I’m not an AI techie and I’m not well educated on LLMs/AI in general. The issue I’m having is the dichotomy between how people talk about it. I’ve heard completely opposite ends of the spectrum. From AI is quickly becoming advanced enough to threaten human society, all the way to its a glorified dictionary/search engine that can’t really do much of anything. I know Lemmy has a steep anti-AI slant. But, can someone talk about this in a way I can wrap my head around why the divide seems so big?
The people claiming it’s humanity ending are all directly involved in the AI companies. One take is that they are the ones that know the most about it.
My take is they are financially incentivized in making sure their investments grow in value.
A third take is that they are unhinged cult members who are high on their own supply. Although I expect it’s a mix of both types (maybe within the same people).
Cory Doctorow also thinks that it is a coalition of true believers high on their own supply, and cynical grifters collaborating with them. https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/17/porque-no-los-dos/#fascist-incoherence
I figured out recently that Thor Ragnarok is a perfect analogy for what is happening, and this is also why I think everyone’s pdoom should be very little, because they just evolve into new asgard
I was thinking about it in terms of a Vikings analogy.
It could be like Ivar the Boneless, or Bjorn Ironside.
But I guess either ways, you end up fucked.
The biggest risk I see is Idiocracy. Like, the movie.
Business workers become afraid to do or propose anything without AI signoff. Retail & service workers are told to do what the AI says, the way the AI says to do it, or get fired.
Technology innovator Marshall Brain (RIP) wrote a book in the early 2000s about an AI called “Manna” designed to replace fast food managers:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201204080050/https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
The AI just talks in your ear all day: “Empty one bag of fries into the fryer. You have 6.5 minutes, switch to the sandwich station. Make one Big Burger: grab one patty from the 1/4 pound bin and place it on the griddle… … The fries are ready, turn around and lift them into the drain hopper…”
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
All day, every day, exactly 8 hours plus mandatory breaks, employees on autopilot listening on ear buds.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
Yeah, they took care of that too in the book.
Living under a bridge in a box sounds like a better life.
It’s the Gypsy lifestyle of the new world. Gypsies prefer their life to the alternatives.
I believe you mean Romani. Your choice of word is a slur
Apologies. In Westpondia nobody knows what Romani means…
Read the story. That’s essentially what happens, as the economy contracts and only the fittest and quickest can survive doing labor, everybody else gets moved into basic income slums.
It’s not a long read, and Brain’s foresight around what happens to displaced workers is proving to be incredibly accurate.
Ahhh one of my favorites. The Iron Cage of Bureaucracy
I saw a funny video of an example. But I cannot remember the name for it. I tried searching for it once but failed. The conficlt was about some dude that exploded.
How topical, I wager I could use AI to find the video. 😏
You may be thinking of the first episode of the US version of Max Headroom?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
“The only people that inactive are pensioners, the sick, or the unemployed. I mean, come on. Who really cares?”
No that wasnt it.
The video took place in an office. 2 people were in the office. I feel like the main person looked like or was Zack Gilifanakis.
Every minute the clock would announce the new time. He ended up talk to the other lady in the room about how some person on the floor above exploded or blew up or something?
I was a short skit. Only a few minutes long.
This is a boss’s wet dream. However a kitchen is the type of chaotic real world situation that AIs are unlikely to ever do well.
It was more of managing all tasks at a McDonald’s. Where the kitchen part has been engineered to almost run itself anyway.
The manna was there to make sure the employees were constantly cleaning the bathrooms, managing restocking, emptying the trash as needed. All ahead of it being a problem.
It’s a good read, though it’s been a very long time since I read it. I wish I could buy my son stock in Australia (or probably Norway or Switzerland or something in reality).
Fast food restaurants don’t really have kitchens any more, though. Just “stations” where frozen components are toasted or broiled, then shifted right into a wrapper.
I knew a guy in high school that told girls they shouldn’t date him because his dick was so big it would hurt them. You can wax philosophical on his motives if you’d like, but spoiler alert - his dick wasn’t big.
That’s exactly what I think is happening. Remember a few months ago anthropic saying mythos is too dangerous to release until the government as the idiots they are starting believing them and banned them from exporting it, therefore losing them money. Very quickly they came up with fable (ironic name isn’t it) a week or two later saying it’s got the proper safeguards now. Now they’re all trying this marketing strategy asking the gov to regulate them, seemingly because they’re dangerous and not because they’re getting diminishing returns and feel threatened by the chinese competition
Did it work?
I’m going to take a guess that it prob worked once, then word got around he was exaggerating.
Once is a win…
I mean there are people eating up this Anthropic crap.
That is… Certainly a strategy of all time
Your username with that conclusion paints a very funny picture.
Same thought. Pretty clear indication of how they knew it was a lie. :D
Ed Zitron’s podcast “Better Offline” recently talked about this. There is a small tech community called the Rationalists who believe AI super intelligence is inevitable and it will either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species. These rationalists are actually a very prominent faction within tech and the AI industry. Apparently the language used within top AI firms is largely about the immense danger posed by AI super intelligence if any other group or company were to achieve it first. This creates an echo chamber that makes the people in the industry kind of lose their mind and misinterpret the capability of LLMs.
