Where does next-token prediction leave us?

https://pop.rdi.sh/where-does-next-token-prediction-leave-us/

by 0x5FC3 • 2 months ago

212 199 2 months ago

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sigmar• 2 months ago

But lately I’ve been thinking if it is just a class issue? This cohort of people likely have a cushion that softens the concussive blows they are doling out right now. They perhaps have the luxury of a somewhat functioning government and a social safety net that they are witness to in all walks of life. Over half the world does not. Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight the people at the bottom rungs.

In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...

https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou...

https://www.mexc.com/news/161986

mxkopy• 2 months ago

The attitudes aren’t 1-1 comparable. China is on a winning streak in terms of socioeconomic development, and AI is likely seen as merely a new technology in the context of the social contract. The US is going the opposite way, and people here view AI through the lens of oligarchy more often than not. I wouldn’t say that a lot of people feel as optimistic, even if they are actually more economically secure.

seanmcdirmid2• 2 months ago

Do you have direct experience with this? From what I understand China has huge youth employment issues right now, and the 35 and out (at even non tech companies) meme has some basis in reality.

China historically has had a poor social safety net, but made up for it with a more dynamic labor market (well, we could say the same about the USA vs Europe).

mmilunic3• 2 months ago

The idea of the social contract impacting perceptions of AI is interesting to me. I hate to use the words “permanent underclass”, but perhaps the main difference is a fear of that permanent underclass actually materializing. In the US, it seems that that would be the logical endpoint of the capitalist system and many people predict AI simply replacing them permanently. Of course, China is not completely communist, but since their social contract is much less individualistic and more collectivist, maybe that makes people see AI as much more likely to uplift society as a whole or at least “trickle down”.

I think this might be a bigger reason as China’s economy for the youth isn’t looking the brightest right now.

cautiouscat2• 2 months ago

Maybe it has to do with % of blue collar vs. white collar jobs in those countries? I also wonder if they have stronger safety nets for displaced workers? It is curious. My anecdata has shown that people who feel "safe" job wise are either neutral or pro. Otherwise negative.

zarzavat• 2 months ago

The classic progression of an economy is resource -> manufacturing -> knowledge.

AI turns this line into a circle by making knowledge a resource problem. Less developed economies with a lot of natural resources and manufacturing like China's are less at risk than heavily knowledge-based economies like Europe's.

umeshunni• 2 months ago

In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries.

I think that's more a sign of the relative state of these economies and the rate of progress. In developing economies, people see progress as something that will improve their lives. In developed economies, they see it as something that will disrupt their current status quo and must be stopped.

holoduke• 2 months ago

Maybe chinese are generally more positive about everything. Many European countries and the US are in a decline for some years now.

Gigachad4• 2 months ago

From what I've seen, The Chinese are more likely to believe the government has their back and the benefits of AI will be spread across the population. While Americans believe it will go towards billionaire mega yachts while they starve on the street.

ndiddy• 2 months ago

One large part of this is that all the heads of AI companies and business leaders in the US and Europe keep talking about how AI is going to take jobs away and displace "lower-value human capital", while we see power shortages and higher energy rates in areas where AI datacenters are built. Meanwhile, China's 15th 5 year plan involves integrating AI across the whole economy while expanding vocational retraining programs, and building out new renewable infrastructure to power datacenters. The Chinese Human Resources Ministry expects AI to create 6-10 million new jobs in the short term, and the Chinese government plans to use it in the long term to fill in gaps in the labor force caused by its demographic shortages.

I think this is a big reason why the Chinese have a more positive view of AI than the West: their leaders have a clear plan to mitigate the negative externalities of introducing AI, and ours don't.

arjie• 2 months ago

Seems to me that it is downstream from the fact that China's economy is growing strongly and strong state power means that they see infrastructural improvements. US and European governments reflect the views of their people which are generally retrogressive and aimed at a fictional view of the 1970s as described in The Simpsons. Consequently, the Chinese are enthusiastic about Nuclear Power, and Solar Power, and Wind Energy, and AI, and ship building, and space programs, and trains, and electric vehicles, and so on ad infinitum to the degree that they don't mind smoggy cities to get these. Meanwhile Western nations mostly want to live in whatever they already have and would prefer nothing change or if it does that this change moves them closer to a past world, while nonetheless enjoying clean air and water.

