Productivity is typically a broader scale measure against the economy. I 100% agree that the shoehorned adoption of AI into general company processes is more of a negative than a positive. Most people here would agree that AI has only really affected productivity positively in the past 6 months-1 year. So obviously there wont be much general uplift across all industries yet, and obviously that would mean there's not really enough data to go off of empirically yet.
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.
If you only ever want frontier model performance then sure, you have to pay to play. But as it is now with open models, some of which I can even run from my gaming PC at home, we're only about 6 months behind frontier performance. Even when the money starts drying up for those at the forefront, the genie is out of the bottle.
Nuance has been completely lost on our society. If it doesn't spark immediate outrage or joy it has no place in our attention economy. I really wish this wasn't the case and I'm not sure how we can reverse it. Most people just aren't interested in the 'balanced takes' because it's just not exciting enough it seems sadly.
I mean yes and no right? I think the nature of how open the internet is and how easily you can find any information you expend the effort to kind of lends itself towards the loss of this type of 'underground' culture. For example I spend a lot of time in the LA rave scene. A lot of people here who have been here for a long time will talk about how the 'old underground' for raves was really where it's at. But honestly that culture never really 'died' in-so-much as it was changed and altered by the newcomers to the space some of whom might have never found said culture without the proliferation of it through the internet. There will always be small niche communities for all sorts of media, but it'll never be 'underground' again in the same way this article presents.
This goes beyond music honestly. All forms of media used to have a kind of social underground or niche. Remember when you played that one video game you found on a video retailers shelf and couldn't wait to tell your friends all about it the next day knowing for a fact that none of them had ever heard of the game before? How about when you found that basement horror film randomly made by the guy from the next town over? There are so many small niche forms of media that used to speak to us and now all of them have to sink or swim against the millions upon millions of pieces being shared on social media every day. The effort the author describes here in finding these pieces really was part of experiencing them and in our new extra-social and commodified world I'm not sure many would go out of their way in that same way any more. Which is a shame.
I'm spitballing here as I don't actually have a concrete answer for you. But from my understanding automobile manufacturing is one of if not THE most advanced 'purpose-built' robotics sectors. While I agree with you that having a purpose-built thing usually wins out for assembly line manufacturing, I wonder if this isn't an attempt to branch out away from single-purpose robotics into more general or multi-faceted manufacturing.
The actual 'performance' of the product is usually the last thing that matters to the consumer. People happily put up with all sorts of bullshit while complaining about how bad the product is usually for a number of reasons. A lot of engineers get trapped in the idea that if your product is simply less enshittified than all the competition then they should win the product market battle. But product marketing has little to do with those things and more to do with getting the product in front of actual users and making the user imagine using your product every day. We're in an attention economy, if you can't grab a users attention then your product means nothing.
Despite the AI doomerism you might find online and on college campuses I'm firmly in the Jevons paradox camp. I believe these AI tools lowering the bar to entry for software development will only lead to more software being produced than ever before. Which would further mean that education and understanding of computer science and programming (these are 2 different things) are more important than ever.
Further however, I would argue there's 2 deeper questions at the root of what you're asking, both of which you have to find the answer to yourself nobody can really help you with these. The first question is "Can I make a living if I pursue this path?". This is the question on the top of everyone in this fields mind right now. A lot of people 10-20 years ago, when they were in the exact position you are now, likely saw that 'Computer Science' was among one of the top paying college majors and they picked it entirely for that reason. I've met a good majority people in the industry that could care less about the computers themselves or how to improve at their job. They just enjoy having a cushy 9-5 that pays well. (And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that) But now the market is shifting and a lot of the people who never really cared are left to the wayside for the people who really love this.
That leads us to our second question: "Is this something you would enjoy doing regardless of whether or not you'd make a living off it?" There are a lot of cool jobs in the 'tech industry' and as long as you really enjoy computers there will always be a new thing to build/learn/tinker with and someone WILL pay you for that niche thing. At the end of the day it comes down to whether or not you want to delve deep into something and learn something new everyday, as that's what a lot of this industry is. If none of that sounds appealing to you then this probably isn't it.
I don't remember who said it but a piece of advice I read once: "Life is a combination of different games. Find the game you're good at, THEN figure out who will pay you the most to play it." If this is your game then come play it.
I feel like this is the biggest disconnect I'm seeing with the new AI trend. Supporting something is infinitely times easier than building it and typically requires a different group of people, but the simple fact that I can build a thing that works, by myself, in 48 hours with very little opportunity cost is insane and feels so understated here.
What would it have taken to get this off the ground before? A ton of meetings with stakeholders to decide if this is even a good idea. Meetings with other developers who touch systems you might understand but have never used before yourself. And WAAAY longer than 48 hours to get an MVP prototype off the ground.
It's a little ironic to me that we constantly shit on how broken something underneath the hood is here despite the fact that it works, while in the same breath complaining about the enshitification of products that have been garbage long before AI came along. I'm not going to disagree that vibecoding spits out a lot of garbage, but we're already swimming in garbage so what does it matter?
