopoly helps a lot too.

> I think a message like that around AI is awesome but no all we hear about is how AI will take your job.

because it doesn't matter whether you can use code to fix your Reevo bike if you can't afford to buy a Reevo bike in the first place because you lost your job

Yeah their comments are things like “AI is going to take all your jobs, our latest model is very dangerous, we’ve got ethicists deciding what you can and can’t say to the models, we’re the only ones who can be trusted to control this technology, our revenue is going to be equal to the GDP”

Then they wonder why people are making the implication that their future plans are to completely take over society and run it according to their own whims.

Most posts on X are AI-generated by non-humans.

The vast majority of people don't work in tech they have real jobs just trying to survive and feed their families. They don't have time for cult nonsense.

It makes me wonder how the powers will be will manage to split this issue into powerless factions like they did for Occupy Wall St.

Just remember it will more likely be the version from Dune Encyclopedia, not Herbert's sons' prequels

Can't wait for a society dependent on spice and which is still controlled those with political (or super human) powers.

> The Butlerian Jihad has started.

I'll let you know when it's time

The progressive you speak about are conserving the ideologies they thought were revolutionary.

The conservatives you speak about are conserving ideologies they thought were revolutionary.

What both have in common is that they don't like change.

How I wish that were true for more than a tiny fraction of the population

Perhaps the World Wide Web but do you see how addicted the average person is to TikTok? 0.1% might decide to lead a tech-free lifestyle (and we can be sure that each will interviewed and get an article written about them).

The industry needs to come to grips with the fact that many, many people either have no use for or actively despise GenAI.

How about concrete actions rather than marketing "visions" ?

Non creepy people were rejected by billionaires class, they just dont fit in. And conversely, non creepy people also avoid the tech bro creepy singularity is here crowd.

I think it is more likely they are just drinking their own koolaid (and their friends are too). They are paid to bring in investor dollars, which requires lofty promises.

> My family keeps sending me screenshots of AI generated arguments against building new data centers.

obviously from chinese models running a campaign to keep the US from pulling away.

Well, they're already bidding up generating capacity contracts for upcoming years. The net effect is raising everyone's electric bills today for a data center that might not even get built in the future.

The real kick in the pants is the ever present danger that you'll end up with a data-center that generates its own power on site, using turbo-generators running 24/7/365 because the grid and generation doesn't have anywhere near the required slack (aka resilience, aka redundancy) to take on hundreds of gigawatts of new base load. In addition to the noise, you also get particulates and pollution.

If they do manage to avoid local generation, you're still left with the noise of cooling systems, and the waste heat island.

An alternate interpretation is also possible: that "public sentiment" overemphasizes screaming minorities, and the vast majority just doesn't care.

Nah those articles are rarely allowed to make it to the top

My take is that the difference is simply down to visibility, and by extension broader understanding, of the issue:

- Cameras film me and my family and neighbors everywhere in daily life => Obviously an issue

- Something about secret agencies maybe (?) reading along my messages => “I’ve got nothing to hide in there anyway”

Optics and zeitgeist.

The Snowden leaks had too much of an abstract bogeyman. PRISM couldn't inspire critical mass outrage because, at the time, Big Tech was still genuinely useful and, besides, the Big Tech involved could be sidestepped with some inconvenience. Flock is neither directly useful nor avoidable unless you resolve to never leave your house.

Metadata tracking is, again, too abstract of a concept, too much a statistical what-if. Compare that with Flock which tracks your very countenance.

Most importantly IMO, Flock has a physical manifestation on which people can direct their anger. There is a "frontend" to actively subvert as opposed to a mere "backend" to avoid.

I'm not. The same people who seemingly magically cared about Flock overnight will move onto something else within the year. There's always something new to be outraged over, Flock is just the flavor of the week.

Lots of people cared, it just wasn’t actionable. The situation with flock has avenues for change in town hall meetings or even good ol fashioned vandalism.

Dragnet surveillance by the CIA was a bit harder to oppose.

The Snowden situation is more complicated to explain. For flock you just show a Benn Jordan video showcasing the camera recording kids and people are likely to understand the problem. It’s also visible, in the real world, whenever you go around and see those cameras

(Benn Jordan has been so good at publicizing the flock issue, I would highly recommend to check his Patreon, his technical work over the years is really impressive)

It is more concrete now. For example the footage that was released about the Kirk shooter showed that you are filmed everywhere, including in residential areas.

People are beginning to understand.

Is that the case? It seems to me that the people who cared about Snowden are basically the same people who care about Flock. Most of the people I know who didn't like Snowden also don't seem to care about Snowden. I do find it interesting / strange that conservatives (of which I am somewhat) don't care about Snowden or Flock. To me, the things Snowden revealed, and the crap Flock is doing are completely incompatible with the way I think government should function. But, maybe I'm more libertarian than conservative.

My theory is generational and knowledge shifts, namely that now we're seeing the first substantial cohort of non-techies with a decent understanding of tech culture and politics. This is also why we see a lot more anti-AI and anti tech CEO sentiment among the young than the old in defiance of our previously held assumptions.

This is about the right time for the children, nieces, and nephews of the first and second big generations of post-Web software engineers, IT workers, etc. to be getting old enough to become a political force. There's been an explosion of tech workers since the mid-90s, and that means an explosion of people related to them as well. The kids who watched their parents be stacked ranked at Amazon, saw the difference in how MS treated contractors and employees, listened to their corporate IT parents talk about how hostile MS is, etc. all learned that the big tech companies are not anyone's friend even if the specifics of the tech go over their heads. And while the workers themselves might keep their heads down and be quiet in public for the sake of their careers, their kids and relatives are less constrained.

And they can talk to each other and find that it's a common sentiment. Since they don't necessarily have technical careers or hobbies, they're also able to export this sentiment to a wider variety of people through overlapping hobbies and interests (e.g. the IT guy at a school in suburban Ohio has a kid who's a theatre nerd, and the kid is good at communicating their anti big tech position to this 'new' group of people).

The distribution of knowledge about how tech companies operate is shifting and diffusing into channels and communities it didn't before.

Observation of your body feels more intrusive than observation of your text.

if you cannot see how your violent ex boyfriend stalking you with cameras is profoundly different than the federal government knowing who you call, then you are a liar.

also, snowden is a traitor. putin's stooge

That quote is referenced twice in the article, including in the subtitle.

> Well, we defunded the police, and let political axe-grinders fill our DA seats with hyper-progressive activists.

When did this happen?

There is no equivalence. There is a mass of people who are concerned about "woke." The people who are emotionally invested in AI's success are a tiny minority who have no power to push a backlash.

Hmm wait a minute, unless that small minority is politically well connected with a lot of media access. Then they could manufacture a fake backlash. Much like the backlash to "woke!" Ok nevermind it is the same.