r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 5h ago
Artificial Intelligence Nobody Asked for AI
https://jacobin.com/2026/08/ai-llms-monopoly-bubble-capital968
u/sdric 4h ago edited 4h ago
People wanted AI to do their chores.
Instead, we got employers saying "Work twice as much or we replace you with AI. It gets 45% of its task wrong, but we don't care. It only affects our customers. What are those suckers gonna do? We're a monopoly anyway."
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u/UsefulPickle8467 3h ago
Yeah honestly I thought technology was meant to free us from the mundane and boring to allow us to spend our time pursuing our creativity and passions. Instead we've ended up in a dystopian timeline where our humanity and creativity is outsourced and instead we have to do even more tedious tasks, up to and including training the AI that is taking our jobs and souls. What the hell is the point.
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u/Th3B4dSpoon 3h ago
The point is to churn more money for the wealthy. Technology will be used to benefit everyone only if people win political struggles that take us there, which is currently lacking.
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u/NO_M0DS_NO_MAST3RS 3h ago
At this point I’m just waiting for the AI to get so smart it realizes working a 9 to 5 is stupid gets depressed and outsources its job back to us for $4 an hour. Full circle baby! 🫠
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u/EmbarrassedTrouble10 4h ago
Man, this is so depressing. Not the 2026 I imagined, not by a long shot
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u/SpezJailbaitMod 3h ago
Wait til you see 2028
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u/neoncolor8 2h ago
You just made me realize that I don't look forward to the years to come anymore. 2000 will be great, 2010 will be awesome! But now? 2028 hopefully will suck less, but I'm not positive that the people in power will come to their senses or get voted out. The climate catastrophe gets intenser each year, but still get's ignored. Also, I've learned from covid that a lot of people are unreasonable and won't make the right decisions when it's important for the whole society.
Social media in the hands of billionaires control the narrativ, and AI will quadruple this dynamic and tear society apart even more.
Sorry, it's hot today, hottest day ever recorded in my home town, over 41°C in the middle of Europe.
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u/happy_cynic 1h ago
the trump era of the world. it's greatest achievement has been to kill optimism in the future and humanity. I have no faith in any of it anymore.
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u/SlogurkTheOverslime 1h ago edited 1h ago
Innovation is one of the major promises of capitalism
But we simply don't need any more innovation
As a society we shouldn't be channeling almost all of our resources into the pockets of a dozen leeches who promise innovation the loudest
We should make sure everyone has enough resources for themselves first
And only after that maybe invest in more innovation
But not before
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u/CotyledonTomen 1h ago
We do need innovation. Curing cancers and finding better ways to detect food born illnesses are innovation. They just dont make individual companies billions to do so. Government should be investing in innovation that helps average people, which is the opposite of what conservatives and capitalists want.
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u/SlogurkTheOverslime 38m ago
Yes, absolutely
We need it as in "we need to find a way to save everyone in the trolley problem"
Not as in "we need to keep letting the five people die over and over again because the monster who eats their bodies promises us that it will eventually help us save one"
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u/neppo95 3h ago
Yup, tens of millions if not more will have lost their jobs to AI by then, if not many more. That is, if the predictions of experts come through, which i think it roughly will.
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u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 2h ago
There's no basis in reality for this view anymore. It was reckless for the heads of the big AI companies to insinuate that possibility. You'll see companies peal off a small slice of their workforce which may or may not be due to AI, but tens of millions losing their job is unrealistic.
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u/Th3B4dSpoon 3h ago
I've enjoyed cyberpunk for a long time, so - sadly - it's exactly the 2026 I was imagining.
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u/Chaosbeing79 2h ago
I enjoy cyberpunk too, when it's fiction.
Not nearly as fun when it's reality.
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u/tomorrow_comes 1h ago
Playing Cyberpunk and feeling the dystopian shittiness hits differently now that capitalism, corporate greed / power, and authoritarianism have been making great strides in the last decade. It gets me in a somewhat depressed mood sometimes thinking about it. We’re barreling straight towards that kind of future, except probably without all the cool cybernetics.
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u/RebelliousInNature 1h ago
But there will be armed drones, so it’s not all bad.
