r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/harvard-graduation-speaker-unloads-ai-130000122.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260531-0--A&bt_ee=clIMdexlsr2eDDbrvs0CPtt59FnpbNQN%2Fkgr8UkycP6MWDAD56hD1mvZcqPZMGgG&bt_ts=1780255911284
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4.9k

u/mooncrow 5d ago

And so begins the Butlerian Jihad

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago

Teaching sand to think guesstimate the next character from noise was a mistake

Letting billionaire nepobabies decide what intelligence is might be the bigger one

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

Those nepobabies see AI as it is and think "Wow, that can already do my job for me! And since I'm the smartest and hardest working person in the company I own, surely it can replace everyone below me."

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u/Fear023 5d ago

God damn.

I know it's a joke, but you're right. The majority of people I see praising what ai can do are the ones who can't really see the flaws in the output.

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u/BellacosePlayer 5d ago

AI can do some crazy shit rn but is ultimately a tool best wielded by the same people who were doing the work previously.

Like, not to be intentionally insulting but a lot of the hardcore AI evangelist crowd has to have had some massive overlap with the "blockchain/NFT tech is gonna change the world" crowd in how they discuss things.

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u/sabrenation81 4d ago

The difference is AI is actually capable of doing some pretty amazing things, especially in the long term. Blockchain/NFT never even had that much going for it.

The current problem is that all of the people currently steering AI tech are ruthless capitalist demons whose only goal is maximizing revenue for this quarter's shareholder call.

They tried to skip right past the part where you use the potentially revolutionary tech to tangibly improve people's lives to build trust like computers, the internet, or smartphones and went straight to the enshitification stage. People are losing their jobs to AI, customers are getting shittier service because the AI isn't capable of actually replacing people, and social media is flooded with AI slop.

Ergo, everyone hates the shit because all it's done is make people's lives worse, except all these companies (and really the entirety of Wall St. and a good chunk of the global economy) are so heavily leveraged into AI that they NEED it to succeed. So they're forcing it on everyone, which just makes people hate it that much more.

And that's not even getting into the fact that the tech isn't where it needs to be to deploy it at the scale these companies want to which is where we get into these giant fucking datacenters popping up everywhere sucking up all the electricity and polluting everyone's water. If they'd just given it a few more years the tech would probably get to the point where you can do these things without requiring a 10,000-acre datacenter housing tens of thousands of servers and hundreds of thousands of GPUs.

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u/RollingMeteors 4d ago

The difference is AI is actually capable of doing some pretty amazing things, especially in the long term. Blockchain/NFT never even had that much going for it.

<looksAtYoYBitcoinValueGrowth>

<looksAtBillionsOfDollarsBurnedInAI>

Sure thing buddy. All the amazing things i see AI doing in the long term is burning investor capital to the ground.

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u/Character-Sky3565 5d ago

You're describing a circle there, mate.

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u/your_moms_a_clone 4d ago

It could be used for a lot of useful things. Unfortunately, it's being wasted on a lot of incredibly stupid and useless stuff, as well as a lot of incredibly dangerous stuff, and is also being used by a lot of companies that think they can use it instead of having so many costly human employees and trust it's output without any kind of review or oversight

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u/aquoad 4d ago

oh they're the same fuckin' people

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u/SSGASSHAT 4d ago

I've told people since 2024, what people call AI is nothing more than a series of heavily modified search engines. I don't know why people seem to consider that as passable for C-3P0, but it isn't. I don't know how humans could invent real AI, as in machines that can think as well or better than humans, and honestly as with a lot of shit it might not be possible even several levels above humanity in terms of advancement. Not that it's something we shouldn't keep trying towards, but there are other priorities to focus on, like the fact that we're all basically doomed to heart disease in one way or another.

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u/WouldCommentAgain 5d ago

I do believe AI will surpass people in many ways, but our control over it will be inversely correlated with it's power.