I, personally, think that this is somewhat like hoping that mining coal will lead to a great leap forward in development because mining coal led in the past to a great leap forward in development.

treebeard901• 2 months ago

One of the billionaires on the All In Podcast, (which I listen to sometimes to get that kind of perspective), mentioned that one thing the U.S. and China could work on as far as regulating AI, is Know Your Customer controls. At first after one of the hosts said this I didn't think much of it but then started thinking through the second order effects later on. Why would that be such a main concern? He gave the example of dangerous people using AI to do bad things, but I think the subtext is much more complicated. At least from the ownership class point of view. Which also ties into the original idea behind OpenAI. Which is that the public should have access to the full abilities of any model equally. But the ownership class can't have this. In another post someone made a good point about licenses and this can be extended to stuff like the legal system, where at the end of the day the personal human connections decide things far more than what a model would compute the result of a case to be...

So because so much of maintaining the forms of power and order within the wealthy class has been reliant on information, and again the legal example can be used here because if you hire a lawyer, you're largely paying for information and access. Now the powers that be to compete with open information have to make the access side of the equation much more important to maintain the status quo with such a disruptive technology. And that is another layer of the need for being able to say, degrade a Chinese model if a U.S. citizen the Govt doesn't like is trying to bypass the restrictions implemented on them using models made in the U.S.

In other words, KYC is about restoring the historical aspect of needing money to have information. And there is a class warfare aspect to looking at it that way.

adamddev1• 2 months ago

Education systems and cultures that value "sounding" correct, repeating patterns and information, and immediate practical gain appear to like AI more that the cultures with a strong tradition of critical thinking. The cultures that love AI are the same cultures that will tend to build something cheap and quickly so that it can sell. The cultures that are less favorable are the ones that invest in building things correctly and solidly and value long term thinking. People with the immediate-gain-over-truth mindset love AI.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...

A graph of corruption levels would also almost mirror the values in the first link. The more corrupt a country is, the more the public loves AI. AI enthusiasm is almost directly correlated to a general erosion of truth.

In the same way, those with a high value of correctness and stability, like people who work w Haskell, Agda, or Type Theory are not as enthusiastic about AI as people who copy and paste boilerplate and snippets for quick, practical react apps.

anematode• 2 months ago

The compartmentalisation that must be required by the scientists and engineers to reconcile with the fact that their work being used to bomb and kill people must be crazy.

I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring?

I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...

BobbyTables22• 2 months ago

I’ve wondered about this.

If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed? What about when police arrest a criminal without injury? Perhaps the balance is determined whether the viewpoint is from one of killing or one of deterrence.

If a doctor provides medical care that extends a to-be murder’s lifespan, is that a good thing? Sure, hopefully most patients aren’t and the provided care is a “net positive”, but does that make it okay?

Sure, one can say, I’ll do paper sales at Dunder Miflin and not have to worry about these problems. Few have been murdered by paper cut. However if they aren’t the #1 paper supplier for almost every “evil” entity one can imagine, it’s ONLY because they failed to do so. It’s easy to pretend to be virtuous after failing otherwise.

That said, I’m not sure if I have ever met any true believers. The executives that claim to be clearly aren’t. The intellectually curious are motivated by the problem, not the product.

overgard12• 2 months ago

If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed?

I don't think this analogy holds. You could use a gun to commit a crime, but you could also use a gun to defend yourself. On the other hand, if your CEO is talking about getting rid of all labor, well, you're kind of complicit in the crime if you keep working there. There's no ambiguity as to "what will this be used for", like there is with a gun.

layer83• 2 months ago

If one works for a gun manufacturer, should they feel personally guilty when crimes are committed?

I would be very conflicted, because the inherent purpose of a gun is its ability to harm people, regardless of whether any given concrete case constitutes a crime or not.

overgard12• 2 months ago

Honestly, I'm baffled that a software engineer would want to work at those companies. Like, you think they're going to keep you around once their AI is good enough to improve itself? Or are they just holding out hope that they can get their bag before billionaires create a permanent underclass, and they can be a step above the untouchables?

zombot• 2 months ago

I guess Upton Sinclair applies: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

BobbyTables22• 2 months ago

Author seems ill informed. The D.O.W is not exactly a fan of Anthropic…

cautiouscat2• 2 months ago

They're not now, but they went so far as to strong arm them because they wanted their product.

layer83• 2 months ago

It’s a case of sour grapes though, in reality they’d still want Anthropic’s grapes.

nl• 2 months ago

They aren't a fan of Dario, but seem very big fans of Claude!

mmilunic3• 2 months ago

Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted.

