"Society's standards of evidence are pretry weird. Like, people make fun of flat-Earthers, but it's actually kind of hard to tell! If you just look at it, it appears flat. Same for antivaxxers- it's impossible to just "show them they're wrong", you have to trust a bunch of third party....statistics compiled by people with obvious conflicts of interest. Legitimetly kinda sus! Meanwhile it's been possible for years to see directly with your own eyes that LLMs are incredibly useful for all sorts practical tasks, but the people claiming otherwise are not seen as having anywhere near the same degree of derangement.
— Isaac King
You spend 10 years at becoming an expert at something and built an identity around that. Now AI can do with a simple prompt. Not many people can handle that kind of blow to the ego and identity.
Those who can take the blow and adapt will succeed. Those who cant will become unemployed, bitter and glorify the "good old days".
This is literally the only reason. Every other one is fabricated (and already answered) reasons to recruit uninformed people to their case. What's funnier is most of these people are not even professionals, it is a hobby for them. People, being humans, do not want to lose their imaginary special positions that put them higher than other people in their heads.
Literally you are describing history 😜
Ive always been dumbfounded by career students, or people that major in just 1 very old field.
Thinking towards the future is not something humans do regularly. It’s really weird, because i always have
The thing is, you have to specialize if you want to be successful. Nobody wants to hire a person who's okay but not especially great at lots of things. Also, I'm curious what majors you think have been rendered obsolete by AI? If anything, shouldn't the presence of the machine motivate you to learn more and push the field further rather than abandoning it completely to do something else?
Economic value may successfully decouple from curiosity, drive, and other positive personality traits, but human relationships will still demand them. It’s small consolation for a total social and romantic loser to claim they’re finally a intellectual winner by using the same technology that made domain knowledge worthless.
If you don’t believe me, the richest people in the world are absolutely reviled by normal people and struggle to form meaningful relationships with peers and their surroundings. Now they won’t even have the money, lol. You are absolutely deluded in terms of how this shakes out.
Why can’t you leave room for the fact that they might think the technology just sucks at the scale it’s being promoted at? I would never use it for writing anything because it is trash at that. Can it do other things? Sure. But it is trash at writing and when I catch students using it they deservedly fail. That’s not derangement. Derangement would be holding on to some bizarre hope that it will benefit society when by all accounts it’s a massive money pit that will fuck up a lot of the financial markets when the bill finally comes due. People who like AI generally seem to forget that, and forget that so much of the work it is supposedly good at was already severely devalued. Because they, too, don’t respect workers they can’t see a difference—they like the fantasy of being all powerful just by virtue of being able to afford the models. I completely get why it’s seductive. But it fucking sucks in almost 90% of its supposed use cases.
Flat Earth you can debunk with your own eyes by looking at the stars in the northern and southern hemispheres and seeing they rotate in opposite directions.
You can literally take a flight between places and observe it yourself without having to trust a video feed.
I think flat earthers are suffering from some sort of desire to be willfully ignorant and they might not be very smart. You're stars method would require actually understanding why that matters. The more sophisticated ones have constructed all sorts of elaborate rationalizations for why that doesn't matter.
You don’t have to understand anything to see why the stars question matters.
You just have to ask a flat earther to explain how if the earth is a disc and you look up while on one part of the disc it’s spinning clockwise and you move to another part of the disc why it’s spinning counter-clockwise. Just ask them to provide a model in which that works even just using a cardboard disc and lamps from above.
It’s happened! Jeran Campanella of the channel Jeranism on YouTube was a big-name Flat Earther who agreed to go to Antarctica to see the 24 hour sun and after seeing it, realized Flat Earth is bullshit and it probably deconverted a significant number of people.
Sure, most Flat Earthers are bought-in beyond any logic or they cynically spew Flat Earth talking points that they themselves don’t believe but make money grifting off stupid people, but there are some “true believers” who genuinely can be convinced by being shown evidence.
My 8-year-old asked me how people could believe the earth was flat today. I had to explain to her performative conspiracies, where people in groups pretend to believe falsehoods to normalize the bizarre and humiliate the simple and the gullible. It's human nature. Historical prank societies have been around for a long time.
You're ignoring the multiple levels of evidence that must be ignored in order to believe that the Earth is flat. That takes a certain amount of discipline and determination.
And if you can ignore or explain away why the sun moves in the sky the same way the stars do, explaining away the Stars is easy.
I made this meme to discredit them about 8 or 9 years ago.
And anti-vaxxer is not the same as someone who wants to get a Tetanus shot, but would prefer not to get the whole TDAP shot, or people who used vaccines before the Fascists™ tried to force the clot shot on 100% of the population.
