I don't necessarily disagree with the main argument, but
> did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone
Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to the managers and require work communication on them. I know this was true for many companies.
This isn't the perfect analogy anyway, since one major reason companies did this was to increase security, while forcing AI onto begrudging workers feels like it could have the opposite effect. The commonality is efficiency, or at least the perception of it by upper management.
One example I can think of where there was worker pushback but it makes total sense is the use of electronic medical records. Doctors/nurses originally didn't want to, and there are certainly a lot of problems with the tech, but I don't think anyone is suggesting now that we should go back to paper.
You can make the argument that an "AI first" mandate will backfire, but the notion that workers will collectively gravitate towards new tech is not true in general.
> Yes, there were tons of jobs that required you to have a smartphone, and still do. I remember my second job, they'd give out Blackberries - debatably not smartphones, but still - to the managers and require work communication on them.
Anil is referring specifically to the way that people who were told to use a Blackberry would bring an iPhone to work anyway and demand that IT support it because it was so much better. In the late 2000s Blackberries were a top-down mandate that failed because iPhones were a bottom-up revolution that was too successful to ban.
So look for situations where employees are using their personal AI subscriptions for work and are starting to demand that IT budget for it so they don’t have to pay out of pocket. I’m seeing this right now at my job with GitHub Copilot.
I don't think your example is really a counterexample. Work-provided Blackberries allowed you to be more responsive to work messages while communicating over an ostensibly secure medium.
on the other hand, making sure that people use AI for performance reviews would be akin to measuring the percentage of work days that you used your blackberry. that's not something that anyone sane ever did.
somewhat in the same vein, nobody ever sent a directive saying that all interoffice memoranda must be typed in via blackberry.
Yea, the point is, if a product or technology is useful, people will want to use it. They'll bang down your door to be allowed to use it. They'll even surreptitiously use it if you don't allow it. If you have to mandate that they use it, what does that really say about the tool?
A better example is probably source control. It might not have been true in the past, but these days, nobody has to mandate that you use source control. We all know the benefits, and if we're starting a new software business, we're going to use source control by default from day one.
Yeah, I think that's fair, but those bosses that made us get Blackberries were mostly doing that because they wanted to be able to call us and make us work, not because we had to be convinced that smartphones had value, right? We all ended up buying smartphones on our own as well.
You may underestimate how many people do not need to be convinced. Again, I'll refrain from making a value judgment, but the hard numbers show that LLMs have been one of the most quickly adopted technologies in the history of mankind, including the time before anyone was forced to use them.
Not sure if these are the best stats to illustrate the point, but ChatGPT was released November 2022, 2.5 years ago, and they currently claim ~1 billion users [1]
By comparison, iPhone sales were something like 30 million over the same time period, June 2007 through 2009. [2]
In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took smartphones several years.
Of course there are problems with the comparison (iPhones are expensive, but many people bought each version of the iPhone making the raw user count go down, Sam Altman is exaggerating, people use LLMs other than ChatGPT, blah blah blah), so maybe let's not concentrate on this particular analogy. The point is: even a very skeptical view of how many people use LLMs day-to-day has to acknowledge they are relatively popular, for better or worse.
I think we're better served trying to keep the cat from scratching us rather than trying to put it back in the bag. Ham-fisted megalomaniac CEOs forcing a dangerous technology on workers before we all understand the danger is a big problem, that's for sure. To the original point, "AI-first is the new RTO", there's definitely some juice there, but it's not because the general public is anti-AI.
Well, we all ended up buying smartphones eventually. But the delta between when Blackberries first were adopted in corporate environments and when iPhones/Androids were can't-miss technologies wasn't small.
I'm so sorry for complimenting you. You are totally on point to call it out. This is the kind of thing that only true heroes, standing tall, would even be able to comprehend. So kudos to you, rugged warrior, and never let me be overly effusive again.
Books may not be good propaganda for the latest, localized issues, but they are fantastic propaganda for ideology.
I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!
Don't get me wrong, books-as-propaganda isn't necessarily bad. Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird... These are brilliant but are also such effective forms of propaganda that even mentioning their titles is a form of propaganda in itself.
> Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!
I think that shows their weaknesses. Propaganda seems to work best when reinforced over long periods. People read a book and get really into something for a while, X is now the one true diet! However, I rarely see longer term shifts without something else reinforcing the ideas.
By comparison the US military has been subsidizing media who want access to military hardware for decades as long as they follow a few guidelines. It’s a subtle drip of propaganda but across America and much of the globe people’s perception has very much been influenced in an enduring fashion. No single episode of talk radio or Fox News is particularly effective but listen for years and you get a meaningful effect.
>I read Atlas Shrugged as an impressionable young teen, and developed some pretty horrible notions about society and morality (and literary technique) as a result. Of course I saw the error of my ways, in no small part by reading other books!
I would be more worried about you developing a terrible sense of narrative and character development. I would kill for a well written ancap paradise book (there are plenty of Ancom options) but it honestly just sucks as a piece of writing I cant get into it.