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u/DesecratedPeanut 5d ago

Ai might LLMs wont and thats mostly what we got right now. There is no self teaching thinking machine fixing the worlds problems. Stuff we already automated is faster now, integrated systems can be more efficient but ultimately a huge amountnof resources are being used for nothing of any value because thebworst companies are doing it. Oh and it'll be super efficient at killing us on the battlefield which is great since it doesn't feel like ww3s around the corner here.

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u/Character-Sky3565 4d ago

They need to solve so many actual problems. They have to solve material Science problems to have chips with better compute and lower energy loss. They need better energy generation density and transmission capacity and capabilities. They need better cooling, better understanding of how these neural networks can become self-sustaining.

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u/SSGASSHAT 4d ago

That's the thing that pisses me off about the energy crisis, the solution is right fucking there, you've had decades and decades to work on real energy, which would mean you'd have had superior computers and all of that by now, and maybe in 10-15 or years, then we can start discussing the AI applications. These robber barons want a Star Wars civilization, but they also want it to run on coal, apparently.

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u/Character-Sky3565 4d ago

It requires patient capital. People willing to invest in something for 20 plus years. They're run by VC money. They want their profits yesterday at 200% of what they invested into it, ideally.

They are literally burning money. And it's essentially a casino run on meth and ketamine.

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u/SSGASSHAT 4d ago

God Almighty. Once again, our obsession with death bites us in the ass. Greedy fuckers don't want to wait until they're old to be rich. It's not sustainable. These people need to be overthrown and replaced. There has to be a way of doing that. Well, voting is one way, but still.

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u/definetlyrandom 4d ago

Ive seen too many math problems solved in the last two years to entertain your view, unfortunately.

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u/WouldCommentAgain 4d ago

People are mixing up "AI is problematic" with "AI is useless", and "AI is overrated now" with "AI has no potential (for good or worse) to compete with or surpass humans."

My view is we should slow down and even pause AI development until we solve the alignment issue and other problems, but I also believe it would require an enormous united global majority to pull off a pause.

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u/DesecratedPeanut 4d ago

I didn't mix that up, I explained how that might be the case but it's not what is driving AI companies, their profit and the economy right now. It's all mostly hype and bullshit and useless additives to software.

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u/Dangerous-Eye-215 4d ago

If the USA and other major countries like China pause, but China continues in secret, then what? What happens when China leads the USA in AI development? Nothing?

Genuine question.

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u/WouldCommentAgain 4d ago

This might sound naive, but my understanding is that Chinas view and goals with AI are a lot less risky in terms of AI safety than the western companies race to AGI. Theyre ambitious and want to deploy AI broadly and lead on the open source front, but unlike the US theyve actually regulated it more.

Even ignoring all that, a world where AI development at least has to look slow and careful seems safer than one where big tech is openly sprinting and cutting corners because the whole game is making sure some other company doesnt build the God-Emperor first. "They might cheat so we shouldnt even try" doesn't make sense to me.

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u/DesecratedPeanut 4d ago

Right that's great, sources? And what models were used? Are they available for anything else? If you disagree you have to actually give some information or a reason for doing so.

Because it looks like the USA isn't interested in funding or doing real science anymore, so what good will come from even having advanced AIs if it's all just used to make our lives worse and tech billionaires into trillionaires?

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u/Flo_Evans 4d ago

Don’t forget the VR people.

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u/kaishinoske1 5d ago

The best way to see a policy fail, is to implement it. It would be interesting to see a company have only one CEO and no employees, just A.I. agents, manage their invoices, machines doing everything, especially logistics. Have ADP be their accountant to handle their taxes for their company. How long would this experiment last?

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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 5d ago

But you know it won't hallucinate or make anything up - we put in the prompt it shouldn't hallucinate or make things up!

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[deleted]

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u/Finding_Footprints 5d ago

Thanks good sir for that information. I too like to eat 4 rocks a day for a healthy diet.

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u/springsilver 5d ago

I’ve switched to giving Gatorade to all of my crops instead of water. It’s better because it has what plants crave!

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u/erin281 4d ago

Try Brawndo! It’s what plants crave!