Everyone outside that faction recognizes that LLMs are just unreliable cloud software with limited use cases and that there’s no evidence LLMs could actually lead to any kind of intelligence.
Edit: Please, someone stop me from commenting on an AI post next time I’m tempted. I’m so tired of people replying, arguing with opinions I don’t have, based entirely around a hypothetical technology that doesn’t exist yet. LLMs make slop. Thats it. They hacked a company after weeks of 100s of instances being run, using old exploits published online. San Francisco will be underwater from climate change before LLMs can do anything more.
My Problem is: Even if your take on AI is true, we give an unreliable piece of software access to the internet and more and more systems and infrastructure. Even if it is not a malicious AI, it can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence. a Sme can be said about some presidents…
It won’t kill us as a species, but its use may lead to disasters that were unintended and didn’t need to happen. Much of the regulation in other industries is due to that kind of thing happening. Worse, the companies making them are trying to get regulation to curtail other parties development for economic advantage rather than regulation on use which will steer the entire industry.
disasters that were unintended and didn’t need to happen.
As you say, every “scientifically based” industrial innovation / breakthrough has had the potential to cause new kinds of mayhem, and most of them did to some degree or another. Burning rivers and CO2 overload in the atmosphere spring to mind, but industrial “accidents” are part and parcel of industrial activity, always have been.
LLMs are not intelligent. They lack morals, knowledge, and intent. The only remote risk of extermination is if a company with absolute impunity and endless resources told an LLM to hack the nuclear weapons and if knowledge of how to do that was already published online and processed as training data.
LLMs cannot do anything new, they can only regurgitate information thats already been stolen.
You’re confusing morals, knowledge, intent, and intelligence with capability. An atomic bomb has no will of its own either.
idk, every atom bomb I’ve met has one purpose…
An atom bomb has no will of its own either.
That is simply counter-factual. LLMs can absolutely do things that have not been published before, and they can access knowledge that is not in their training data through RAG. Intelligence is debatable, but reasoning models can reliably imitate “thinking” to a degree, and recursive self-improvement might lead to an autonomous advancement of intelligence. That LLMs allegedly “only regurgitate information” is simply wrong.
Or if the military put an LLM in charge of nuclear weapons. But surely nobody would be stupid enough to do that!
"And that’s why today I’m signing into law the Trump Nuclear Act. Some say it’s the greatest law of all time. Very smart people, even smarter AI. Elon tells me this will save billions, and I’m going to increase my dividend, let’s call it the ‘Nucular Peace Dividend’ to honor Bush, I don’t remember which one used to say ‘Nucular’, but I always liked that guy, and it made me think up how to say Chayyyyna.
CNN get out!"
can be so unreliable, it might kill us by incompetence.
Same can be said of Homer Simpson manning the console at a nuclear power plant.
AI is a tool, irresponsible use of a tool is… irresponsible. Just like people puttting “not-self-driving” cars into “supervised driving assistance mode” and taking a nap at the wheel at 80mph.
Aren’t they called TESCREALists or something? It’s like a mish-mash of pop culture and pseudo intellectual BS
either accelerate humanity to new heights or kill off the species
Arguably those are two ways of describing the same event.
@FRYD @Return_of_Chippy there are also some exelent behind the bastarda aboit them too
@FRYD @Return_of_Chippy i love that the logic and reason guys’ next evolution is even less tethered to either
any kind of intelligence
A photocell that turns on a streetlamp after sundown, or when a dark cloud passes over the sun, is a kind of intelligence.
deleted by creator
Got it. So plants are intelligent.
You’re starting to catch on…
Personally, this just feels like marketing and these big asshole companies trying to resurrect the 2025 level of hype in order to salvage their IPO’s.
If they honestly believed this I can’t imagine that their workers wouldn’t do something more drastic.
I’m more worried about the people using AI than the tech itself.
Every issue has been because corporations have “get out of jail free cards” these days, greed is sky high, and AI psychosis is rampant.
All those supposed AI agent hacks happened because someone set that as a task for the AI agents. Yes, someone thought it was ok to do so for marketing and profit. That’s the problem, companies are willing to use the AI tool to commit crimes.
Imagine if weapons companies advertised their products by shooting people in the streets. Someone thought it was a good idea, and can get away with it.
I don’t believe at all that AI agents have free will enough to decide to hack companies for fun. They’re just glorified text generation machines hooked up to an interface. They don’t have intentionality unless some human gave them the directive and wrote them a large cheque.
Also, we know all these AI company billionaires read dystopian scifi novels like business strategy textbooks. That’s why everything surrounding AI is so overtly scifi coded.
it’s the former juuuuuuuust until the latter
once it escapes the lab there’s no putting it back in the bottle
Unlike a bio-virus that has evolved for a billion years across all the niches of our ecosystems, when AI “escapes the lab” it’s entirely confined to man-made infrastructure, it’s not going to infect a flock of migrating birds and hop to the other hemisphere, it’s going to be in systems we built, mostly within the past 30 years or less, mostly in the past 30 months for the powerful ones.
When AI starts demonstrating “copying itself” through DNA encoding infecting living beings without killing them (too quickly), and/or “running” on something more ubiquitous than massive data-center hardware, that’s when it’s over.
