16%? They're called grifters and robber barons.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2026
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The environmental issues with AI are solvable (e.g. , solar powered, replace water with air or keep recycling the same water, etc).
The issue with taking jobs is not an issue because the government can create state-owned businesses that return a revenue (creating a net profit to tax-payers) to create jobs until the unemployment rate is stable. If it replaces all jobs, then we can put everyone on universal basic income and distribute everything to anyone who needs it (socialist utopia).
AI has already and is actively making a substantial chunk of things worse.
OpenAI has made war crimes legal
Youtube is a sea of slop
Book industry is drowning
FOSS is being openly robbed while also drowning under slop
Anti-AI paranoia is really ratcheting up and its also being exploited by AI. USAA the military savings bank has a flood of AI bots accusing humans of being bots to stifle criticism of the bank enshitifying itself. Meanwhile pre-AI video reposts have people screaming "That's AI slop!" In other places, too thorough of a text post is probably AI but it also might just be some poor neurodivergent person who is an actual expert on the subject and is excited to share.
Then there is all the layoffs and firings.
Health insurance scams are using AI to target those who are less lightly to appeal.
Stuff like the people shut out of part of the job market because an AI decided they had been rejected from too many prior applications.
Oh and the computer electronics parts market is fucked. I have a few spare DDR5 memory sticks that would now pay for a third of what my current computer cost me! Never mind the NVME spares I have on the shelf.
Actually most of the consumer electronics market is fucked. Didn't they postpone the next play station while Valve is trying to figure out if people will be cool donating a kidney or part of their liver for the VR goggles and the steam console box.
Only saving grace for me is my spelling and grammar skills seriously atrophied after using grammarly for a few years so most people look at my writing and never think "This sounds like AI!"
If by "AI" they mean "oligarch-owned and controlled AI", we have common ground here. But then again, that is true of anything owned and monopolised by these ~~people~~ humanoids. Case in point: only few people will agree that...
- oligarch-owned media empires have a positive impact on society
- oligarch-owned social media networks have a positive impact on society
- oligarch-owned space companies have a positive impact on society
- ...
The problem is not with the tech. The problem is that the tech in the hands of a small clique of sociopaths.
Hmmmm, not much actual use for the hallucinating plagiarism machine, but I do see your point.
Imo, LLMs do have a purpose (and their ethical sourcing problems, like you mentioned). It's just that right now, silicon valley sells it as the answer to every single problem out there when it clearly isn't.
Also, AI can be so much more than just LLMs.
I don't disagree. Most generative AI models are some variant on "plagiarism machine", but categorizing and identifying data are extremely useful things that AI does.
LLMs are good at quickly generating code, but the issue in software is rarely how fast humans can write code. In fact, more speed with less understanding is a really bad combination (I am a developer working DevOps and anecdotally I see way more large scale bugs now than I did 5 years ago).
Agentic AI is, unfortunately, just an LLM pretending to be a person, and that's a really bad thing. Like so incredibly bad. Did you know that humans are statistically more likely to make mistakes when under pressure? Cause the LLMs sure do. Create a narrative of pressure and the LLM cracks like a rotten egg. Cause that's more statistically likely!
The speed and ease at which LLMs allow you to generate code is a bug, not a feature in my opinion. In my org, a group of 3 very junior engineers wrote a 5k line shell script for building k8s clusters according to our business specs and it's fucking awful. The actual time to get it out the door was short, but now it's basically impossible to change it without fucking up like 20 different things. The fucking thing will randomly quit because the shit ass LLM thinks set -e is a good thing to use, and it's full of unused variables everywhere. I had to add a feature to it (which is how I learned of its existence), and I spent a miserable week just reading the entire fucking thing so I could ensure that my change wouldn't cause an oil refinery in the North Sea to explode due to a butterfly-effect series of bullshit.
The frustration and toil you feel as a software dev is a feature. If something is making you mad and is taking forever to write, that's a sign you probably need to change your approach. If you're using an LLM to write a bunch of boilerplate, why not just eliminate the boilerplate or like, make a factory to spit out a bunch of it or something? Your discomfort is a powerful tool and you are not best served by ignoring it. Those junior devs would have written something much better if they had been forced to experience the true toil and suffering of writing a 5k line shell script.
I fall in the junior category, but with more experience prior to becoming a certified full stack dev than most juniors. I was a sys admin for a decade where I taught myself how to code to simplify my job. Plus I had 1 year at university 15 years ago. I use my company provided license with AI very sparingly and never let it implement code. Mostly I use it like a glorified stack overflow when I run into a problem that I can't work out by myself. Usually, it will suggest some code that's not good, but it's enough to highlight a concept I'm ignorant to and then I can do what I need. If there's a block of code that has something that I don't understand, I can highlight it and ask it to explain. It's usually pretty good at listing out what something is doing or at least supposed to do.
I would love if AI disappeared immediately, but it's not going to happen. If someone is using, it should be used as a tool and not a replacement. If you can't do the thing that it's doing, then you shouldn't be use it to do that thing. I probably ask it questions less than once a week, and again, never put in code that I don't understand what it does and why.
I have a good friend that's a senior dev at a company using Claude code. He's become an AI code reviewer, but much to my dismay likes it. He's vibe coding his own fuck around app with it and it's writing the backend in C#, a language he doesn't know being a frontend dev. It's so infuriating to me that someone that I know to be intelligent is so damn stupid.
