It’s sad that we ended up here. I can’t fathom that young people aren’t excited about technology anymore.
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
The reality of the world faced by today's 21 year old college grad is completely unlike the world graduates went into 20 years ago.
Would you be excited about technology when it appears based on their stated intentions and revealed track record over the past 15 years of your young life that those driving it fully intend to use it to disenfranchise you further, not empower you?
Funny, I don't feel "disenfranchised" by AI. If you do, well... in the words of the other Steve, you're holding it wrong.
The only thing that's really being enfranchised by AI is my stock portfolio.
I was promised cancer cures and longevity medicine but all I got is a way bigger workload for the same pay.
401k has never been better though. College grads don't have one yet so I can see why they're grumpy.
Nor do I, but the loudest voices in public have spent the past 4 years telling anyone with a microphone that white collar work is dead. How would you expect that to make a new graduate feel?
> But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
> What have we done?
Arguably this transition happened a lot earlier; the first half of the 20th century was the time for pure techno-optimism, then somewhere between nuclear weapons, global warming, and reporting like The Silent Spring people realized that there were downsides. Medicine had its peak with antibiotics, the edge blunted by the thalidomide disaster, and now sits in a complex web of paranoia and propaganda.
It's not enough for technology to be "cool" in an apolitical vacuum. People have to believe that there will be benefits for them. And the big pitch from the AI companies is the "great replacement" of all white collar jobs with AI. No wonder they're upset.
Modernity is soulless for the most part. Social media, the 24/7 news cycle, unaccountable mega-corps, the list goes on. I suspect people are tired of the constant psychic damage you endure for just trying to exist in 2026.
you are so starry-eyed about what the tech can do that you're missing the societal impact
it's like marveling at the wonders of nuclear fission (truly a marvel) and wondering why people are angry about a nuclear arms race that has literally put us one button press away from global destruction
I have noticed a certain personality gloms onto AI and unlike other technologies, it is so easy old people and the technologically illiterate can do it! In fact, old people and morons seem to love it. And it gets annoying really fast. The same people who were web 3, crypto, block chain, nft bros are the biggest supporters of AI. Utility or not when scammy people act the same way as they did for all the other tech trends it is a massive turnoff. I am tired of seeing AI writing and AI images, and instead of people talking about how we are going to use AI to make people’s lives better the only thing people can talk about is how much money some tech bros are going to make and how everyone else is going to lose their jobs because we won’t need them anymore. And your idiot friend from HS has an awesome business idea, which amounts to AI art on a t shirt or AI youtube videos and just needs you to be in on it with them to actually do the work like they are selling Amway.
I think the problem AI has is after the novelty wears off, and if you are not using it for code specifically, it is mostly just a fancy search engine that the dumbest person you know uses to validate their idiocy.
Hopefully people are understanding that technology, no matter how cool, does not exist in a vacuum. Technology is defined by who controls it, how it’s used, and what power it enables them to wield. Those concerns are far more important to society than how neat the tech is.
An obvious example is nuclear weapons. Amazing science, incredible engineering, awe-inspiring power. But I doubt you would make the same critiques of people who were anxious about the world they create. A world in which MAD exists is fundamentally different than one where it doesn’t.
Regarding your grandfather, it’s a pretty well-supported hypothesis that younger generations are less happy and more depressed because of technology from the very industry pushing AI onto them! Why should you expect them to be excited about a new world-changing tool from the same set of companies that brought them an infinite doom-scrolling feed of self-doubt, the increased polarization of politics, the viral spread of conspiracy theories, and a higher rate of youth and teen suicide than ever before?
Technology isn’t fundamentally good or bad, but it can have very negative impacts on society. It seems like people are catching on to that fact.
I was inspired by technology when I was young, but not anymore. When I was young it felt like the tech industry was about empowering human beings - Steve Jobs liked to say that a computer was like a bicycle for the mind. Today it feels like the tech industry is about wonton destruction ("move fast and break things") for the purposes of making a tiny number of people fantastically wealthy.
I'm aware that Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cannot imagine him complaining about how he had to miss some great parties so he could spend the weekend taking food and medicine away from the world's poorest children (as Elon Musk did during his DOGE phase). The ethos was just completely different.
If you’re still writing things like this you are stupid or willfully ignorant. All the boomers at work expose similar opinions and it’s because when the younger generation tries to explain why they feel this way, the boomers stick their fingers in their ears and start yelling.
