<i>"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models."</i><p>Yes.<p>For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.
Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people than jobs for them. Gradually, more jobs for smart people were developed, but not until WWII did the demand start to exceed the supply. Hence the frantic technical training efforts of WWII and the following college boom. This was the golden age of upward mobility.<p>It's hard to imagine this today. Read novels from the 18th century to get a feel for it. See who's winning and who's struggling, who rises and who falls, and why. Jane Austen's novels are a good start.<p>The nerds didn't take over until very late in the 20th century. There were very few rich nerds until then. Computing was once a very tiny world. You could not get rich working for IBM. The ones who left and got rich were in sales.<p>So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.<p>That may be where we go once AI does the thinking. That's where we go when smarts are not a scarce resource.
> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.<p>This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write that subjugation of women is a "core value", simply because it has been for so many time periods.<p>> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality.<p>John Henry is not going to beat the steam shovel any time soon.<p>> For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly.<p>It's not an anomaly; rather, it's the other way round. These used to be highly specialized skills that carried significant status, and got democratized by mass education in the 20th century.<p>We're not prisoners of history. We don't have to go back to being serfs for the few people who own all the land, oil, food, energy, data centers, and operating systems. I hope.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do think that ingenuity, problem-solving, impulse control, and the ability to delay gratification and reach long-term goals have always been valuable skills.<p>You might still only be a farmer if you're smart, but you can at least be one of the more productive farmers with a more smoothly running farm.
I think you forgot discipline and long-term thinking in your core values. Even before high technology, there were things to plan and resources to manage. Especially after the beginning of agriculture.
Can't say why but I enjoyed so much reading this comment
*Austen
These takes ignore how much more important critical thinking is becoming, as LLM's are clearly unreliable and prone to slop.
This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct.<p>The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.<p>That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can be reasonably mitigated. The equivalent position in 1920 would not be telling individuals "don't ever drive a car," but rather extrapolating critically about the negative social and environmental effects (many of which were predictable) and preventing the worst outcomes via policy.<p>But this requires understanding the actual limits and possibilities of the technology. In my opinion, it's important for technologists who actually see the downsides to stay aware and involved, and even be experts and leaders in the field. I want to be in a position to say "no" to the worst excesses of AI, from a position of credible authority.
> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society.<p>You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a <i>vast</i> net positive effect for everyone.
Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the climate effects.<p>The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.
I don't think it's fair to say suburbanization lead to isolation. I think factors like social media have had a much bigger impact.<p>It's not like you're living away from any people - you have 100 other neighbours living on your street!
I think a lot of it depends on personal opinions on what society <i>should</i> be like being treated like objective truths.
Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum.<p>Cars became a self-reinforcing <i>driver</i> of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).<p>In the car centric places, a few generations later they become an indelible aspect of nature. It is impossible for most people to imagine society working otherwise. And even when they do, the collective action problems are near insurmountable. The introduction of technology has irreversibly trapped us in a way of <i>thinking</i> we can't escape.<p>This is exactly the premise of the Amish religion. You must strictly control technology to create the society you want, not the other way around.
it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski
> Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).<p>Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:<p><pre><code> The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots
crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned
into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons
and presidents.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-paved-the-way-for-the-modern-highway-system" rel="nofollow">https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...</a>
The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.
Robustly advocating for your opinions is not an act of oppression.<p>The advocates of the automobile have been far, far more successful at shaping US society, laws, culture and our physical environment.<p>I imagine that’s also true in many other nations to a lesser extent.
It's the folks pushing cars that are both the most strident <i>and</i> the most successful at pushing their "obviously correct" way onto everyone, at least in the US.
“Anti-personal mobility” is beyond absurd, absolute loony-bin stuff.<p>“Anti-personal mobility advocates” do not exist. Transit advocates exist, and improvements in transit also massively benefit those who need to or prefer to drive.
Most motorists absolutely hate e-scooters and e-bikes. They hate them with a white-hot passion. You will never see more road rage than against a scooter when I ride it in a traffic lane. The scooter goes about 17mph, and with 3+ traffic lanes available to cars, they will pile up behind a scooter, scream out their open windows, honk and cut me off, and spit in my face: yes literally spit all over my face, because they hate personal mobility so much.<p>Motorists hate anything that isn't a car and is in their way. Motorists hate Critical Mass; they hate light rail or streetcars that hog their rights-of-way; they hate pedestrians (especially when pedestrians aren't wearing the right clothes); they hate Lyft, Uber, and Waymo especially; they hate big trucks and they hate Amish people with horse-drawn buggies.<p>Motorists will establish coalitions to vote against public transit measures in their home towns. They have come out in City Council and other public meetings, to protest and rail, so to speak, to rail against the expansion of light rail into their neighborhoods, because not only do they hate the construction, but they hate the "type of people" that light rail brings, and ultimately they hate the gentrification that comes from a fixed-route project that will ultimately close their shitty exploitive businesses and replace them with more elevated exploitation and richer moguls.
As someone who's canvassed on transit and bike mobility issues before, I think you've spent too long in online urbanism circles. There's a kernel of truth in what you say but it's exaggerated and victimized way too much. Your examples are also pretty textbook online urbanism and ignores other vulnerable road users (motorcycles, mobility scooters, etc)
No, in fact, my assertions are wholly based on in-person interactions with motorists, in conversation and on the roads. I’ve literally been spit upon and road-raged, and many voters and taxi drivers have expressed their sheer hatred and opposition to public transit.<p>My assertions have nothing to do with “online circles” except here where I am breaking the bad news to y’all.
If you haven't spent time in "online circles" then why is your understanding of vulnerable road users and non-car options limited to only bikes, light rail, and Critical Mass? What about rail trails projects? Does your area follow any NACTO guidelines? How does your DOT/DPW see things?<p>I don't deny the general idea that motorists in the US tend to have a crab mentality on the road where they want and expect everyone in the road to only be other drivers. I've also been sneered at in various ways in every non car form of transit I've been in.
e-scooters kind of sit in an uncanny valley of shittiness. I'll upfront say it's not at all fair to anyone using them responsibly, but there's a lot of cultural baggage that is going to make them uniquely reviled compared to alternatives. For instance, I've longboarded all around the city of Dallas for years and nobody has ever honked at, cut me off, or spit on me. But temporary rental scooters with no permanent docking station carry with them the stigma of:<p>- People riding them on sidewalks to putting pedestrians in danger<p>- "Parking" them right in front of someone's gate, blocking the entrance to their house<p>- Obviously drunk partiers using them in lieu of getting a ride or taking the bus<p>- Groups of them sitting around half knocked over completely blocking a sidewalk or other pathway meant for cyclists, runners, walkers, and other pedestrians<p>Fair or not, you're like the kid using a razor scooter at the skate park. Nobody likes you but it doesn't mean they hate everyone at the skate park. They just hate scooter kids.
Yeah I do not think there are any serious transit advocates that put time into advocating for e-scooters. They are worse and more dangerous than bikes and e-bikes in every possible way.<p>And any bike lane infrastructure would benefit e-scooters anyway, so riding them in the road at 30mph below the flow of traffic is a sad hill to die on.
I assumed comment is referring to people that advocate for transit as “anti-personal mobility”, they are counting cars as the only “personal mobility” which is beyond laughable.
THIS. But the car/oil companies did do bad things like work to undermine public transport & EVs back in day. Now we have sprawling burbs & social isolation. Phones, death of 3rd spaces & church going, etc. made it worse as people stopped having bigger families, leading to even more isolation.
>personal opinions on what society should be like<p>Anyone who still even has a personal opinion at all pertaining to what the world should look like distinct from swallowing whatever 'the market' has decided to impose on them is worth listening to.<p>That's the most interesting thing about the situation of technology today. Most technology is banal, what's notable is that apparently now a culture needs to be in possession of 'objective truth' (no such thing exists) to defend what is, by definition, a subjective way of life.
The best way I've ever heard it described is that in a car-dominant society, every new neighbor in your neighborhood is somebody in your way, taking up your spot, making you late in your commute.<p>The psychological effects of this are enormous and under discussed.