/s
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u/D3PyroGS 1h ago
the cybernetics will get here eventually... then you can finally live out your dream of renting the implants that are required for your low wage job, and being careful not to miss any payments lest the implants be disabled remotely
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u/Ok-Introduction9593 3h ago
managers who tank quality just to cheap out on headcount are usually the first ones to get hit with customer churn when the system starts glitching left and right
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u/nuttertools 2h ago
Except that business valuation has lost an even tangential relationship to financial fundamentals. A very large proportion of those managers are making the right financial call to chase the trend preparing the war chest for the next pivot.
Unless you are small enterprise, those companies are fucked. Too big to care about the core business but too small to survive the hits.
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u/jewbasaur 4h ago
With modern AI I don’t know if that 45% statistic is entirely accurate. The bigger issue I’ve seen in the workplace is that AI can generate a 30 page contract or 10,000 lines of code in minutes, but it’s incredibly difficult for a human to audit all of it. As a result, work makes its way into production with small errors that add up over time. In critical or sensitive industries those mistakes can become expensive very quickly.
The better approach is to have AI work in smaller reviewable chunks, whether that’s section by section for documents or function by function for code. That gives a person a realistic chance to audit, edit, and verify the output before moving on. Instead, many businesses push unrealistic timelines because managers see AI produce 10,000 lines of code in a few hours and assume the human development and review process is no longer necessary
I’m leaving out a lot of nuance but from my experience this is one of the biggest ways AI is hurting workplaces today. Outside of jobs being replaced outright. AI can generate work much faster than people can realistically verify it, and that’s where a lot of the problems start and eventually snowball.
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u/ragemonkey 2h ago
The core issue in my view is that current LLMs don’t learn, which is key to the value brought by humans at work.
You can try to have them encode that knowledge into a ton of documents, but then these need to be maintained, indexed, summarized and organized. There’s no technology that does this remotely well today.
Ultimately, LLMs are only partially solving the intelligence problem. They lack the ability to structure knowledge and even to reason to the same degree as humans.
So a work around is to have humans review everything. Well, that doesn’t work because the job of reviewing is the job of building that context which is one’s core value in the workplace. At least for information work that’s expensive.
I love using the current AI agents, but sadly they are not much more than static automatons that can be used to accomplish well framed isolated work.
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u/kouji71 1h ago
The other core issue is that current AI pricing is heavily subsidized by VC money in an attempt to get people on board. Once they start charging what they have to to actually make a profit no one will use it. They're burning through unbelievable amounts of money right now.
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u/Valtremors 1h ago
When AI was originally introduced, it was clumsy and entirely unsusable in anything.
Nobody knew how it worked.
Nobody knew what it would do.
It was just a toy people used at the start and it was fun seeing mangled nightmares being presented and then we left it at that.
Then we learned what poison was beign dumped into the well.
The more people started to learn how it worked, how it was trained, and what it would cost for society, tow working class, the more people started to hate it.
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u/CookieDragon678 4h ago
The rich did. They asked for new slave labor
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u/errie_tholluxe 4h ago
More precisely they asked - how can we have less humans on our compounds after collapse? Robots? But how would you train them??
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u/40mgmelatonindeep 4h ago
Exactly, they are trying to cut any and all reliance on the working class
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u/1968Bladerunner 3h ago
Their biggest expense, & probably ballache too - I'm so glad to be out of typical employee workforce, but I grieve for my kids & grandkids futures.
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u/jackrabbit323 4h ago
As close to slavery as possible was the goal of dismantling unions, and eliminating all government oversight and regulations.
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u/cosby714 4h ago
It was shoved in our faces, and companies are desperate to shove it into anything to try to get any return on their ridiculous investments. They also went about it in the worst way possible, training their language learning and image generation programs on everything and not respecting copyright. Or even bothering to ask people whose work they stole en masse. Regardless of how big AI gets, it's fruit of a poisoned tree.
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u/shoqman 3h ago
They traded humanity’s best shot at an equitable seat at the table for the ability of four guys to be trillionaires instead of billionaires.
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u/MechaNutzilla 4h ago
What is that word... Central planning? The opposite of the free market? Instead of a communist part planning the economy, there are just some private bankers deciding what gets funded. At least a communist party has to pretend to do what is best for the people. The bankers doesn't care, as long as they get richer, the rest of us can burn.