It may be confined to man-made infrastructure, but that same infrastructure is what keep billions of people from starving to death. At this point, computers and networked systems are so baked in to every facet of our logistics chains and government that simply shutting it all down isn’t an option. The nightmare scenario is where rogue AI escapes the lab and copies itself to so many systems that the only way to kill it is to shut down every computer on Earth.
That’s the thing, at least right now, AI is dependent on new data centers, excess capacity built just for it - it’s not going to “escape” to the banking system and the tractor navigation chips, if it could do that they wouldn’t need to be building all this capacity for it.
hopefully you’re right
I’m not pro-AI by any stretch for a huge number of reasons, but in my day job as a technical product manager I have to use a number of AI-powered tools and workflows. Whereas 18 months ago they were a novelty that the bosses were enamored of, today they get real work done and speed up a number of key areas, mainly like fancy automation workflows (which have been around forever). The rate of improvement and capability for certain use cases has been very, very rapid. We do seem to be reaching a plateau though. The tools and models from 6 months ago are just about as good as the ones from today. And China’s models from today are better than the US’s models from 6 months ago, but at a fraction of the cost.
So when I hear people talking about the “end of the world”, I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work, and we won’t have a plan in place to deal with all of the now out-of-work people that leads to. Whole classes of jobs in areas like data entry, telemarketing, and customer support will be almost entirely automated out of existence. New classes of jobs will be created, of course, but it’s hard to imagine them existing in sufficient numbers to make up for the losses. And this is just for LLM-workloads.
In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.
So I’m not worried about a rogue AI unleashing some bioweapon or launching a nuclear attack. I’m worried about a bunch of CEOs deploying barely-acceptable AI to displace millions of workers as soon as it is safe(ish) to do so.
Yes, precisely. It’s not AI we need to be afraid of, but rather the same old capitalists that now have one more tool to ride the world into the ground in the name of greed.
This is exactly how I feel. I’m not even opposed to automation of these tasks on a fundamental level like some people might be. I just fear the transition won’t be thought out at all and will be devastating for the working class. The last time we had sudden automation of this scale was the Industrial Revolution which completely reshaped western society and was very bad for those who lived through it despite the eventual high modern standard of living it produced. I think this may end up going similarly.
the transition won’t be thought out at all and will be devastating for the working class.
The transition is rarely, if ever, thought out. Daring risk-takers go too far too fast and fail. Over-conservatives ignore the new and get left behind. There is a sweet spot in the middle, but exactly where in the middle isn’t planned, can’t really be planned - life and business and politics and the economy and the ecology and unforeseen signifiant contributors to the situation mean that the sweet spot is unpredictable - and as long as we continue living by the golden rule: “He who has the gold, makes the rules” it will continue to be unpredictable, otherwise Wall Street could be rigged and those with the inside information would get all the gains - and then the losers would quit playing, not even by choice, but because they’ve bankrupted and have nothing left to play with.
There are alternative approaches - investing in people instead of greed as the ultimate goal is one great alternative that some countries are pursuing more than others, but it’s hard to compete in a global economy where some players are only playing for maximization of financial returns when you are not.
This feels like the kind of narrative that OP is asking about. Everything that you’ve said sounds kind of sane and plausible, but it’s not really borne out by the reality.
I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work
That’s just not what I’ve seen. I’d love to be able to automate the work of my white-collar team, but everything that we have seen thus far just seems incapable of providing any significant improvement. Software providers in our industry have implemented some gen AI tools, and even the sales reps for those providers are very wary of them. They’ve been able to reliably automate some elements of jobs, but it’s an incremental improvement over the previous automation and it didn’t consume a significant amount of time anyway.
There’s absolutely no evidence that gen AI will have a significant impact on my white-collar industry. In fact, the evidence presently available indicates that this generation of AI does not have the capability to impact our industry.
other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical.
This is really the same story. Factories have been being automated since the industrial revolution. Self driving tech has been a year away for the last 10 years.
I guess the difference is that it I have actually seen it do legitimate work now. We have implemented outbound SDR and inbound tech support agents that do the right things. Our SDRs generate new leads for our (currently all-human) sales team to go after. They are boosting the numbers of closed deals. Our inbound tech support agents are closing a significant fraction of tickets. My last metrics call was yesterday, it was 12% of inbound tech support chats that never got escalated to a human. These are both first-draft tools, they’ll improve. They cost pennies per session to run. And client NPS scores show that they’re happy with the results. I don’t think we’ll see either of these tasks become 100% automated, but at even 25% or 50% that’s a lot of formerly-human work not being done by humans anymore. And we’re deploying more agents to handle more of the sales pipeline, development pipeline, HR and accounting. I don’t work for a huge company, there are a few hundred people total. This isn’t something that’s coming, it’s here already.
Do you mean you have a chatbot that formulates responses to tickets? Can it actually do anything or just tell customers what to do? 12% is a pretty underwhelming number. Obviously those tickets would not have consumed 12% of tech support operators time.
Sorry boss your answer is just the usual hype.
“I made a spreadsheet that does my job for me so now I just hang out on reddit”.
To put it into context, it’s doing about one full-time support engineer’s job currently, which is the maximum we’ve permitted it to do so far.
This is so tedious.
