The HN crowd is going to hate this article, but I think it's an important discussion to have.
I'd like to challenge the crowd here to think about this from a different perspective. Let's assume you aren't interested in spreading propaganda to promote a certain piece of technology. Consider that you aren't in control of people's opinions.
This is like a UX issue. It doesn't matter if you think the login button should be in the bottom left, if the users want it to be in the top right, you put it there.
So consider this QA feedback for the technology. How do you make people not feel this way about it? Go do that.
It's a new disruptive technology that has been around for 3 years, people will just stop caring about this as a topic with time. Right now it's just trendy and zeitgeisty to shit on AI, eventually people will get bored and move on to something else.
No matter how hard you try you can't keep the fire of hatred alive for very long.
On Android there is an option called "Bluetooth tethering - Share phone's internet connection via Bluetooth" . If it is On and you are connected to the car's bluetooth it will have internet access via your phone.
I'm suspicious that the car's system can do this. I don't think we should be assuming your car can tether internet through bluetooth until we see someone snoop Toyota-bound traffic being routed through their phone.
I have a 2025 Renault 4 etech and I frequently enable bluetooth thethering so I can access Spotify, HBO etc via the in car entertainment system (It runs a flavour of Android called OpenR Link) , not via android auto. Though I frequently need to enable the bluetooth tethering setting on the phone before the profile can be activated via the cars paired devices menu (where you can select other profiles such as Audio, calling, etc)
While the car has a sim card already, I can't use it for general purpose apps without a subscription. Only updates, remote control and I suppose telemetry.
I usually opt for choosing a bluetooth tether instead of wifi since I already establish a connection for calls, or music / audio books.
It isn't hard to imagine Android being able to transmit vehicle telemetry via the same means.
If AI works you'll be able to make more stuff with fewer people. While that could lead to unemployment historically it's not gone that way. You get more stuff.
Like agricultural employment has gone from ~70% to ~2% but the people who would have dug potatoes make cars, houses, aircraft and the like.
That's quite an unsubstantiated leap. The world has gone through plenty of digital transformations and the number of people in poverty has only _shrank_.
It's hard not to make that leap when so many layoffs are (according to PR releases anyway) attributed to AI adoption. Even if the reality on the ground is that many of these workforce reductions are to make the balance sheets look better (presumably as a bet on AI), it's impossible to ignore the accelerating wealth gap, especially in the context of the gutting of regulations and state actors leveraging world events on prediction markets. We will not be given a fair deal if we simply wait for our benefactors to provide one.
In particular, CS students are feeling it more than most majors. (Especially compared with the shock that most of them probably thought CS was the field for job security.)
Saw an article recently that said CS majors were up there with performing arts majors and art history majors in terms of unemployment rate.
Yes, but during those transformations, the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ.
You can't have it both ways: either LLMs are an amazing, revolutionary technology that can replace many human jobs in unprecedented ways, or it's going to be a mild transition that really only helps people.
> the CEOs of the companies selling the products involved weren't actively and aggressively marketing them as being able to replace all the humans they employ
The assembly line was explicitly about replacing skilled with relatively unskilled labor.
That was exactly what a great many things were marketed as, such as the jacquard loom and dynamite.
What actually happened in each case was that employment went up for a good long while, as the efficiency boost to the sectors touched made investment far more viable. Eventually successive rounds of automation did reduce employment in each of weaving and mining, but it wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as initially advertised or feared.
It isn't the first time a new technology has been pitched to replace many worker's jobs, both successful and unsuccessful versions of the promise have come to pass several times.
I think what they are saying is "that something can replace a job does not inherently imply the next step is poverty". From that perspective, you can absolutely have it both (and many other combinations of) ways.
At this point money is essentially a social construct. None of the billionaires have a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins.
Think ST:TNG; automation makes enough stuff. Why worry about money?
So focus on political action then; log off this VC funded freebie intended to ameliorate your feelings about the rich owners and operators of this site, and do like they do; tell government to make things right by you or we replace government.
You think PG is sitting on the sidelines letting Congress figure out themselves? He's putting his thumb on the scale through his actions through social networking with politicians.
Gotta leave the basement and do the work
Americans are heavily propagandized and naive af. So exhausted by educated morons.
Quality standards benefit the buyers, who on the face of it are corporations replacing representative's constituents with capital investments not made in their districts, not the constituents themselves. I would expect there to be support for limiting quality somehow, maybe by enforcing copyright law (actually legal training datasets are a lot harder to obtain). Regulatory burdens do obstruct commercial investment, but the burden primarily falls on small participants who in the AI market are far from posing a threat to employment. Only the largest firms can threaten the wage and salary model of organization.
> You want people to stick to social norms, call it both ways
Oh, I downvoted both of you. But I only flagged you because of the name calling, which is against the guidelines [1]. When I flag I like to give the person on the other side a note, in case they genuinely didn’t know.
But go ahead and commit to the dogma money must continue to exist even though the financial system is merely a socialized ethno object not immutable physics.