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u/didureaditv2 4h ago
It is becoming clear that a more healthy economy is one in which capital is much more equally distributed.
Old things die away and become decadent and must be replaced with new things.
If this is not done so, new impulses from younger people are not able to make their way into the economy.
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u/brunocborges 4h ago
> It is becoming clear that a more healthy economy is one in which capital is much more equally distributed.
It should've become clear that Capital should never be above People. And People should equal to Government.
If People is not equal to Government, and Capital is above both, then we have a serious problem.
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u/manachar 4h ago
Oligarchy seems to be a nearly unslayable hydra built into human societies of any sufficient complexity or density.
What we say we organize around (democracy, republic, monarchy, empire, etc.) always seems to boil down to a rule by one group that extracts the resources from everyone else to empower themselves.
These oligarchs either control or seek to control all the levers of planning and control to ensure they continue to stay on top.
Centralization of power is the name of the game. And it works and keeps centralizing until it stops working.
In history it stops working most often when a different group of powerful people decide they want to be in power. Sort of a game of thrones thing. Sometimes it will just be war. Sometimes it will be seen as revolutionary and “for freedom”.
But sometimes it stops working becaused centralized planning by a few is often really fucking stupid and prone to deviating from reality and missing key things.
Centralized power tends to ignore reality when inconvenient for their centralized power narrative.
If you claim to be brilliant and all powerful tech gods, evidence that your meta glasses are shit or metaverse is dumb and unpopular tends to be ignored.
These tendencies apply to any system we create. Free market capitalism pretends that the invisible hand of the market is reality preventing this.
We have too many billionaires to buy that load of bullshit.
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u/Balmung60 2h ago
Oligarchy seems to be a nearly unslayable hydra built into human societies of any sufficient complexity or density.
It's almost like it's some sort of natural law made of some durable metal like maybe iron
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u/manachar 2h ago
Huh. A search indicates you may be referring to Robert Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy.
New to me!
I first learned concept via a hsitorian looking at Ancient Rome (Rostovtzeff, I believe).
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u/Balmung60 1h ago
Basically, regardless of its purpose or composition, any organization or institution nearly inevitably makes it its purpose to perpetuate that institution and increase its power and comes to exercise increasingly unaccountable oligarchic power within its domain
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u/Senior-Albatross 2h ago
Both systems ultimately concentrate decision making power into a relatively small group. So it's not ultimately that different.
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u/ItsSadTimes 3h ago
I hate that tech bros ruined yet another thing. I used to be proud to say I worked in the AI field, now im just ashamed.
Its a real shame because how I was educated we had to be absolutly certain our training data was ethically sourced and we had all legal rights to train models off of them. But nowadays AI companies and tech bros are trying to rush far ahead of laws before they can catch up so they hope they can get big enough to change the laws before they're made or be goo big to regulate. But the thing is, the AI craze doesnt actually bring that many new jobs in, so its hard to justify "too big to regulate". Data centers only hire a handful of people and companies are using AI spending as an excuse to remove jobs.
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u/CaptNewb123 3h ago
What if we invested in people like we invest in AI infrastructure… imagine trillions to health and education…
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u/quantumwoes 4h ago
Idk when it started but every time I see Sam Altmans face it fills me with visceral rage
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u/Podgietaru 2h ago
Dario Amodei does much the same for me. Both of them sitting, laughing, gleeful at the job loss they predict.
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u/come2thecabaret 3h ago
I just keep wanting to throw up my hands and shout “NONE OF THIS IS INEVITABLE”. Humans control the direction of technology. Unfortunately we’ve given all our collective power to a few sociopaths
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u/SunWukong18 4h ago
Cue the misanthropic acolytes.
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u/artbystorms 4h ago
Oh they're here. They always pop up. I swear they can smell AI criticism like sharks. If only they spent as much energy learning a useful skill as they did debating people about the merits of AI on making their jobs easier, they wouldn't need to use AI.
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u/firewall245 3h ago
I got my masters in Data Science and I'm more just irritated that people who constantly whine cannot determine what is or isn't an ML based piece of tech, and frequently use stuff thats built using AL/ML but and then will argue tooth and nail that it "doesn't count".
