Transcript
Title text: This is how you all fucking sound
[A smug tech bro wearing a sideways cap, watch, chain around his neck stands in front of a data center by a lake with dead fish. A smoke stack blows pollution into the air]
Tech bro: AI is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a suit with cigarette in hand stands in a restaurant while two disgruntled diners cough from the smoke]
Suit: Smoking indoors is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug man in a top hat and suit stands in a factory with two sad and dirty children]
Hat: Child labor is already here, there’s no going back.
[A smug plantation owner stands in front of a field with with two angry slaves]
Plantation owner: The Atlantic Slave trade is already here, there’s no going back.
I think too many people are too dug in on the fallacy that real value isn't being generated by AI. It is. I see it every day at work.
I get that it's scary and frustrating and I get that jobs are going to be lost. We (royal) need to do better and demand better from our governments.
I said elsewhere but the genie is out of the bottle and we can't wish it away. You either acknowledge that and want to build a sustainable future with it, or you are a luddite digging in their heels on a lost cause.
Back to the farming analogy on the pod he explained that it was a similar groundswell of protest because jobs were disappearing and people were rightly up in arms. But here we are 100+ years later. The jobs never came back. Tractors are here to stay.
There's been a lot of studies showing that people think they're being more productive and improving things with AI when in fact they aren't. Your perceived value runs counter to the actual data.
Anecdotally I see the opposite of you. Nothing but slop pull requests and mountains of more work being churned out that I have to spend all my time sifting through. Literally draining value away.
I'd argue those around you are doing it wrong. I've seen far from this.
When your best retort boils down to "skill issue" you should probably take a closer look at your position...
Better than those who bury their heads in the sand? 🤷♂️
AI does not give people a blanket performance bump - situationally it can be used in ways to enhance productivity in some tasks, I've had good success using it to chart out things like big database moves and some of the VM parts of MVVM builds - but that time savings is cut down heavily by having to hand check the results, and for many complex or especially novel tasks (very common with database/analysis tasks, not very common with MVVM tasks) they're absolute money-burning dogshit.
I think the pushback you're getting here is due to you being kinda abrasive about it, and glossing over the areas wherein AI is the aforementioned absolute money-burning dogshit. We'll undoubtedly be keeping AI in some ways - we can run it locally, there's open source models, etc. but this tech is getting fairly mature at this point, and we haven't found any new novel areas in which it's useful. It's shit for data analysis, every implementation of general agentic AI has been nothing but an expensive quagmire, image generation will never be profitable outside of simple models (and of course porn) but AI is situationally really quite useful as a code assistant, for infosec, for NLP/chatbots/image recognition and it will 100% be sticking around (in some forms) for all those use cases.
It's just not a black and white issue like many pro-AI folks here have been presenting it, and you've been deeply patronizing in your explanation of your perspective on the issue. Hence, pushback.
Think less abusive and more not open to put up with delusional bullshit? 🤷♂️
We do both agree it isn't black and white. I think a lot of AI is bullshit and needs to go away but a lot of it is freaking amazing. Just Friday I solved 2 production issues without needing to engage a vendor because I was able to use their AI agent. I told my boss I spent about 3 hours over 3 days as opposed to 7 days working with the vendor.
That's a very real and very substantial cost savings.
I have a coworker that built a series of copliot skills to effectively automate the creation of artifacts in a bunch of GitHub repos using existing standards. AI writes the code. Quick validation and push to dev. Run QA tests and deploy to PROD. What may have taken me days can now be done in hours.
I have coworkers who use it in their day to day communications with HR, PAC and Legal on sensitive topics not just to write it but also interpret what they receive.
Does it cost too much? I think that's still up on the air for our company that will show up in a year or two.
Outside of all that, today I was using AI to take pictures of plants to see what is toxic to my cats and checking the references as required.
I'm saying all this as someone who has serious concerns with AI and the companies behind it. I think governments need to implement harsher laws and bleed these companies dry. I think there should be government owned and run AI models and how to power them needs to be addressed as does the environmental cost. Just like the bullshit Bitcoin conversations a decade ago.
But all of this can't be stopped. Progress is progress and I don't believe any conspiracy that states this is some shadow elite pushing it down our throats. Globally we see the value. It's becoming widespread adopted globally.
I'm sorry, man, me fucking you in the ass is here to stay. It doesn't matter what you do, you can't just stuff the genie back in the bottle. Well, I guess it is in the bottle, actually, eheh heh heh~.
My man, we can do, literally, anything we want to. We own the planet.
Yes and do you have the overwhelming support of the rest of the planet?! Lol. Fucking delusional.
"Seize the means of production" energy. Great in theory but we live in the real world.
I'm gonna seize the means of your production pretty soon, buddy, and it'll be enough to make your neighbors blush.
🤣🤣🤣 best of luck!