I forget my lived experience is atypical among engineers. Before getting an EE degree (which I have not leveraged in over a decade tbf) I worked to live in ruralandia fixing old tractors electrical issues for poor farmers (which turned me on to EE), building barns, homes, rebuilding cars, growing crops, slaughtering livestock for food. I also play 3 musical instruments fluently.
I have a shit ton of experience and muscle memory for doing without money. Get good scrub?
Do not put all your eggs in a single skills basket.
End of day you aren't in a soup kitchen feeding the hungry and exploiting child labor to avoid sewing a shirt. I guess you get what you give, right?
:shrug:
Guess you all should not have ignored politics this entire time. Live and learn.
The number of people in absolute poverty has shrunk, but the proportion of national income held by the wealthy has increased, so economic mobility is declining. There are many reasons for this, but typically deployment of technology is a capital expense and employers aim to realize all the gains from their investment, notwithstanding the upskilling and/or deskilling effect it has on workers, who are treated as fungible economic units rather than people. Nobody likes this except capitalists.
Unemployment rampant. All production remains in the hands of a few. All power (tokens) remains in the hands of a few. Goods are cheaper but no one can buy them. Path to the upper class now guarded closely by tokens, potential avenues for entrepreneurs diminish rapidly. Own an AI or compute, get someone to give you tokens, or live in poverty.
Distribution of abundance in current time is close to evil, America reducing entitlements and support (not expanding). Rampant waste. No reason to think any of this will change.
I'm confused. It seems the parent comment is saying AI proliferation could make cost of goods drop orders of magnitude and you say it's detached from reality because people don't want goods, they want housing food and gas?
Yes they said "relative superabundance". Relative to history there is an abundance of most good and services (including food and housing).
As a Gen Z or Gen A I'm sure it doesn't feel this way, but that's mostly because they are comparing themselves to what they see on social media instead of comparing themselves to how people actually lived 100 years ago, or how people in developing nations lived 20 years ago.
I think point the OP was making is that as we grow abundance people will still be miserable because as expectations rise satisfaction falls. Also most people are susceptible to envy, and the more stuff there is the more statistically likely it is to be distributed unevenly.
Even if the average person's circumstances improve objectively from generation to generation, people's 's instinct are to fixate on the parts of their lives theyre unsatisfied with and to compare themselves with others who are better off - leading to subjective misery.
> Cost of goods and services drops by orders of magnitude at every point in the supply chain.
That sounds great, but how are LLMs supposed to achieve this? You can't just say "AI will make a utopia". You have to present a vision for how it will get us there.
I'm tired of hearing about how AI will solve all the worlds problems. I want to see actual progress towards achieving these goals. And for the most part that hasn't manifested. Most people would consider AI to have had a net negative impact on their lives.
How? The biggest cost of most products comes down to energy cost and the profit margins of each proccess and middleman. Actual labor costs are already a pretty small portion of most products and even if you mine and smelt twice as much material per worker with AI somehow, that is at best a few percentage off the final price. And adding in AI processing isn't going to reduce energy costs or increases wages.
> would 100% expect a commencement speaker to be hyping me up
That’s what this speaker was trying to do. The problem is it was stupid and dishonest. It could have been done properly. But none of that will rise to the level of a roadmap. If you’re looking for a roadmap at commencement, you were failed at multiple steps before.
The funny thing is that it's not even true. People invested in AI just glee at the thought of common men in abject poverty, so this is the marketing that stuck.
Shows you don't need to have red skin and horns to delight in the suffering of starving people.
How is a ruling in a civil court not a form of government prosecution? It would be more correct to say that your first amendment rights stop at defaming others.
The state enforces property rights too. Let's say someone won't let me build a place of worship on their land. Is that a "first amendment violation but with more steps"?
You could make any instance of "government upholds the law" into "constitutional violation" that way.
A ruling in a civil court is very obviously not a prosecution. Because prosecutors can't, by definition, make rulings.
Laws that force the government to violate the constitution are unconstitutional. So yes, a violation but with more steps.
A ruling in a civil court that is enforced by a government is the same thing as the government ruling it, but through transitive properties. It can't be not enforced and enforced at the same time (the argument that civil is somehow not judicial).
In reality we are just griping that our government is too pussy to amend the constitution, and we've already written laws that subvert it, and those are being upheld by a corrupt/politicized supreme court and bullshit case law.
If I were to bring a civil suit against you because the comment above offended my sensibilities, it would be quickly thrown out of court because it is your first amendment right to say anything you like, with certain exceptions that the government recognizes as limitations of this right.
Even though this is a civil matter, it is still a judgement on government law. This is not some contract dispute where the parties are simply seeking arbitration, with no government involvement except as a "service provider" for this arbitration.
Alex Jones will not have a criminal record as a result of this. He has not been declared as committing a crime.
He did take actions that, by civil law, created civil liabilities. He was sued over those liabilities. He failed to participate in the civil litigation process and lost badly as a result.
Civil and criminal law are not the same thing and your insistence otherwise doesn't change the reality.
