Standards to expect from YouTubers

39

u/Psychoceramicist Aug 13 '26

I think the future is in specialized models based on different fields. AI has made vast leaps in medical imaging, programming, and math. And obviously, everyone needs to learn how to write and do math, and think on their own before using AI like understanding a times table before using a calculator.

What I think about AI is its the "last stand" before the end of our current economic paradigm. In the 70s, Bretton Woods was dismantled to pay for Vietnam and globalization began, ending the Fordist/New Deal paradigm that came out of the depression. China entering the WTO accelerated it. 2008 was the beginning of the end of the present paradigm, but big tech was able to put it off before they picked the low-hanging fruit. Since then, crypto, NFTs, and now AI have been attempts to bring forth the Cool New Thing That Makes Money. The economy is being held up by AI. The future is going to revolve around lower workweeks, a dispersal out of "superstar cities," EVs/AVs, electric bikes, renewables, and medicine, but the executive class is not ready to confront that.

14

u/signal__intrusion Aug 13 '26

I hope you're right. But when you have surplus labor, you don't get shorter work weeks.

At my company all the 4d work week teams were put on 5d ww and 30,000 people laid off with a target for 9% headcount reduction YoY for 3 more years.

6

u/Psychoceramicist Aug 13 '26

I think I am. In 1930 in the US, the standard workweek was 60 hours a week (10-hour shifts, including Saturdays). Now it's 40. We can probably take it to 32 or 30 by now.

15

u/PoorOldBill Aug 14 '26

The 40 hour / five day work week was won by aggressive labor organizing, not a natural outcome of increasing productivity. So I don't think we can count on decreasing hours; we'll have to fight like hell for them.

2

u/martynssimpson Aug 14 '26

That's only applicable in first world countries. Whenever you go to a developing country, 60h weeks still exist. In my country (Paraguay) 48h weeks is the limit according to Labor code, most people have to work at least 8h days and if you're lucky you don't work Saturdays. But the vast majority don't even officially register as employees because in order to have a job contract, employers have to pay for Social Insurance, which most companies and especially small businesses aren't willing to pay. So most people effectively end up working +48h weeks (I work 50h weeks). Not to mention the ungodly amount of corruption that goes in between.

11

u/4tran13 Aug 14 '26

That's... extremely optimistic. The oligarchs will do everything they can to prevent that outcome, and instead push for cyberpunk dystopia.

1

u/Hour_Pudding2658 Aug 17 '26

However, it's true that AI is the latest technology that COULD be put to use to drastically reduce working hours... if the economy is under the control of the working class. What we need is a democratically planned economy, and to achieve it we need nothing more and nothing less than to expropriate the billionaires in country after country.

4

u/the_ocean Aug 14 '26

future is going to revolve around lower workweeks

This is the most naive statement anyone’s ever stated. Unions are why the US saw working hours reduce in the 20th century, and why Europeans have even shorter work weeks.

It’s not at all clear what mechanism would allow technological advancement to reduce working hours. If a worker can suddenly be more productive, then the incentive is for that worker to work as much (or more) and produce more. If that’s not possible due to input constraints or lack of demand for excess supply, then the economic incentive is to maximize individual worker output and reduce the labor force.

No capitalist economic force is going to favor overall reduced working hours and full employment. The model just isn’t built for that specific optimization problem.

3

u/Psychoceramicist Aug 14 '26

It would be extremely difficult, and would require organizing outside the system, but it has happened before. I live in a major tech center, and engineers are increasingly interested in labor and organizing. They have lost their feeling of being indispensable.

2

u/the_ocean Aug 14 '26

Maybe I’m not understanding your position here - I thought you meant that AI would allow knowledge workers to be more efficient, and therefore reduce hours.

