This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So far, the only things that the Sociopathic Oligarchs and Government seem to be excited about is using AI for either surveillance, or to take jobs. I haven't seen one example of it being useful for anything that would benefit the average Citizen.
Give me one reason that people should be happy about AI.
I just don't see the benefit of AI. AI has no liability. You can't trust the information it tells you as it spits out fake facts in 2 seconds. What benefit is this serving society? I think that where the doubt comes from.
I sat though a intro to copilot training session and this is what a took from it:
Highly inconsistent - didnt work half the time for the Microsoft employee presenting.
Have to be super specific with paragraph of prompt - like devil wears parada coffee scene. Which means its less effort to do it myself than figure out what it wants me to tell it. This might be fun for making catboy pictures on my free time but zero at work. In fact less than zero time as time is lost unless I can use the same prompt again. So unless there is site that gives me lots of copilot prompts to reference its not worth my time to learn.
convert word to power point - sure thats useful but never had to use that ever so w/e
If being used in a meeting it will tell me what I missed if I step out. Rofl. So ok in the event you cant ask someone on chat wtf happened on the side because a order came at the door. Again never happened to me cause I dont have a toxic team.
Read teams chat - i can have it summarize my teams chat for decisions. First off decisions being done on teams with no email follow up? Teams has 30 day retention policy. Nothing of value is kept in teams chat.
Oh the best part:
it cAn FoRmAt ExCeL aNd PoWeR pOiNt FoR mE. I almost fell of chair laughing. According to Microsoft 80% of users dont know how to do this basic thing and need an AI to clean it up for them. Mate, if you can't do this simple thing you dont deserve the data. This is a literal skill issue and a simple one to fix. this it takes an hr, maybe 2, with 2 being how to google excel help. This is a secondary school skill. Hell i used it in primary school.
Bonus: If used in meeting it can tell ppl how upset I was and describe how it came to that conclusion. I have IMMENSE concern for working with a human who is unsure if I was flipping the table in front of them.
I cant wait for the next forced training. Thank god it was over teams or they would be seeing my signature look of not being impressed.
the benefit is price and reliability, it is cheaper than an employee won't call in sick and only bills for the seconds it works.
I'm not concerned it will take my job I'm concerned some idiot will give it my job despite not being able to do it.
Turns out telling an entire generation that AI will replace half their jobs, flood the internet with slop and make billionaires richer didn’t produce boundless techno optimism. Who could have predicted that? The AI industry may have a capability problem, but it definitely has a messaging problem.
to be honest in the age of targeted ~~advertisement~~ opinion manipulation I would not be surprised if more young people would be happy addicts to it
The AI industry is actively telling companies that they can become 'more efficient' (i.e. fire workers) with AI; that's more than a mere 'messaging problem'.
It has a financial interest in companies firing their workers and raising prices to make room for it.
How it feels to me is that the goal is for the world to become so intrusive/demanding/stressful that the only way to exist in it sanely would be to build an interactive buffer between the person and the greater world, and they want to sell these brown nosing AI agents as that buffer.
I detest the ethics, economic, and environmental costs of these platforms, but the part of me that is casting around wildly for some sort of life preserver wonders if somehow these horrible contraptions of inevitable doom might just provide some short term relief.
It’s that they believed it was an inevitability — a very profitable inevitability.
I'm not even concerned about it replacing jobs, it has proven to be shit at replacing real intelligence, and making the LLM bigger is not a path to AGI. Also my job requires hands, which copilot doesn't have, so maybe I'm biased.
But I'm concerned about AI being used to spread disinformation and control narratives in favour of the ruling class. I'm concerned about AI datacenters exacerbating climate change. I'm concerned about even further erosion of privacy and mass surveillance. I'm concerned about the inevitable economic crash that will come when they eventually accept that this mess has no path to profitability. I'm concerned about AI psychosis and the way chatbots can seriously mess up a vulnerable mind. I'm concerned about the effects AI will have on children who grow up using it. Probably a few other things too that I'm forgetting about right now.
I'm also concerned about the powers that be trying to force AI to do things it can't actually accomplish in spite of the fact that human labour is objectively the only real option. It doesn't matter that it can't actually do the job, it matters that they spent money on it and will keep hammering at it until reality catches up with them and hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people get hurt when the world burns because they won't stop chasing sunk costs. The hubris at the top of a lot of companies is thick enough to cause real suffering for a lot of people.