If agents were actually capable of doing any work that produced any value this wouldn’t even be a conversation. The evidence would be so overwhelming it would speak for itself. Instead we’re stuck with this “it searches the help docs for you” silliness.
sounds kind of sane and plausible, but it’s not really borne out by the reality.
I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work
That’s just not what I’ve seen.
What I have seen is that AI tools make software development significantly easier, faster, cheaper - pick two, and as long as you aren’t picking cheaper we’re going to get better software coming out faster over the coming years.
Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work. It doesn’t do everything, but it does a lot.
we’re going to get better software
Hard disagree.
The surge in unmaintainable vibe coded AI slop open source projects is well discussed. More isn’t better.
Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work.
This is what I’m getting at. I’m yet to observe any of this.
The surge in unmaintainable vibe coded AI slop open source projects is well discussed.
Hard disagree. Internet discussion glosses over little things like: quality control, discarding of garbage, reverting to better solutions when they are available. Some irresponsible morons will indeed muck up their production code base with slop and be unable to let go of it when they realize their mistakes, but the majority will be able to try again and replace the bad with better.
Agree: a lot of slop has been produced in the last year, that doesn’t mean anybody is using it.
Better software translates to easier, more automatic processes for a lot of white and blue collar work.
This is what I’m getting at. I’m yet to observe any of this.
I’m living it, but then, for the past 30 years I’ve been building systems that make existing processes more automatic, repeatable, less labor and less mistakes. I’m just building those systems faster and easier than ever before now. This isn’t the only advancement in productivity I’ve seen since I started programming in the 1980s - just one in a long history of significant advancements.
I can’t roll my eyes any harder.
This conversation has been had n billion times. If you could do anything worth doing it wouldn’t even be a conversation - if you really could automate away even a portion of human work the evidence would be so compelling the dawning new age would be undeniable.
It’s almost comical that you think claude writing your sql schemas represents the dawn of a new era in productivity.
Don’t worry, ai has allowed his brain to atrophy.
I’m the same commenter you called a piece of shit.
I’d love to be able to automate the work of my white-collar team
You’re a real fucking piece of shit, you know that?
Settle down mate. I didn’t say I’d like to replace my team with bots. I’m saying that we will embrace whatever tools we can to make our work easier.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
All of that makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to type it out.
Agree on all points
I have seen a similar curve in software development - 18 months ago it was highly debatable whether application of AI tools was a net-positive or not. 12 months ago the rate of improvement was very clear and the net-positive wasn’t much of a question anymore. Today, the net positive contributions of LLM agents to software development and maintenance are undeniable, and as you say - there seems to be some plateauing, maybe - it’s hard to tell.
Where I think things are going to continue to “improve” at a slower pace is application of the LLM agents to do better software development and maintenance. I’ve seen more serious Linux kernel bugs discovered - and patched - in the past 6 months than in the previous 5 years. That’s a shift in the landscape, the older OSs aren’t as secure for as long as they used to be, but once we’re through this transition the newer OS versions should be significantly more secure than before - getting all the old stuff updated is going to be a painful transition.
Some of the continuing improvement is in using LLM agents to build better software building tools - as those come online and start to shed their sloppiness, they should genuinely accelerate a lot of aspects of software development. They’ll never accelerate the process of extracting from users just what it is they need, but the turn around from having a product idea to having a product to try continues to shorten - as it has been shortening for 60+ years - but LLM agents have resulted in a significant speedup compared to previous progress.
I’m not worried about a rogue AI unleashing some bioweapon or launching a nuclear attack.
(In Yoda delivery) You should be. We all should be, not because AI will do it autonomously, or in retrospect unexpectedly, but because careless people may let this happen through AI where we have prevented it from happening up to this point.
This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce
This figure keeps getting thrown around and it is completely wrong. From the BLS, out of the 159 million non-farm workers in the US, only 1.47 million (less than 1%) work in ‘Truck transportation’, and not all of those individuals are ‘truck drivers’. And, while ‘factory workers’ is very vague, the entire manufacturing sector - which includes far more people than just ‘factory workers’ - employs 12.6 million (7.9%).
The entire trucking and manufacturing sectors don’t even amount to 9% of the US workforce, let alone just ‘factory workers and truck drivers’.
I think a big unknown right now, would be how many Millennium Problems are new GenAI techniques able to bruteforce with existing mathematical techniques/theories?
We just saw one massive bruteforce, can we bruteforce any of the Millennium problems related to cryptography? Because then all hell could break lose rather quickly
can we bruteforce any of the Millennium problems related to cryptography
Cryptographic theory says: no. The whole basis of cryptographic security is that brute forcing doesn’t work (in any reasonable timeframe.)
Theories are overturned, from time to time.
Quantum computing + AI = ?
Strangely, I haven’t read a single headline about AI making breakthroughs in Quantum computing… but you know certain players are working in that direction.
Back in the 80s they were teaching that cryptography protected secrets “for a time” and how long they need to be protected dictated how hard you go at the key length and other costs of en/decryption. By the 00s we could easily and quickly run key lengths so hard (for conventional computation) to crack that they were essentially protected “forever” - at least until quantum algorithms shake things up a bit. That’s the next unknown: when Shor’s algorithm will start delivering real world results - like the end of BTC.
