(edited because my original reply was uselessly mean)

Wow … nice to see!

I’m pretty sure a major problem with AI is that people don’t know how to talk about the actual problem.

It’s mega-corps replacing people while “stealing” their intellectual output. It’s a reshaping of the “social contract”. It’s those making bank quickly pushing the whole world in a direction that may just be a really bad idea (like we’re no longer in control of our own world/lives at all).

It poses the question: is all tech progress good or is it sometimes “bad” such that we actually want to design our own fate and sometimes just be comfortable with what we have and what we are?

Does this whole post-industrial revolution world need techno-hype to be happy? Or can we collectively just touch grass and settle a bit more.

More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.

I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.

I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).

My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.

Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.

Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.

But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.

Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.

Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.

And with how this particular AI technology only works by consuming all of the internet’s and our libraries’ data … it’s not just a transfer, it’s pretty much theft.

Yea … it’s the but I don’t get why people don’t care about this more.

If we’re replaced, there’s nothing really left for us in the terms of the way we’ve conceived our whole world for centuries. Sure maybe we go native again or something, but let’s be real, that is a massively tough transition even if it’s viable.

Yea this vibes.

For me, it felt like coding was a more attractive term for people who weren’t “proper” computer science and “engineering” types who weren’t confident that they knew what “program” meant or even “algorithm”, as they were working things as they went.

I’d guess that as computing involved more and more people with this non-standard background, coding became preferred. I certainly encountered people uncomfortable with my casual use of “algorithm” because it triggered their imposter syndrome, and my pointing out that they write algorithms with the code the write all the time certainly didn’t help.

I’m afraid what you wrote was not purely what you state here, and to the extent it was, poorly so.

I don’t think I’m the one here for whom the message is lost.

Ha, ok. Well I think your response is rude, meaningless, petulant, and a waste of space.

But I’m really glad we have people like you on social media to remind us what it’s all about.

Many, myself included, may not like to hear this, but I think it’s the bitter truth.

For better or worse, the majority like this technology. AI companies have stuck the landing in a sales sense.

For those who find it cringey or offensive or whatever, we may have to get used to being black sheep (even more).

Techno feudalism … seems plain and simple to me.

Our independent value and sustainability is no longer a given.

In a monopolised AI world (and how can it be anything other than a big tech monopoly) … you give yourself over, as training data, in exchange for permission to survive … and rely on the AI trained on your data.

Let’s be real … big tech cornered us over the past couple of decades. And now they’re trying to grab us by the balls. It’s happening fast. And most don’t have the philosophical agility to keep up with the implications.

I think they mean in parallel, as in the government steps in and regulates with guarantees etc, not that these reforms would come from the AI itself.

Most notable part for me in the article was not the AI stuff … but that Atlassian has never been profitable.

Not surprising for a tech company. But for one as big and kinda foundational in the service it provides … I found it surprising. Imagine if MS or Apple or Google were never profitable and companies were just entirely reliant on their services!

Couple that with how little love anyone has for Jira/confluence … and yea … good luck with that Atlassian.

I think it’s a great lesson in hiw good people can create and tolerate bad systems …

… how a bunch of clever and thoughtful people (academics) can walk into creating a dumb system which they simultaneously hate or disagree with, and don’t know how to effectively change or fix.

Worth studying IMO as a case study on these general problems. My understanding is that it was a manipulative capitalist that kicked it off by appealing to academics’ egos by creating increasingly specialised and likely redundant Journals (IE more subscriptions). And of course most academics know it’s dumb, but have no sense of collective action. And so humanity just stumbles along doing dumb shit.

Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.

The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.

But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.

There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.

Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.

Yea I got the general or vague impression that this was reminiscent of their initial maps roll out.

Are any heads gonna roll for this?

Surprising twists there about the tomb having been vacated by Egyptians due to flooding with the second tomb yet to be discovered.