> I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality.
That was my take with the entire report which I think lends to an inherent bias within the data and stories. You have the entrepreneurial stories, then you have the ones where people are both impacted and receiving benefits.
The infographics and charts even call out how countries that are "first-world" with fewer safety nets are more likely to be in "survival" mode compared to countries with them.
The bit from George Carlin standup routine regarding how the poor are there just to scare the hell out of the middle class rings true in this reflection. Poorer countries accept their current realities and the feedback reflects the hustle. Richer countries with safety nets reflect the existential issues with previous industrial revolutions. Richer countries without safety nets reflect the fear that their efforts will be made "replaceable" by AI.
As for the rest - massive testing creating false positives - that is an issue of implementation and the errors introduced by humans, not data itself. If the process were in large part made more automated, it could screen for a larger panel of issues for less cost.
From my experience working deep in data and human factors - the issue in quantifying the root cause isn't reality, we live a shared experience in general. The issue is the data isn't good enough. What bugs us about it is the psychology that our perceptions are different enough to the degree that we will fight to prove an unknown.
Memes are funny when they hold an element of truth to them. And reading through your blog post, there are some moments of laughter.
But, your conclusion that it's just about one side coming to the other rings hollow.
The reason you are fixing a database at 9pm on a Friday is because you or your predecessors or company in general did not care to pay off their tech debt. Doing int and bigint was always a bug to bite you in the ass. Not having your cloud metrics properly setup and observable is also tech debt because there was a decision made somewhere not to build it, or document it in a runbook, or whatever. And there you are, 9pm on a Friday, self-doubting yourself.
Agentic AI, I hope, will evolve into a decentralized model - because the user is the edge, not the cloud. The problem is that the hardware that it takes to run LLM at scale only works in the cloud - until the blackbox of LLM magic is distilled into an ASIC well enough to be mass manufactured.
Without this happening, without a way to take a state of the machine and put it into soda cans, it remains the realm of those with the cash to keep their well from drying out.
They do need hosting and now they need a very particular hosting with very particular hardware which is the bottleneck.
Now here is the trick - exporting the magic that makes LLM work (transformers) into ASIC hardware to get it out of the GPU. The problem being the blackbox of logic gates within the gpu that makes the LLM work.
There are a few that have figured it out. There should be more, way more. Else this will never scale and we'll be stuck within the trap of cloud - because nobody is asking for less except in their bills.
>The real question is why would anyone want, or want to help build, such an obscenity.
Power Saws and CNC mills have no autonomy. They have to be guided every inch or instruction by hand. Autonomous AI agents remove the hand. So if we don't define the role of humans in the process of creation, we get AI building things we didn't ask for or need.
AI is coming regardless. There are advantages that we all accept it can do. But the machine is a 'slave' only if we refuse to be 'masters'.
There is a term called social ecology.
It is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. In effect, the way human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing ecological crisis.
The point of social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual persuation and renewal are meaningless or unnecessary; they are necessary and can be educational. But modern capitalism is 'structually amoral' and hence impervious to moral appeals.
Power will always belong to the elite and commanding strata if it is not institutionalized in face-to-face democracies, among people who are fully empowered as social beings to make decisions in new communal assemblies. Power that does not belong to the people invariably belongs to the state and the exploitative interests it represents.
What is obscene is measuring outputs by 19th century standards. As long as we believe that "being born doesn't entitle you to food", we will stay on the hedonic treadmill until the planet or our psyches break.
>A magpie is not provided food and shelter, it has to hunt, fight for territory, and build its nest.
>Humans don't have some inalienable "worth". But if you can work, you might choose to trade it for some food and shelter.
A magpie is a slave to its environment (high entropy). Humans are capable of building systems that alter the environment (low entropy).
If we are apathetical to AI, we choose to ignore the benefits and improvements from technology. And ever since the plow, bows and arrows and sharpened rocks, we have always depended on technology to improve our condition. Which is why naturalists find it amazing when we find other species of life on this planet use tools to give them advantages that nature and evolution didn't supplement them with through genetics.
There is a difference between "survival" and "purpose". We have developed our ape-selves to become more than meat in the circle of life. With purpose, we can be more than the magpie.
AI is not an environment - it's a technology as much as the hammer or plow. If it is built to concentrate wealth or kill more people, that's an architectural choice and not a law of physics.
Human labor is more than product outputs. If we cannot change the social contract that defines worth to shift towards human participation and stewardship, then it's a death sentence for the majority of the world's human population.
While companies are not charities, they do depend on consumers. If you take away the income of consumers, do you have a market? If anything, AI should be treated like the telephone or electricity - a public utility - where it can be used to re-engineer how systems, like agriculture, can be done.
At some point we will reach a point of post-scarcity. Where energy is effectively little cost if not free and is able to create all our needs. What happens when things are no longer scarce?
We (humans) need to work on ourselves to overcome our base natures like greed.