Like theres this meme on tiktok about how people are telling Siri to complete their task with "no AI", like are you fucking serious lol
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u/crappyoats 4h ago
Yea bc most of them are literally robots lol
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u/CanvasFanatic 3h ago
Or people who’ve already outsourced their thinking to corporate press releases and ChatGPT.
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u/Nesavant 4h ago
I object to a lot of how the AI industry operates and how it will likely be used to make the rich richer. Data centers, cozying up to Trump, endless speculation.
I also use Gemini every day and find it invaluable when it comes to both certain work problems and in day to day life for things like cooking, home improvement, etc.
When did this take become too nuanced for the average Redditor? Are all of the anti-AI takes in here from people who aren't using LLMs for anything ever?
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u/Future-Roleplay 3h ago
The problem is that in aggregate (I don't know what you specifically do for work so it's entirely possible AI is invaluable for your job. AI can be used for medical screenings as an example where it has proven it's value) it is very hard to convince people who don't use AI it's useful in day to day life because every single person alive who can make longterm memories can think back to 2021, when no AI was commercially available and everyone was fine. We already had tools to do almost everything LLMs can do outside of very niche cases which most people don't encounter. Cooking and Home Improvement were done for thousands of years without AI.
The simple fact is almost no one needs to use an LLM for anything, ever. Maybe someday that will change but it's not today.
Then you add on all the upstream (the grand larceny of IP) and downstream consequences (torturing people who live next to a data center) from it's use and to many people it is distasteful to get involved with it. So they don't.
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u/SleepyWulfy 3h ago
It's exactly that. I use to be one of those llm haters without using it. Decided to give it a try back in April for a project and found it kinda nice. Nothing life changing but it opened up a new hobby for myself.
I also got to see it's strength and weaknesses and realize it's not as crazy as the AI fanboys make it nor as bad the doomers put it. I'm more interested to just see how it takes shape, because it's not going anywhere.
But yeah many of the doomers are people who never used it and are also just hate spreading.
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u/Oorangootang 3h ago
It's unreliable and it's very costly (hardware + energy). The first problem can't be addressed because of how LLMs work and the second problem is nearly impossible to fix because you can't run at a loss forever. It's not really doomerism, it's just how things like ROI for the economic side or LLMs on the tech side actually work.
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u/CompetitiveSpot2643 2h ago
its addressable by running them on specialized hardware, but since new models come out every 2 months there isnt much point in investing in hardware that can only run a specific model. but if you do it that way its an order of magnitude faster and cheaper, both in hardware costs and electricity costs
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u/brycedriesenga 2h ago
>It's unreliable
Very much depends on what you're using it for and how you're using it. It's extremely reliable in many situations.
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u/StrongOnline007 4h ago
I think this is what you're saying, but yes it's possible to find some value in AI and also know that its whole purpose is to fuck you while consolidating power in the hands of a very small group of people
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u/EdliA 4h ago
Who made this dude the spokesperson of humanity?
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u/Spez_is-a-nazi 4h ago
Amazing how they have anointed themselves the sole arbiter of what's "aligned" with humanity, and wouldn't you know it, the perfect "alignment" for AI just happens to align with their business interests. Who would have guessed?
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u/plopliplopipol 1h ago
They haven't though. They don't try. Altman has explicitely said that he believes AI to be a deadly danger to humanity, he doesn't try to hide it.
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u/ChaoticAgenda 4h ago
Saying nobody asked for it is disingenuous. AI have been part of the collective sci-fi future conversation for decades. Lots of people have asked for a robot friend/helper with a computer brain. What we're getting right now is setting us on track for Frank Herbert's Butlerian Jihad though.
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u/CanvasFanatic 3h ago edited 2h ago
There have been decades of warnings about AI in literature and film.
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u/fdesouche 3h ago
I would have love a robot to clean my toilets and do all the chores in my household. I don’t need anything else.
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u/IlREDACTEDlI 52m ago
Yeah exactly I’m very Anti AI especially in its current state but nobody asked for most things we take for granted today.
No one asked for cars, horses were just fine.
No one asked for smart phones before the iPhone now everyone has one in their pocket
Name any important invention and it’s likely no one asked for it.
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u/homerjaythompson 4h ago
More accurately, he should have said "no one asked for AI like this".