I'll say that given the way OpenAI and Anthropic have hideously overextended themselves (they have over a trillion dollars of financial commitments to companies like Oracle), it's not impossible that the current crop of American LLM providers do just kinda... poof away. Traditional banks want nothing more to do with them, they're getting majorly spooked. All that needs to happen is for private credit to lose confidence in them, which is already happening. When they're out of cash, they'll be on the hook for an absolute ridiculous amount of money and they'll probably just get liquidated.
I'm sure there will be new companies that pop up, but they're going to have to charge 10x what Anthropic is making enterprise customers pay, since inference likely still isn't profitable at the price Anthropic is charging.
I don't use LLMs as a knowledge base because if the problem is bad enough for me, I'm likely just grepping through kubernetes source code or something. That being said, I don't necessarily have an issue with folks using an LLM that way as long as they fully understand exactly how bad it is at what it does. You'll be fine if you lose access to LLMs, and that's the number one thing in my book. Your friend? Not so much.
(As a fun bonus to all of this, Oracle is very likely to die if OpenAI can't meet its commitments. Either way, Larry Ellison will probably stop being a billionaire, since almost all of his wealth is in Oracle stock).
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We can figure out how to correctly use the hammer after we convince CEOs to stop bashing everyone's feet with them. Until then, the foot bashers make it a moot point.
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The tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.
I don't care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center, they're still addictive and poisonous.
The tech that the sociopaths built is an addictive control machine.
LLMs are not addictive control machines. Social media engagement farming and native advertising/propaganda machines are addictive control machines. We consistently get the marketing functions fudged up with the utility of the thing itself. Like blaming violence on video games or talking about addictive qualities of children's cartoons.
I don’t care whether the person selling the cigarettes to my kid has read Fanon and volunteers at the homeless center
Cigarettes are actually a great example of engineered addiction. Historically, tobacco products had a mild addicting affect resulting from their short-term immediate stimulative benefits combined with the reliance on nicotine. But it wasn't until the boom in marketing of the 1920s followed by the industrial scale experimentation of the formula in the 1940s that the addictive nature of the product surged.
The end result was an enormous increase in per-capita consumption, leaping from 54 cigarettes per person per year in 1900 to 4,345 cigarettes per person per year in 1963.
The quantitative surge in consumption radically changed the health consequences of cigarette use.
You could do similar analysis on everything from alcohol consumption to LSD. From TV to TikTok. At some point you have to draw a line between the utilitarian value of the thing versus the mass market distribution and profit-driven consumption behaviors. Otherwise, you just end up with 1920s Prohibition and a thriving black market that undercuts the policies you intended.
And then you get Joe Kennedy. Is that what you want for your country? More Kennedys?
I bet that 16% have already let AI talk them into some really awful financial decisions
Reminds me of this:
Which is a less offensive variation of the joke that 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape.
The way we live is completely wrong for a human being. Wasting our lives for numbers in a computer, just enough to pay bills and waste another month.
Yeah, modern living is so anathema to human life that the ancient greeks literally told horror stories about it. Sisyphus pissed off Zeus, and was cursed in the afterlife to eternally push a boulder up a mountain, only to have the boulder roll away from him as he neared the peak and end up at the base of the mountain again. That was meant to be an extreme torment, because the task can never actually be completed. Sisyphus is forced to spend all of his waking hours struggling, only to have the struggle reset again every day.
And now we stare at spreadsheets for 8 hours every day, doing tasks that have no end.
Can't you select pretty colors for the cells?
I hate how tech bros make people hate all sorts of artificial intelligence by naming their fucking large language models AI. Without machine learning, I would have had to type this text all by myself. But look at me, speaking into a microphone. On the toilet! 😭
Fuck tech bros. Love tech. If it's the good kind of tech. The one that doesn't drink all our water and doesn't consume all our electricity. And fucking graphics cards!
Word! I've wouldn't even say that LLMs and other generative AI are a problem*. Locally run, i.e. in the hands of the people, and used on the right task, they can be a great tool! People are just fed up with centralised oligarch tech shoved down their throats in pursuit of the Epstein class' pipe dream: lay everybody off, automate (almost) all production and keep the profits to yourself.
* well, as long as you don't look to closely at how they were trained in the first place...
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Little that happens in this country has a positive impact on society. The only positive things that have happened during my lifetime were the ADA in 1990 and legalized gay marriage between 2003 and 2015.
The global results from the dissolution of USAID suggests that had a major positive impact.
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The 16 percent represents the billionaires that stand to lose their ass if the bubble bursts
The US wouldnt be an oligarchy if 16% were billionaires.
That 16% has investments in it.
It doesn't matter what Americans think about anything. In fact, they DON'T THINK. Imagine someone thinking and deciding that any idiot can have a gun. Or someone thinking and deciding that the width of a man's thumb at the base of the nail or the length of three dry, round barley grains placed side by side is a basic unit of measurement? That's not thinking, that's idiocy.
Yeah and everyone knows that every American must agree for a law to be valid, which is how we know that this describes every American
16 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact
Going to need this group cross-referenced with the percentage of Americans who enjoy CSAM.
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Amazing. Given how much wealth the top 10% own, it's basically only the wealthiest—who have enough income to exist in a different tier of society—who think AI will have a positive impact. The other 6% must be their sycophants and shills.
I love AI. It DOes all kinds of things NOT just make pictures. TRUST me I us ai every day. THE example I like to share is how it let's me research different types of MACHINES.
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