Yeah, that's another big one I didn't think of.
I'm also concerned about AI being used to generate non-consentual nude/sexual images of real people, and of minors.
AI is hurting Genz learning experience in college, plus they are also USING AI to make resumes, in which employers use thier own AI to screen out the applicants
One thing that gives me hope is that my local college made an announcement on Facebook about an AI product they bought for athletics.
Every single comment on both it and the news story was negative.
They just gotta use it to know it won't be taking jobs.
Seriously. Use it for something you consider yourself an expert at. Based on what happens, remember it's like that for any topic. Yes, even the ones you know little about but it seems to. That's the state of generative "AI".
I generally agree, but they are damn good at programming and only getting better. Can they build a software solution without an expert? No. But they can replace many junior devs.
they are also good at maths, try asking some average difficulty problem it will give step by step solution
Tell this to the people who have the power to take away jobs. They don't care if it works correctly or not.
Yeah they do. That's why they're all expensively rehiring and struggling with budgets. I mean, they know now.
Whenever a chat bot is aggressively presented on a website, I like to ask it how to disable all AI features. Often it will tell me to click on menu options that don't exist.
Young adults have to become experts at something to realize that - a prospect that AI makes harder every day.
Oof.
A depressing truth bomb there.
48 percent of people are still that gullible?
Im a cable lineman, ai isn't going to install your fiber. It will take over all the middle management roles, so I might have 4 new bosses in the future all trying to micromanage me. Ai is coming for managements jobs, if all you do it push papers and tell confident lies kiss your job goodbye.
Honestly, I hope AI continues to improve and does actually wipe out large swaths of the job market. Maybe then countries will finally have to come to terms with the idea that capitalism is absolute fucking shit and finally consider some sort of UBI or other way to move away from the existing garbage of a global economic system.
What I don't look forward to is the significant months/years these fucks take to make those decisions, and the pain and suffering it will cause to billions of people. Why do these assholes always have to be dragged into the future kicking and screaming?
They will decide to kill millions of us before they use their profits to pay UBI.
Wouldn't having so many unemployed people work in their favor? Lots more scabs for one.
Right now AI is looking a lot like a bubble. Wealthy people keep investing in it, but all the AI companies are losing money way faster than their profits. They're selling compute at a vast loss, and if they charged full price, no-one would buy it.
With tin-foil hat firmly in place, this is what the owner class hopes to get out of AI:
1. Automate everything. As Corey Doctorow surmises, they want to automate as much as possible, until the working class just isn't needed anymore, so they can build their Ayn Rand private city utopias (Peter Thiel has plans) and let the rest of us starve somewhere, displaced by the quarries, data centers and automated factories.
2. Create armies of swarming killer drones that are commanded by AI, as Randall Munroe predicted, not only to annex any territory that they can't buy, but to garrison all the working class they've confined to reservations to die of thirst and hunger. And...
3. In the meantime, process all the mass surveillance information in order to predict who is a dissident or a troublemaker or is capable of organizing resistance, so that they can be dispatched early. Also to micromanage their dwindling workforce and make sure women can't go to an abortion provider.
whatever you said is only true for US not China
Not at all! China isn't trying to do the same buildout. In fact, they're turning towards the AI-as-software model, in which AI is run locally and sold as software rather than being sold as compute from large supercomputers.
It turns out that most of the things common folk and common businesses do with AI are managed pretty well with open source AI software run locally with a dozen terabytes of training data.
And if the US companies sold tokens at their actual rate (not at a loss) then it would be cheaper for even small businesses to put together a high-powered PC and set it up to do AI tasks. So for everything that isn't the stuff I listed, the AI-as-service model is already obsolete.
I'd be worried too if it causes students to cheat on their homework & steals art from artists
What is the x-axis on this chart? Time?
"Not Found" error. From the link, I assume you're deeplinking to a temporary/personal tokenized download.
Ah, my bad. Just search the name (Stromberg, June 2026) and date of the primary research paper the graph came from, I scrolled through it until I found the graph in question.
Let me elieviate your fears. Human capital is listed as a liability, technology investment is CAPEX.
But so many prerequisites for effective AI implementations are relying on improving quality of inputs / training materials and that is an OPEX siphon.
While taking the poll to see how folks feel several humanoid robots were beating people to death in the background.