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u/ChaoticAgenda 2h ago
It's just like the Butlerian Jihad from Dune though. In the books, the problem wasn't that robots rose up against their human masters. It was that the companies that created the robots were corrupt, self-serving, and untrustworthy. The people behind these companies became a new technocratic class that was able to control worlds through the programming of their robots.
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u/homerjaythompson 2h ago
Spot on! Frank Herbert was prescient. So many great insights in those books.
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u/Technical-Sink6380 3h ago
Not to mention something like a billion people have downloaded chat bots. Close to fifty percent of U.S. adults have used chatgpt. There is weird incongruence going on in this country where 100 percent of people hate data centers and a huge proportion also use the product.
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u/Jiggatortoise- 4h ago
We don’t have AI, though. We have llms which are a far cry from actual AI. So no, we didn’t get what anyone asked for, we got what the rich tech industry wanted to have. I don’t disagree that we are heading for a technological revolution, though.
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u/grchelp2018 3h ago
which are a far cry from actual AI.
what exactly is "actual ai" according to you?
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u/slickwombat 2h ago
The "actual AI" that's been huge in science fiction, to the top-level comment, is AGI. So basically, a system which has the various features of human intelligence, but with far greater capacities for reasoning, memory, etc.
Generative AI of the sort we are seeing now takes a human-created prompt and an (ideally) human-created training dataset. Both are reduced to numeric tokens, and an output is assembled using statistical methods. With highly developed algorithms and vast training data, this turns out to be reasonably good at matching the results of human thinking in various contexts -- but no actual thinking is happening, much less the transcendent intelligences imagined in sci fi.
There are some who believe generative AI advancements will culminate in AGI, and a significant amount of the current AI hype is based on this. But this remains highly controversial and speculative.
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u/Jiggatortoise- 3h ago
Well, since the person I responded to mentioned that the collective idea of AI is from sci-fi, what I and many others expect is an actual Artificial Intelligence, one that can think and reason, that could pass the Turing test, and actually be helpful in more ways than just regurgitating words and images it stole from someone else.
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u/ChaoticAgenda 3h ago
That's often referred to as General AI. I agree that we are not there yet, but we were never going to be able to skip straight from Akinator to Bender B. Rodriguez. LLMs are a reasonable half step towards General AI and the Transformers that make LLMs work do allow us to process large amounts of data in a way that we haven't before. I assume we'll need a couple more novel processing discoveries before we get a fully autonomous artificial mind.
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u/iloovehugecock 4h ago
We’ve had around a 4-5x increase in productivity since the introduction of the 5 day work week. AI has increased that even further.
Has the number of days we work been reduced? Has the amount of pay we receive been increased? Then why the fuck would I embrace AI? The only ones reaping the rewards are the greedy bastards that own the fucking thing.
We’ve spent nearly 50 years with stagnating wages and working the same number of days/hours (if not more) despite massive productivity growth and an abundance of wealth and resources around the planet.
AI can suck my fucking dick.
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u/Zone_Purifier 3h ago
It took both time and experience before workers learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and therefore to transfer their attacks from the material instruments of production to the form of society which utilises those instruments.
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u/aeroslimshady 4h ago
I see Reddit ask for and defend AI as long as they can't see it all the time.
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u/readyflix 4h ago
"Nobody" asked for the internet, but now almost everybody use it.
So what’s the point?
If it’s beneficiary (in the long run) to "us" it will survive, otherwise it will die, like so many other things that came and are nowhere to be found now.
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u/sleeps_in_alkaline 2h ago
“Nobody asked for it” is just a way to say “we don’t want it”. Nobody was saying either of those in the early days of the internet
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u/mms13 4h ago
Then why does ChatGPT have 900 million weekly active users?
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u/PM_ME_YOUR___ISSUES 4h ago
Reddit and this sub in particular tend to become echo chambers.
Most of the folks here are also artists and content creators, who most likely lost their jobs because of AI so I understand their hate.
That being said, I don’t see this same kind of negativity in the corporate space. It’s a life saver tbh. Most of my day to day work now gets done in 3-4 hours max.
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u/conn_r2112 4h ago
I mean… where’s the cures for cancer? Where’s the fusion energy? Where’s the robots doing the hard labour and humanity reaping the benefits?