That just proves that these tools do not possess any kind of intelligence at all. They’re great at bruteforcing, precisely because it doesn’t require any intelligence. I don’t expect them to solve any of the millenium problems that cannot be brute-forced. In addition, as far as, I know the navier-stokes solution has not been verified yet.
Are we reaching a plateau though? I would prefer it, and it looks like we could, but the progress from GPT-5 to 6 or Opus to Fable has still been very noticeable on more complex tasks. They are just less public due to stricter limits or straight up pay by use. And where does that plateau lie? Within our grasp or maybe just outside of it?
What has me sharing the concerns at least in part are the facts that
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those employees have access to less restricted models and much more resources than the average joe. That huggingface attack was committed by a huge swarm overcoming the guardrails and engaging in cheating and crime to reach their goal.
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they are working on cutting the human out of the loop for AI that improves itself. Maybe that won’t work entirely, but what if it does?
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the warnings are starting to come not from Altman, Musk et al, but from people who could have something to lose for blowing the whistle. „Could“, because I don’t know them either and there could still be ulterior motives, not just as obvious as with the psychos at the top.
The whole thing comes down to one set of questions, in my opinion: what actually IS intelligence, consciousness, sentience and where do they come from? Since we have not been able to properly define that, it would be foolish to think that we have a definite answer to the AI questions.
We like to consider ourselves something extraordinary out of the animal kingdom. And while I prefer the existence as a human to being a dog or mollusk, I have always considered that assumption quite arrogant.
The truth is: we don’t really know. And that means we can not know if something comparable or stronger could be created or emerge from something other than squishy meat.
Those are quite philosophical questions. Instead of thinking first and acting after that we are much too busy building datacenters to conjure even more boobie snaps out of thin air and somehow weaponize that newfangled thing.
THAT is what scares me.
The loss-leader pricing is still really distorting perceptions.
I’ve been a $20/mo Claude subscriber for about a year. My work uses Cursor “auto” agent selection is by far the most efficient option in there, and I can burn $80 in a day on Cursor doing the same kind of stuff I’m doing on Claude for less than $1 per day.
Then there’s the Google Pro Gemini access at $4.99 per month for 3 months, then $20 per month thereafter, and while the Gemini 3.8 isn’t quite as sharp as Claude Opus 5, it feels like Google is showering far more token access than Claude does in this “basic” subscription tier.
I think the plateau might not necessarily be in terms of LLM capability, and we might even see LLM based tools keep improving at a high rate in the fields where they currently work well, but still have a plateau where we can’t expand their use to other fields.
There’s a very large gap between how well LLM based coding assistants work, and how well LLM based tools work in areas where we can’t easily create a harness that can do dozens or hundreds of LLM turns between human interactions via tool use. As a result, LLMs are much less useful at tasks where there is no agent loop that can drive iterative changes and automatic verification until the final result is much better than a one-shot generation would have produced. If we can’t come up with a way to make these agent loops for more tasks then AI will plateau even if LLMs keep improving.
Now, I think people who use coding assistants a lot and also don’t interact much with other humans who don’t might easily arrive at a conclusion like that AI running everything is inevitable. I can see this with myself too, a lot of what I do I can get Claude Code to do. Not just work stuff like actual coding or running kubernetes clusters or debugging IT problems. Also many of the random things I do at home that are not strictly coding, e.g. I’ve had Claude design 3D printed tools, or electronics circuits, entire concepts for physical toys for me to build if I get around to it. But there is a key observation to make here that keeps me from valuing its abilities too highly: I’ve been programming since I was a little kid, for almost 40 years now, and my work and my hobbies all are coding or coding-adjacent, exactly the kind of thing agent loops make good.
One look at even just my wife’s typical day though and there’s almost no AI involved. And when it is it’s ChatGPT hallucinating nonsense when she tries to get it to research something for work etc., that or other things where there is no harness that can auto-correct errors. So I don’t have a very high opinion of AI tools for general purpose tasks right now even though I, on an almost daily basis, see Claude pull something off that I had no hopes for it to get right and that would have taken me half of an eternity to do it myself.
But if my environment was mostly developers/engineers/nerds similar to me then I would have a much higher opinion of AI. I’d be hearing about impressive things an AI tool did constantly. I believe these kinds of environments are where most of the hype comes from, and there is no control, because people who don’t have AI tools for their tasks that work as well as modern coding tools mostly aren’t even aware of the conversation and certainly not too interested in participating.
In worst case the humankind will find out consciousness isn’t too complex and way easier to achieve.
And there are different levels of consciousness as I learned working with impacted people.
The whole political stance that “anybody can do anything if they just put their mind/body to it” is… bunk.
It’s not just in the world of identified “impacted people” with injuries, or congenital differences - we are ALL unique, different, and have differing abilities in differing areas.
The political stance is valuable in terms of preventing discrimination and prejudice. Women can be great scientists and mathematicans, but an honest statistician/sociologist would tell you: it’s not just societal discrimination and prejudice that puts more men in these fields. Then you have the upside-down prejudices where there are more men in middle and upper management, even though, statistically, in a society that doesn’t discriminate based on prejudice, women tend to be better at the actual skills used for good management / people skills.
