"People getting paid by AI say it's great!"

Wow, shocker.

It's almost like being embedded in a profit-motivated information bubble makes you look crazy to outsiders.

I can confirm. I've worked for two different companies since 2023, and in both of them, there was a cabal that were super hyped up on AI while the rest just ignored them. In one of them, it was half the company, but that company was more like a cult.... People in my current one are more level-headed, but that just makes the divide look even bigger.

Any high-level AI company is ignoring everything to move as fast as possible for the off chance they’ll be one of the ones standing. That’s the good outcome in the sea of catastrophe that awaits in 12-18 months for them.

It’s insane until you realize coke and ritalin are budget items and then you’re like “oohhhh.”

We’re talking new releases per day; priorities change week to week. And every single one of them beholden to nvidia.

This is not an industry of sober reflection. There is some cool maths involved, and hardware nerdery. But from a traditional business model; no. Just rival cults, sports teams, bands of marauders, or what have yous.

If you paid me a 10 million dollar bonus to push AI, you bet I'd be lying my ass off about how great AI is too.

The study found that young people were growing less hopeful and more angry about the technology, even though around half of the demographic was using AI either daily or weekly.

“Even though”? I would argue “because of”. They’ve used AI enough to know that it’s inconsistent and unable to actually do their jobs, but it’s either being used to justify layoffs or as a cudgel to push you for unrealistic increases in productivity. Maybe the AI will one-shot a prompt and save you a bunch of time or maybe you’ll spend three times as long rewriting prompts in the hopes that the next time will do the trick. 

Moreover, people like me explicitly avoided management as a career path. I wanted to do the work that got me into the field to begin with, not manage a bunch of people to do it for me. Now everyone is a middle manager, just of the world’s most frustratingly inconsistent employee who never learns and doesn’t respond to anything other than you asking again but in a slightly different way. 

For everyone except C-suite executives and shareholders, this is a fucking nightmare. The Jetson’s envisioned a future where productivity gains increased so much that an employee worked two, one-hour days a week, doing nothing more than pushing a button. Instead we have people working ridiculously longer hours to clean up AI slop, and burning out in the process, leading to being laid off or outright fired, meaning your income drops to zero.

I'm starting to think the "disconnect" coming from the so-called "AI experts", is more profound than even this article is claiming. They don't even seem to think that laying off sizeable chunks of the working population is going to have a negative impact on the economy. That's fucking bizarre.

There was a connection? I never got past the 404 error.

Related - https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience.

And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly.

Between AI stockholders and everyone else you mean?

Oh the guys selling snake oil think it's the best thing since sliced bread.

For some working in tech, the AI backlash has come as a surprise. AI leaders have focused on managing the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI — a theoretical form of AI superintelligence that could perform any task a human could do and think for itself. But everyday folks are more concerned about AI’s impact on their paycheck and whether or not their power bills will go up as energy-hungry data centers are built.