The upsides of automobiles, or personal mobility in general, are <i>enormous</i>. I can go wherever I want, whenever I want along with other people and cargo. I don't have to wait for a schedule set by someone else, or worry about union strikes. I love my cars!
This is true, although I have to say as someone who doesn't own a car, good public transport can avoid most of those issues. I live in a small-ish city (500K - 1M pop, depending on how you count it), and I can get pretty much anywhere I need to without worrying about schedules and certainly without worrying about strikes. The biggest issue is getting out of the city - that's when it's usually more important to worry about schedules, but it's still mostly doable - and occasionally transporting furniture or something like that.<p>On the other hand, the benefits I get from that public transport are incredible - it's cheap, it's always there, it requires minimal logistics in groups (no trying to figure out who goes in what car and needs to be dropped off where at what time), it works regardless of my level of inebriation (admittedly I've not pushed that one to any sort of extreme yet), it's safe enough for children to travel independently (no dropping them off and picking them up), and it's largely accessible for people with difficulties walking or moving about.<p>I think a big part of the issue is that people have tried out poor public transport infrastructure and recognised - often correctly - that their car is way better for them. But good public infrastructure can often be far more convenient than cars, it just requires people to be motivated enough to build and finance it. A neighbour of mine didn't notice his car had been towed for a week because he used public transport so much and so rarely touched his car. When he'd parked his car it was fine, but then they needed to block of the street to do some work somewhere, and he didn't notice they'd confiscated all the cars there. That's the sort of effect that good public transport can have - so comfortable that you can forget you even have a car.
this is so funny, even when trying to talk positively about cars you cant help but throw in a 'fuck you, I got mine'. Unions are cool, and good for workers. Enjoy your weekend! Thank a union.
Unions are <i>literally</i> a 'fuck you, I got mine' system. They protect <i>current</i> members at the expense of other people who might want to work in the industry.
No, they're a "fuck the C-suite, we're the ones who actually run this joint."
You could always join the union at a unionized shop.<p>It’s not like they’re the doctors guild that purposefully restricts the number of new doctors per year.
Private employee unions are cool. Public employee unions are a cancer on society.
Those are all enormous benefits to you and you alone. The greatest thing about cars are the things they do for you.<p>In order for someone else to have those benefits, they also need a car.<p>If as a society, if we could feel the same way about public transit, bike lanes, sidewalks, that you do about your own personal vehicle - we'd be better off.
It's the toxic American hyper-individualist mindset. As an American, I hate it so much.
I'm hardly alone, there are millions and millions of us. But the HN bubble skews toward affluent childless male urbanites, so discussions here tend to be weirdly disconnected from the real world that regular middle-class Americans experience.
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There are countless use cases for point to point personal transportation not covered by public transit options.
Most of these use cases exist because of the prevelance of personal vehicles. We reach for cars because they are there. We see the world through windshields, so when problems arise we conceive of car-based solutions. Cars force us into city designs and styles of living that require cars. That is to say, cars necessitate cars.
Everyone hates cars until they need an ambulance.<p>Yes, obviously there are many negative externalities to a car-driven culture, but just like we can easily become blind to the diffuse societal costs of a piece of technology, I think a culture of nay-saying makes it very easy to be blind to the diffuse <i>value</i> of a piece of technology too.<p>Loud stinky cities full of pollution and climate change are obviously horrible.<p>But we easily take for granted how amazing it is to be able to drive to a mountain and go for a hike, or call an ambulance, or go to a restaurant when it's raining out, or safely travel in a city without risking being assaulted, etc.<p>Internal combustion engines are amazing and horrible.
automobiles -> suburbanization -> isolation -> mental health crisis seems like a fairly easy hypothesis to test since there are still millions of people in america living densely and carless in places like nyc and you could demonstrate that they have a statistically significant gap in mental illnesses. so easy to test that i bet several people already have and you could just check.
Yes, they have. And they found it to be correct.<p>> living in dense inner-city areas did not carry the highest depression risks. Rather, after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the highest risk was among sprawling suburbs<p><a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208571/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10208571/</a>
I can tell you as a resident of New York City that the negative effect of the automobile on the built environment is very much present here as well.
for sure! but that's irrelevant to a causal chain that includes "suburbanization", since you're not in the suburbs (in manhattan at least, the walkability does drop off pretty quickly)<p>another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?
It is not merely suburbanization that has been caused by cars, but also the very urban fragmentation. Immigrants are no longer permitted to live in enclaves, ghettos, or the same neighborhood with one another.<p>Another thing about "this mental health crisis" is that it has been ongoing for many decades before we noticed it and before it was brought to the forefront. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was out and then President Reagan approved the mass closure of asylums. What happened was that massive numbers of citizens had been condemned and committed by their relatives and "put away" in homes, facilities, and institutions, and then Reagan shut 'em all down.<p>Today, the mentally ill live among us. Either their families care for them, or they live in jails/prisons because they became criminals and were convicted, or they live independently/on the streets. The mentally ill live now in "virtual institutions" where their chains and restraints consist of drugs. The drugs are what keep them connected to their home clinics and their psychiatrists. The drugs keep them coming back for more, month after month, to their pharmacies and clinics. The drugs they are convinced they cannot live without, making them compliant and unsure of what is really going on in their lives.<p>The non-criminal mentally ill are mostly encouraged to integrate and socialize, to seek employment and try to simulate functional human beings in society. So they live among us and they are causing more noticeable issues when they interact with people possessed of more sanity. The mentally ill are probably less likely to drive or own a vehicle, and more likely to rely on public transit, so you know where to find them.<p>But the mentally ill who live independently, and live with these "virtual restraints" are likewise living in fragmented neighborhoods that are not walkable and require a lot of effort to overcome the sheer distances that separate them from services and their employers. They're living among immigrants, foreigners, heathens and infidels, and on every corner is a moral trap such as easy alcohol, easy sex, easy gluttony, easy gambling that can ensnare even the sanest city dweller. These traps are, of course, legitimate businesses that cannot be shut down by a mere vice-squad raid.<p>So "this mental health crisis" in 2026 can perhaps be partly traced to the advent of personal motor vehicles, but I feel there are several causes that have brought it to the forefront.
You miss how this mental health crisis seemed to emerge in lock step with screentime. Not really suburbs. It is funny when people wax poetic now about the carefree latchkey adventurous childhoods of the boomers or gen x. I mean all of that stuff was little adventures happening in the suburbs. Nothing else to do inside so this is what would happen. You give that kid along with the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, well, tiktok there's your isolation and mental health crisis source right there. At least in the early dialup days kids were kicked off periodically so parents could use the landline, and there just wasn't such a bottomless well of content either to spend all waking time consuming.<p>EDIT: missed your other reply a few mins earlier alluding to smartphones already
That's a common narrative in popular culture (especially since the publication of Jonathan Haidt's <i>The Anxious Generation</i>), but it doesn't really bear out in data. Smartphones don't really have a discernible impact on mental health at a population level.<p>The idea is that teen mental health got dramatically worse in the early 2010s at the same time as social media began to become ubiquitous, but this is likely a coincidence. The underlying metrics we're tracking here are self-harm hospitalizations, and concerns about teen self-harm were already growing in the early 2000s. This leads to a bunch of new guidance getting published which increases teen mental health screening, tracks mental health status as a cause of injuries, and forces insurance companies to cover associated costs.<p>It's one of those situations where our stats about a problem increased as we became better at tracking it. Teen suicidality is actually WAY down over the past ~30 years.<p>Qualitative data is, of course, much harder to work with than hospitalization numbers, but the data we do have suggests a weak correlation, if any, between phone use and poor mental health— see <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30944443/</a>, which suggests phones can explain at most 0.4% of variance in well-being among teens. [1]<p>It feels like common sense that social media is bad for you, and sure, there's plenty of work to be done in understanding how and why social media can cause harm. But the idea that there's some big crisis just doesn't pan out.<p>Info drawn from <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation/id1651876897?i=1000664706439" rel="nofollow">https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-anxious-generation...</a><p>[1]: In fairness, Haidt published a response to this article featuring a new, bespoke set of controls for the data. His analysis suggests that the impact of social media use on mental health is nearly twice as large as that of being sexually assaulted and four times larger than hard drug use (which itself has a slightly larger effect size than wearing glasses). Personally, I don't find these conclusions plausible at all. Maybe Haidt's been p-hacking, or maybe the data set is worthless. I couldn't say. <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691822000270" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000169182...</a>
> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.<p>Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.