Civil and criminal law are separate things, absolutely. But the first ammendment applies to both civil and criminal law - it is a limitation on the government's ability to create laws, not just a limitation on the government's ability to pursue criminal penalties.
Alex Jones is only liable because there exists a law that the government created that says that defamation is illegal. Since this is a law, it could have been in conflict with the first ammendment - and, in fact, there have been legal challenges on this very line that reached the SC. But the Supreme Court has found that this is an acceptable limitation on the first amendment rights, with the specific limitations.
But, for example, if the US government wanted to adopt the English law on defamation, it would not be constitutional in the USA, it would run foul of the first ammendment.
> But the Supreme Court has found that this is an acceptable limitation on the first amendment rights, with the specific limitations.
Right, and I think this example is more about maintaining a civil society than it is strictly about freedom of speech. I think it's pretty clear to say that "freedom of speech" has limitations, making the word "freedom" contextually debatable.
What happens if you don't pay your civil liabilities? Civil vs criminal is a silly distinction when it comes to discussing right suppression. Jail time is not the only way to suppress a right.
You go to jail for failure to abide by a court order. Which is still distinct from going to jail for your speech.
Alex Jones can continue to say whatever he wants, from a criminal perspective. He may be somewhat more aware of the potential costs of being a professional liar now, which might cause him to make different decisions as he analyzes the cost/benefit ratio for something he wants to say.
The government won't stop him from saying whatever he chooses to say. The government might enforce costs, should he be sued for what he says and is found liable.
This is not how freedom of speech works. The civil or criminal nature of any law limiting speech is irrelevant. What is relevant is if a law limiting speech is narrow enough and if it serves a purpose that is aligned with the constitution. Anti-defamation laws clearly do serve such a prupsoe (they limit only specific types of speech that is not of public interest, and they exist to protect the victim's constitutional rights where they conflict with the a user's free speech right), so they are compatible with the first amendment, and would have still been if they added criminal penalties and not just civil effects.
The government/congress/states can't make a law or regulation that says "you have a right to never hear anyone signing in the rain". Even if such a law somehow passes, when you bring a civil suit against someone singing in the rain because you claim they violated your right (enshrined in this law) to not hear such singing, you will lose your case, as the law you based it on infringes on the first amendment rights of the singer.
Note that things would be very different if, instead of a law, you had a HOA which enacted a rule saying "singing in the rain is not allowed on the premises; violators will be fined 1000$". Assuming any signage about this is clear enough and so on, you could be forced in court to pay such a fine to the HOA, and may even end up doing jail time if you refuse even after losing a lawsuit with the HOA. The first amendment is a limitation of the state's ability to create laws, it doesn't limit private entities from limiting speech, nor the government's ability to enforce property rights behind such an ability.
> What is relevant is if a law limiting speech is narrow enough and if it serves a purpose that is aligned with the constitution. Anti-defamation laws clearly do serve such a prupsoe (they limit only specific types of speech that is not of public interest, and they exist to protect the victim's constitutional rights where they conflict with the a user's free speech right
I'm sorry, is there something in the constitution that gives you the right to not be defamed?
> is there something in the constitution that gives you the right to not be defamed
Have you considered that there's a significant cultural difference between you and the framers of the Constitution?
Those guys were mostly "gentlemen" in the 18th and 19th century sense. Lying, sullying someone's good name, and otherwise dragging them into disrepute was decidedly "ungentlemanly" conduct. I don't think most of them would consider it "free speech" that could pass without censure, no matter what the text of the constitution said. Let's not forget Alexander Hamilton died in a duel because of some words he didn't even recall saying.
> The government won't stop him from saying whatever he chooses to say. The government might enforce costs, should he be sued for what he says and is found liable.
IANAL but I think of a civil suit as a substitute for the injured party extracting justice by less civilized methods. If you wreck my fence, I can come wreck your fence in retaliation. Or I can sue you. The government is only providing the venue for resolving the dispute.
Now in reality there are political and other influences on court behavior. But the government is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant.
This is only part of civil law. Civil law also governs numerous government regulations as well. If you're fined for illegal parking, that happens in a civil court too - but it's still a suit between you and the state. Even in your example of a destroyed fence, the reason you can bring such a suit in court is that there are state or federal laws that I broke by destroying your fence. If such laws didn't exist, a judge would not help you.
What you're thinking more of is contract law - where two parties go before a judge simply to adjudicate a matter that is entirely of their own invention. If we had signed a contract that said I can touch your fence but in touching it I left a hand print on it, I might think the contract allowed me to do so, while you may think that the hand print constitutes wrecking your fence, and we can go before a judge to decide and enforce said decision. The judge then won't look at any state/federal laws, they will look only at the terms of our contract (assuming the contract itself doesn't violate any laws, of course).
> The government is only providing the venue for resolving the dispute.
The government provides the venue, the decider, the rules of engagement, and enforces the decision. The government stands on the side of the plaintiff, ready to turn the resolution (that the government decided) into the same result as if it were law.
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