No, young people do not have to be optimistic. They have to think with their own brain, and form their own opinions.
People in the 1980s were optimistic in technology because they didn’t have the chance to see the social upheaval that youth in the 2020s have grown with. Only a complete idiot would remain steadfastly optimistic after seeing what the rise of the internet, social media and mass surveillance has done in the name of this promised technological utopia. Only the sociopath would tell a young person to happily embrace AI in the worst economy in decades while headlines about AI-related job losses are everyday news.
Blind faith in anything leads to terrible outcomes, and that includes technology.
People are not excited because those companies blatantly disgregard the law, exploit and fuck people over and try to concentrate as much power as possible in their hands. Young people are not stupid, they can see that the increasing wealth gap makes their lives suck more. And they also understand that AI is a hypercapitalistic tool, that, if left unchecked, will only accelerate this trend.
So yes, that kind of curbs the enthusiasm, doesn't it?
> People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
I was saying he had nothing, not even shoes (and people now have plenty).
This shouldn't be hard. It's truly basic text comprehension.
It's starting to look more and more to me as if conscious is just an illusion that we ourselves perceive.
There is nothing fundamental about it, just an artefact of a certain style of computing as perceived by the reasoner itself.
We look at the current llms and because we see them for how they are fundamentally operating we assume they can't be "conscious" but we really don't even know what conscious is. The only people in the world that know ANYTHING about conscious are anaesthesiologist - they know how to turn it off and on again. What does that even tell you about conscious?
We don't really have a good way to measure whether something has consciousness. Heck, we have pretty limited ways of testing how "intelligent" non-human animals are (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind_in_animals).
With that said, just because we don't have a great way of measuring it doesn't mean that we should assume LLMs are intelligent. An LLM is code and a massive collection of training weights. It has no means of observing and reasoning about the world, doesn't store memories the same way that organic brains do (and is in fact quite limited in this aspect). It currently isn't able to solve a problem it hasn't encountered in its training data, or produce novel research on a topic without significant handholding. Furthermore, the frequent errors made by it suggests that it fundamentally does not understand the words that it spits out.
Not really sure what you mean by your anesthesiology comment. Being able to intubate and inject propofol does not make you more of an expert on consciousness than neuroscientists and neurologists.
I didn't say we should assume LLMs are intelligent.
In fact I always thought they weren't because they only "forward pass".
But then they came up with the whole "Reasoning model" paradigm and that contains obvious feedback loops. So now just throw my hands in the air because I think no one really knows or can tell for sure. We are all clueless here.
You can only be certain you perceive it and you can't be certain others perceive it (or if others exist at all of course).
The only thing you can really tell is "I perceive myself in some sort of feedback loop manner".
Which to me it even sounds like it has "arisen" from underlying mechanisms.
We can't even tell about the feedback loop. LLMs shows why: we have no way of telling if our active memory is true or if the present moment I'd the only thing that have ever existed for us.
IMHO consciousness is just the ability to detect change. Everything can be calm and static, and then, suddenly, something changed. I think that is our capacity to notice that change that makes us conscious.
It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.
Indeed. Claude jammed DaisyUI into a vibe code weekend project when I wasn't looking, and I've actually been pretty happy with it even now that I have to code myself (AI starts to really suck ass for the last 20%, so I usually take over then, but love the bootstrapping and PoC-ness). Petal UI is usually my preference, though that's only on Elixir LiveView (but that's my stack of choice anyway)
are you seriously comparing AI to tulips? I don't even know what to say. Even if you are very bearish about the technology certainly you can't be this detached from base reality. Yet here we are
I was young once and naive, and I read a bunch of sci-fi. I could never have imagined having these LLMs or coding agents during my lifetime. Never. It was unthinkable to me that something like this could even happen.
And yet, here we are.
Even if you think it’s just a statistical trick, you should still be blown away.
You should also be optimistic, because that’s what we need young people for. We used to be able to convince young people to get on boats and migrate halfway around the world to die on some godforsaken land. Or get on boats and go fight some ideological war somewhere else (not saying that was a good thing). But now we can’t even get them excited about technology?
What have we done?
People used to have nothing. My grandfather got his first pair of shoes when he was 10 years old. Yet he was more joyful and positive than most people alive today.
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