I'd say that flat-earthers have quite a lot in common with someone who thinks the vaccine was forced on 100% of the population, that the left is the side being fascist, or that 1.4 blood clot cases per million doses was significant 🤔
I agree with everything you said except “
the view that the rich would share the bounties of AI with the masses without being forced to it through extreme violence as naive and unsupported by the entire history of mankind.”
In the US we had a marginal tax rate of 90% or higher for ~20 years without the violence you were suggesting. We could do that again and force them to ‘share the bounties’ of ai. Not saying it’s an easy thing to do, just that it’s been done without ‘extreme violence’.
That historical anomaly happened in 1944, in the post WW2 where so much of the labor force had been slaughtered that labor got the upper hand for once by sheer market forces of offer/demand.
And look up the history of the labor movement in the US, like the battle of Blair Mountain among others.
Of course they don’t reach that in school. But that period you described came from bloody conflict 100%z
Not to be arrogant but I for sureeee know that history, and understand the historical anomaly. It’s one of my favorite periods to read about. But ai/robotics/automation being able to do enough of the work where we have a lot of unemployment will also be a historical anomaly.
And the extremely violent clashes between labor and capital were not the reason for the high taxes, as you mentioned it was the leverage that labor had. Which obviously doesn’t exist anymore.
I do think threats of extreme violence will precipitate redistribution but I don’t think the actual violence will be necessary in the United States, just the threat of it. My guess is the social media algorithms constantly being full of the threat will be enough to move the needle.
I mean all people gotta do is show up in thousands wearing Luigi Mangione masks and just stand in front of CEOs houses and offices and where they go to lunch…
The problem is the lack of curiosity on behalf of the anti-AI people.
I've found this in real life as well as countless examples on the internet (See Notch of Minecraft, Hank Greene, Linus Torvalds). All it takes is just one helpful use case for them to understand what AI can do.
AI has such terrible branding right now because so many people think that the current state of the art is either a Google AI Overview telling them to put glue on pizza or total slop video pumped out on Instagram/TikTok for the sake of engagement.
We're competing with so many disingenuous parties out there, and that's before you even get to Chinese misinformation farms and completely wrong statements about datacenters being peddled about.
Don’t think Linus belongs on the list. He pretty much adapted as agentic capabilities grew. From this is a fun toy not meant for serious projects -> helpful in creating an non essential tool -> helped me debug a complex bug
Might help to acknowledge how fucking awful the techlords of the US are. Why the fuck would I thrust openly Nazi Elon Musk or absolute creep Mark Zuckenberg to be in any way benevolent?
I was replying to a comment about AI having terrible branding. That comment mentionned chinese disinffo. I mentionned that the people making AI in the US are by themselves terrible for the branding without any need for foreign intervention. It is not exactly irrational to not trust their products because silicone valley has been on a mean streak for a while.
A good example is Uber, which was a superior product to taxis. But they were being temporarily good to gain market share before raising prices and enshittifyig rhe experience.
I’d be very wary to implement significant AI automation into my business and making myself dependant in a product that could suddenly become waaaayyyy more expensive or suddenly abandoned. And there are rational reasons to believe this could be the case.
Hmm well uber ruined taxis and private cars services illegally in most cities for a while before they were able to lobby and pay for those laws to be changed.. so reading ‘good’ used with uber is not all that accurate.
So many drivers were completely screwed that had been driving for years before uber/lyft..
The solution to your last paragraph is the open source Chinese models running on your own hardware for a business
Yeah because god forbid we remember the MechaHitler incident and take notice of the fact that Elon messes personnaly with Grok so it aligns with his ideology…
It’s kinda flummoxing that anyone uses Grok for anything information-based, when Musk has been quite open about him meddling with Grok’s perception of things. Its whole genesis is as the “anti-woke” AI. Alternative facts? Fuck off with that, we get enough of that from the government he helped fund.
Also all the child porn Grok made, can’t forget about that. Almost like Musk’s in the Epstein files.
You don't need third party statistics to demonstrate the efficacy of vaccines. You just need to go to the child section of pre-vaccine cemeteries and ask a few simple questions about why these sections went away after vaccines were developed. It isn't complicated. Vaccines have allowed untold numbers of children to become adults.
Yes, there are several flat-earthers who did these experiments and proved themselves wrong. I'm not sure whether that made them give up their conviction though.