I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote.

I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?

overgard12• 2 months ago

I hate the term "democratization". It's putting a respectable face on something that shouldn't be respectable at all. In the age of the internet, coding and other creative skills have always been largely democratized to people that care enough to learn. Nothing is being "democratized" by AI, there's simply (an attempt) at driving the value of actual skill to zero so the skill-less and stupid can purchase their way to mediocrity (without the benefit of transferring that money to someone who has worked to be skilled). There is NOTHING "democratic" about that.

brookst7• 2 months ago

It’s not coding that’s being democratized, it’s the ability to create games, tools, etc, that require coding.

Suppose it became possible to buy a Ferrari (not that new hideous one) for $5k. That would be democratizing Ferrari ownership: far more people could do it. I’m sure there would be investment bankers who would complain it devalues their hard work (I am not a fan of those people, but it is notoriously long hours). Does that make a $5k Ferrari less of a democratization?

skor• 2 months ago

I am against how its being used as well, in fact Authoritarianism is literally "central power to preserve the political status quo" - and that is what you have folks: OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/Facebook/etc are all central powers.

Coding was always power that you can have if you just read the freely available info but having access to a computer and internet is not free - if we can change this it would make democratized.

ventana• 2 months ago

I'm thinking of some similarity between the non-technical middle manager using agents to avoid the biggest obstacle of their developers, and a person installing a wall socket at home.

It's not too difficult to install a wall socket, but many things can go wrong, so people would normally call an electrician. In some jurisdictions you are not allowed to install it without a license, or probably you can install it only for yourself but not for anyone else if you don't have a license, and you need to call an inspector and check your work when you're done. Some other jurisdictions truly don't care, you can do whatever, and all the possible damage is on you.

Electricians are somewhat fungible, because you often don't care who will do the job for you, but the profession exists and they can pay their bills.

I wonder how far we are until, at least in some jurisdictions, a person won't be legally allowed to update the website that stores customers' data or processes payments without being a licensed software developer, and how rules, should they be adopted, will change our profession.

RobotToaster• 2 months ago

in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability.

Hasn't this been the case since the power loom put hand weavers out of a job?

kjkjadksj2• 2 months ago

This time it is different. Ai promised to be the power loom for all things. Knowledge work and all physical work through robotics. And there will be no more jobs to turn to. Why might an AI company allow for humanity to live in this future? They’d have no utility. No economic purpose. They’d have no unique skill. Supporting them over the datacenter amounts to investing in waste heat. And they may even rise up and destabilize the horror you’ve created for planet earth. Game theory suggests keeping humans on earth is increasingly a liability.

altmanaltman3• 2 months ago

Coding was always "democratized". You just had to put in the effort of learning and understanding. Finding free resources is very easy.

AI doesn't make that learning and understanding easy but just allows people to skip it.

That doesn't mean democratization at all.

imtringued2• 2 months ago

You just had to put in the effort of learning and understanding.

Yeah it's always so weird when people anthropomorphize the harsh physical reality of learning a skill that is accessible to everyone as some sort of secret boys club, where the existing club members do not let you in, when the only difference between the members and outsiders is whether they've paid the entry fee or not.

rootusrootus2• 2 months ago

democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager

Works the other way too. Now a junior engineer can use AI to do much of what a middle manager had been doing in the past.

Frankly I think the middle manager ought to be WAY more worried than most.

ninalanyon• 2 months ago

individual bargaining capability

Thinking that "individual bargaining capability" capability is an especially useful thing for society as a whole is one of the things that has got us into the current Hobbesian mess

mlmonkey2• 2 months ago

I tuned out when I came across this:

Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.

Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.

jack_pp2• 2 months ago

do people at the bottom have access to medical advances or are they in lifelong debt in the unfortunate case when they need those medical advances?

brookst7• 2 months ago

How accessible were covid vaccines?

jamilton• 2 months ago

Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.

I would consider that apathy.

gmueckl• 2 months ago

Especially basic scientific research is so far removed from actually useful applications that there is no direct cause and effect relationship between single items of research and any eventual effect on society.

perching_aix2• 2 months ago

Every time someone invokes the "playing God" / "the hubris of creation" card, it makes me think they're the proud ones, and this case is none the different.