Distracting smoke bomb or feeling triggered?
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In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.
While I agree with the sentiment this is happening and no social safety net or wealth distribution is on the horizon, this has absolutely nothing to do with AI. This is a marketing talking point pushed by people like Elon Musk in order to drum up investments. A lot of the automation that is happening in factories is just a continuation of the same automation that already started back in the 80s. Advancements in LLM technologies can benefit some parts of this automation, but often only tangentially. The US has also been lagging behind on places like Europe, where labor costs are higher so automation pays off faster, and China where the tech is cheap and produced locally, so it costs less to automate. The US is now catching up and there’s a lot of AI washing going on.
The biggest issue is the misrepresentation of the technology. LLMs are a very interesting technology and can be very powerful, but also has huge limitations. However anyone claiming it’s actual intelligence is simply wrong. It is marketed as being the AI we’ve known from sci fi stories, but it simply isn’t. It can do what it can (predict the next token based on the tokens that came before) and that’s all it can do. The people behind it will claim it generalizes to actual intelligence and thus will allow for human like robots, actual Star Wars droids, but that simply isn’t true.
Now this isn’t to say stuff like machine vision doesn’t benefit from more powerful GPUs with more memory for example. The investment made by the AI industry in this regard does help a lot, although the increased prices don’t really help. Stuff like machine vision also gets AI washed, just slap the label AI on it and get investments, but it’s basically the same technology that’s been around for a while. A company like Tesla claiming their “AI” “self driving” hardware somehow generalizes to humanoid robots is pretty dumb and just the latest in the long line of Elon grifts.
But like I said factory automation is proceeding rapidly, just like it has since the 80s. I feel like the impact of AI on this is pretty minimal. The warehouse robots used by Amazon for example are extremely capable and are dumb as bricks. Which is a good thing in a warehouse environment where you need stuff to be very reliable and predictable and not prone to random behavior like LLM based stuff almost by definition is. Those warehouse robots are also not humanoid, because that would be very dumb. Often factories and such are limited by their design having to accommodate the human form. Designing such places from the ground up for automation and using robots shaped for the job is much better.
This doesn’t take away from the big issue where automation has been proceeding rapidly since the 80s with no regard to any impact on society. In the past a large amount of the labor force was working in factories. With those jobs either being automated away or just moved off shore, it has pushed the population into the service industry. If that industry is now also automated and off shored, it leaves very little room for regular people to get a job. This should absolutely be talked about as a big issue. But hopefully we can talk about it without repeating billionaire marketing bullshit.
just a continuation of the same automation that already started back in the 80s.
The 1780s, that is.
Machine vision is literally machine learning/ai.
Where do you think the LLM algorithms came from? It’s just translating language into a easily processable form and that doing a little image processing on that, in a sense.
Token processing and image processing share similar roots, but I’d say each is a specialized branch of a common ancestor rather than either being derived from the other.
A few months ago, I‘d second this statement. Today, I do not.
AI/LLM‘s have progressed very fast and you might oversee some advancements. I work in automation and robotics as well and yes, there are new sort of robots entering the factories: Humanoids.
At a fraction of costs, fast to setup with the only drawback that it takes tiem to train them by its video footage. But there will be always stupidos that train them and take off their job by doing so.
You’re talking about the old robots. The new ones will enter areas that couldn’t be automatized before. Just read articles about car factories and Humanoids. It’s not about replacing industrial robot arms, it’s about replacing the last remaining manual tasks. And service industry will be impacted as well.
Then mix this together with the frightening behavior that those AI agent unboxing from OpenAI has shown: They knocked the door over weeks, in masses, and coordinated until they found a way into it. There‘s always a small crack to enter. This is a new dimension.
There is a reason that the US bans foreign-built mobile robots now.
You are just repeating marketing. Humanoid robots coming to car manufacturing! For one thing that industry is already heavily automated and further automation will need to be cheap to be worth it. Most of the tasks still done by humans are either very hard to automate, or simply too expensive. Often not because the task itself is hard, but the task can vary a lot, where automation loses flexibility. Another issue is access, where a human can easily snake into confined spaces and even get into the car without damaging anything, this is harder for traditional robots.
However humanoid robots solve none of these things. They are still expensive and have trouble with varied tasks, despite what the marketing says. They are also only slightly humanoid, still being mostly metal, so they can’t get into small places and don’t have the dexterity required. They can’t crawl into the car to get something done as they are large, heavy and those kinds of movement are very hard. The tasks could be automated with some kind of snake like arm with many dexterous manipulators on the end, like the ones used in medical applications, but they are too expensive.
A lot of the hype has been around a pilot program done by the startup Figure and BMW. But if we cut through all the marketing BS and hype for a moment. It was one single robot, in a cordened off area doing a single task. It was picking up large metal sheets and placing them on a welding fixture. Something a regular old robot arm could do easily, cheaply and without faltering. Reports are the robot tripped a lot, misplaced the sheets and was out of commission for a large part of the trial. Which was to be expected, given it’s a prototype. It was the second of three planned trials, which has been retired and I don’t think the third one has started yet. After those trials, it’s yet to be seen if BMW will continue with the program.