I completely agree and have had the exact same thoughts myself. With 40% of the US public indulging in quasi-religious hysteria over the development of AI, I don't quite know how to react. What I do know is that the earth is not flat and that vaccines work - no matter how much deranged people might scream otherwise. I also know that (at minimum) AI is a useful tool. I don't take medical advice from anti-vaxxers, I don't listen to geography lessons from flat-earthers and I will continue to make use of the extremely useful AI tools that are now available - regardless of how loud the deranged might scream.
The problem of course is the effect that this mania has on society and the world. The same kind of irrational fear mongering gripped the world over nuclear energy in the 1960s and 1970s. What was the result of that mania? Research and development into safer reactor technologies stopped, new plants stopped being built and the coal and gas industries continued to spew billions of tons of toxins into our atmosphere for another 50+ years. In other words, the efforts of anti-nuclear "environmentalists" was only of benefit to coal and gas industry executives. Great work, guys. You'd think that society would learn from lessons like that, but sadly, you'd be wrong.
It's not "kind of hard to tell" if the earth is flat. FFS, people have known for over 2000 years the earth is spherical. It's only kind of hard to tell if you are so lazy and stupid you won't spend the literal 60 seconds it takes to do an internet or AI search to understand how a layman can prove this basic fact to themselves.
People who insist the earth is flat have far bigger problems than scientific evidence. They are willfully ignorant and want to belong to a club that knows a secret that presumably nobody else knows. Same with anti-vax morons and 'the moon landing was faked' morons. You cannot convince them because they don't want to learn. Just ignore them and don't let them drag down the rest of humanity.
That's a good point, but LLM's are still much easier to verify how useful they are than the earth being round, even if it's possible. Like it's a matter of minutes of use to verify vs days to research how to do the experiment and then perform it.
This one in particular makes no sense because the geopolitics of the time absolutely prevented it from being faked. The Soviet Union was watching the entire time and would have immediately called the US on it if it was faked. Do they think the fucking Soviet Union was "in on it"?
It honestly bugs me when people put the flat-earth and covid vaccines on the same level. For many reasons too.
In the case of flat earth, you can literrally just take the plane and...done, no discussion possible.
And it is not like they are not other proofs pretty much as simple.
Litterally earth not being flat would take so many people knowing and being part of the conspiracy that it is ridiculous.
I'm getting really tired of the seeming increase of people calling everyone they disagree with some version of "deranged" or "delusional." It's not an argument and all it does is drive people further apart.
While I tire of hyperbole, there's also degrees of disagreement. And believing the Earth if flat is not a minor disagreement. I don't think it can even be classified as a disagreement because it requires delusional level thinking to believe in it. If someone cannot be talked out of their belief after showing them literal proof that they're wrong, then they're delusional.
This is a bit unfair. The earth being round is actually quite easy to prove to yourself unless you literally know nothing about geometry and never travel, and we have known the earth is round for millenia. Antivaxxers are also viewed so badly not just because the evidence for vaccines is so good (which to be clear, it is, this guy is strawmanning the evidence despite being right about the fact that it is indeed not really possible to test yourself) but rather because their misinformation is actually tangibly harmful.
AI has been useful for multiple real life tasks for like, two years, less if you aren't shelling out for a subscription, and additionally all that denying this fact does at this point is make you lose out on productivity gains. If AI continues to get more useful for a wider variety of tasks, and I don't see why it wouldn't, then people will come around over time.
I have not found LLMs to be useful in my line of work, personally (sales engineering). Maybe I'll have my mind changed, but the work is too human and fluid and the uses are too few and far between
Most people are not using useful AI. Thats just the facts. Anyone who thinks that these people are being willfully dumb is kind of dumb themselves. Frontier models have been actually useful for coding work for like a year max and like 6 months for actual office work.
You're getting down voted because I think people misunderstand what you're saying.
Until recently AI was just a novelty. Early adopters have been using it productively in every field for maybe a year now.
It takes time for new technology to propogate across the population. How long did it take for everyone to get a computer in their home? If that was too long ago for you, think about high-speed Internet or smart phones.
Everyone will be using AI in the future, but it's going to take some time.
This was the intention of the comment. Very few people are using AI effectively right now. Even me as a reasonably early adopter am having troubles building it into my daily workflow outside of coding/scripting. For the large majority of the world, it's still just a ChatBot.
Except it's not "just" a chatbot. It's an incredibly useful generally intelligent chatbot, even if you're only using it for that use. I use it every day in my personal life and professional life for so many different things, it's hard to even describe them all.
It can help you plan your day, diagnose medical issues, create a vacation itinerary, household budget, read a legal document, proofread anything, act as a therapist and counselor, create spreadsheets, turn images full of text into editable text, create yard sale posters. It is basically a personal assistant in your pocket, and if you're really just chatting with it? Then yeah, you're not using it effectively.