I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all.

I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either.

One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923

Lerc2• 2 months ago

Calling this a straw man would be attributing an unnecessarily sturdy construction.

Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc.

The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal"

The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative.

Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature.

I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you.

I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.

overgard12• 2 months ago

Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase.

We really aren't past that phase at all. Reasoning models are just next-token prediction trained in a way where it thinks out loud, essentially. (Source: books on how LLMs actually work, and asking ChatGPT directly!) Harnesses and tool use help a little bit, but it doesn't change fundamentally what an LLM is.

Lerc2• 2 months ago

Perhaps you should check your books again, reasoning and reinforcement learning are different things.

Some reasoning is trained by reinforecement you could just finetune reasoning, people have had better results than you would expect by brute forcing inserting tokens to periodically say "wait, let me think."

Reinforcement trains things to produce better results, not move towards a specific correct result. There is no future answer to predict.

Npovview• 2 months ago

People have bargaining power through their military services. If even that job is taken by AI, there is truly no recourse for the people left at all. These are the sentiments of Yuval Noah Harari.

futune• 2 months ago

The first person videos of drones hunting terrified soldiers coming out of Ukraine seem relevant. Apparently the last moments of the hunt are pretty much automated now, which increased the kill-rate considerably.

alanwreath• 2 months ago

It’s a cliff we’re all being push to. Don’t know about you, I’m just struggling to put on my parachute !!!

layer83• 2 months ago

Where did you find a parachute?

perching_aix2• 2 months ago

On Hugging Face, presumably.

jstummbillig3• 2 months ago

So, where does next token prediction leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.

In what way is this different to electricity?

naktinis• 2 months ago

The question is what classes of jobs will replace the ones made obsolete by a particular innovation, and how many vacancies there will be. With electricity we had managerial, creative, high dexterity, etc. jobs. If a sufficient amount of human capabilities are replaced then that may be different to electricity. Also it's about how many top-tier "power plants" (AI, robotics) there are, who owns them, and once "everything is solved" (which it isn't yet) how much of that will trickle down to everyone else's life quality.

customguy6• 2 months ago

In what way is it similar?

jstummbillig3• 2 months ago

So, where does electricity leave us? In a perpetual loop of rent-seeking for something made with humanity’s collective output of centuries. It is not a good place for an individual to be in, regardless of class.

overgard12• 2 months ago

I have a more depressing theory. I think class is part of it, but I'm starting to suspect that a shockingly large number of people lack the critical thinking skills needed to think out the implications of this stuff. I say that because I've met so many people of the managerial class that seem to think it's going to replace the annoying people they have to pay, but somehow they don't think it's going to come for them. It's like we have some sort of society-wide main-character syndrome where a bunch of people just think that somehow the machine can replace every other job, and yet after ingesting all of human knowledge it somehow won't be able to compete with someone with "domain expertise"? Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe? I don't think this doomsday scenario is going to happen, but I think the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

rootusrootus2• 2 months ago

Some get it, though. When I quipped that Claude may eventually replace me, my manager was visibly shaken as he mentioned it would probably come for him first.

I feel better about it than I did a few months ago. Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen. I forsee humans being necessary for a long while yet.

energy1233• 2 months ago

Still seems like there’s something missing that is going to be hard to make happen.

I think part of the negative societal response to AI is the uncertainty of it all. AI killing me, taking my job, augmenting me, curing me of old age, all seem like viable futures within my lifetime given the information I have. People want to know it's going to be okay and even the smartest experts can't credibly promise them that.

suzzer99• 2 months ago

The billionaires building doomsday bunkers get it.

dclowd9901• 2 months ago

"Ingenuity" is what I think is missing. The sheer _want_ of solving a problem that is distinctly a living creature's concern.

The irony is if we ever taught machines how to have this, they'd probably not want to work for us anymore.

mmilunic3• 2 months ago

Perhaps this is a form of Gell-Mann Amnesia (but kinda inverted) where everyone views AI as too inaccurate for their own niche, but perfectly fine for every other field that they know comparably little about.

beng-nl• 2 months ago

I’ve been thinking about this, or a variant of it.