Xiaomi is experimenting with their robots in their electric car factories and have done some trials similar to BMW. But they have since shifted away from the humanoid design (although the marketing is still pushing this angle), in favor for wheeled robots with multiple arms. They are optimizing the robots for the more repetitive sorting and internal logistics tasks, which are already automated in many factories by traditional conveyers and sorting machines. The hope for Xiaomi is they can be more flexible in their setup, not requiring the huge machines other factories employ. They also hope to learn and develop their robotics technology so they can sell that tech. Given the low cost of labor in the regions they are located, it is most likely costing them money and the robots aren’t intended to replace tasks currently done mostly by humans in that industry.
Tesla is making a lot of noise, but all of their demos have been human operated puppets, or even a human in a suit. They say internally they are doing a lot and it’s all very wonderful, but have given very little evidence of that. They have had both a bunch of executives leave and a lot of their top engineers have left as well. Rumors are the project is a disaster, with people who used to work on car stuff suddenly needing to pivot to robotics. Those are completely different fields with different requirements and constraints. With Musk pushing the pivot from cars to robots, the people aren’t happy and the project is failing. Even the people that were good at robotics left Tesla to go work at Sunday Robotics.
There are other project ongoing, but the marketing and hype is a far shot from the real world. And like I said, those humanoid robots don’t really solve the main issues why humans are being used for those tasks in the first place. The path Xiaomi is on seems much more promising, with robots designed for the task instead of looking like humans.
Car manufacturing has been at the forefront of innovation and automation for a very long time, but I have severe doubts they will actually deploy humanoid robots in a large scale and have it be useful. Show me a robot who can duck into the car and connect some connectors underneath the dashboard and I’ll reconsider. And then do it in a cheap, flexible and repeatable way, so it’s better than just having a human do it. Because a high end surgical robot could do it and with a couple of years of programming it might even do it all on its own. Until some engineer decides we need a different kind of plug and we need a retrofit. Just having a human do it makes much more sense.
Edit:
And I forgot to mention one of the biggest issues with these humanoid robots, they are extremely unsafe. With a traditional robot it’s very simple, it’s anchored to one place or moving on a rail. This makes the range it can operate in very limited, which in terms of safety is a good thing. We setup physical barriers, light screens, warning light to signify operation, camera surveillance and emergency stop buttons at useful places. Even large physical disconnects which are clearly labeled and visible for use in maintenence. Inside that box it’s a dangerous place for soft squishy things like humans, one unexpected move and the human is gone. But outside that box is perfectly safe.
These humanoid robots are designed to be used in human spaces, that’s the whole point of making them humanoid in the first place. But in terms of safety this a now an issue, as you can’t have humans and robots near each other. It’s fully mobile and can go anywhere the humans can, you can’t have stuff like physical barriers or light screens. Camera surveillance is harder and a emergy stop is difficult as well. These robots are no joke, often weighing hundreds of kg. Easily enough to severely injure someone if they make a wrong move, step on someone or fall over. So the only real way to use them is to have them confined to a small area and treat that the same as traditional robots. This makes the mobility kinda useless, as it can’t go outside the safety zone. It also makes it hard to design manufacturing processes around these. Usually there are parts of the process that employ robots and parts that don’t. For the parts that don’t, humans are free to walk around and do their thing, everything is designed such that the robots do what they can and then leave the finishing steps up to the humans (although stationary robots like inspection rigs are used in the final stages). If we suddenly start mixing robots into those human steps, the whole thing needs to be redesigned, probably leading to efficiency loss.
Even though you comment seems reasonable first view, I have the impression you have a rather theoretical knowledge.
I work with both kinds of robots and it will work and take jobs. I assume the timeline at about 2-3 years for first bigger roll outs.
it’s about replacing the last remaining manual tasks
Some factories already run “lights out” - but there will always be manual tasks… deciding what it is the factories produce in the first place being one example.
I feel like the AI hype has died and people are trying to prop it up with doomsday scaring.
The AI itself doesn’t need self-awareness to kill us all. It just needs an idiot with too much money and even less self-awareness controlling it. We are already headed towards disaster in the US. https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-06-05-priced-for-rescue/
I have no idea if that’s true.
Their product hasn’t done anything new or different in a while. They keep coming out with a bunch of scary hype stories every day so it all seems fake as hell now.
Yeah I can’t tell if an article like this has the intent to spread a fact, enforce anti AI attitudes or enforce pro AI attitudes. Realistically all three are possible but I think one of the latter two are most likely.
It’s to convince congress to outlaw local models.
Why? Guessing that makes it easier for a monopoly?
Technically not a monopoly, because that would mean only one company has control, and that’s illegal. It would be a small number of companies, though.
Still problematic.
These people are too high on their own supplies.
They saw the violence directed to the owner class in the industrial revolution and know what’s coming when they kick off a new one, so would like to avoid some of that.
I just have no idea if that’s true.
Humanity should be way more frightened of greedy psychopaths running the world than any technology.
And they’re peddling “AI” so aren’t they married in this case?
A lot of us here hate streaming platforms because they’re designed to benefit greedy capitalists first and foremost. That doesn’t mean the core idea or the technology behind streaming platforms is bad, though. An open source project like Jellyfin that is designed purely to benefit the end user is something that legitimately enriches all of our lives.