Respectfully, without judgement, your perspective may be wildly skewed because you’re American (going by your post history). I suspect the negative externalities in a society built around cars don’t register with you because to you it is the normal state of the world. As a Dutchman, I grew up in a built world that is based around the human scale and to me your parent’s claim comes across as astonishingly obvious.
I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.
I wouldn't be surprised if it contributed significantly because of the lack of (access to) third places [0] it breeds, but that is conjecture on my part, so fair enough.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place</a>
I would be hesitant to draw that correlation. IMO cars give you more access to third places, not less. With a car one can cover far more ground in a given 30 min drive after rush hour died down probably in every city in the world, than what one can cover in 30 mins walk and transit ride (especially when transit schedules might favor a commute into the central part of town vs some off peak trip to a random corner of town).<p>Say what you will about the ills of the car, but it takes a lot of specific context for them to emerge as the worst option of transport from an individual perspective. Really most of the cars ills are from their collective harms, something most can't appreciate as a tragedy of the commons sort of failing.
Yes, cars mean you can cover more ground in 30 minutes, but they also push EVERYTHING further apart. And what about parking? I can get very far on foot, by bike, or by train in 30 minutes, especially in an environment that hasn't been made artificially sparse by accomodating cars.
There's no shortage of third places in the American suburbs, you just have to drive to them. I'm sympathetic to the argument that walkable third places are better third places because I lived car-free in New York City for a decade and enjoyed many of them. But living in the suburbs or exurbs doesn't inherently mean you don't have access to shared communal spaces.<p>If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.
The Netherlands has 513 cars per 1000 people compared to the US rate of 779. A significant difference, certainly, and it's plausible that there's a threshold effect where a society built around 50% more cars faces unique problems. But this doesn't at all seem consistent with the original idea that automobile technology itself is bad.
Car ownership is not a good proxy for how important cars are to living well in a particular place, when the places you're comparing have completely different design philosophies. If you look at how many trips the average Dutch car owner takes by car vs. how many trips the average American car owner takes by car, I guarantee you there will be a much larger difference.<p>I'm also not sure that anyone was claiming automobile technology itself was bad, just that in many places at many times it has been used in suboptimal and harmful ways.
I definitely agree that merely having automobiles doesn't require adopting characteristically American urban design philosophy, and that this philosophy isn't very compatible with dense walkable urbanism. But I don't see how to interpret<p>> The upsides of automobiles generally all exist outside of the 'personal automobile', i.e. logistics. These upsides and downsides don't need to coexist. We could reap the benefits without needing to suffer for it, but here we are.<p>other than as a claim we should not have personal automobiles.
You might think so, but a flat number comparison doesn't do justice to the vast differences in urban planning. Check out this video, it describes Dutch urban planning pretty well: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k</a>
I suppose in the Netherlands they use carts and horses to stock up the supermarket? To transport coal to the powerplant (or the wind turbine blades to where the wind turbine will be built)? Surely a bicycle isn't enough for that.<p>You might be only talking about personal cars, but you've got to remember that trucks share the same infrastructure cars use. Modern city wealth wouldn't be possible without engined vehicles driving on roads (maybe if you went really crazy with rail that could be exception). You take away personal cars and either the infrastructure stays or your city wouldn't be possible anymore either.<p>But even beyond that - personal cars provide a level of freedom and capability to the general population that no other technology can match. Trains suck, buses suck, passenger ships suck, planes are uncomfortable (but otherwise pretty good). Bikes don't work with long distances, multiple people, the infirm, winter (riding in the winter is a great way to get injured, two-wheeled vehicles don't do well with ice), bad weather, if you need to be presentable when you arrive. Oh, and bikes get stolen. Constantly.
There's a lot of people in this comment thread interpreting the post's analogy as "ban all cars forever" rather than "consider how to use them as part of a wider societal strategy that makes places better for everyone".<p>You can implement all kinds of transport badly. Trains can suck if they don't take you where you want to go, bicycles suck if wherever you live doesn't provide acceptable parking methods.<p>Cars are great in a vacuum, but once a city decides it's going all in on cars and bulldozes the place, they provide problems for anyone else. Buses will suck because they're stuck in traffic and walking will suck when you're getting around on the side of 3 lane highways or vast surface parking lots. Most importantly, driving will suck, because everyone <i>has</i> to drive everywhere, and that creates more traffic for the rest of us. You get in a doom loop where you build more lanes, which drives more vehicle traffic. If you make the alternatives more viable, people take up those alternatives and vehicle traffic eases.
It seems like a hard argument to make that bikes can suck more than cars <i>because of parking</i>. As a bicycle enthusiast, I can provide you with some better reasons. You'll get rained on. You'll get sweaty. The helmet will mess up your fancy hair. You can't go as fast.<p>Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.
The point I was engaging with was how urban spaces can discourage certain kinds of transport users if their needs haven't been considered. If you get to your destination and have to hunt for a nearby fence post to lock your bike to, that's a bit of friction that makes me less willing to cycle. If I know there's a nice safe, quiet route for me to take, and a sturdy rack at my favourite cafe, it's a much easier decision.
Parking is one of the biggest downsides of bikes IMO.<p>Bikes are great, I ride mine whenever I can. But most places lack secure bike parking and the police don't take bike theft seriously. So sometimes I drive my car even to places where I could easily ride a bike just because I'm confident the car will still be there when I get out.
Yeah, that's a real problem. For practical urban riding, I use a beater fixie that I can replace for less than a car payment. I've had a few stolen, but that's across decades. This is probably highly dependent on your particular location. But I've also had cars broken in to.<p>Replacing the bike is actually a lot easier than getting the windows fixed IME.
Fwiw the only place I had a bike stolen was the secured underground garage in my apartment complex. Never had issues just parking it out front while running errands or other such stuff, or parking outside work during the day. I'd figure foot traffic would keep angle grinding down. I've personally not seen angle grinding done that brazenly before, seems liable overnight though where the thief has time to work and the assumption no one is awake to hear the grinder (such as what happened in the case of my apartment).<p>If I can't find a good spot to actually lock up the bike though I will just bring it in to wherever I'm going. Shops or restaurants don't seem to care if a bike is parked in the corner and you can thread your ulock through the wheels and make it useless to ride off with.
> Parking is one of the biggest upsides of bikes IMO.<p>I think that's true at the moment, but only because there's so little demand for it. You can always find a sign post or something because no one else is snatching them up.<p>At the end of the day bikes are still private vehicles and, though they're smaller than cars, they aren't that small and the infrastructure to secure them (which is integrated into cars) isn't small either. So you get the same problem writ small.
Writ <i>very</i> small, though. You can easily fit a dozen bikes into the space of one parking spot, if not more (double-decker racks exist!), and it is a lot easier to contrive a spot for your bike in the absence of bike racks than it is to park a car when there's no parking.<p>Heck—if you have a car & your building doesn't have parking, you're basically screwed. If you have a bike & it doesn't have a bike rack, you can just carry it up & put it on your balcony. At that point, I don't think you can really compare the two.
The problem is smaller and that is bad? That’s getting pretty close to the definition of better.
> Buses will suck<p>Buses are only workable because of cars. We build roads for cars first and trucks second. Buses are at most 3rd in the list and getting to use them is an incidental side benefit.<p>No one builds enough roads for buses. They have to use the roads built for cars.