Hypothetically, I’m scared and sad that AI can replace me (it currently can’t, not literally, but a lot of my skill and expertise, built up over say 30 years, that used to be valuable and rare is now cheap to get from an AI).

Let’s try to see the upside. How ‘powerful’ would it make me if, at the cost of my own edge being dulled, can access everyone else’s edge?

I am still my own expert. Now with AI I have a minor expert in everything else as well. What is the best way to use that? don’t have an answer but it’s an aspect I haven’t seen discussed much and I think it is worth bringing up.

globular-toast• 2 months ago

It's normal Gell-Mann amnesia and, yeah, it's a really big part of why AI is so accepted.

typon• 2 months ago

Actually I think AI will largely automate software and math and really not much else in the short to medium term. (speaking as a computer/math person)

dyauspitr• 2 months ago

You think every person only thinks of their own job and no one dreams of anything bigger from humanity’s perspective? I’m never going to be in some kind of space colony but do I want to see them happen? You betcha.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 2 months ago

The real trouble isn't that it can replace us. Instead, consider that when there have been two comparable technologies in the market, the market has invariably chosen the lowest-quality/worst one. Why? That's easy to understand... while the chosen option is objectively the worst, it's always the cheapest. And cheapest wins. It's not "can AI do his job?" so much as "is the AI cheaper than a human?". And I think we all know the answer to that... even if the silicon's expensive now, volume pricing, data center buildouts, and other economic forces will soon make it cheaper.

The thing that is truly mysterious to the managerial and ruling classes though... when everyone is unemployed, who will be able to afford to buy your junk? Whatever industry you're in, whatever it is you're selling, the people buying that have the money to buy it because they still have jobs. If you're cutting jobs at your company, that helps the bottom line, but every other company is doing the same thing. And they're laying off your customers.

dmje• 2 months ago

I think it’s this but also that we all see the value in our own niche because it’s ours, and have more trouble seeing the values in other niches. So it becomes a self perpetuating positive reinforcement thing.

ciconia• 2 months ago

society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?

I think this ties in with the rise of racism over the last two decades. Historically, antisemitism has been instrumentalized by the elites in order to deflect animosity from the lower classes: "look, it's not us that are robbing you blind, it's the Jews!"

I see the same thing happening today in the Western world. The elites are squeezing more and more of our countries' wealth, turning governments them into hollow sources of rent, while at the same time backing corrupt politicians who tell us our misery is all because of (illegal) immigrants.

the people that are cheering for it need to really consider what they're cheering for.

Indeed. To me if there's one reason to oppose the use of AI technology, it is political. Sadly, the SWE class (if it can be called that), being better off than the majority of humans on earth, seems to care very little for class issues and inequality in general, maybe out of self-interest. But as you said, the machine will be coming for them too, it's just a question of when, not if.

fny• 2 months ago

I don't think its entirely class. I've met many people who have convinced themselves they have some special sauce--even in software! And even those who are insulated like doctors and plumbers don't realize they're still at risk from second order effects. What happens when half of their customers are broke? That possibility is not an exaggeration. Even if everyone re-skills over night, people will default on their mortgages at a scale greater than the '08 financial crisis.

And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.

Gigachad4• 2 months ago

Even if you are a plumber and we don’t automate plumbing, you’ll have half the population displaced and switching to plumbing. Everything that isn’t automated will be over saturated.

exfalso2• 2 months ago

Agree on the knock-on effects. My prediction is deflation. Money will be worth more and more. As a consequence governments will have to step in to ensure inflation(with e.g. universal income), otherwise the economy stops.

But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.

What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.

dingdongditchme• 2 months ago

So I am expecting the AI bubble to burst (or at least deflate) some time soon. Perhaps this puts me I an specific camp, I am not sure. But this whole "AI will replace X jobs" does not phase me, not because I think AI is useless. On the contrary I am a daily user, but in my mind, people fail to see that the economy is not built around jobs and capital, but wants (or needs) and trades. Even in a world where everything can be done better by a machine than a human, there will always be the "want" for an item that is handcrafted. AI is yet another tool that accelerates us to satisfy more "wants" and that's great. I'm looking at a whole lot of things that will be available in the future (especially software but not limited to) which are not available today, AI generated or not.

weatherlite9• 2 months ago

Perhaps the feeling is that in a competitive society (which most of us live in) as long as things aren't collapsing I don't see why a plumber/doctor should care if a bunch of lawyers and software devs will be out of a job. They will become relatively wealthier even if their income is taking a hit. Their purchasing power should rise if most of white collar work is collapsing.

karlgkk2• 2 months ago

On the flip side, people think AI is magic: too much magic.

