I find it interesting how this is almost the “democratization” you mentioned that AI provides. While AI “democratizes” certain technical ability, in some ways the democratization of things can actually be bad, in that this “democratization” pushes us towards a system in which people are completely fungible, and so lose their individual bargaining capability. By democratizing this ability to the non-technical middle manager, the junior software engineer ends up losing their unique contribution and hence vote.

I read a while ago about boycotting AI if you can, and I would love to, but this issue makes me wonder if that could even be effective. If the goal is to remove every unique contribution you provide, what can you take away with a boycott?

In the data I've seen, the US and European countries have a more negative view of AI than China and developing countries. Doesn't that fly in the face of the premise here that only people that have economic security support AI?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/survey-how-21-countries-vie...

https://www.ipsos.com/en/conflicting-global-perceptions-arou...

https://www.mexc.com/news/161986

I think that there is a misconception about what money is. It is a vector of value, and value comes from the work of the people. If less people can work, this will lead to deflation, something that capitalists would avoid. But remember that AI is hardware and energy, and that requires more workers. Your token price pays for electricity and hardware GPUs -- only marginally for AI science. Sure, developers have to be more like architects than code monkeys, but I am not sure if it is a bad thing.

Also, I have this contrarian view that the LLM tech will now plateau. They are not a path to AGI. Look at how they work, and you'll understand that they are unable to innovate. Models are like a compressed version of Internet knowledge, and that's what they are spitting out. That's already pretty good. But I don't think that we'll see another leapfrog innovation on LLMs anytime soon. After all, OpenAI happened by accident.

In the future, we will all have today's frontier AI on our laptop to automate our lives. There are still many things to invent out there, and I see LLMs more like an enabler than a competitor.

It has really left a bad taste (to say it politely) seeing people I consider colleagues, friends, leaders support something like this. These people would spend hours/days/weeks designing systems reasoning through tradeoffs and yet for something like this they can't spend even two seconds thinking through what it all leads to.

The usual justification is "someone using AI will replace you". I wonder if they can actually think through that for more than a few iterations. You can visualize for-loops and recursion in your head but you can't visualize what a few iterations of "someone using AI will replace you" _actually_ means?

My usual go to line is: "I will see you in the breadlines of the future comrade. At least one of us will have their head held up a little bit higher."

"Implications Of Predicting The Next Token"

https://minihf.com/posts/2026-05-07-implications-of-predicti...

In what way is this different to electricity?

LLMs can both help you advance your knowledge and do your homework (preventing you from learning).

I think about a related question pretty often: What proportion of people working at these companies are "true believers", that their work will be a net benefit for humanity? And for those people (if they are at all numerous), how do they plan to fight back against the obvious harms that are already occurring?

I just can't imagine working at one of these companies without hating myself. But I suppose with what they're being paid, they can afford a very good therapist...

Here's the RIGHT mental model of the people the author is talking about.

1. If AI is good enough that it can boost productivity by 20% then it is good for society in general because the gains will be redistributed (as it has always been). So even if it is ME who is getting laid off, I will still say it is still good for society because that's how progress happens - by breaking eggs to make omelettes

2. If AI is so good that it can replace full professions altogether like Mathematics, it is a profound joyful moment for humanity. What better thing can happen to the curious ones amongst us to get an oracle that can answer every question? Why does the author seem to scoff at this?

3. If AI is so good that it is a complete superset of humans itself, it is much much more profound moment when civilisation will be changed in ways that English doesn't even have the vocabulary to describe. It can't be stopped nor is it clear that it should.

The author is in curious and has a bad mental model of the people they are describing. They say it is a "class" issue and bring old outdated Marxist terminology to prop up their weak argument.

Or it will turn out we no longer need middle managers because of AI.

Side note: I am pretty sure most companies could fire 50% of middle management and see a dramatic productivity improvement. With or without AI.

No those are just marketing slogans. The founding tenet of AI is to best match next token according to a reward model.

Yes there are people making stupid claims on all sides. Attributing phrasing like solved or cooked is as if it is some sort of fanatic specific jargon simply ignores the terminology of different groups of people. I don't use cooked myself, but I am not so ignorant of the younger generation that is see it is just another in the long line of terms like sick, bogus, hip, radical, macaroni, etc.

The author plays the trick of flipping the situation from stochastic parrots or next token prediction. Those are "taken as pejorative" whereas cooked and solved "to signal"

The flip is done to place the fault on the other party. You could equally uncharitably say that invoking next token prediction or stochastic parrots is signalling, whereas AI skeptics take terms like cooked as pejorative.

Specifically on the topic of next token prediction, we are already past that phase. Even then I don't think that a model trained by prediction has the limitations that people think it does. As a thought terminating cliche it is simply obsolete when models are trained on reinforcement techniques where there is no template next word to predict. Diffusion models don't even have an autoregressive nature.

I am not terribly fond of the claims made by people at the extremes of any particular to issue. We can perhaps try debating the facts of the matter rather than assuming the internal thoughts of people who might disagree with you.

I generally do not attribute malice to people who describe models as next word predictors. Most are simply uninformed and if you query what their understanding is of a model then you see that what they are imagining is a Markov chain. Investigating if their imagined model could correctly use "an" before "alligator" but obviously not choosing an animal beginning with a vowel just because it had just said "an" often leads them to think that there's more going on than just the next word.

"Inevitable"

I don't know why the author is so surprised people want freedom from others. We're the original bullshit machines, and with every useful invention, an additional chunk of utter snakeoil is snuffed out. We're not particularly reliable either. In an old post I can't find for example, I remarked how people can apparently do figure out how to document and coach properly, as long as the target is an LLM, not a human. Suddenly the limits and importance of attention, contextualization, clarity, working memory size, etc. are not so elusive and debatable after all.

I'm sure I need not to remind the author of the "certainty of steel" quote, as ironic as that'd be for an indeed inherently stochastic system. A parrot though, I'm not so sure. "Not sure" why the author feels compelled to conditionally deny it is absolutely meant to be pejorative either.

One does not need to be blind to the mentioned prospective pitfalls either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196923

> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.

Does that apply to medical advances too? e.g. antibiotics, vaccines, etc. too? We are living longer today thanks to advances in science and technology. Not just the people at the top; but also the peopl at the bottom rungs. Most scientific research does not take into account who the beneficiaries of that research would be.

This may be the promise of the American dream, but it's not the promise of "capitalism". Capitalism promises nothing to the individual. Capitalism means putting machines to work, and using as few people as possible, paying them as little as possible, to operate them. In that sense, AI is capitalists' wet dream: all machines and no people.

The comments on this page so far seem to agree that it all will happen like this. I have doubts. What I see mostly is slop. Slop can replace bullshit jobs, but the point of bullshit jobs is not to produce bullshit, it is to employ people. There is no point in having bullshit jobs done by machines. For the non-bullshit jobs (of which, yes, there may be fewer than we think), slop won't cut it.