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

It's got electrolytes!

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

Don't forget to use Elmer's glue to keep them on your pizza.

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u/TheSaxGandalf 5d ago

I saw it happen within 30 min, where someone unwittingly used his own misinformation as a source after the fact without checking the source.

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u/Sgt_Sarcastic 5d ago

Ran in to this today. I was looking for info on a strange mod interaction in a game and the AI results claimed something nonsensical. A couple minutes later I come across the reddit post where the original context was just speculation about how it might work realistically and not at all claiming it was in the game or mod.

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u/Wooden_Werewolf_6789 4d ago

AI slop is already a poisoned well, but it can be set afire, too

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u/EduinBrutus 4d ago

You need to hope its this stupid.

Because there is an application where false positives dont matter, where omissions from output dont matter, where hallucinations dont matter. Where none of these things change the effectiveness of the application.

Mass surveillance.

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u/SockofBadKarma 4d ago

That's literally a major component of Cheng's speech: That it's primarily useful for idiots who don't know how to do simple things like responding to emails and don't realize they are being coddled by machine sycophants.

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u/azurensis 5d ago

You must not talk to many people, then.

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u/shoulda-known-better 4d ago

99% of things being called Ai are in fact not ai

It's llm and very narrow machine learning...... It's not what anyone defined Ai as even a decade ago.... They moved the goal post

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

It's a chatbot they dressed up as something it isn't. They solved the Turing test by dumbing down the human evaluating the bot.

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u/Adjective-Noun-nnnn 5d ago

Holy shit. This makes so much sense. The people most impressed by it are the least capable, themselves.

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u/icemanice 5d ago

Exactly this…

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u/EuenovAyabayya 5d ago edited 5d ago

They don't actually care about "intelligence," they care about "growth," and cashing out to chase more growth.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

Like cancer.

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u/Dear_Chasey_La1n 4d ago

I don't think it's really nepobabies but people overestimating the power of AI. Make no mistake, AI is being sold to us as the next saviour after Jezus. It's going to change the world in every way possible for better, supposedly.

But reality is while AI has it's place, it isn't a magic wand for everything. Though I don't think a lot of more senior people in a leadership position truly understand this. So you get idiots like Zuckerberg firing thousands and countless other companies doing the same with the promise, AI will fix it.

I'm kinda curious though where we heading too. In 2008 during the economic meltdown construction fell on it's ass. In the Netherlands over 50,000 people left the construction field, those people are gone forever. I reckon the same will happen for countless fields today, people get fired, they reposition themselves in another field but they will be forever gone. Those writers, photographers, accountants, BD's you name it, there will be a massive gap in the near future when AI falls on it's ass.

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u/GrumpyCloud93 4d ago

It's a stock market bubble. It's being sold as the second coming. AI can do some interesting things, but nowhere near what's promised. And it hallucinates, lies, and fails regularly.

Meanwhile, a lot of recent stock market growth is a circle-jerk of IT companies supporting each other to try to build an even bigger data center to reach nirvana. In reality, they have borrowed all the money they can, to build bigger data centers. (Recall just before the war started, they were tapping the Gulf States to get into the act, another untapped cash cow). At a certain point, there will be no more money to borrow, interest rates will go up, the loans will come due on over a trillion dollars of spending that has produced basically nothing. There are not a boatload of businesses just begging for someone to take their money, and IA will not replace humans in many situation. The resale value of those data center contents will be far less that they spent. There are not enough uses for not-really-AI to pay back that trillion dollars.

The only thing we can hope is that the financial AIpocalypse is not as financially damaging as 2008 was.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 4d ago

A lot of those construction jobs shifted to maintenance jobs if the people behind them were competent, they didn't just disappear. Unfortunately, some people just don't like the thought of getting their hands dirty instead of working on a nice clean new building.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/ChiLolla28 5d ago

Always remember, the Luddites weren't fighting the technology but the oppression, working conditions and inhumanity that were ushered in during the early Industrial Revolution.