Even with large advances in reasoning and actionability, it still makes insane mistakes and it's wildly prone to prompt attacks. That is a fundamental flaw in the technology.

Even an AGI will lack the millennia of self-preservation evolution that will cause it to do crazy shit. So much of what humans do is governed by a desire to be alive and to be liked.

So, I'm not particularly worried about these changes happening rapid fire. I'm more concerned about the ladder pulling effect and misinformation.

red75prime2• 2 months ago

Correct me if I wrong, up to 40% of Roman citizens were on "welfare". This, at least, shows that it's not impossible to have a functioning society with a large percentage of people who only contribute political activity.

killingtime74• 2 months ago

You mean they were slaves right

thrance4• 2 months ago

These people weren't completely idle for one, and Rome was subsidized by the rest of the Empire, from which it extracted wealth and resources.

csomar• 2 months ago

Wealth is largely distributed by luck, though it has become more concentrated over the last 30 years or so. Most wealthy people aren't particularly smart in the intellectual sense but they tend to think they are, because what other explanation do they have?

Admitting you were just lucky, rather than exceptionally hardworking or talented, is something very few people are willing to do. In all my years, I've met almost no one who genuinely attributes what they have to luck rather than their own effort.

Shit, even the cynical people that think their wealth is going to protect them are probably ignoring that if unemployment hits 50+%, society is just going to stay stable and they're going to be safe?

Most people can't see two steps ahead. Most people believe the mainstream narrative and think they are outsmarting everyone else in the process. See how Trump tweets still work despite proving time and again that he's full of s**. These people will keep doing what they were doing until they are completely emptied out.

thrance4• 2 months ago

I believe you're simply (correctly) identifying the lack of class consciousness that is rotting our civilization. If everyone believes they are smarter than everyone else, and will be able to come up ahead in the rat race, then there's no one left to organize and take the collective actions needed to smoothen the AI transition.

osigurdson2• 2 months ago

The title is a little misleading as it sounds like it might hint at the end state of next token prediction - i.e. will we reach AGI with it and so on. Instead, this is entirely about "means of production" and "class war" stuff. While that may be coming, it isn't clear that this is the most likely outcome, its just the most pessimistic one. The author might as well have included that it will "be the end of the human race" as well, since once you get to the future state described, there is no alternative outcome that I can see.

birdsongs• 2 months ago

I would argue we're already in a pseudo class war. Most of us in tech are isolated so far, but the middle class is disappearing worldwide, and the wealth gulf is growing.

Most propaganda seems to be centered on increasing division along gender / race / sexuality boundaries, so that infighting keeps people from looking up for too long.

But I might just be overly radicalised.

ares6233• 2 months ago

The western world is about to find out first hand why millions of people decide to leave their homes every year to try and start over elsewhere. As one of those millions of people, I can only shake my head. Was working in an office and being in countless standups that bad?

NoGravitas• 2 months ago

All of history is the history of class war. The post-WWII social-democratic years were a kind of truce, but truces in the class war are always unstable.

0x5FC32• 2 months ago

I apologise. The title was meant to be ironic, but I see how it is misleading, especially to the HN audience.

gspr7• 2 months ago

Would you like to elaborate on why you think the outcome described isn't among the more likely?

osigurdson2• 2 months ago

It requires a nascent analogous architecture to biology (neural nets) and a discovery (next token prediction) to exactly match evolution. I think that is unlikely. Instead it will be a tool that is capable of doing certain things that machines were not capable of previously.

cubefox• 2 months ago

For a more thoughtful and very different analysis:

"Implications Of Predicting The Next Token"

https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...

simianwords• 2 months ago

This author fundamentally doesn't understand the mental model of the people they are describing and makes huge sweeping claims in what they think is a in a savvy manner but they are completely wrong.

Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about.

1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes

2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this?

3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should.

The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.

0x5FC32• 2 months ago

good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed

How exactly? Is this a version of trickle down economics I am unfamiliar with?

