People who are vehemently against any form of AI will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth.
Its a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that it has none, you will be left behind.
You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use it or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt.
If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use AI now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may bitch and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group.
I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate AI myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
I am 100% fine with being left behind by a technology that I see as an attempted corporate surveillance scheme that has metastasized into a giant money pit. The difference from the 80’s and 90’s is people were actually using computers to make money back then. If any AI company is actually making more money than they’re spending, I haven’t heard about it, and you’d think they’d be advertising it. https://isaiprofitable.com/
I’ve been happy to fully sit this one out thus far. Don’t feel like I’m missing a damn thing.
People who are vehemently against any form of blockchain technology will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth. Blockchain is a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that blockchain has none, **you will be left behind**. You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use blockchain or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt. If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use blockchain now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may *removed* and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group. I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate blockchain myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
It’s a classic scammer tactic to create a false sense of urgency, so people sign up for something without thinking.
Slow down, and do some critical thinking. The promise of AI is that you can type in a simple prompt and the AI will figure out all of the complicated computer stuff for you. How would someone be “left behind” by this technology? Do you suppose that experienced developers will lose the ability to write simple sentences?
I don’t think people will loose the ability to type in “make that button green”. Even if AI fulfills it’s promises (which is doubtful, read up on the halting problem) someone who knows how computers work will be more employable than someone that only knows how to write prompts. Because the person that knows how computers work can also write prompts and will be better at doing that than someone that doesn’t know anything about computers.
More important in this day and age is learning how to spot a scam. Someone pressuring you to do something immediately is likely scamming you.
Talk me more about how in the future, game controllers will be made obsolete by motion-sensing cameras, and we will all be jumping around in front of a big flat-screen TV playing party games and finger-gunning down bad guys in rail shooters!
Yea, and the internet will never go mainstream. I also heard Apple developed this new product called the iPhone, what a stupid idea that no one will buy, people will just stick with regular cell phones when given the choice. Now excuse me while I ride off on my horse that will never, ever, be replaced by these new au-to-mo-biles.
the issue I have with how people use it is that it’s easy to just create more shit that they spew out into the world
I’ve got no issue with people using tools to improve their work. I think it’s fair to say that AI is enough like predictive text and spell check when it comes to tools you can use at work. and like any tool, the user is still responsible for the end result
my main problem with AI is that it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically) to create pure garbage that is thrown in my face every day. like, scale it back a bit everyone…
To be clear, capitalism is fucking our world. Nothing about the technology can do that on its own. Its how it is being deployed.
We could have started with smaller LLMs, deployed strategically at institutions of higher learning for real societal value, running on renewable electricity… fuck it lets aim for a trillion dollar IPO promising to replace all doctors and engineers!
it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically)
Environmentally, it has yet to surpass Bitcoin in electricity usage (though it’s set to triple soon, and that will make it a bigger power hog than all of cryptocurrenty).
Economically, this is the biggest bubble since the 1800s railroad boom. Scaled for inflation and GDP railroads were a far bigger gamble than AI, and they hit a 20ish year recession when that boom was over.
Hopefully the “fungible technology” argument holds water, and whatever AI investments don’t work out the hardware / data centers can be re-purposed for truly valuable aspects of it. Truly valuable to who is the key question.
Bitcoin had a slower rollout, it wormed its way into smaller niches. A lot of early bitcoin mining was done on “borrowed” or otherwise “unused” hardware that other people paid the electric bills for.
I generally approve of much of what cryptocurrency could be used for, but I’ve been pissed off about the waste of proof-of-work cryptocurrency since before 2018, and nothing has improved since then.
People who are vehemently against any form of AI will be left behind. That may be difficult to hear, and even more difficult to accept, but that is the cold, hard, truth.
Its a tool, and just like any tool it has uses. It can be used inappropriately, and it’s valid to criticize those instances. But if you are plugging your ears and going “Lalala!” when people talk about actual valid use cases, or stubbornly pretending that it has none, you will be left behind.
You will be like office employees from the 80’s and 90’s who refused to use a computer and then suddenly found themselves without a job. It’s your choice if you use it or not. It’s also every company’s choice to not hire you because of your unwillingness to adapt.
If you haven’t learned it yet, this is your warning and your wake-up call: Learn how to use AI now, or find a different career. It’s not going away, no matter how much you may bitch and moan. There will soon be two classes of people, those who learned how to use this emerging technology, and those who refused. Things will be much harder for that second group.
I don’t say this to be snarky or smug. I hate AI myself, but I also recognize how fucking stupid I’d have to be to refuse to use it. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s also the truth.
I am 100% fine with being left behind by a technology that I see as an attempted corporate surveillance scheme that has metastasized into a giant money pit. The difference from the 80’s and 90’s is people were actually using computers to make money back then. If any AI company is actually making more money than they’re spending, I haven’t heard about it, and you’d think they’d be advertising it. https://isaiprofitable.com/
I’ve been happy to fully sit this one out thus far. Don’t feel like I’m missing a damn thing.
Ah, there we go, I knew your rhetoric sounded familiar!
Seriously though, what “skills” are you building by learning how to use LLMs at your corporate job? How to tell a chatbot to do a task for you?
Sure, if you’re trying to build a local LLM server from scratch, tune a minimalist harness with a RAG and custom skills, optimize context compaction and concurrent token throughput, and integrate all that into existing automation pipelines, that takes some technical skill. But that’s a tiny fraction of people in the corporate world that need to do anything like that.