Alvin Toffler's book "Future Shock" describes what's going on within this thread.
Toffler predicted that as change accelerated, we'd face the paradox of too many options (like a Cheesecake Factory menu) or, conversely, feeling like we have no options due to the framerate of change. He argued that we would enter a state of transience where our relationships, jobs and values would become "temporary". And thus when the rate of change turns everything "temporary", all the old institutions - religion, family, nation, profession - can no longer provide a frame of reference.
In short, the "simulation" of our existence may be starting to drop keyframes - causing pixelization in our society which we obviously see as glitches.
The machine is just going to do whatever we tell it - it is a horse with blinders on or a steam engine going round and round. It doesn't know it needs to work within the human framework. Physics and society only intersect where it's needed for safety - this seems like one of those cases where we need to make sure we define the conditions how both the dog and tail can wag each other.
There was a court ruling earlier that I think starts to set this up: "AI generated images cannot be copyrighted". The same could be said about the rest of the 3 M's. Then expand upon that. AI generated content not being eligible for copyright would go a long way to put value back into people's work efforts.
Let machines deal with improving the framerate of life. Let humans decide what life should be. Hopefully it will finally have more than 50% humanity in it instead of amoral capitalism.
>someone raised the question of “what would be the role of humans in an AI-first society”.
Norbert Wiener, considered to be the father of Cybernetics, wrote a book back in the 1950's entitled "The Human Use of Human Beings" that brings up these questions in the early days of digital electronics and control systems. In it, he brings up things like:
- 'Robots enslaving humans for doing jobs better suited by robots due to a lack of humans in the feedback loop which leads to facist machines.'
- 'An economy without human interaction could lead to entropic decay as machines lack biological drive for anti-entropic organization.'
- 'Automation will lead to immediate devaluation of human labor that is routine. Society needs to decouple a person's "worth" from their "utility as a tool".'
The human purpose is not to compete but to safeguard the telology (purpose) of the system.
You did get the memo from POTUS that loyalty is more important than intelligence, right?
Un-bias intelligence in this operation is not welcomed. One is told what is "factual truth" (not facts themselves) by those who operate out of Pennsylvania Avenue in DC.
If you're not blindly loyal and in line with the administration, then you'll be at risk of losing whatever role you have unless your loyalty is proven then you may receive some of that back based on how much you have demonstrated.
--
The problem in infosec in this world is not competence, it is cult of personality. This is why black t-shirt dislike black polo shirts not so secretly.
I left my shocked face next to the mountain of documented government abuses...
Why are people thinking this is new? Your data down to your current browser session and current location have been sold as much as possible for almost 30 years. Tracking pixels replaced tracking cookies that is linked to your habits and metadata heuristics can pick a single person out of the noise of thousands doom scrolling the same dumb information.
And the .gov has been using it for quite some time - data brokers sell it as readily as adtech has sold your habits to .com. Best part for them - they do not need a judicial oversight to access it and they have unlimited resources to pay for it - look at CALEA.
I doubt they are looking for protesters in general. But it does make it easier for them to "target" people not aware or smart enough to maintain good OPSEC.
Back in a time when you had to pay out the nose for long distance calling, you had outdial service through X.25 PSN or more often, as ARPANet turned into Internet, you had Telnet accessible outdials.
I'm sure the 5% employee tax in Seattle and the bill being introduced in Olympia will do more to smooth things over than some quirky blipvert will.
I think most people in Seattle know how economics works, logic follows:
while "techbro" don't work is true:
if "techbro" debt > income:
unless assets == 0:
sellgighustle
else
sellhousebeforeforeclosure
nomoreseattleforyou("techbro")
end
else
"gigbot" isn't summoned and people don't get paid.
"techbro" health-- due to high expense of COBRA.
[etc...]
end
end
I get the feeling that this is supposed to be about the economics of a fairly expensive city/state and that "six-figure salary", but you don't really call it out.
If it was about the technology, then it would be no different than being a java/c++ developer and calling someone who does html and javascript their equal so pay them. It's not.
People get anxious when something may cause them to have to change - especially in terms of economics and the pressures that puts on people beyond just "adulting". But I don't really think you explained the why of their anxiety.
Pointing the finger at AI is like telling the Germans that all their problems are because of Jews without calling out why the Germans are feeling pressure from their problems in the first place.
If you are a writer or a painter or a developer - in a city as expensive as Seattle - then one may feel a little threatened. Then it becomes the trickle down effect, if I lose my job, I may not be able to pay for my dog walker, or my child care or my hair dresser, or...
Are they sympathetic? It depends on how much they depend on those who are impacted. Everyone wants to get paid - but AI don't have kids to feed or diapers to buy.
Oh yeah, call out a tech city and all the butt-hurt-ness comes out. Perfect example of "Rage Bait".
People here aren't hurt because of AI - people here are hurt because they learned they were just line items in a budget.