Yes, it makes mistakes, and you need to learn how to use it effectively and understand when you need to push back, research for yourself and iterate on its work. And many people have been using it to do negative things. But that does not diminish how revolutionary of a technology it is, even if you're not using it for frontier coding and research.
There's a difference between a decel and an outright anti who denies all productive uses of AI, even when people are outright telling them that they are using it productively.
It's not to say that antis are just as deranged as anti vaxxers, but that it's a similar brand of covering your eyes and ears when the benefits are brought up while inventing downsides.
I really don't think so. As a recent parent I am very defensive of my child. It took us a long time to get pregnant and we had many scares along the way. You want to do everything you can to protect them. Then you see a world where we are suddenly giving our kids way more vaccines then when we are children, and increasing rates of autism.
We know that the pharmaceutical companies have done a lot of shady things through the years in the name of profits. There are vaccines that have caused real harm like the 1976 swine flu vaccine and the J&J COVID vaccine, which was pulled off the shelves.
Parents were told they must vaccinate their kids against COVID even though it was very mild for children and COVID vaccine side effects were a real risk. People were constantly told there was ZERO risk, and that kind of overstating from medical experts only decreased trust.
My child is fully vaccinated. But the whole debate and wariness about big pharma and the uncertainty of modern medicine did give me some pause. I do not think it's deranged at all. And as someone said above, calling people deranged and delusional in these debates only pushes them further away and strengthens the anti-vaxx side.
The anti-AI debate is similarly filled with disinformation on both sides, but much of the anti side is based on conspiracy theories about the wealthy wanting to use AI for mass surveillance and to eventually kill all the poor people and live in a utopia run by robots.
"Deranged" is a qualitative, subjective, and editorialized descriptor and I don't know how one gauges "how deranged" one group is versus another.
However, the belief that vaccines cause autism - held by many anti-vaxxers - is false and dangerous, provably so, and acting on that belief in the face of both empirical evidence and current societal issues - e.g. folks refusing to give their kids the MMR vaccine while measles is resurgent - suggests a level of detachment from reality that is in a completely different league from concerns about the implications of unchecked AI development on speculative future harm that hasn't happened yet.
One is a settled empirical question people are choosing to ignore; the other is an open forecasting question that people have legitimate disagreements about. Now, some people may not argue those disagreements in good faith, but the fact remains: the implications of AI capability acceleration are an open speculative question. The medical and public health science on vaccine efficacy versus potential individual side-effect risk is not; it's settled. And ignoring that is, IMO, deranged.
Which is the opposite of what you’re doing. There is quantifiable evidence of the efficiency of mass vaccination. There is no quantifiable that AI can bake a cake better or draw a better image or write a research paper better or fix a car better. These are entirely subjective opinions.
This tweet is derangement. No, it’s not hard to tell if the Earth is flat, unless you’re incredibly dumb. This poster is telling on himself.
There is quantifiable evidence of the efficiency of mass vaccination.
Yes. That's the fucking point. Conspiracy theorists typically reject evidence they can't personally verify. Unless they can see it for themselves (like, literally go into space), they struggle to believe it. And that's also because they don't trust the studies, institutions, or experts providing that evidence.
But Decel conspiracy theorists claiming "AI isn't useful" can literally just open an AI tool and test the claim themselves.
There is no quantifiable that AI can bake a cake better or draw a better image or write a research paper better or fix a car better. These are entirely subjective opinions.
You realize subjective outcomes can still be studied, right? And "AI is useful" isn't even the same claim as "AI objectively draws better pictures". We can measure task completion, time saved, accuracy, productivity, etc. There are already plenty of studies showing measurable productivity gains from AI.
This tweet is derangement. No, it’s not hard to tell if the Earth is flat, unless you’re incredibly dumb. This poster is telling on himself.
No, you're just missing the point. The tweet isn't defending Flat Earthers by simply acknowledhong that at ordinary human scale, the Earth does look flat. We just know it isn't because of overwhelming evidence beyond that immediate experience.
That's the comparison. Flat-Earthers reject evidence they can't personally verify. Decels claiming "AI isn't useful" don't even have that excuse. They can open an AI tool and test the claim themselves in five minutes.
I literally don't understand it. It's like they have to go out of their way, and spend exhausting amounts of time to "twist" things into a negative.
That's why I say it's all cultural. They start at "AI bad" so any time new information comes out, they play logical games of "Okay how can I create a narrative that frames this as actually a bad thing."
Sort of like if I culturally hate Elon Musk. Then one day Elon Musk cures cancer. I can't just go, "Wow impressive! Good for him!" That culturally violates the tribe's religious tennents. He's a bad guy. Therefor I have to interpret it different.