What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question

How are the curious going to eat or have a roof over their heads? Or how are the curious going to pay for the tokens?

civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe

Maybe, we ought to think real hard and slow about it?

agnosticmantis• 2 months ago

If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been)

This redistribution has never been as automatic and inevitable as you seem to assume.

What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question?

Getting paid to answer said questions would be nice. The alternative is you'll have to work 14-hour shifts in a warehouse to be able to pay for ChatGPT 10.0 subscription with ads, but sure, it can answer your math problems and satiate your mathematical curiosity.

wcfrobert• 2 months ago

On point 1: I generally agree with you about the benefits of technological progress on a long enough time horizon. But what about the short term? What mechanism of redistribution are you assuming for the displaced workers? A scary number of Americans live pay check to pay check. How many will be forced to default on their mortgage or withdraw from their retirement savings? How many can afford to go back to school to retrain to be a plumber or nurse?

Breaking eggs to make omelette sounds good unless you're the egg. There's an excellent quote from Thomas Friedman: "when you get laid off, the unemployment rate is not 3.4%, it's a 100%". It's great to fantasize about future utopian abundance, but most people live in the present and most will be presently ground to powder. All technologies have a barbelling effect. Redistribution of surplus does not happen by default. The tumult and disruption may last a decade or more. And the fruits, if we make it to the other side, will not be for this generation to enjoy. The textile workers did not cheer for the loom, because they were not the ones that enjoyed the joy of cheap Uniqlo or H&M t-shirts.

On point 2: Many people derive meaning and identity from their work. Acquiring expertise, feeling useful, contributing to society, honing your craft are all things that leads to a good life. It could be that after AI we will all write poetry in the morning, go fishing in the afternoon, and paint in the evenings, but I don't think most people are like this, it's certainly not the way I am wired.

On point 3: "utopian AI is so good that words can't describe it so it can't and shouldn't be stopped". I do not think utopian abundance is guaranteed just by copy-pasting data centers across the globe. There is a non-negligible chance that things go really badly.

Lastly, I think the usage of the word "class" shouldn't automatically be linked to "Marxist ideology". This is cheap rhetoric: "class" --> associated with Marx --> communist loonies of the 20th century --> therefore disregard all argument presented.

xyzal2• 2 months ago

Don't worry guys, if the situation gets too bad, the social contract breaks, heads will roll for a while and then it will get better.

"Inevitable"

Melamune2• 2 months ago

LLMs reveal an important truth that we were already deeply aware of. With this cognitive offloading, the interests that drive us lose their meaning. If friction disappears, there is no longer any desire, pleasure, longing, obstacle, or demand. It is indolence, and it goes by the name of apathy. All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished? The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it. I doubt that after having experienced deprivation, shame, and death; as well as their positive counterparts, we will ever fail to overcome entropy. We will adapt, for that is all we know and can do by default. What is given without effort does not transform.

shinycode3• 2 months ago

That’s exactly part of the feelings I have. I always loved to learn, dig subjects, debug, create. Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value. I feel indolence and apathy. In my company the CEO explicitly says that code quality does not matter. He doesn’t care as long as we ship fast and iterate.

I am genuinely sad and feel I’m losing something and if I do everything like I used to do, I am pressured that I waste time.

selcuka5• 2 months ago

I'm in a similar boat. Today I commented on a junior developer's pull request, and he pasted the answer he got from Claude Code, verbatim.

Ignoring how disrespectful that behaviour is, I can't understand what value he thinks he brings in. Were you hired to be an interface between me and Claude? Because I don't need you. You are just accepting that you are redundant by doing that.

gspr7• 2 months ago

I feel the same as you. But at the same time: do you not think your CEO will be proven wrong? Maybe I'm delusional, maybe I'm just rationalizing, but surely code quality, and code understanding, does matter?

And if your CEO is right, then surely their business is doomed? If they don't understand, or can't maintain their own product, what's to stop their customers from just "making it" themselves?

How is anyone happy with this trajectory?!

aembleton3• 2 months ago

Now I feel something has been taken away and has no value.

Did you feel similar when Wikipedia was created or Google or when you first got access to the internet?

All of these tools have made digging into subjects and learning easier. I find the same with AI. I love it when a random thought pops into my head and I can explore it with an AI such as Gemini. Then ask it for the sources it used so that I can read further.

AI is just a tool, much like StackOverflow. It doesn't prevent creativity, it just makes it easier and more accessible.

xtracto• 2 months ago

I recently at around 42yo learned how to darn/mend my socks. My mom taught me how to do it.