As someone who likes to half read an article then come back to it later, this actually pissed me off. Messing with your favicon and the tab title so I can't actually find your article to finish reading it later feels hostile towards users like me. As such I blocked this URL entirely. I don't care what their motive behind it is, if you want to act sus then I don't want to be on your website.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Operating systems don't typically include drivers out of the box for every single interface that could possibly connect to it. Often you'll get 'generic' drivers on Windows that at least map some of the basic inputs, but up until like late Windows 8 iirc Windows didn't even include that. Previously if you wanted to connect ANY controller to your PC you had to install third party drivers to make that work. So Valve bundling their controller drivers with steam just kinda... makes sense? Are you saying you would prefer to go find the drivers or have them written by not Valve instead? I really don't understand the 'walled garden' take here. You could go build your own drivers for this if you really wanted to, you don't need to use Valve's software.
Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.
From a conceptual perspective it sounds great. The problem is that OpenClaw isn't actually a solution to that problem for 2 reasons, user expectation and underlying security. The majority of people I've talked to who want an 'AI assistant' effectively are expecting a proper executive assistant, just in AI form. A proper executive assistant will remember every important bit you tell them, they won't need to be reminded of it later, and more importantly they come to me of their own volition when something comes up. All things OpenClaw does not solve. Further, using MCP as the underlying protocol means you have to implicitly trust every piece of data you connect to that AI, because otherwise it's way too easy for me to send you an email with hidden instructions just for your AI to read. I mean even the defaults for the OpenClaw install had basically opened everyone who installed it and didn't configure it in any way to any attacker. So while I agree with you that there are problems in this space that an AI agent 'could' solve, OpenClaw does not currently solve any of them, and in fact does the opposite, exposing you and all your information easily.
Kind of? Even watching is probably a bit of a stretch here. The point of an MCP server is to be a sort of AI translator for whatever you're inputting. Here we're inputting an iframe that's running a wasm binary. So I imagine in theory all the AI sees is the actual iframe and whatever is in memory currently for the wasm game. Funny enough without some sort of screenshot tool on top of this I'm not sure the AI can actually 'see' the game at all.
It took me a reread and some thinking to realize what was going on. The 'MCP app' he's referring to here is basically a browser front-end replacement like electron. So what he's doing here is running DOOM as apart of that browser run-time and passing it through to the front-end. It's less "playing DOOM through the AI" and more "Playing DOOM while the AI can watch".
Right on the nose. And to make that problem worse we've integrated a fair share of our lives into these devices, for which there is only 2 terrible choices. I can't tell you how many friends have expressed to me that they'd love to try GrapheneOS or get out of the mobile ecosystem entirely, but all of them use mobile apps for banking which effectively locks them in. It's basically the devil's bargain because we've added so much ease of use functionality to our day to day lives through these devices. In exchange Google is now showing us it was never ours to begin with.
No the negative externality here is that we've derived a value directly to this data, thereby negatively incentivizing this poor behavior. To further elucidate, it effectively introduces a cat-and-mouse game for the people who actually care about the data itself, they now have to worry about nonsensical third party behavior.
I think this is less a bait and switch and more just a legal liability shield. They're not saying you 'cant' use it that way. They just don't recommend you do, and they won't support you at all for doing so. Which I think is completely fair. Also, these two things aren't in contradiction. Deploying on prem does offer more security, but then it's up to you to use it correctly.
It's funny to me that you would dismiss my point as a 'whataboutism' when it was an attempt to engage with your point about water, which was itself a whataboutism. I hope the irony isn't lost on you there.
Since you want to conflate nutrition with agriculture I'm happy to meet you there and bring it back to what the article was actually about, emissions. If we compare data center water intake and emissions to just the US beef industry alone, data centers are a very small drop in a very large pond. We're talking on the orders of almost 2000x the water usage and twice the emissions. And that's just beef, we could talk about avocados, bananas, or tons of other actual 'nutrients' that are an effective waste of water. But we like those things, just like we like cat pictures and slop (even though I'm not a fan of your reductionist comparison). I'm not saying you have to like it, but other's do. Just like some people like beef, and others will never touch it.
I'm actually not even disagreeing with you about the rise of data center consumption being something we should be monitoring. You're not wrong about that. But can we at least have an honest conversation about reality and get a little further than what all the headlines say. Maybe instead actually respond to the topic at hand and not make whataboutisms about water.
Is there a problem with providing other metrics like water? I didn't see that mentioned any where in the article. Not to be snarky, but your response kind of reminds me of this famous tweet: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang...
If you want to talk about water you're obviously free to do so, but you were the one to bring it up. Most of the articles I see about water usage in data centers seems to be propaganda as well. That's not to say data centers aren't consuming more water. I'm sure they are. Considering however that agriculture still accounts for over 70% of overall water usage and we're wasting a lot of it growing things like alfalfa in water hungry regions. Last I'd seen the metric data centers were estimated at around 6%. So I'd argue we should probably look at the worst offenders first.
Beyond data and vibes though, I can't think of a single technology in human history that had a forced adoption quite like AI does. To the point where it should be pretty obvious to all of us that a large group of people are going to push back and be unhappy that it's disrupting their work. That doesn't mean that the people who actually like the technology wont find more productivity with it though. It's just when measured against a sea of forced adopters you'll never find a general uplifting trend. People typically don't like change.