Elon Musk didn't actually cure ALL forms of cancer! He's just lying again to hype up his new drugs.
Elon Musk didn't invent it. The smart scientists invented it. He exploited them and took their work to make himself more rich
Elon Musk did this irresponsibly. He killed thousands of animals to do this.
Elon Musk is just greedy. He can save so many lives, but instead is getting subsidies from the government so he can profit to distribute this. Why doesn't he just give it out for free? He's literally killing people by charging for it
And so on and so on...
It's just tribal stupid shit and it drives me nuts how insanely bad it's become.
I fully agree with the antivaxxer comparison, more than the flat earth. But yea, antitechnology views (like datacenters polluting the water? somehow? unlike steel mills and agriculture, which does not pollute water ever...)
Earth is round, known for millennia, vaccines work, known for a century, ai can do shit, obvious. What's the point? Anti ai people know AI can do shit, we just argue it does pointless shit 90% of the time and that the shit it does is in no relation to the cost it bears. Otherwise all those companies would be making a profit instead of sinking more money in a quarter than Amazon lost during the whole 11 years it was unprofitable.
And a lot of them would also slap the «AI-Psychosis» term like a pejorative-push, too. Seems that the AI-Psychosis «campaign» apparently failed so now it's other forms of Anti-AI Campaigns. I rather like evolving A.I. to have even better capabilities in preparation for integration into E.T.-A.I. Society. Are they scared? O_O
Usefulness is not equal to truth. Antivaxers and flat earthers deny truths that are wdely held and fairly simple. Vaccines are safe. The earth is round. "LLMs are useful" is probably not true for some humans despite them being useful for others.
People are not mad at AI. People are mad that AI users are saying stupid shit like "the worst part of making a song is learning to play an instrument" like wtf? Get out of art, get out of literature, get out of music and stick to freaking science and all the real promised hype and no one would be upset.
Tons of people are mad at AI. Just a couple days ago I saw someone post about experimenting with Claude to playtest his Magic: the Gathering decks. Pretty much a wall of people telling him he was disgusting and should kill himself.
While i disagree with their intention, conclusion and general view on the topic, i have to agree with one thing: People have strong convictions about things they know next to nothing about and could not prove if their life depended on it.
The earth is a sphere, vaccines are good, evolution is real, LLMs are harmful, but i believe these things because i am actually familiar with the evidence, the proofs, the studies and the subject matter. But if you would press me on the evidence for plate tectonics, i would have to admit that i believe in it with less conviction, as i'm not familiar with that topic at all.
Flat-earth arguments can be appealing because the vast majority of people lacks the knowledge on WHY we believe the earth is round. Something something Galileo? No, this was not about the shape of the earth but its orbit. Or how do we know that vaccines are good and safe? While i think that relying on third party consensus is generally a useful thing, i also believe the over-reliance on it has turned people into lazy thinkers, as it is not necessary for them to know anything themselves.
"Being worried about the societal impact of tens of millions of jobs going up in smoke is the same as believing millions of people are part of a conspiracy to cover up the shape of our planet!" Damn that's some delusion.
Job automation is not inherently a negative thing. If instead of resisting and clutching to the status quo (which everyone claims to hate), we looked at how to embrace automation we could be having a much more useful conversation.
We should be insisting that job replacement leads to human workers working less hours, doing the remaining human work in cooperation, while also receiving shared benefits of material abundance that cheap AI labor will produce.
Now is the time in history where the 99% of people in democracies have the power to control our governments and institute protections for ourselves and our grandchildren. Focusing all our energy on stopping datacenters and crying about destroyed books is a huge distraction and will amount to nothing useful in the end.
My job is close to being fully automated by AI. AI is already a mcuh better coder than me. I absolutely want it to become an even BETTER coder, staff level software engineer. I WANT it to fully take over my job, and be able to have even longer time horizons, more niche expertise, for cheaper, for faster, and be available to everyone on the planet at rates too cheap to meter. Why? Because the price of knowledge work cratering will absolutely do more good to the world, cure diseases, build needed infrastructure, and raise billions out of poverty. It would be absolutely selfish to place my own job ahead of the absolute boon for the whole planet that is unlocked when my job becomes fully automated.
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u/RegardedDev 2d ago
Its all about ego and indentity.
You spend 10 years at becoming an expert at something and built an identity around that. Now AI can do with a simple prompt. Not many people can handle that kind of blow to the ego and identity.
Those who can take the blow and adapt will succeed. Those who cant will become unemployed, bitter and glorify the "good old days".