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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2023

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  • Yeah I think you’re dead on. I’m evidently not alone in thinking that the age of information is driving a lot of consciousness of worldwide issues on a scale we’ve never seen before. People in the Middle Ages only knew the small world they lived in on the scale of a city or region. If that city or region was prospering, their life was likely pretty damn nice.

    These days, we’re aware of all issues everywhere. And if you don’t create that perspective for yourself, that can be incredibly overwhelming. You have to give in to a certain sense of wilful ignorance because you literally cannot be involved with every one of those problems. Not clicking on all the doom and gloom news articles has done wonders for my mental health. I guess you could say this thread was a moment of weakness… :p




  • You need to give articles making predictions about the future a heavy amount of doubt. We may be relatively intelligent as a species, but I genuinely think we way over-estimate our abilities. Predicting the future is hard. The biggest problem is that predictions are based on past data, and cannot account for what might happen that hasn’t happened before. Which when faced with a brand new problem tends to be a brand new response.

    Look at our lives right now. While certainly not ideal (who could make that claim, in all history?) it’s pretty damn nice if you look back in time. Yes lotsa awful stuff MIGHT happen, but that’s always been true. And compared to the challenges of the past it’s not on any scale we haven’t been on before (I mean the Cold War literally could have resulted in the planet becoming uninhabitable due to nukes).

    I’m not saying I disagree with you, I’m merely trying to give it a glass half full perspective. I agree some scale of societal collapse does seem like it is a real possibility, but it’s by no means guaranteed or necessarily even likely. We don’t know what we don’t know. Embrace not knowing what the future holds and just enjoy life for what it is today.


  • I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don’t get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.



  • I’m not dismissing its usefulness for those scenario’s (see my response to Veltoss below). But people tend to way over-estimate what it is capable of.

    Generating an office layout? Yeah absolutely, because that’s largely based on prior art, no real innovation required. Though as you noted you’ll almost certainly need to “steer” the AI because there’s so many variables and permutations that it cannot realistically come up with a perfect solution without real intelligence. It’ll require iteration from “someone” no matter how advanced it gets.

    But AI as it exists right now won’t replace let’s say your office manager, who would probably be given the responsibility of planning the office layout. Because their job entails making lots of intelligence based judgment calls. That said; given they will get more AI powered tools to do their job there may be fewer jobs available overall because now your office manager at some big office won’t need an assistant anymore.

    Note I am not saying that AI affecting our economy isn’t happening or won’t happen. I’m merely saying that any predictions people are making should be met with a heavy amount of doubt, because there is so much misunderstanding out there.


  • For me personally it’s not that I want to downplay it, it’s that I want to balance the scales. I see far more over-estimating of AI happening than downplaying.

    The current form of AI is great as a tool and sadly there are definitely jobs out there that are nearly completely replaced by this tool. But that scope isn’t about to change much based on where we are currently at. Many jobs require actual intelligence to make judgment calls, and the current form of AI just isn’t going to cut it here as it has no real intelligence.

    Of course, that won’t stop dumb business leaders from still trying to use AI here, but that’s an error in judgment that imo will correct itself over time.