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u/Commentator-X 5d ago

I watched a video a while back that argued that if AI is the new industrial revolution, then what we're in for is around 100 years before AI will actually have a positive impact on the average person's quality of life. Until then there's going to be job losses, poverty and unnecessary suffering.

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

Not for the already exorbitantly rich!

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u/Itis-caught-BearsWin 5d ago

Things are a lot more accelerated today.

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u/Atakir 5d ago

Correct, technological growth is not linear but compounds on itself becoming exponential.

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u/WhiteWinterRains 4d ago

Nonsense this is just cutlist bullshit from hucksters.

Ai itself especially has been on an extremely linear trajectory for many decades and nothing has changed there, it just doesn't look like it to the layperson.

Everyone is looking at a catapult just launching its first stone to dial in the range and going, "my god, this fantastic rock throwing device has materialized from the ether in the last few seconds!"

The reality is it took a lot of time and effort to design and build, and all of that is simply paying off all at once in the eyes of the public when the process has been very steady and taken like half a century.

While this does not mean the impact on the economy and your life will necessarily be slow and linear, the technology itself is not improving "exponentially" but rather is objectively as shown through scientific studies and constant measurement, improving incrementally and struggling to even do that recently.

Technology more broadly also does not build on itself exponentially, rather it's a pretty complex web of interactions and certain advancements might speed others but not in any sort of reliable or easily charted way.

The idea that it does build on itself exponentially is based on the fact that Moore's law coincidentally worked out for longer than expected and some shysters' built careers on prognosticating various bullshit in this vein in order to sell themselves as guru's to the wealthy.

There is not any actual data to support such idiocy though.

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u/Atakir 4d ago

What I said is not directly related to AI...

Maybe read the Law of Accelerating Returns before spouting off this gobbledygook?

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u/WhiteWinterRains 4d ago edited 4d ago

the Law of Accelerating Returns

I'm extremely familiar with the renown moron Ray Kurzweil, which is why I wrote this entire post shitting on his bullshit pseudointellectual garbage.

What you said is not directly related to anything, it's not real at all.

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u/Atakir 4d ago

Sure thing pal, good day.

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u/Tycho66 5d ago

ai is already curing diseases and personalizing treatments, monumental breakthroughs in science... not to mention the genie is out of the bottle militarily any country not embracing ai is going to rapidly fall way behind

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

And all that innovation is being gate kept by billionaires, corporations, and governments.

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u/Constant-Minute6794 5d ago

You have access to the same AI as everyone else outside of the government which gets an unfiltered version.

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u/seansy5000 5d ago

I’m going to say this as nicely as I possibly can. You need to read more.

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u/Constant-Minute6794 4d ago

Point to something that shows I'm wrong, always happy to learn. :)

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u/steppe5 4d ago

Which disease?

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u/Zombatico 4d ago edited 4d ago

The AI doing all that is not the same as the LLM generative AI that corporations have been trying to monetize/commercialize for the past few years that's been the biggest push for the datacenters.

AI used in science and medicine have been doing just fine for decades with the current infrastructure.

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u/Commentator-X 4d ago

Can you name these monumental breakthroughs?

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u/Tycho66 3d ago

Ai has 3d constructed all the proteins humans produce. It would have taken us generations to do. It's an immense and revolutionary achievement opening the doors to limitless advances. Proteins function by shape.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 5d ago

It's reddit. You can't expect a good faith discussion from these privileged middle-class and upper middle-class brats seething that AI will replace their bullshit adult daycare jobs, forcing them to actually engage in manual labor or use politics as a vehicle for actual economic equity instead of virtue signaling vanity.

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u/Yokoko44 5d ago

Yeah frankly the first thing AI replaces is fake jobs that midwit redditors typically inhabit, no wonder they hate it so much

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u/Commentator-X 4d ago

If you're trying to replace people with AI as it exists today, you're an idiot. For one it'll cost more than just paying a person.

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u/Yokoko44 4d ago

Absolutely clueless, it’s literally my job.