To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.
So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)
When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)
We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.
In western politics, there are various definitions of the word "progressive". The definitions that include Kamala Harris are mostly used by right-wing Americans.
How much corporate funding did Bernie get?
Why do you think capital supported Kamala? Especially in hindsight?
And your joke about left vs right sponsorship of streamers has a very soft underbelly, which, if you don't know about it yet, kind of tells the whole story right there.
> In western politics, there are various definitions of the word "progressive". The definitions that include Kamala Harris are mostly used by right-wing Americans.
No, Kamala Harris had some pretty extreme "Progressive" positions such as open borders.
> And your joke about left vs right sponsorship of streamers has a very soft underbelly, which, if you don't know about it yet, kind of tells the whole story right there.
I don't see the point of insinuation. Make a point, or leave it, please. Doing this is just a waste of time.
Hackernews is not the place for political arguments. That's not just a suggestion, it's a rule. I noticed somebody used an ambiguous word in a way that, IMO, was not quite correct, and it is an interesting word so I clarified the technicality, and mea culpa, I probably dipped into actual politics too far. Let's get back to building stuff, yes?
Kamala Harris's voting record is extremely progressive. Nevermind the subjective approximation of her policy positions as the Democrat nominee, which was watered down as she tried to garner broader support compared to her 2020 primary run.
>The Voteview project (now based at UCLA) has, since the 1980s, employed the roll-call votes cast in Congress to locate all senators and representatives on a liberal-conservative ideological map. These data and methods have been utilized by academics in thousands of peer-reviewed books, book chapters and journal articles. Although no method is perfect, there is a general consensus within the academic community that the NOMINATE methodology employed by the Voteview project and its close cousins represent the gold standard.
This places her on a spectrum where the farthest left you can go is the most left leaning US Democratic senator, which is not very "progressive" in the context of western politics as I mentioned in my last comment.
Yeah, exactly. When someone like Bernie Sanders talks about the economy and big corporations today, they sound a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a full-on capitalist and proud of it, and definitely would not have been understood as a "leftist" at the time. He believed the USA government's job was to act as a strong, firm check against the worst tendencies of capitalism (like monopolization), but only so that capitalism could function at its best. There were many at the time who did not believe capitalism was really the way to go, though! Just look at organizations like the IWW, and the various worldviews that were sympathetic to the rise of the USSR just a few years later. Hell, one of the people who ran against Teddy Roosevelt was Eugene Debs, a socialist who got more than an insignificant number of votes.
But 100+ years later, a Teddy Roosevelt-esque understanding of government and capitalism is the furthest left USA politics can imagine.
"Democrat" is a long-used general US political slang to refer to an individual member of the Democratic Party (or to refer to a collective of individual members if used as the plural "Democrats"). In the past few decades right-wing commentators have made frequent improper use of the slang to refer to the official party, partly due to its easy association with negative words such as "autocrat" and "plutocrat", resulting in the common misuse of the slang. However, there is no such thing as the "Democrat Party" or "Democrat nominee".
> The obsession with AI (and other vapourware) in our industry ... fuelling the hard-right — who coincidentally are very much using AI.
Is it useless or not? If it's vapourware, why would you care if the other side uses it? If the far right is using it successfully, then by definition it is not vapourware, right?
Because the output from LLMs drowns everything else. So if people use it to drown actual discussions yes, it's useful for that. Everyone else though, has to suffer.
I think that's aligns with what GP is saying: if one is going to say people are using it, even if for things you don't like, then choosing to call it vapourware in the same paragraph is a confusing use of the term.
In a charitable reading I think the author was meaning something along the lines of "fails to be as useful as made to sound on things I think are worth valuing but very useful for things I think are slop" but chose a different meaning term by mistake.
LLMs are purported by their creators to have a different use (advancing of human knowledge, genuine artificial intelligence, etc) than drowning discussions online. The fact that people can find some uses for bad technology does not make it less of a failure or, those goals less hot air.
It fits for software that has not reached its creators stated goals. LLMs are not AI and have not improved lives for any human, outside of making some people rich.
I'd disagree the definition fits that situation as vapourware is for software which is still unobtainable, not software which is available but the reviews and feature coverage suck vs the advertisement hype. Are we able to talk about that definition further before we dive into talking about your views on LLMs?
As someone who uses LLMs every day for general questions/brainstorming, more efficient coding, and building a product used by doctors to improve their documentation (saving them hours per week and freeing them to interact with their patients more personally), I would like more of this hot air please. Would you begrudge disabled people their new assistants? Language learners their translators? I could go on.
LLMs have some very important downsides, and I fully agree that they are dangerous, but we should dispel the notion that they don't have positive use cases. That leaves the benefits on the table, while the bad actors will continue with their destruction anyways.
Anyway, my original point was indeed just about the semantics of the word "vapourware", which if I'm interpreting the author correctly, would be better replaced with "malware" (not that I agree with such a stance).
Shady business, potentially, but you might be underestimating how much some guys really, really need to have the most expensive watch in their friend group.