Many places build dedicated bus lanes, and a few places build roads specifically dedicated to buses, like the Queensland Busway system<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busways_in_Brisbane" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busways_in_Brisbane</a>
That’s cool but one counterexample does not negate the general trend. Most places have few dedicated bus lanes. Most cities have approximately zero dedicated bus roads.<p>Even the cited system seems to be limited and exists to connect with trains as well as buses that use normal streets. Wikipedia says that they chose buses for this expansion instead of trains specifically because there was already a strong bus system, which uses the same city streets as cars and trucks.
Sure, industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.<p>However, you're making my point for me. If you fail to invest in good public transport it will suck. That is downstream from designing your society around cars instead of transportation for everyone. Bikes do not work for extremely long distances (although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily), but those long distances are a requirement precisely because infrastructure is designed around cars. Even so you can take bicycles on trains and use them for last mile transport at your destination, or store a bicycle at your destination train station (most have lockers or guarded storage) if it's a commute.<p>Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.<p>Bikes have their own infrastructure that they do not share with trucks. It is for human beings only.<p>Here's some reasons to hate cars. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umgi-CbaSRU</a>
> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either<p>This is a big claim with no justification.<p>Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable.<p>Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far more safety features than a bike can.<p>Of course, cars go faster and going faster increases lethality at the limit. No argument there, far more people die in cars in general. But specifically concerning weather, cars allow people to do many things that a bicycle cannot.<p>Not to mention general comfort. Being in a bike in a snow storm is very unpleasant!
There’s probably very little weather that is safe for cars but unsafe for bikes. Uncomfortable, yes, possibly extremely so. But you can bike in a downpour so severe that it’s unsafe to drive specifically because you’re not in a 2 ton deaths machine.<p>Maybe a severe enough snow storm? Even then we’re in Goldilocks territory for the storm to be unsafe for bikes but safe(ish) for cars.<p>The biggest factor is that people simply will not get on their bikes in severe enough weather. At least not in most places. Maybe in the Netherlands they’ll bike in a blizzard.
Safe for cars/bikes, or the passengers vs the bicyclist?<p>Hail comes to mind. Lightning possibly (I believe cars are much better insulated against lighting strikes). High winds could easily push bikes around / knock them over where cars just keep going.<p>We drove our van through a forest fire (Cedar Creek Fire - a BIG one) and got a bit of smoke, but otherwise, just fine. No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.<p>And there is a reason drivers hate SOME bikers - here in CA, many simply refuse to follow the rules of the road. My light turns green, and 5 seconds later, some biker comes rolling along in the perpendicular direction - I almost hit him. This kind of stuff happens over and over. I am very fond of bikers when they follow the rules - I bike sometimes too.
>No way would I have attempted that on a bike - the increased aerobic activity alone (to say nothing of embers / ashes / etc) would have probably caused crazy amounts of smoke inhalation / death.<p>Riding a bicycle while wearing an unpowered respirator/face mask is surprisingly easy, especially if it has an exhalation value. It does restrict breathing somewhat, but breathing isn't usually the bottleneck when you're cycling. This might even be the optimal way to escape a fire if the roads are congested.
Hell, we organize championships: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMinwf-kRlA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMinwf-kRlA</a>
> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either, and lethality is orders of magnitude higher. Generally though people here ride bike paths that are shovelled and brined just as the roadways are.<p>Extreme hot weather and pollution are both a much bigger health risk for bikes than cars.
> industrial scale transport and personal transport share a rolling platform with an engine, but they're different platforms with different requirements, different economics and different lifecycles.<p>What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.<p>> although school children here will happily pedal 10km to school and back on the daily<p>How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.
>What does this mean? This feels a bit like a distinction without a difference, as the infrastructure built is shared by both.<p>I guess I wasn't clear in implying my doubts as to whether that's a hard requirement. Trucks are much larger and heavier which takes its toll on the road surface itself. They don't need access to suburban environments. Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment. So yes, in part they do, but it's not that black and white.<p>>How flat is it there? I can’t imagine a typical kid biking 10km each way around me. I feel like the average kid at my kids’ school would take 45 minutes or more to bike that distance.<p>Famously pretty flat, but with e-bikes gaining ground, elevation changes don't make much of a difference anymore. And yeah a 45 minute commute by bike is not unusual, but remember, we have the safe infrastructure for it. Kids bike in from villages surrounding towns and cites.
> They don't need access to suburban environments.<p>How are suburban environments stocked then? Surely village grocery stores are not stocked with milk one bike load at a time.<p>> Even in the inner city here trucks are banned outside of loading and unloading hours to foster a walk-able environment.<p>Sure. But they use the same infrastructure. The fact that the vehicles are built for different purposes and may have different regulations doesn’t mean the cost of infrastructure isn’t shared. Pervasiveness of roads makes it easy for cars, trucks, ambulances, buses, and even bikes to get around more easily.<p>Just like the pervasiveness of the Internet make it easy to scroll TikTok, purchase goods from Amazon, and read books through Project Gutenberg, even though those are very different use cases.
This is a pretty large amount of words to burn down a straw man.
That's a really rude and dismissive take - the impact of cars has been immense, in particular the ways in which they've been given primacy as a mode of transport and the ways in which that necessity has interacted with our laws and infrastructure development (sabotoging of public rail transport, parking regulations and the creation of car-dependent suburbia, pedestrian safety, highway projects decimating communities of color, etc. etc. etc.).<p>To blithely state that nobody could make such a claim seriously is an attitude which actually has a really fitting term: carbrained.
I would say that seriously, so there you go, theres two.
Disputable. One could argue that artificial nature of US cities (i.e. lack of centuries of accumulated decisions) were bigger driver of this than cars themselves.
My parents made a home in a nice suburban neighborhood, where today some good restaurants and a coffeehouse are in walking distance, and grocery shopping is a short car ride. Yet we grew up still rather attached to neighborhoods further away, where our schools and grandparents lived. There was no possibility of bicycles or “kid power” to reach there; Mom and Dad always, always drove us everywhere!<p>Today I find myself in an urban hellscape without owning a vehicle. Nothing is walkable. I am crammed in, thanks to Equal Housing, with immigrants and people of utterly alien races and cultures (I consider myself the minority.) If I expect to find people like me or shop within my demographic, nothing is adjacent and it’s all several miles worth of transportation.<p>Car culture and forced integration has fragmented every possible family unit that could have been cohesive or collectivist. If I am celebrating a religious or cultural festival, I can count on none of my neighbors sharing that celebration, or in fact raising conflicts on the days most sacred to me.<p>Anywhere I may choose to walk, or even if I drive, I am trudging through vast empty parking lots of asphalt because of cars. The roads are laid out for cars. A cop told me yesterday I shouldn’t drive my e-scooter at 17mph in the street but on the sidewalk. Every motorist also hates those scooters, whether in motion or properly parked. Every motorist also hates the light rail train and hate for Waymo is fomented by motorist and pedestrian alike.<p>There is no place I could move to or live that would change this equation in any useful way. I do not hate cars, but I hate what they have done to our lives and our landscape.
Wasn't one of the surprising upsides of cars that incidents of incest went down dramatically? There are odd/unexpected non-logistics upsides.
This is a willfully ignorant and wildly incorrect take. Your isolation argument completely neglects socialization with family and friends that is supported via automotive mobility. Do you also somehow have the impression that automobiles somehow forced suburbanization? I think not- you don't want others to have the freedom to choose anything other than some industrialized urban existence. The effects of the automobile are vast, subtle, and cultural- and overwhelmingly positive
I've always lived in walkable cities. I don't own a car and with pollution, congestion, accident risk, pavement obstruction, etc. other people's cars unequivocally make my life worse.<p>We can argue about whether this is a good trade off, but the claim that cars make everyone's life better is straightforwardly false.
I live in a walkable city. I cannot drive because I am blind. Cars make my life better. Uber exists. I use it to get many places that I otherwise wouldn't go to.
Yes it's a widely known fact that prior to cars blind people only stayed in a single room for their entire lives. It was only due to the motorized auto carriage could blind people finally ride around and experience the world! Pretty cool!<p>I wonder how the Uber driver feels about not being considered a full time employee and unable to have affordable healthcare and a nonexistent retirement plan. Hopefully they don't think too hard about it or that would be incredibly selfish of them.