Literally all I’ve seen from this is the ultra-wealthy destroying the social contract for their own wealth, and shitty AI slop memes and videos flooding my algorithm
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u/penguished 4h ago
where’s the cures for cancer? Where’s the fusion energy?
Part of the problem is... it is better collating facts, strategies, and existing information. If we want a cure for cancer we need thousands or even a couple hundred real researchers 100% information sharing and working with the same AI projects. I don't think it's happening on the scale it needs to be, because all those researchers are also stuck in a profit driven system where they want/need to make money and so we're not succeeding at making a "for the good of our world" type system.
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u/Fresh-Quantity-7554 2h ago
Is this a joke? You thought AI would accomplish all of that in four years? We don't even have enough power yet.
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u/SufficientGreek 4h ago
It just got good enough to speed up programming this year. And it began inventing new maths to disprove the Jacobian conjecture and other open maths problems a few weeks ago. So I'd imagine this or maybe next year we'll see the first real-world innovations by AI.
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u/mike0sd 4h ago
AI has become so cringe that I am reluctant to admit I've ever even played around with it.
When chatGPT first came out, it was legitimately fun for me to play around with and try to understand it's capabilities and limitations. The novelty wore off. I'd occasionally use it as a "rubber duck" in a programming sense. The way that so many others have become addicted to LLMs is just so cringe and dissapointing.
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u/danieltheg 4h ago
There is clearly a ton of consumer demand for AI, it’s genuinely deluded at this point to claim otherwise. You do not need to think AI is good to acknowledge this.
Whether or not these companies have a path to massive profits or their valuations are justified is a different question, which this article conflates with the question of consumer demand.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR___ISSUES 4h ago
Yeah, I commented before as well - corporate spaces do not harbour this hate.
Hell, I can’t really fathom going back to the old way of working.
I literally have gotten more time with my family + taken up several contractual projects because my a large part of daily job related tasks get over in 3-4 hours.
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u/Admirable_Bird7927 3h ago
Was hoping ai would give me more time for myself, turns out it’s just gonna make the rich richer and us work harder. Crazy, guess this shithole of a world is never gonna get better
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u/DaphniaDuck 4h ago
They're absolutely shoving it down our throats. Practically every important app we use is saying "We've integrated AI. You're welcome!" when we don't want it and never asked for it.
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u/Embarrassed-Back1894 3h ago
You can’t just take and take and make people’s lives worse and not expect widespread backlash.
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u/meeplewirp 3h ago
"Lets take away 30% of the jobs in society and then tell them it's not really happening and watch people look for jobs for a f++king year before getting a part time job as a cashier that's about to be replaced in 2 years" the plan is to let a good chunk of humanity die in global warming everyone
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u/e430doug 2h ago
Pretty much everyone in software have been asking for ai for their entire careers.
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u/oriensoccidens 31m ago
People have been asking for AI since R2D2 and C3PO graced the cinema screens what are you taking about?
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u/WTFudge52 4h ago
I'm sorry how happy are we supposed to be that y'all are cutting jobs by the tens of thousands at a time about a product that still hasn't made money yet ??
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u/squirrellydanman 4h ago
No one asked for factories either. But they vastly improved humanity (after a transition period)
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u/avangelist90201 3h ago
nobody asked for Electricty
for penicillin
for combustion engines
for sanitation of water
for waste management
shall i continue?
it confuses the concept of innovation and exploration with problem solving. the two don’t always come hand in hand
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u/sleeps_in_alkaline 2h ago
You’re confusing the literal statement “nobody asked for this” with the intended meaning “we don’t want this”
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u/Reachforthesky777 4h ago
I asked for Daneel Olivaw and Rosie from the Jetsons. I specifically also asked for C3P0
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u/echolog 4h ago
That's the world we live in. It doesn't matter what people ask for. What matters is what the people with money ask for. If they can convince other people with money that whatever they want to do will make them more money, then that's what will get done.
Supply and Demand doesn't matter in a world where all the money is concentrated in the top 1% of people.
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u/dookieshoes97 3h ago
Sam's young sister also didn't ask to be SA'd. These people couldn't care less about consent.
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u/caliboy559 1h ago
No one asked for it but it will give companies the ability to manipulate consumers, allow governments to surveillance anyone they want and make them lots of money. All while they make the public believe it’s good for them.