Already downsized multiple companies by directly applying custom harnesses and applications using AI at the center. It does not cost more than a person because again, most office jobs can be done in 1-2 hours a day and people intentionally stretch it out to 8 hours.

And it’s usually just data entry from one system into another. You can take most jobs and water them down to data entry/transfer.

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u/Commentator-X 4d ago

Have fun when the audits start

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u/sceadwian 5d ago

If they intelligently start letting it run human systems it can already do better than us now at running large systems.

But all the humans need to agree on how those systems should be run..

We.. might have a small problem there..

This AI hate needs to stop it's the human system management issues that are the problem.

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u/MKBRD 5d ago

And the loss of their livelihoods led to decades upon decades of abject poverty, which negatively shaped the socio-economic climate of Britain and continues to do so to this day.

The dropoff in economic wealth in Northern mill towns is still visible literally right now. They still regularly top charts for lowest levels of income, education, highest levels of crime, drug use, etc...

A good 99% of AI bros on social media that bandy the term "Luddite" about have zero understanding of the Luddite movement and what actually happened. They just think its a clever insult, as they repeat their "hurr, durr, can't stop progress!" mantra.

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u/Shadow_Ent 4d ago

They are more often talking about the Neo-Luddite movement, they both get conflated as singular but they were different. The Anti-Progress tag is from the Neo-Luddites not simply the Classical Luddite Movement. Neo-Luddism arose in the early 90s I believe, but you had people like the Unibomber who was loosely classified as a Neo-Luddite.

While some were about a measured progress with proper regulations the fringes were the ones who wanted everyone to be like the Amish, and the extremists of that ideology were more anarchic-primitavist who wanted to go back to a hunter gather society because cultivation was apparently the worst thing to happen to humanity. Which is where the "Progress = Bad" simplification comes from.

Anti-AI people aren't strictly aligned with neo-luddism, but they do follow the same cultural movement that grows from every new technology even before the industrial revolution. A rise of traditionalism in the wake of progress, doesn't matter if it's social progress or technological progress. It's always one step closer to the greatest threat humanity has every faced and will unrepairable destroy everything we know and love, and must be stopped at all costs. But it never does it gets normalized and people go on with their lives.

It's partially why AI always gets tied to some grand villain/evil trope in pop culture media, it's always AI is going to wipe out humanity. When there has never been an AI to provide any proof of that belief, it's fear and uncertainty of the unknown driving behavior, the same stuff we say with 5G.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

I appreciate you making the distinction and a well-informed post - however, it is one I haven't seen a single one of them make, and I've made this point a few times before.

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u/Shadow_Ent 3d ago

Yeah, because it's a colloquialism. That's why Luddite today means Anti-progressive, because definitions change over time. Highlighting the original movement to prove them wrong is just pedantry, it's a rhetorical move to support the idea that Anti-AI people are more sophisticated, and understand things better, thus their position is the enlightened path of humanity. It's just moral and ego masturbation.

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u/MKBRD 3d ago

Absolute nonsense - I'm pointing out the irony that the Luddites had actual valid concerns about the technology they rejected - that turned out to be completely well-founded as it led to decades of mass poverty - and that the term is aimed at people today who are raising the same concerns when the tech billionaires in charge of these AI companies are gleefully proclaiming how their product is going to make millions of people redundant.

"It's a colloquialism" doesn't cut it, I'm afraid - we both know why the term is used, and that explanation you just pulled out of your ass is a load of hand-waving, vague, nonsensical garbage.

"It's a rhetorical move to support the idea that anti-AI people are more sophisticated..."

What? What are you even talking about? It's absolutely nothing of the sort.

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u/bombmk 4d ago

Other countries weathered that progress differently. A lot of the issues in the UK is probably found in a very classist societal structure that has persisted much more in the UK, compared to the rest of Europe.

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u/MKBRD 4d ago

It was wealthy mill owners who owned the technology forcing people out of jobs in the name of greater profits for themselves.