This doesn’t contradict or respond to the comment you are replying to in any way.
Troll post? No, they do not "unequivocally" make your life worse. "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.<p>The only way you receive food (except from your backyard inner-city garden?) is through people DRIVING. The way you receive packages is by DRIVING. They city infrastructure you enjoy is maintained through skilled laborers and tradespeople DRIVING.
There's a difference between personal vehicles and special purpose vehicles like ambulances and delivery trucks. I don't think anyone in this thread is saying all automobiles are bad, but car-centric development is definitely bad. You don't have to theorize from first principles about this. There are many places around the world that aren't as locked into the personal car as the US is, and they are still functioning societies where you can receive food, packages, medicine, workers maintain infrastructure, etc.
In fact, the cities which are repeatedly rated as having the highest quality of life are almost all not car-centric.
People travel to ALL of the jobs you just described in...wait for it...personal vehicles. And sure...there are places in the US that are not as car dependent, and places around the world that are just as car dependent as many US cities. The post I replied to said that other peoples' cars are "unequivocally" making their life worse, which, as I pointed out, is complete nonsense.
Troll post? You state that "other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living, then go on to talk about things that trucks do, not personal vehicles
> "Other people's cars" facilitate thousands of aspects of modern living and society that you apparently take for granted. You can choose to ONLY look at the negative impacts, but the comment as stated is ridiculous.<p>THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..<p>In aggregate, benefits of cars outweight the cons for 99% of people. Perhaps if you live right next to a busy highway, you might the the exception..
> THIS! I am shocked that some people don't realize that modern civilization and our modern quality of life depends on cars to a huge degree, even for people don't personally drive. Such a lack of knowledge about modern industry and logistics..<p>I'm more shocked that somebody thinks that modern civilization and logistics depend on personal cars. Can ypu expand on your statement that modern industry and logistic depend on persobal cars?
The distinction between personal and commercial cars is too small to allow effectivelly banning one while keeping the other. Any country that tries to do so will inevitably overshoot in one of the directions: either the ban will be too permitting, so people will still use personal cars, just less as today, or the ban will be too broad, which would negatively affect the commercial or logistical use cases and the economy will suffer.
I don't think anyone is arguing about banning ALL vehicles, much less all personal vehicles, but rather to simply become less car-centric. Most cities which top the list of highest quality of life worldwide all have fairly good public transportation options and/or are very walkable.
With respect, a few people are indeed making that argument.<p>Many car haters constantly play this motte-and-bailey game where they insinuate that cars are evil and should be eliminated, then they pull back and say “oh no, we don’t want to <i>ban</i> them” when confronted. But it’s clear that some subset really would prefer to eliminate civilian vehicles.<p>I like smart urbanism and pedestrian-centric development, but the anti-car culture annoys me to no end. It is self-defeating. The average person in the US has a car, and likes having a car, so you should start every argument with that assumption. We made a lot of progress on improving pedestrian access in the early 2000s by focusing on a positive message. But I guess there’s no room for non-adversarial messaging anymore.
Ok, so i guess that personal caes don't play any huge role in modern civilization and its logstics so i was right to be shocked by your statement.
Obviously true, but apparently we're in a hornets nest of anti-car coastal folks here? Very strange comment thread overall.
I said cars not driving. Yes, the supermarket needs trucks to deliver the food. It doesn't need cars.
I think the right term for highways or most other car roads is “car sewer” - you need very specialised equipment to navigate them, they are deadly, smelly, loud and unpleasant. One of the worst environments humanity has produced.<p>Yes they ship people around somewhat fast. Slower than possible with other methods, and the cost is incredible - economic (much more expensive per passenger than almost any alternative), political (they inherently divide people, dehumanise and make people never really share a public space), health - they reduce lifespan by both lowering living quality as well as directly killing a staggering amount of humans per year).<p>And we have learned how to build better places for humans that do not need these coffins on wheels - if you visit any European capital, and most Asian ones - you will see environments built for humans, not cars - soo much nicer.<p>So cars as a technology have definitely not been beneficial to humanity overall, but it has been somewhat useful to some.<p>I think strongtowns were very good advocates of what places in America could like if you look beyond cars. I personally like the “not just bikes” channel though.
They have a net positive effect for every owner, except that they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood in most places. So I'm not entirely sure they're a vast net positive in every value system. In yours, yes, but not in mine.
Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.
This is such a fascist take- "they seem to facilitate and encourage ways of living that require automobile ownership as a condition of adulthood" i.e. I don't agree with that way of living so I wish others didn't have the freedom to choose it
It's fine if people choose it.<p>It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to.<p>And there seems to be a lot of the latter.<p>For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.
This is a regional problem. Legislation to require pedestrian accessibility would fix it.<p>Where I live every new development must build out sidewalks as a condition of permitting.
I don't follow, are people then not able to choose to live somewhere that has shopping facilities or hospitals that are built so as not to be only accessible by automobile?
Yes, if such places are plentiful. It's a messy situation where revealed preference (house prices in walkable areas, Amsterdam and Paris increasingly full of rich young Americans) vs immediate consumer choice (more cars! More convenience! Oops, now we need to flatten downtown for an elevated freeway...) tend to give conflicting answers.
We shouldn't have to completely upend our lives to move to the small handful of major cities that provide the infrastructure to exist comfortably without a car. At least in the US, your options are limited to NYC, Chicago, Boston, and maybe a few others (Seattle/SF). And even then, the hard set default in these major cities is car ownership EXCEPT for NYC.
> re people then not able to choose to live somewhere<p>No, because no such somewhere has been built in the country in question (US) in the past ~60 years, because the default is car-centric. So you're left with a few uber dense, old, predating automobiles, places. Which are extremely expensive, because they simply do not have the capacity for everyone who wants to live in them.
In much the same way, the proliferation of suburban big-box sprawl denies others the freedom to have a walk-able neighborhood.
Automobiles are one of a key pillar of logistics. Getting things (food, medicine, construction materials, etc. etc.) to and from backbones like rail, harbors, airports etc. So even for those who don't own a vehicle or even want to own a vehicle, automobiles are still a vast net positive.<p>I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Maybe everyone lives in giant 10 million+ population cities that are all connected to each other by rail (and rail connects all airports, harbors, etc.) and then you have to show up at rail station to get your groceries or whatever else?
Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.<p>Yes cars/trucks/busses are still useful overall and are an incredible last-mile solution for freight.<p>But on a personal level, it means we all must live far apart and maintain our own individual vehicles, along with the average total costs of $11,500/year PER CAR. [0]<p>I’m not saying they should’ve even been banned for personal use - owning a car and living in a rural suburb should still be an option, but it is very expensive to choose that lifestyle.<p>However the auto companies on the early to mid 1900s had heavy influence on policy, even buying and shutting down their public transit competitors, converting cities into “car cities”. This is where it drove into “negatives outweigh the positives” territory. Everything before that was more positive, but this was a massive negative on society and continues to handicap cities today, making them expensive and even just dangerous to walk around (due to high speed roads and limited sidewalks)<p>[0] <a href="https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-owning-car" rel="nofollow">https://www.nerdwallet.com/auto-loans/learn/total-cost-ownin...</a>
The amount of space in US cities (broadly, out into their sprawl) that is used up by cars is <i>incredible</i> and serves to make other modes of transportation (to include things like busses, even) less-useful <i>and</i> make cars on-par with or worse than things like bicycles once you take out the time spent traveling these inflated distances, ~50% of which distance typically exists <i>because of cars</i>, and the time spent working to pay for your car, to say nothing of then needing to dedicate more time specifically to working out (or just accept being less healthy) because you're not walking or bicycling as much as you could be in a world where cars hadn't sprawled everything really far apart with gigantic parking lots, half-mile-diameter highway interchanges, large barely-used front lawns to provide distance from unpleasant and loud roads, big unusable "green space" buffers from highways, et c.<p>Once you start really marking how much <i>nothing</i> you're driving by even <i>in</i> many cities, where that "nothing" is one or another use of land that exists solely because of cars, it's a bit of a shock. "Wait, work would only be 8 miles away instead of 15 if not for the effects of widespread private car ownership? The grocery store could be 1 mile instead of 3? And I spend <i>how much</i> time a week bicycling to nowhere in particular to make up for sitting all day long? And this car & gas & insurance costs me <i>how many</i> of my work-hours per week, just to pay for it? Hm... am I... <i>losing</i> time to cars!?"