I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.

Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.

Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.

energy1233• 2 months ago

These things are biologically/neurologically caused. They're adaptations that worked well in our ancestral environment (effort -> reward = satisfaction, stress = effort) which are now possibly becoming maladaptations. We won't be the first organism to experience this (likely unfortunate) transition. What's concerning is that it usually precipitates something bad like large genetic alterations through natural selection or the simple elimination of the organism from certain environments (like fireflies near cities).

irthomasthomas• 2 months ago

Like the lion in the zoo that gets food thrown to him.

customguy6• 2 months ago

All these promises without even reaching an ideal! Could it simply be that this ideal is becoming impoverished?

What ideal?

The prevailing view is that « AI makes us stupid », so it’s actually a good thing if only the wealthy were still capable of using it.

You mean it would be a good thing?

I doubt that [..] we will ever fail to overcome entropy

What does this mean?

What is given without effort does not transform.

Children who have loving parents absolutely are affected by that, even if the love is given unconditionally and was there even before they had a sense of self. We are also very much transformed by living on a planet with sunlight and all that entails, and we never had to turn the sun on for that.

It's true that muscles you don't use atrophy, and that includes the brain and "the heart", but it's also true that the best things in life are free.

Melamune2• 2 months ago

What ideal?

What is ideal for one person may not for another, therefore I cannot define this ideal without making a mistake. But if I had to try, I would say: answers for the scientist, paradise for the believer. As for the impoverished ideal, some of the fundamental goals that serve as a pretext for these technologies have not even been achieved and yet we are already, gradually and methodically, being stripped of using them.

You mean it would be a good thing?

It would be a good thing, yes. Not the most desirable option, to be sure. But proportionally less harmful to all those who would then be forced to do without it and adapt without necessarily conforming. I admit it's a divisive issue and that it's unlikely to happen that way. But we won't be able to reason with those who see only progress or magic in it, nor will we be able to close this Pandora's box. Whether rightly or wrongly.

What does this mean?

This means that, as far as we know, it is impossible to prevent the universe from deteriorating, aging, or descending into chaos, because decay and disorganization are fundamental laws. Perfection is not of this world, and thankfully so, for beings as imperfect as we are would quickly corrupt it.

the best things in life are free.

That’s an interesting thought experiment, indeed. There are indeed things that are given to us, and for which we can be grateful. Antoine Lavoisier said, “Nothing is lost, nothing is created; everything is transformed.” That’s kind of the problem with quotes, they sound nice but don’t always take the complexity of the world into account.

It was a pleasure exchanging with you.

ares6233• 2 months ago

Thanks for writing this.

It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to.

The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means?

My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."

basicoperation• 2 months ago

Do you have the same opinion of labour-saving inventions that were created before you were born, or is it just future ones that are evil?

ares6233• 2 months ago

I did not have a voice to inventions created before I was an adult. I have one now. And in fact, we have lessons from very similar technologies on how this would play out (internet + social media), so we can't say "how could we have known?!".

bambax• 2 months ago

The promise of capitalism has always been - you will have a spin at the roulette table.

This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.

The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.

jstrebel• 2 months ago

AI is like TV in that old saying: AI makes the smart ones smarter and the dumb ones dumber.

LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).

harrouet• 2 months ago

AI has already replaced a lot of workers, but there is still no AI-managed business out there, regardless of doomsday PR.

I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing.

Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident.

In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.

est• 2 months ago

The founding tenet of AI, “saving us” from all sorts of difficult things: climate, disease, poverty, conflict is falling, fast

No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.

birdland• 2 months ago

What are these complaints really other than "I had a nice position in the previous system and I'm afraid of losing it"? Many felt disposable and not valued already, maybe it was a good system for you but not for many. You have a valued skill and you enjoy working in a field using that skill, well for 90+% of people that isn't what work is, you're lamenting the loss of something that the vast majority never had access to in the first place. What exactly is so great about our current predicament that it needs to be protected from new technology?

6510• 2 months ago

There is nothing new about machines displacing jobs and it will happen the same way as before.

deterministic• 2 months ago

Non-technical middle managers who have not written a line of code in their lives, now feel that the biggest obstacle between them and greatness has lifted.

Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI.

Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.

Where does next-token prediction leave us?

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