Fuck AI

I think when you see an action you should always look for the reaction. For example the rise of short video and fragmented content also gave us a kind of golden age of long form spoken content. There's always a swing to the pendulum.

Similarly I believe the age of slop will put a large premium on anything that is done sincerely and well thought out by a human. Just because they desperately want to sell slop, doesn't mean the people want to buy slop.

We are in a period of magical thinking. Absent of learning process, people have shifted towards the idea of innate skill. It's a false idea.

It happened before LLMs. Take the tech industry's enamoration with unicorns. At it's peak during the 2010s, they were all searching for the magical nerd who could mash away at a keyboard. Then miraculously produce a billion dollar magic box that spews rainbows and pixie dust.

That person does not exist. That person is the work of millions of people of varying skill type and level doing their day job. But the corporate driven world needed its wunderkind.

LLMs have made this idea believable for anyone. What if you had a magic box that could make you perform like a unicorn yourself. What if others had a magical box that could make the average or below-average person perform like a unicorn that you think you are.

I suspect people had become demoralized by all this magical unicorn stuff. Who really is that smart. Nobody. The world is average by definition. Can we all drop the charade? Nobody is that special.

The corporate rat race has caused credential inflation, as generations of people today stepped over each other to put up a facade of being the most outstanding employee you'll ever hire. The reality is most of us are average pretending to be above the standard deviation. What a stupid thing.

I suspect this has caused silent collapse of morale that nobody wants to talk about. Doing so would be to concede defeat, and make yourself vulnerable in a bizarro world that revolves around capitalist sharks smelling blood in the water. I think people are tired of the autodidact slog that corporations have offset to your personal time. People got tired of having to learn to be a supergenius unicorn in order to put food on the table.

What has gotten me about the recent decade of change is the devaluation of creativity.

I have an art degree but work in tech (and am a working artist, but that's beside the point) and being able to approach complex problems creatively sets a person apart from other people in a very positive way. My team at my day job is made of four different people with unique perspectives and when building something new, we all test it because we all notice different things and end up having different suggestions for ways to improve it.

However, things don't always work, and that's the other half of creativity: identifying and dreaming up methods to work around processes that do not function correctly without creating negative impacts to users and other folks involved in the project.

And in another ten years it's eminently possible that I'll be working with a person in their 20's who cannot function without putting a prompt into a machine.

It started over a decade ago, maybe more. In my 20's I hung out with people who had studied computer science at some very prestigious schools. The typical "I vote for the right, because I'm very smart and should be allowed to do whatever I want"-types.

Their attitude was that you should never learn anything that you're not making money from or is getting paid to learn, because they thought the brain has limited space.

Gonna be unpopular here but here it goes anyway.

The promotion of free thought and "using your brain" was a remnant of lies told to you in your childhood. We are (correctly to a degree) associating this with AI because it is the current evolution of working class control. However, it is not unique in its goal. You are an adult now. You are seeing the reality of living under a capitalist society and what it rewards. It rewards serving capital. You were supposed to stop thinking after you entered the workforce. As your parents and grandparents did.

Your parents and grandparents experienced this in similar ways. Sometimes the carrot and sometimes the stick. But, we romanticize the past so we focus on previous generations "having it easier". And, again, there is truth to this, clearly. The material conditions of the current and upcoming generations have declined. But, this is only because the ruling class of society has grown more confident in their ability to distract and corral it's laboring class.

For no generation in recent history have we been encouraged to "use our brains" or "think freely". That was all nonsense they told you while you grew up. There was just a lot more carrot previously than there was the stick. The bread and circus was better maintained. So, there was really no reason for most of population to keep thinking. They accepted their single family home and ignored the few that suffered.

AI is not primarily used to keep you from thinking. No, the systems that existed before it worked and are working quite well for that. It may have that side effect and it's welcome for the capitalist class. But AI is meant primarily to empower "the stick" with constant surveillance and control over each and every individual that dares to ask what happened to "the carrots".

AI is more about the ruling class being able to say "yeah, you can see how things are. But, you can't do anything about it."

And they're wrong. Their confidence will be their undoing.

OP, your feelings of alienation are not unique to living in a world of AI. They are just being allowed to be realized without any distractions because of the degree of hubris that AI has given the capitalist/ruling class. It is a good thing in a way. Allow it to give you clarity and class consciousness where your parents lacked. It is through this class struggle we can free ourselves from this alienation you are describing.

Edit: Appreciate the upvotes. Have been use to downvotes anytime I try to explain why AI feels so awful. It's not just AI.

I've had this sense that all these data centers being built will eventually be these deserted mega complexes. Some not even being completely built. Once the bubble pops. It'll be some real dystopian/backroom type shit until they get repurposed into something else.

I feel ya. My single straw that I hold on is: They're losing tons of moneys. The AI-bubble probably bursts soon.

I already felt like I don't belong in this world before AI, and now AI hits even worse. Fuck that shit. :c If you want someone to talk, I'm here btw. :/

with slide rule, stopwatch, machine, and automation the destroyed pride in manual labor.

Now, with AI, they want to destroy pride in mental labor.

The subjugation of the working class remains the goal.

We’re still here. What you’re describing as missing is still here. We have lives, experiences and wants that may differ, but we exist and the people we love and respect are also here. Here is the world.

When I was young television was run to inform and educate. Programmes for children and adults ran at natural speeds taking their time to unfold ideas. Then business graduates took over and everything was fast and flashy but said nothing anymore. Then later the internet came and at first it was run by the technical people who had designed it and there were personal websites on any interest you might have and newsgroups where people from all over the world took time to help others in their own area of expertise. Then the business graduates took over and everything was bright and fast, ill informed and run only for profit or to profile the user which is the same thing but worse. The repeated trend here is clear and common, people who are able to create things very often have a notion of acting for the good of society. When these things do well they are overrun by a different sort of person, one who has no feeling for the common good or wellbeing, one who in fact often disdains it and is motivated only by greed and will without conscience ruin anything good for profit. The second sort of person should be identified and nullified and corrected and the first type allowed to flourish and not the reverse as is the case in the world we have allowed to grow up around us.

Here is my encouragement to go and learn something new! Try something computers can’t do yet, like cooking or playing an instrument. The learning by remembering information era is long gone, but there is the opportunity to learn skills robots cant mimic yet.

I am cut from my company because im a junior dev that still needs to learn :/