You don't get highways and the interstate system if vehicles are not for personal use. And if you don't get those, you don't get the modern logistics system.<p>I guess what I don't understand is, given the current state, 1) what do you want? 2) how much will it cost? (and how will we pay for it?) and 3) what are the tradeoffs?<p>On a related note, it seems like a lot of the anti-car/urban planning wonks have a belief that everyone really wants to walk, ride bikes, or take mass transit everywhere, and I think they're wrong. Most people want to drive personal vehicles.<p>Maybe if we lived in a world where mass transit had very strictly enforced behavioral norms, more would consider it. But even then, I still think most people prefer the many conveniences afforded by personal vehicles.
I guess instead of answering your first three questions, I’ll say this:<p>Our world would be better without being completely dependent on cars. You can see this in a few select cities or neighborhoods that have avoided the worst of car dependency. There are still suburbs, but they’re a bit more dense and you can easily bike to a grocery store in 10 minutes. There are still rural suburbs, but it’s much more expensive to live there due to the extra effort to get where you need to go.<p>There isn’t an easy way back since we let the auto industry have such a huge influence in politics, they’ve shaped the world, and it would take us decades and a LOT of money to revert the damage. We can still make steps.<p>HOWEVER, to bring the point back, we’re still in the 1910’s auto industry with AI. Are we going to let the AI industry get heavily involved in politics and shape our world into a worse one to benefit them? We’re at a point where we can reap the benefits, like with early cars, without the damage that came later
> Personal cars are not the same as using them for logistics.<p>Yes, they are in fact, the same. You cannot introduce such massively useful technology into the world and then say that it would be used only for logistics and not for personal transportation. Short of a worldwide totalitarian government, such arbitrary restriction would be completely unenforceable.<p>It is possible to shape things with regulation, but only to some degree. With any great technology, you have to take the good with the bad. And the good outweights the bad in any historical technology. AI will be no exception.
Sure, on your own land, just like you can drive more-or-less whatever you want as long as you stick to your own property, today, including vehicles that aren't "street legal".<p>On public roads? No reason we'd have to license private cars for that, at least not for just <i>any</i> purpose.
How about the fact that any country that tries to ban private ownership of cars would completely fall behind in all car-related technologies, infrastructure and services, which would very soon negatively affect all those commercial or logistical use cases that our civilization vitally depends on?<p>Trying to ban all private cars while keeping our car-dependent civilization working is unrealistic, no matter how you look at it.
Any country that tries to ban private ownership of nuclear weapons would fall completely behind in all nuclear-weapon-related technologies. Should we therefore encourage the private ownership of nuclear weapons?
I entirely fail to see why this is a "fact".
Exactly. These arguments are all buttressed by the "if everyone would just..." argument [1]. In fact, everyone will not just. And so if you want to build your Utopia, it will have to be compelled by force.<p>[1] <a href="https://x.com/eperea/status/1803815983154434435" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/eperea/status/1803815983154434435</a>
We pretty much did with aviation.
Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.
Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-minute car commute would take ninety minutes by bus, so now we <i>have to</i> have cars.<p>There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.
I'd argue that's /because/ we regulated aviation (and also some annoying physics limitations), so we never had the option of becoming fully dependent in the way lots of places have on cars.<p>Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.
> I don't agree - they have some negative effects<p>The problem is we are numb to it. 40,000+ people are killed in car accidents every year in just the USA. Wars are started over oil and accepted by the people so they can keep paying less at the pump. Microplastics entering the environment each day along with particulate from brakes, and exhaust. Speaking of exhaust: global warming. Even going electric just shifts the problems as we need to dig up lithium, the new oil. We still have to drill for oil for plastics and metal refining, recycling and fabrication.
They have some positive effect in some situations but the overall effect has destroyed cities and made people fat and isolated.<p>Kind of like how fat and salt are good for you until you over consume. The world has massively overconsumed cars.
I think it's most obvious in hindsight, probably it was a long time (some decades) before cars were understood to have much of a negative effect at all. Nobody* thought much about air pollution (even adding lead to the gasoline) or climate effects, or what would happen when cities were built enough that they were then dependent on cars, or what happens when gas or cars gets expensive.<p>All they saw was that trips taking a day could now be done in an hour and produced no manure, and that meant suddenly you could reasonably go to many more places. What's not to like? A model T was cheap, and you didn't even need to worry about insurance or having a driver's license. Surely nobody would drive so carelessly as to crash.<p>*well, not technically nobody, but nobody important.
If you read the period news, pretty much everything except lead poisoning and climate change was well known by the 1920s. Rich people wanted cars but a ton of places had resistance from everyone else to what they correctly recognized as removing the public spaces they used and shifting externalities to, for example, the people being hit by cars.<p>What’s really interesting is that you can find newspaper columns in the 1920s recognizing what we now call induced demand as even by then it was clear that adding road capacity simply inspired more people to drive.
That's also part of the problem. People back then had other systems to make those critiques (or their job didn't require the travel it does now), and now they don't. If alternatives don't exist, and most US people today have never experienced them, there's no demand for them, and you realistically can't expect that demand to come without a massive, grinding slog.<p>Lack of alternatives + political unwillingness to provide them + lack of political pressure to provide them + the massive effort that would be needed to build a system from scratch that has already been dismantled, and infrastructure is in the way because it wasn't a factor + corruption, democratic decline, etc. = most problems around cars in the USA.
There's a lot of fear in that for sure. Cars cost the average American household something like 20% of their income (for low income this can be over 30%) so a ton of people would benefit from alternatives, but most people are thinking “if the bus is late more than a couple of times, I‘ll lose my job”. One of the interesting things I've noticed is that there's a lot more social excuse for car problems (which code middle class) than transit/bike problems, and it's interesting seeing how often people who are chronically late to work due to “unexpected” traffic get a free pass compared to the alternatives.<p>Remote work was the biggest upset to this system in generations but that's being stamped out at many organizations.
The positive effects were immediate, and measurable. The negative effects are delayed, and hard to quantify without all the advancement in climate research since then. If everyone in 1920 knew a 100 years from now there would be climate crisis to reckon with, perhaps a few things would have changed along the way.<p>Today we have a much better understanding of the world, so we have the means to think down the line of what the negative effects of LLMs and course correct if needed.
Negative effects were immediately noticed. The change in smog was apparent. Road laws rapidly advanced. Road building standards rapidly changed. Congestion was also very much apparent, and the reason behind massive highway building effort that came some thirty years after the car's rise to popularity.<p>Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic? They didn't fail really, what failed was implementation not planning. Most cities you see with notorious traffic today, chances are the bottlenecks that exist were planned to be relieved by some midcentury road plan that was for whatever reason, not ever built. Comprehensive rapid transit was often also planned, several times over, but not built or at least never to the full scale of those plans. Catalytic converter was also a great success people today probably don't even think about. You can see the mountains again in California's cities thanks to the catalytic converter.<p>Leaded gas took longer, but I'd say the tailpipe pollution, congestion, and general capacity related issues were well understood.
We did know in the 20s. We knew in the 30s. We knew in the 40s. We absolutely knew in the 50s (oil industry funded their own studies on this). We knew before we decided to direct billions into a federal interstate highway system that bulldozed countless communities of color and killed many cities' downtowns and sense of connectedness.<p>I don't see anything positive about being forced to participate in this car-ownership game where 99% of North American cities are designed around car ownership, and if you don't own a car you're screwed. I don't WANT to own a car, I don't want to direct countless thousands of dollars to a car note, car maintenance, gas, etc. I want the freedom to exist without needing to own an absurdly expensive vehicle to get myself around. There's nothing freeing or positive about that unless all you've ever known and all you can imagine is a world in which cities are designed around cars and not people.