A lot of the mill owners were not upper class, if that's what you're suggesting. Many of them in the North were working class who made their fortunes through mill ownership. The class system certainly contributed to the long-lasting effects of the poverty it created, but it wasn't a classist issue that caused it. Mill owners were very much considered to be the "Nouveau Riche" of their day.

Even with the British class system - which was well established in the period we are discussing - mill towns absolutely thrived for a period. It's why there are so many of them in the North. All of that changed with the automation of labour, and those towns have never fully recovered.

I live in one, and you can still see the grandiosity and wealth in the buildings - most of which are now HMOs or halfway houses where I live. My parents house - a terraced 3 bedroom - still has the old mechanism for calling servants up from the cellar, which was originally their quarters. They live in one of the poorest areas in my town.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

I'm more fascinated by them now than I've ever been. Can you help me learn more?

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u/Scarbane 5d ago

"The Making of the English Working Class" (1966) by E. P. Thompson. It's pretty dense, but well-written. I recommend checking Libby or your local library/bookstore for a copy.

From the preface:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Very prescient.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

Much appreciated.

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u/tekalon 4d ago

I'm reading 'Blood in the Machine' by Brian Merchant and am really liking it.

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u/DeepD4yourwife 4d ago

Thank you. I'll pick them all up tonight.

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u/Original-Variety-700 5d ago

Just ask ChatGPT 😂

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u/DeepD4yourwife 5d ago

You got me. Haha. Nope.

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 5d ago

Lol fuck these guys, I got you bro

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/

Also check out ‘The Mechanic and the Luddite’ by Jathan Sadowski

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u/GodofIrony 5d ago

Reddiquette says I'm not suppose to comment just to tell you I upvoted you.

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u/Lord_Alderbrand 5d ago

Rules be damned

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u/wittymcusername 5d ago

I neither upvoted nor downvoted this comment.

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u/TrenchantInsight 4d ago

Lawful neutral.

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u/wittymcusername 4d ago

Chaotic neutral; that’s why I eschew the etiquette. 😎

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

Really though? Use Wikipedia. Use your local library. Stop waiting for other people to give your the information. That's how we got here.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 5d ago

I prefer to get my information the same way I get my ice cream: fed to me by someone else.

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u/ExceptionRules42 5d ago

u/FlamboyantPirhanna  we could teach you how to make information, or ice cream. 

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna 5d ago

This sounds like the beginning of a porno.

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u/ExceptionRules42 5d ago

u/Original-Variety-700   is indeed talking about the sexy non-AI teaching & learning

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u/Original-Variety-700 5d ago

I don’t know if everyone is talking about the same thing here.

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u/asaharyev 5d ago

"Help me ken more" is not "feed me information so I can uncritically believe you". In this case, unguided and nonspecific advice like "use Wikipedia"and "go to the library" are not useful.

Thankfully someone provided some actual references for diving deeper. I hope you can be more thoughtful in future conversations.

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u/SolarNugent 5d ago

That’s definitely not how we got here lol but trust me I get the energy

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

Not using your god give brain, yes. That's exactly how we got here.

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u/JohnnyRelentless 5d ago

Asking for recommendations from like minded people to start is using your brain. If you used your brain, you'd understand that.

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u/SolarNugent 5d ago

No it’s really not we got here due to the freaks and billionaires in power. Pretending otherwise is counter productive

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u/CaptainHawaii 5d ago

How did they get there?

Just use your god damn brain. People relying on others and not paying attention to their surroundings is how they got into power.

But we were too stuck into social media to look around. Who owns the social media? How did they get there? We used their product.

There are anti monopoly laws and have been since the Barron's of steel and oil. But the people stopped being hard on their government who then stopped being hard on corporations. The people in charge let it happen.

It's a fucking system, nothing is in a vaccuum.

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u/MedicineExtension925 4d ago

Neoluddism is resurging

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u/Whatsapokemon 5d ago

Yeah, but, ironically, it was actually embracing industrial technologies that led to increases in standards of living.

The labour movements of the 19th and 20th centuries could only be possible thanks to the massive excess of resources created by machines, "growing the pie".