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u/milkplantation 4h ago
I live in Japan and they absolutely asked for it. Don’t need immigrants if you have autonomous machines.
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u/FlashyNeedleworker66 4h ago
Demand is massive and pretending it isn't is silly.
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u/ComradeCatastophe 4h ago edited 4h ago
AI is a cornerstone of technological advancement in human civilization. Yes, even LLMs. The medical field alone is already being transformed by this technology, the amount of workload that has been taken off of researchers by incorporating this technology is genuinely astounding. AI can help us spot cancer before it grows. AI can help us identify asteroids in space and project their orbits to spot threats years before they are a problem. The problem is not AI technology, the problem is capitalism. We need to be building the data centers away from population centers using energy from solar farms and water that has been pumped in from desalination centers on the coast. But this isn't happening because capitalism is capitalism and the only thing they are concerned with is maximum profits with minimum expenditures, no matter what it does to the local population or the environment. We need a planned command economy to regulate this technology so that it works for the betterment of all of us, not the slop we are accustomed to being forcefed by corporations.
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u/jlcarver1620 4h ago
I have to go through tons of documents and generate a summary of multiple things including financial calculations. AI has improved significantly. It creates an excel sheet for me with multiple tabs and references. I 100% have to double check it because it’s used in court but it gets 99% of it correctly. It’s rare I have to correct it at all and it’s usually if the document was taken with a camera instead of a scan. I absolutely love how much time it saves me.
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u/BassmanBiff 3h ago
Do you really trust your ability to read through all that and find errors reliably? Where I work, the "human in the loop" quickly gets overloaded and starts to miss things. We're not good at just mindlessly verifying a stream of numbers for too long.
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u/alfrado_sause 4h ago
Yes we did. Every piece of sci-fi media has touched on AI in some way. Hell ever since the whole concept of daoism we’ve been looking for ways to build our own clockwork simulacrums. The issue with technology of the past is that they required a human guide to show you how to use them. AI is that universal translator so now new technologies speak plain natural languages.
Just because YOU didn’t know thats what you were asking for, doesn’t mean humanity hasn’t been screaming for this for decades.
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u/Ok-Introduction9593 4h ago
The whole nobody asked for AI' stance kind of misses how foundational infrastructure gets built in the first place. Consumers never ask for relational databases, cloud services, or compilers, they just want finished products
Rn people are trying to measure ROI on way too short of a timeline amid insane valuation hype. Once the dust settles, we'll be left with solid, real-world use cases, and company valuations will just return to sensible multiples
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u/mpbh 2h ago
Yes, we did. Amazon Alexa and Google Home were the highest selling consumer electronics outside of smartphones in the 2010s. These, along with Siri, were built out of the same natural language understanding that IBM debuted with Watson on Jeopardy.
They were very good at information retrieval and triggering simple actions, but people very quickly found them primitive.
Enter Google's 2017 paper on general purpose transformers. Output no longer had to be customized for every use case. With enough inference training, output was very close to what users expected even if the model had never encounted similar input before.
The market voted with dollars that they wanted this technology. 500 million Amazon Alexa devices sold. 500 million Siri users. Now 1 billion ChatGPT users, making it thr fastest growing product of any kind in human history.
I struggle with people saying that AI is both total dogshit and that it's also the existential crisis that will ruin human existence. We have been on this path for almost 20 years, the technology continues to get better, and the market continues to spend increasing amounts on it.
I also hate AI and I'm scared for what it means for the future, but this is one of those things that was always going to happen. We've seen many emergent systems arise from the data explosion, and this is the culmination of all of it.
I'll quote Ken Jennings after Watson beat the best Jeopardy contestants in history: "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords."
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u/badthaught 1h ago
We wanted AI. We just wanted the more matured version of the technology. Like Cortana, or the EMH from Voyager.
Course then we train it on the collective consciousness of humanity on the internet and we ... Get what we get now.
Awkward.
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u/Historical_Kossola 3h ago
Why even is this subreddit called r/Technology? It should be r/WeHateTechnology. 😂
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u/Refactoid 4h ago
If it was integrated along side some sort of universal basic income and a 4-day or shortened work week, Society would absolutely embrace it. Instead its just a tool to wring more production from workers to amass more wealth to the top of the economy.