Nah. We have no means of predicting the long-term effects of LLMs. Major new technologies have always caused effects that were completely unpredictable during the early phases. Any claim that a much better understanding of the world allows for thinking through the effects is pure hubris.
A large part of the effect that cars have come from massive subsidies and policy choices that push for cars over alternative options. The comparison shouldn't be "cars vs literally nothing" but rather "car-dominated infrastructure vs the same investments in alternatives". (Not to say that it's an either-or; the optimal equilibrium might still involve some mix of car investments, just far less than we have now.)
It's not at all clear whether automobiles were a net positive. They are more or less solely responsible for climate change (even emissions not directly from motor vehicles wouldn't be possible without them), which may prove to be the worst mistake in the history of technology.
The benefits accrue to the owners of the vehicles. The negative effects are externalized onto everybody else.
What benefit do cars provide that public transit doesn't? How are thousands of individual cars better than light rail?<p><i>Cars</i> aren't a positive in society. <i>Transportation</i> is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".
one trip to Amsterdam will show you how bad our use of cars has been for us
I'd say commercial automobiles probably have a net positive effect. (Though their impact on pollution and climate change can't be discounted.) But daily life in walkable and public transitable European cities is so, so much nicer and healthier than in most American cities. I'd trade ubiquitous personal automobiles for that in a heartbeat.
There's still plenty of cars in europe. Biggest advantage of europe is even the major cities are only so large in footprint, like even berlin is barely over a dozen miles across. Major US cities could be 40-60 miles across. Greater LA maybe over 100 miles across depending on how you measure, all contiguous development. The northeast corridor is nearly contiguous urban/suburban development over a ~450 mile snake from washington dc to boston. Makes a little 10 mile rail line in berlin capture a much greater share of potential trips within the berlin urban area than a 10 mile rail line pretty much anywhere in the US. LA has a light rail line that is over 50 miles long.
No - as a society we cannot say that its a “vast net” positive. The externalities that harm the commons are not accounted for.<p>We (or lobbyists) resist having carbon costs included in the prices we pay at the pump.<p>Edit: More transportation is good; I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, just that our accounting for costs makes things look better than they are.
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Cars I'd argue are a net negative for everyone. In the article it goes over this pretty well.<p>The automobile <i>was</i> a revolutionary tool, but I think it has been overprescribed as a solution for the problem of transportation.<p>The grips of capitalism and consumerism have allowed for automobiles to become a requirement for living nearly everywhere in America except for the densest of areas.<p>I love cars, I enjoy working on them, driving them, the way they look, the way they sound and feel. They do offer a freedom that is unparalleled, and offer many benefits to those who truly need those guarantees.<p>Ultimately, to me they are a symbol of toxic individualism. I would be happy if we could move on from them as a society.
More and more urban centers are banning cars in their cores. Especially older cities built before the automobile existed.<p>An analog might be the push for banning phones in schools. Setting apart times and spaces where serendipitous human interactions are encouraged by the lack of distractions.
I think he is to pesimistic, a tool is a tool and if AI progresses without hitting a ceilling, i will see a potential future of a society which might explore space.<p>Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go.<p>Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want some kind of compute but its like with 4k; We have 4k for ages now but it is not the default resolution on all displays sold. We stoped pushing the boundaries because invest is not here. People do not bother too much with it.<p>With AI and the richest companies and people want to see what happens, pushes the envolope a lot faster, pushes us to find solutions.<p>This AI Compute based on ML/Neuroal Networks can also be used for physics simulation, protein folding, and everything else.<p>Stoping technology is not an option and not a solution. Education is. We need to educate people.
All blocked in the UK, sadly.
<a href="https://archive.is/eXuD0" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/eXuD0</a>
He's gay, and being gay online contravenes the UK Online Safety Act. Complain to your legislators.
I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle.<p>This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" and technological societal control over the "NPCs" of the world that remain since they will likely be programmed by their peered AI that will do the thinking for them.<p>So what to do entirely depends on whether you feel we are responsible to the future generations or not. If the answer is no, then what to do is scoped to the personal concerns. If yes, we need a revolution and it needs to be global.
> to eliminate "useless eaters"<p>It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.<p>It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replacement are a fuss, a pile of lies to justify layoffs and worsening financial situation.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-openclaw-ai-agent-accidentally-deleted-her-emails" rel="nofollow">https://www.pcmag.com/news/meta-security-researchers-opencla...</a>
People have this misconception that first it was one way, and then <tech was released>, and they'll wake up and suddenly it is another. It's a slow creep. 10 years ago there were 5 of us on a team each responsible for something specific. Now I can do all of that. Teams and companies will downsize. How do you see AI creating <i>more</i> jobs? (I need some hope right now lol).
My hope is that there is a sort of Cambrian explosion of small software projects built by people who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Many such projects will go nowhere, but some percentage of them will see success and growth. My second hope is that there will always come some threshold of complexity beyond which AI cannot effectively iterate on a project without (at minimum) the prompting of an expert in the field.<p>The combination of these two things could lead to a situation where there is a massive, startup-dominated market for engineers who can take projects from 0.5 to 1, as well as for consulting companies or services that help founders to do the same.<p>Another pair of hopes is that a) the LLM systems plateau at a level where any use on complex or important projects requires expert knowledge and prompting, and b) that because of this, the hype of using them to replace engineers dies down. This would hopefully lead to a situation where they are treated like any other tool in our toolbox. Then, just like no one forces me to use emacs or vim (despite the fact that they <i>unambiguously</i> help me to be at least 2x more productive), no one will force me to use LLMs just for the sake of it.
It's made it cheaper to do whatever it is you did therefore the demand for it will go up. It's somewhat of an open question of where the new equilibrium is. Historically that can go either way. We have fewer farmers that we once did because there's a limit to how much food people will eat. But we probably don't have fewer carpenters as a result of power saws and nail guns. We probably have more because the demand to build things out of wood is effectively unbound.
Massive job loss from AI requires one of two things: actual human-equivalent AGI <i>or</i> no increase in demand.<p>Focusing on option 2 and software development, teams and companies will only downsize if the demand for software doesn’t increase. Make the same amount of stuff you do now but with less people.<p>What I think will happen is that enough companies will choose to do things that they couldn’t afford or weren’t possible without AI (and new companies will be created to do the same) to offset the ones that choose to cut costs and actually increase the amount of people making software.<p>I am pretty sure these are well known economic ideas but I don’t know the specific terminology for it.
<i>> no increase in demand.</i><p>We are already hitting the limits of demand in many areas of life. The fundamental currency that is not growing is <i>human attention</i>.<p>Sure, now you can be a musician and use AI to help you make an album in a weekend. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to listen to them? Everyone is already inundated with more music than they could ever listen to in a lifetime.<p>Now someone who's never written a line of code can vibe code an app and upload it to an app store. Great. So can a million other people. Who's going to install those apps? When was the last time you found yourself thinking, "I wish I had <i>more</i> unmaintained apps on my phone!"?<p>Now someone who aspires to be a "writer" but lacks the willpower to craft sentences can throw a couple of bullet points at an AI and get a thousand word article out. Great, so can a million other people. Who wants to read more AI slop text on the web? There are already a million self-published authors whose books never get read. That's not going to get better when there are a billion of them.<p>All of us, every single one of us, is already drowning in information overload and is stressed out because of it. The last thing any of us want is <i>more stuff to pay attention to</i>. All of this AI generated stuff will just be thrown into the void and ignored by most.
There are more options:<p>Mass unemployment, consolidation of all AI-related benefits in the hands of a few, an increase in demand that doesn't outpaced the loss of employment, increase in capabilities (not AGI) that mean a few chosen people can do most things without hiring other people, etc.
If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt. They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases.<p>I know it is the classic sci-fi dystopia where somehow despite endless advances in tech and automation, the masses can't figure out how to make it work for themselves and end up living in shanty towns on top of each other waiting for gifts from the elite, or scraping in dirt outside the cities, but come on... I just don't see that as being credible.