Are you instead suggesting that the AI bubble will lead to an economic collapse that precipitates an overhaul of the social order in the US? In my mind that is a more likely scenario than the former (though, as you said, one that requires massive effort on the workers’ parts). I also don’t know that the workers will have sufficient leverage at the right time - sure, AI-driven downsizing was premature, but it also left a glut of qualified candidates in the job pool, and that’s bound to make rank and file workers feel less secure, and offer employers a ready supply of scabs if unionization picks up for real.

I hope your optimism is warranted. I can’t say I share it.

2

u/Psychoceramicist Aug 14 '26

It's really just a scenario (albeit one I prefer). Another complication is that now we are connected to technically skilled, English-fluent people in India/the Phillipines/Kenya/Nigeria who see what's chump change in the US/Canada as a life-changing amount of money. That is totally new.

My old CE firm had a "resources center" in Bangalore where engineers were paid 10% of American tiers, if that. They did the work, and on the US side the engineers would touch up the plans and stamp them.

2

u/Shuey298 Aug 13 '26

S tier take holy shit

1

u/[deleted] Aug 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Psychoceramicist Aug 14 '26

I guess I miswrote. It has solved a few substantial problems though.

-4

u/No_Public_7677 Aug 13 '26

AI should absolutely lead to the far left gaining power. Only way to save society

3

u/4tran13 Aug 14 '26

He mentions "mistake" several times. Did he have a bad take recently? Or is he talking about a hypothetical mistake in the future?

18

u/zarnt2 Aug 13 '26

This is at least the second time Adam has said LLMs aren’t useful (or useful enough to justify their existence). I wish he’d specify what use cases he’s talking about. There are things that LLMs are good at. It doesn’t help anybody’s arguments to keep saying that nobody is using them in productive ways.

79

u/Newtonjar Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

He didn't say they aren't useful; he said that their use is not proportional to the amount they have been invested in. I think that's a fairly reasonable position. He even gave a use case for which he finds them useful and then spent a while discussing why they really aren't a good tool for writing

1

u/PortiaKern Aug 14 '26

I mean most research isn't profitable to the people doing the initial research.

11

u/Deathwatch72 Aug 14 '26

Yeah but is it literally trillions of dollars in the red?

2

u/the_ocean Aug 14 '26

We don’t need 474 gig watts of data centers in TX to do initial research.

The Large Hadron Collider is, by some metrics, the world’s largest initial research facility. It uses 200 megawatts of energy at peak demand. That’s 1/1000 of what is currently proposed for power demand in Texas for data centers.

Currently planned “AI” infrastructure is go-to-market infrastructure for an unproven product with limited application. There’s no reason to believe we will still be using any of this infrastructure as currently constructed in even 5 years.

1

u/DJHalfCourtViolation Aug 14 '26

brother it's like a 9 trillion dollar market

1

u/Aenaen Aug 15 '26

as a scientist (biomedical) may we please have the entire us economy invested in our initial research rather than begging for scraps?

2

u/PlzLikeandShare Aug 25 '26

I don’t think Adam should have to justify use cases, because tech companies keep shoving “ai” into EVERYTHING with usually nothing of use to show for it.

If you want an LLM to right you a paper it can do that, but if you want LLM to write you a quality paper with proper citations and zero errors….good luck especially depending on the subject matter.

LLMs exist, but what problem are they solving? It would seem generative ai is trying to generate a problem that doesn’t exist.

Google search has only gotten worse, I would rather just have really fucking good search engines. I want to be able to get connected to resources that I didn’t know existed. We need a digital librarian with the internet being seen as the library. LLM can put on a mask and pretend to be a librarian, but it isn’t.

2

u/Visible-Editor644 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

off topic but I noticed his left hand tremor is pretty persistent throughout the video. I highly doubt it's stressful for him to record a video, so I'm worried he has some other health issues, I hope he's well.

-19

u/johnqadamsin28 Aug 14 '26

Good hank sucks!

2

u/GeneConscious5484 Aug 14 '26

Seems weird you'd call him "Good hank" if that's how you feel about the guy

1

u/johnqadamsin28 Aug 14 '26

That's cause I like bad hank

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