When the interest rates went up in 2022/2023 and the cheap money went away, businesses had to pivot their taxes while appeasing the shareholder.
Remember that time when Satya went to a company sponsored rich people thing with Aerosmith or whomever playing while announcing thousands of FTE's being laid off? Yeah, that...
If your job can be done by a very small shell script, why wasn't it done before?
I see it like the hype of js/node and whatever module tech is glued to it when it was new from the perspective of someone who didn't code js. Sum of F's given is still zero.
- Lead Time vs. TCO vs. IRS Asset Deprecation: The moment you get it fully built, it's already obsolete. Thus from a CapEx point of view, if you can lease your compute (including GPU) and optimize the rest of the inputs for similar then your CapEx overall is much lower and tied to the real estate - not the technology. The rest is cost of doing business and deductible in and of itself.
- The "X" factor: Someone mentioned TPU/ASIC but then there is the DeepSeek factor - what if we figure out a better way of doing the work that can shortcut the workflow?
- AGI partnerships: Right now, you see a lot of Mega X giving billions to Mega Y because all of them are trying to get their version of Linux or Apache or whatever at parity with the rest. Once AGI is settled and confirmed, then most all of these partnerships will be severed because it then becomes which company is going to get their AI model into that high prestige Montessori school and into the right ivy league schools - like any other rich parent would for their "bot" offspring.
So what will it look like when it crashes? A bunch of bland empty "warehouses" with mobile PDU's once filling all their parking lot space gone. Whatever "paradise" that was there may come back... once you bulldoze all that concrete and steel. The money will do something else like a Don McLean song.
CUDA isn't all that and a bag of chips. It just is the Facebook/Twitter of the data science and from that LLM space. There are Tensor processors and other ASIC processing for specific compute functions that can give Nvidia a challenge but it's not unknown to every gamer that there has always been a performance difference between Nvidia and AMD/ATI.
Ok, point made Nvidia. Kudos.
ATI had their moment in the sun before ASIC ate their cryptocurrency lunch. So both still had/have relevance outside gaming. But, I see Intel is starting to take GPU space seriously and they shouldn't be ruled out.
And as mentioned elsewhere in the comments, there is Vulkan. There is also this idea of virtualized GPU as now the bottleneck isn't CPU... it's now GPU. As I mentioned there are Tensors, Moore's Law thresholds coming back again with 1 nanometer manufacturing, there is going to be a point where we hit a threshold again with current chips and we will have a change in technology - again.
So while Nvidia is living the life - unless they have a crystal ball of how tensors are going to go that they can move CUDA towards, there is going to be a "co-processor" future coming up and with that the next step towards NPUs will be taken. This is where Apple is aligning itself because, after all, they had the money and just said "Nope, we'll license this round out..."
AMD isn't out yet. They, along with Intel and others, just need to figure out where the next bottlenecks are and build those toll bridges.
Often people are stopped using a premise of what's called a "Terry Stop" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._United_States) which permits police to briefly detain a person based on reasonable suspicion of a crime. If new reasonable suspicion for a different crime arises during the stop, that new crime can be investigated, provided the entire stop's duration is not prolonged beyond the time that the original stop would have taken.
And body cameras suck ass in terms of audio, they control when it's turned on and off, etc...
The best defense is to film them as well. Have cameras in your vehicle and home that stream directly to the cloud. Make sure that all the dialog is recorded.
Cops will do what they do - there is no stopping that at the individual level.
But what you can do is make sure that every movement and word is recorded for later scrutiny for due process. The days of banning cameras outright is gone, the data is sold and they purchase it. The only way to handle the invasion of privacy is to control the information.
Radio scanners made in the US today have a block in the 800Mhz range while everywhere else, that is not the case - reason? Newt Gingrich being caught talking this same shit over an analog cell phone. Yet, we still live with the stupid laws long after the technology, their antics or political relevance have moved on.
That was my take with the entire report which I think lends to an inherent bias within the data and stories. You have the entrepreneurial stories, then you have the ones where people are both impacted and receiving benefits.
The infographics and charts even call out how countries that are "first-world" with fewer safety nets are more likely to be in "survival" mode compared to countries with them.
The bit from George Carlin standup routine regarding how the poor are there just to scare the hell out of the middle class rings true in this reflection. Poorer countries accept their current realities and the feedback reflects the hustle. Richer countries with safety nets reflect the existential issues with previous industrial revolutions. Richer countries without safety nets reflect the fear that their efforts will be made "replaceable" by AI.
As for the rest - massive testing creating false positives - that is an issue of implementation and the errors introduced by humans, not data itself. If the process were in large part made more automated, it could screen for a larger panel of issues for less cost.
From my experience working deep in data and human factors - the issue in quantifying the root cause isn't reality, we live a shared experience in general. The issue is the data isn't good enough. What bugs us about it is the psychology that our perceptions are different enough to the degree that we will fight to prove an unknown.