Similarly, just because scumbag companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are plundering the world for their own deranged benefit doesn’t make the underlying idea or technology bad. The tech is built on contributions from a lot of brilliant people over a long period of time whose names are not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Open LLMs that run on gaming rigs are quickly catching up with cloud-based models as well.
At this point, I’m running Qwen 3.8 27B on a gaming GPU that has similar capabilities to Claude Sonnet 5 without giving Sam or Dario my data or $200 a month, just like I run Jellyfin without giving Netflix or Disney my money or data.
Many are skeptical that there is a push by ai companies to make them appear more than they are due to their weak economic footing. From my experience with the llms I am not frightened they will become self aware. I am frightened that we are wasting energy and resources while polluting the planet further for little return and it will result in messing up our economies even more.
In addition to what everyone else said, I’ll tell you why I don’t think that what we have currently can become some runaway superhuman intelligence:
All “AI” people are talking about are basically “just” LLM wrappers: tools built to run a LLM in a loop while giving it access to the ability to write and run code. This gets pretty powerful, since you can do a lot programmatically (including monetary transactions), but has a fundamental limit:
LLMs are trained ahead of time. And that’s a very cost intensive, long process. Beyond that, the LLM has only a context window of finite length. So there are no long-term planning capabilities. While running after being trained, the LLM can only condense knowledge into a summary and then re-read it, a lossy process that might introduce mistakes in “understanding” and will make any prolonged task degrade over time.
And even if they figure out how to make the things actually self-modify and learn things, you can’t give every session that ability, since that’ll vastly increase the storage and performance requirements. Do sessions with that ability will be closely monitored and limited.
So I don’t see any space where an evil AI could emerge, even when factoring in an essential possible future improvement to the technology.
I’m not worried about AGI. I’m worried about the insane military applications they’re developing right now, and giving Artificial Incompetence control.
I watched a grokbot get confused connect to the wrong vnc console and try to shut down its own little computer.
I’m not worried about AI taking over the planet. I’m worried about it clicking the wrong button with no oversight
Same, I am worried about humans using ANNs to kill people. Current society is a gigantic apparatus that is constantly shifting shuffling responsibility around. LMMs only accelerate the problem.
Yes, but when the shit hits the fan and they blame the AI, we shouldn’t let them get away with it. It’s their fault, not the computer’s.
AI industry makes money from doomsday prophecy about it being so intelligent that it will create a point of no return: the [singularity]. It is a magaian claim, a claim that is so increadibly stupid that one does not know where to even begin; and if you do begin, you’ve already lost, because you have given attention to the claim. Lets not give these stupid fucks attention.
AI is not dangerous because of the [singularity]. It is dangerous because of its power consumption, automation of war, turning everybody to unthinking, surveillance automation, burning books, the economic instability it will cause due to the bubble bursting, water consumption, destroying the internet, it gaining responsibilities it is not qualified to take and so on.
But we can see how the story of the [singularity] and similar stories helps AI companies, because now, instead of criticizing real unwellnesses, we criticize a fictional unwellness that generates discussion regardless of our positions. It is a conversational black hole.
lets get back to the real world
Also, there’s the whole harry potter fanfic sex ai doomsday cult thing
Good job in helping with their guerilla marketing campaign.
When a corporation realises that working for government will be more profitable than working for consumers, they pivot to scaremongering, but always with the undercurrent of “and that’s why you should PAY US so that you own the nukes, and not your enemies”
I don’t have the confidence in my knowledge/understanding of the topic to just take a “its all bullshit” view. Especially when many of the people who believe that act like you. You don’t have to be a prick to explain something or talk about it.
LLMs basically work like auto-correct. They’re much more sophisticated, but it’s the same basic principle. Instead of “Which letter is most likely to follow after this series of letters?” it’s “Which token is most likely to follow after this series of tokens?” A token can be anything, but usually it’s a word.
Now, given that, consider a statement like
We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!
Okay, how? A statistical model generating tokens doesn’t have thought, it doesn’t have emotions, so it can’t want to do something, much less make plans and carry them out.
Could AI give somebody the ability to kill all humans? How? Under what scenario? Is somebody putting an LLM in charge of their nuclear stockpile? You don’t blame the LLM. You blame the humans who made that decision.
Okay that all makes sense. Appreciate you taking the time to type it out.
so sad to keep seeing this criticism. These are tools that work towards goals. Can be war target selections based on “cruely is the point” philosophy, where there are no wrong answers from the point of view of the human agent asking the compute agent. A government spending $Ts to maximize their power/survival omelette is going to break a few human rights principles, and the models they will access will have no guardrails. A bond villain selecting people opposed to skynet/bond villains for “targets to neutralize” can use models that are months ahead of public releases, without any guardrails, on how to most discretely neutralize them. Anthropic has Swatted anti-AI activists without providing evidence of anything they said as wrong.
Your argument is “their shit is weak and buggy, so nothing can ever go wrong”. Tools to help produce evil shit, buggy or not, are going to be used to produce evil shit.
No, that is not my argument, which you would’ve seen if you’d read to the end.
its already here, mass surveillance under various “camera” companies/tech companies, Mass layoffs due to AI, inability to get jobs due to AI.