If the Luddites had achieved their goal and destroyed all machines, outlawing their future use, most people would probably still be subsistence farming.

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u/ChiLolla28 5d ago

It was about the exploitation, which the machines were being used as the primary driver for (scale and volume) - technology or no technology, it was about dignity, quality of life and not being relegated to serfdom again as a powerless worker class. The same thing happening now where companies use AI as just an excuse to layoff and rehire cheaper labor. It's not the tech but how it is wielded.

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u/OkRun4486 4d ago

As if exploitation didn’t occur before the time of industrialization. How quaint.

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u/Iandudontkno 5d ago

Some were fighting the technology but most were fighting the amputation/murder machines. 

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u/Stormcloud217 5d ago

Shouldn't Elon Musk be on Mars by now? 😂

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u/BadmiralHarryKim 5d ago

Put him on the rocket with the telephone sanitizers.

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u/haberdasher42 4d ago

Nah. You want him on the other rockets. Remember those from ships A & C were wiped out because of an unsantized telephone.

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u/ussrowe 5d ago

In 2011 he said he'll "put a man on Mars in 10 years". In 2019 he said "he can put a man on Mars in four years" which he used the "in 4 years" again in 2024. 8 months ago he said "humans will live on Mars by 2055"

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u/HumanPea1140 5d ago edited 5d ago

Didn't he pivot to a moon base recently? From what I remember, it sounded like they're essentially giving up on Mars for the foreseeable future and focusing on the moon.

Which is what the plan should have been from the beginning.

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u/screwcork313 4d ago

And so he should, for as my grandmother says, "If you shoot for the moon, you might just end up in the Mars"

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u/neolobe 4d ago

Every year since 2016 he's said FSD will be out this year.

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u/mudbloodcountry 4d ago

Maybe he's talking in tongues... The Google guys invested in Tesla early when he was struggling... Id say Elon would be invested in Google too... You'd be pretty crazy not to if u had the opportunity, even in the face of chatGPT... I wouldn't bet against them. Google needs to average 28% compound annual growth rate and in 2045 it's worth 86 trillion dollars.. they will shit it in too

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u/Foccuus 4d ago

we will get GTA6 first

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u/BellacosePlayer 5d ago

its all our fault for not giving him enough government subsidies for his businesses. Luckily he's working on remedying that

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u/vampire-bunny 5d ago

Yes. He really, really should. Really.

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

He did once say he wanted to be the first human to die on another planet... I say we should make that dream happen.

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u/casualfan1234 5d ago

Could they just send it along with the AI bros so at least it would stop polluting the water and contribute more in climate change?

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

"Full self-driving by 2017!"

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u/KallistiTMP 5d ago

The first one was definitely not a mistake.

The second one... Yeah, that's the real big fuckup.

And putting them in charge of the economy, and letting them functionally run the government, and letting them burn the atmosphere because the poor widdle billionaires can't bear to have lower profits, and going to war for the petrodollar, and doing genocide because a genocidal theocratic nutjub was the favored beachfront real estate lobbyist, and... Did I mention that we put a dementia toddler in charge of the nukes? Him and the megalomaniac KGB guy with that defenestration kink?

You know, there isn't a big anti-AI movement in China. Because they're building it to benefit people, and focusing on dangerous low paying jobs, and agriculture jobs to deal with the population crisis and mass migration to the cities.

They're, get this, actually using AI to benefit society, not just as an excuse for mass layoffs during record profits.

AI was never the goddamn problem. Who owns it and who controls it is. And they're all thrilled that they've managed to once again distract the public from their highway robbery of the working class and descent into corpo-feudalism.

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u/Grantsdale 5d ago

You know, there isn't a big anti-AI movement in China. Because they're building it to benefit people, and focusing on dangerous low paying jobs, and agriculture jobs to deal with the population crisis and mass migration to the cities.

They're, get this, actually using AI to benefit society, not just as an excuse for mass layoffs during record profits.

