almostdeadguy

> We at Gizmodo were gobsmacked by the sheer size of the reaction to Coxon’s not-at-all breaking news. As Coxon himself acknowledged, he wasn’t revealing any hidden secrets about the beliefs of AI’s industry leaders.

Are we supposed to be comforted by this?

That's fair. I respect that you scrutinize everything you send and aren't needlessly hostile. I'm less optimistic that most other people who realize they can do this will do the same, and I worry that we'll soon be incentivizing companies to abandon customer service entirely.

Reminds me of an executive at my company who has sent extremely inflammatory, needlessly escalating, LLM-generated messages to one of our vendors in support threads (for problems she simply does not understand, any prompting she does I'm sure is just to have her AI agent coerce a concession/credit). I recognize that there are companies with scummy billing practices, but people like this don't seem to care that there are human beings on the other end of these things who are scrutinized as though they are interacting with another human being.

Nails the Claude dialect. Technical nonsense like:

> I'm collapsing this back to the rendered outcome:

And intermixed with SaaS product page idioms from a brain-damaged marketer like:

> No broader cleanup.

> No further architecture work.

> Just the button.

Aside from the patterns everyone knows like em-dashes, "its not X, it's Y", etc. I think the key features of claude diction is it sounds like a junior engineer over their skies who is trying to make up for that with extra verbiage mixed with extremely grating SaaS marketing-ese.

> Should Donald Trump get a say in how to run Google?

Trump does have a say in how to run google, in a very real sense.

> The American mob seems intent on leading their country into the gutter. Good thing (despite what the mob has thrown at it) that the United States still has strong institutions and strong markets. Without Silicon Valley, America would have already lost its place on the world stage.

American elites are more than happy to follow basically whatever Trump wants them to do with the knowledge that they'll get preferential treatment by the law and win all the no-bid contracts he can award. But ask yourself if this would be any different if Trump were head of a large company under a smaller regulatory state. Seems pretty obvious that not much would change.

If by "the mob" you mean, a small cohort of wealthy, powerful, unscrupulous people, those people who make decisions that the rest of us have no say in, then I agree, that is a problem.

> But please lets hear more indictments from a population who can't even agree with itself on the issues already under the government's purview. Now let's set a precedent for even more state interference in the market, that way when your party (whatever side you are on) chokes the next future election away the next nut you don't agree with has even more power? Is that your plan?

In a smaller state, Trump would have continued to be an executive and the shape of his impact on the world might be slightly different, but would be no less oppressive. Ask tenants in NYC in the 1980s if they think a Donald Trump with smaller regulatory oversight who stayed in business would be better or worse for our country.

Do you think our country flips parties every year because our government does a good job of reflecting the will of the people?

Mob rule, aka Democracy.

Please tell the coal miners in Appalachia that they shouldn't worry about their jobs being lost, because look at all the new tech jobs we have!

I do think what you are highlighting is probably a pretty significant difference with AI and highlights the problem with the comparison, if the optimists turn out to be right!

So in the short term, it seems likely to deflate the cost of software and other products/services produced by professional workers. If it becomes good at other forms of production (i.e. physical things, physical labor, etc.), perhaps it causes currency exchange to become pointless.

There are a few caveats to this that everyone seems to leap over, one very important one is that the a priori control of production, land, and natural resources is not egalitarian, and there's no reason to really believe it would become egalitarian even if people could in theory produce everything they wanted/needed for themselves.

But even barring that, we live in a world with finite natural resources. And that by itself should be a serious concern for anyone who sees this as a possibility. I get that optimists also seem to believe that technology we don't have like dyson spheres, asteroid mining, intergalactic travel, etc. will solve any resource scarcity concerns, but that is not a given, and developing any of those things would still rely on our planets natural resources to even bootstrap.

We live in a world that can't even coordinate the safe development of models or nuclear anti-proliferation, and already experiences rampant injustice surrounding use of our planets natural resources, which does not bode well for the future.

And even if we did end up in a world where these problems were solved, advanced models posed no threat to our existence, etc. they would not be solved instantaneously, and would likely cause catastrophic changes to society and massive amounts of suffering. We can solve scarcity of basic needs and access to medical care, decarbonization, etc. today. Without the use of AI. We do not need to go through years of suffering because tech execs want their play things.

Oh agreed, I'm mostly explaining why someone who was a skeptic would make the calculation that they can afford to opt-out of using AI (and why you might weigh on the side of opting out even if you didn't think using LLMs had a morally unsavory valence).

If this technology really is world-changing, you aren't going to be using it for long anyways.