I could teach vast majority of corporate workers everything they will ever need to know about using “AI” in a half hour Lunch-N-Learn. There is no skill involved in asking a chatbot to move all your emails about “Project ABC” into a new Outlook folder called, “Project ABC” or asking a chatbot to, “draft a department memo about the new parking policy found in the HR SharePoint site.”
It’s not the next industrial revolution, it’s not the beginning of the Singularity, it’s not the dawn of a new age of our species. It is merely the latest hype-cycle of Capitalism that exists to siphon wealth from the population up to a handful of ultra wealthy billionaires and megacorps, and artificially prop up a dying economy just a little longer. And long term, we will discover the same thing about LLM use as we are finding out now about electronics in school and the mass proliferation of smart phones: That it stunts people’s critical reasoning, reading comprehension, self-image, and social confidence.
So what you’re saying is that Linus Torvalds is only a mid-tier programmer?
Has Linus been screeching about how everybody must use AI or get left behind?
i’m not learning any skills… i’m offloading some work on to AI so that i can do other stuff on company time…
Isn’t that what we should all aspire to? To destroy capitalism from the inside?
Capitalism isn’t being “destroyed from the inside” by you offloading grunt work to an agent. If anything, you may be helping justify future cuts of your job by demonstrating that there is less need for you. Your managers will be all too happy to cut half your department and make the remaining people take on all that work because, “AI makes them 5x more productive.” Of course, none of those people will get a 5x pay raise.
Use it or don’t, it doesn’t make a difference in the long run. This bubble will pop soon anyways and we’ll be on to the next “revolutionary technology.” I suspect it will be quantum computing, I’ve been seeing a significant upswing in news articles and bot traffic about that over the last few months, but who knows.
If your work is pushing AI hard, use it if you need the job, play the game if you have to, just don’t let yourself be mesmerized by the aggressive marketing hype. Anybody who is pushing the idea that tech workers will be replaced in the next 5-10 years with LLMs is a religious fanatic and should be treated with the appropriate levels of mockery and disdain.
Also, if you really want to work on taking down Capitalism, organize your labor, and support other movements that do the same.
Yeah, i’m not an idiot… i’ve already considered all those points about the downsides of using AI at work … like you said… play the game
How do you know i"m not using my free time at work to do exactly that?
you made a lot of assumptions about people who use AI at work …
Eh, more like generalizations based on observations of my own, and many other corporate workplaces that people I am close to, work in.
It’s a classic scammer tactic to create a false sense of urgency, so people sign up for something without thinking.
Slow down, and do some critical thinking. The promise of AI is that you can type in a simple prompt and the AI will figure out all of the complicated computer stuff for you. How would someone be “left behind” by this technology? Do you suppose that experienced developers will lose the ability to write simple sentences?
I don’t think people will loose the ability to type in “make that button green”. Even if AI fulfills it’s promises (which is doubtful, read up on the halting problem) someone who knows how computers work will be more employable than someone that only knows how to write prompts. Because the person that knows how computers work can also write prompts and will be better at doing that than someone that doesn’t know anything about computers.
More important in this day and age is learning how to spot a scam. Someone pressuring you to do something immediately is likely scamming you.
Talk me more about how in the future, game controllers will be made obsolete by motion-sensing cameras, and we will all be jumping around in front of a big flat-screen TV playing party games and finger-gunning down bad guys in rail shooters!
Yea, and the internet will never go mainstream. I also heard Apple developed this new product called the iPhone, what a stupid idea that no one will buy, people will just stick with regular cell phones when given the choice. Now excuse me while I ride off on my horse that will never, ever, be replaced by these new au-to-mo-biles.
See, I can do it too.
This falls apart the second you look at it when you see that it doesn’t take much learning to use that tool for most applications.
At the same time, people overly reliant on that tool take a big hit in developing and strengthening their own skilks and thinking capabilities.
Combine the two things if you still can.
agreed
the issue I have with how people use it is that it’s easy to just create more shit that they spew out into the world
I’ve got no issue with people using tools to improve their work. I think it’s fair to say that AI is enough like predictive text and spell check when it comes to tools you can use at work. and like any tool, the user is still responsible for the end result
my main problem with AI is that it is absolutely fucking our world (environmentally and economically) to create pure garbage that is thrown in my face every day. like, scale it back a bit everyone…
To be clear, capitalism is fucking our world. Nothing about the technology can do that on its own. Its how it is being deployed.
We could have started with smaller LLMs, deployed strategically at institutions of higher learning for real societal value, running on renewable electricity… fuck it lets aim for a trillion dollar IPO promising to replace all doctors and engineers!
Environmentally, it has yet to surpass Bitcoin in electricity usage (though it’s set to triple soon, and that will make it a bigger power hog than all of cryptocurrenty).
Economically, this is the biggest bubble since the 1800s railroad boom. Scaled for inflation and GDP railroads were a far bigger gamble than AI, and they hit a 20ish year recession when that boom was over.
Hopefully the “fungible technology” argument holds water, and whatever AI investments don’t work out the hardware / data centers can be re-purposed for truly valuable aspects of it. Truly valuable to who is the key question.
Bit coin farms never built massive illegal gas turbine power plants in residential neighbourhoods at least not that I know of.
Not that I am a fan of the waste for crypto mining either.
Bitcoin had a slower rollout, it wormed its way into smaller niches. A lot of early bitcoin mining was done on “borrowed” or otherwise “unused” hardware that other people paid the electric bills for.
I generally approve of much of what cryptocurrency could be used for, but I’ve been pissed off about the waste of proof-of-work cryptocurrency since before 2018, and nothing has improved since then.
deleted by creator
good thing that downvotes can only be used to suppress narratives on lemmy. lol