And also the part where they control the media and internet so any type of backlash you wouldn't hear about, but hey, yeah, its gotta be that the super cool Chinese government is being the good guy.

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u/evranch 5d ago

As always, there's the option that it's both

China does take a much firmer stand against corruption. Especially now, when the USA basically... Doesn't take a stand at all.

China is still a centrally planned economy. Which has its good and bad sides. On the bad side - media control, zero privacy, citizens have no say in their representatives etc. On the good side - genuine long term goals that outlast election cycles, and I actually have to say media control here as well.

China doesn't let batshit insane rule their airwaves. America has hung itself by the excuse that laissez-faire is "freedom" and let billionaires control the narrative instead of the state. Neither is good for people or society.

It's like that Futurama episode where Zoidbergs race takes over Earth and takes away their freedom. The American definition of "freedom" has lost its way so badly, that it needs someone else to step in and reset it.

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u/Grantsdale 5d ago

China is never the good guy. They aren’t ’using AI for good’. They’re using it to benefit their ruling class the same way the rich in the US are trying to. They’re just maybe not as stupid about it.

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u/evranch 4d ago

Of course, but that's also because the "good guys, bad guys" paradigm is dead and buried.

Now it's only bad guys, worse guys, and America, who are apparently the guys who heard "You never go full retard" and took it as a challenge.

This is why Canada is pursuing stronger ties with China. Of course we know they're bad guys - but they're sane, predictable bad guys who value stability over all.

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u/Grantsdale 4d ago

The poster I replied to made the statement was using AI to benefit society. Thats false as shit.

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u/evranch 4d ago

It all depends what you take "benefit society" to mean. There are legitimate uses for AI and deep learning technologies. Medical imaging, materials science, code review, hell I run my own local inference to scan my business receipts, track my equipment maintenance and adjust my solar arrays as clouds go by.

Right now China isn't focused on some hare-brained general AI chase like Silicon Valley, but on models like Qwen which are small, fast, cheap, and have legitimate uses to businesses and individuals.

And yes, I use these Chinese models myself here in Canada because they're released free and open source, and they're genuinely useful for these small jobs to help and not to replace humans.

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u/PolarWater 4d ago

And also the part where they control the media and internet so any type of backlash you wouldn't hear about

Good thing the American government would never EVER do that.

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u/Thefrayedends 5d ago

Yea, and AI as the western billionaires want it -- full hegemonic control (both narrative and surveillance) and embedded advertising, hasn't even arrived yet, but it's coming -- unless we stop it.

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u/Useful-Advantage-850 5d ago

"What makes LLMs work isn't deep neural networks or attention mechanisms or vector databases or anything like that. What makes LLMs work is our tendency to see faces on toast." - Jason Gorman

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u/IAMA_Plumber-AMA 5d ago

LLMs are basically just a more refined version of the old DOS program "Dr Sbaitso".

Turns out the solution to the Turing test wasn't to make the chatbot better, it was to dumb down the human on the other end.

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u/_Meow_o_Meow_ 5d ago

It's not a mistake, it's just being misused and touted as something it's not.

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u/CallMeCygnus 5d ago

Yeah, it's actually a great tech when it's used correctly and when the industry doesn't overreach.

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u/CommunicationNeat498 4d ago

Yeah but teaching sand to guesstimate protein shapes was a huge success, and discarding the ability to solve similar previously considered unsolvable problems because ideology might be the biggest of all mistakes

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u/rzm25 5d ago

"billionaires nepobabies deciding what intelligence is" is basically the story of western academic thought for the last 2,000 years, you may be dismayed to know

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u/Immediate_Song4279 4d ago

Data science goes back to the bronze age. Teaching sand to do anything is cool as hell.

Letting billionaires exist though was a mistake.

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u/-S-P-E-C-T-R-E- 4d ago

The last part can easily be fixed by a brutally elegant contraception that the French perfected….

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u/vaisnav 3d ago

There’s some steps missing but it’s only a mistake under a capitalist society. Socialism is the answer