> <i>If there is mass unemployment, who is going to buy anything from anyone? The "few" don't need or want us to be scraping in the dirt.</i><p>> <i>They want us spending lots of money on their products, so their wealth increases.</i><p>If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet.<p>> <i>despite endless advances in tech and automation, the masses can't figure out how to make it work for themselves</i><p>If the tech (or the really helpful tech) is guarded behind a lock, and they don't hold a key, it's not a matter of figuring things out. Unless by figuring out you mean revolt?
> If we're considering scifi scenarios, imagine this: if full blown automation of everything is achieved, why would the "haves" need the "have-nots" buying anything at all? Why would they need them to exist, at all? Think about it. It's an extreme and we're not near it... yet.<p>So we reach this post scarcity society, where everyone could be living a life of luxury, but this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who would they be?), somehow form this uniform view that they just don't want 99.9% of other people around and let them all die off while they guard themselves in gated cities or something.<p>It just makes no sense at all to me. Like in a sci-fi novel or movie where it is a plot requirement, ok, but in reality, I just cannot see the path and all the things required to get to that particular reality. So many ways it would work out differently.
> <i>So we reach this post scarcity society</i><p>A full automation society, where the implied post scarcity is not necessarily for everyone. Maybe it <i>needs</i> most of the population not to exist in order for the few to enjoy the lack of scarcity. Resources aren't infinite, but greed is.<p>I mean, resources and wealth could be far better distributed <i>right now</i>, no need for AI, yet most times this is attempted the wealthy fight tooth and nails against it, even though the impact for them would be very small. What makes you think having AI will magically make them better people?<p>> <i>[...] this whole group of "haves" as you call them (who would they be?) somehow form this uniform view that they just don't want 99.9% of other people around</i><p>A uniform view on this matter is easier to achieve by an extremely small subset of people.<p>And really, do you need to ask "who are they"? I mean, the billionaires and owners of concentrated capital of the world?<p>> <i>I just cannot see the path and all the things required to get to that particular reality.</i><p>You cannot see a path from unchecked capitalism and extreme concentration of capital, via total automation, to this particular reality?<p>It sounds like a failure of imagination. I see the people at the top being lying sociopaths and have no trouble believing this.
A few hundred years ago it took a team of 5 plus draft animals plough a field. Now one guy with a tractor can do it. Some teams and companies will downsize. New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.
> New companies will appear doing things that we can't even imagine yet.<p>I read this take a lot but I don't buy it. This isn't guaranteed by any means. And even if it <i>does</i> happen, isn't it just as likely that AI is deployed into those companies too and they don't actually result in any job growth?
Are SWEs the farmers of the draft animals in this analogy?
> It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1].<p>And early cars were expensive, dangerous, highly unreliable, uncomfortable, belched foul exhaust, and required knowledge of how to drive AND maintain them. We are far, far from that scenario these days.
> <i>It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people.</i><p>I don't think the comment you're replying to is saying that an evil AI bot will kill people. They are saying something along the lines of: mass job loss doesn't bother the AI companies because in the AI-powered future they envision, population reduction is a positive side effect.
> This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it<p>If AI is smart enough to replace the 99.999% it's also smart enough to replace the 0.001%.
That fact doesn’t prevent the 0.001% from continuing to control it.
Yes, but that isn’t the question as long as those wealthy people control most of the system: companies aren’t going to lose executives, they’ll shed the jobs which they don’t respect. Someone wealthy does not need to accept a bad deal to avoid sleeping on thr street. It’s everyone who isn’t insulated who has to actually compete for work.
Besides the argument above, that an AGI powerful enough to replace 99.999% of humanity won't be controllable, there's also the economic argument: corporations, executives, all that means nothing if 99.999% are unemployed. Our economy is based on consumerism which will obviously cease to happen in a scenario where 99.999% of humanity is unemployed. The economic system would be so upended that ownership and such notions would become immaterial.
I would worry that it won’t go quickly to 99.999% but instead would grind down different groups of people slowly enough that they’d be able to entrench their power: being a cop will be a growth job, people would be given state-sanctioned automation-resistant work like picking crops as a condition of receiving social benefits, the Republicans would more seriously dust off the previously-fringe proposals to restrict voting to property owners again, etc.<p>Setting people against each other is a time honored way for a small elite to control a large population.
If we meet in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but I have an android slave with a gun and you have nothing but a rusty spoon, it's going to be pretty clear who the android belongs to, and who it serves. The android also makes it likely that I will have a bunch of other nice stuff that you don't. Food and water, for instance.<p>This scenario is not meant to be taken literally.
I have given this serious thought over the years. I even have an unfinished novel exactly around that topic.<p>Energy. The key is controlling their access to energy.
The 0.001% has a controlling stake in AI, so they're in the clear.<p>The 99.999% needs to assert <i>their</i> controlling stake in the technology. I don't know what this looks like. Maybe ubiquitous unionizing, coupled with a fully public and openly-trained LLM.
There are already several fully open source LLMs. You can start participating in those projects today.<p><a href="https://www.bentoml.com/blog/navigating-the-world-of-open-source-large-language-models#what%20is%20the%20best%20open-source%20llm%20now%3F" rel="nofollow">https://www.bentoml.com/blog/navigating-the-world-of-open-so...</a>
The monkeys claimed ownership of the world's resources according to monkey law. I guess we are now subservient to the monkeys.
IMO this is a common trap. Certainly there's no boundary of cognitive capability that separates capitalist elites from those below them in terms of an AI's ability to outperform them.<p>But that doesn't really matter when we talk about "replacement" because these people don't "do" they simply "own".<p>They're not concerned about being outpaced at some skill they perform in exchange for money...they just need the productive output of their capital invested in servers/models/etc to go up.
It's not about capability. It's about who "holds the key". And sure, many currently with deep pockets and pushing for AI will miscalculate and get pushed by the wayside. I think many people who are not in the 0.001% are miscalculating right now in HN.<p>What's important is that ultimately some small subset owns this, and it doesn't matter how smart they are, only that they own the thing and that it cannot be employed against them (because they hold the key).
No because the technology will be used against you.
I'm tempted to (bitterly) point out that feeling responsible for future generations was already off the table decades ago when we decided to ignore our ecological footprints.
It would be difficult, but not necessarily THAT difficult. With enough pushback from the public, AI would start getting regulated in meaningful ways. The problem is too many people love it, and see no problem with it. Because the momentum and money is on their side, it feels like it is impossible. Maybe things will turn out fine and we will just live in a similar but more depressing future, but if the pro-AI crowd gets bit and changes sides that could be a turning point.
> Maybe things will turn out fine and we will just live in a similar but more depressing future<p>Or things could turn out more than fine and we progress as we've always progressed, towards more abundance and humans in 30 years will live massively better lives than we live today, just as we live massively better lives than people at just about any previous point in history.
The article skips the potential upsides of an AI future - like curing diseases, abundance, merge type immortality. I'm keen myself with nothing to do with the goals of the 0.001% really. I think the future generations will like the above and look back on now like we look back at medieval dentistary.
I have nothing against AI as a technology but the notion of it "curing diseases" is so silly. The limiting factors are largely in fundamental biology research and then human clinical trials. There is no plausible way that LLMs will make those activities 10× faster or cheaper. Hard work still has to be done in the messy real world outside of computers.
Re. disease cures I am hoping more for AlphaFold type stuff and simulating cells in silico rather than ChatGPT type LLMs. There is some progress like<p>>“There are people sitting in our office in King’s Cross, London, working, and collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer. “That’s happening right now.” <a href="https://www.htworld.co.uk/news/research-news/isomorphic-labs-nears-first-trials-of-ai-drugs-ddev25/" rel="nofollow">https://www.htworld.co.uk/news/research-news/isomorphic-labs...</a><p>and<p>>...enables researchers to move seamlessly from AI-generated sequences to functional antibodies in just days <a href="https://the-decoder.com/googles-ai-drug-discovery-spinoff-isomorphic-labs-claims-major-leap-beyond-alphafold-3/" rel="nofollow">https://the-decoder.com/googles-ai-drug-discovery-spinoff-is...</a>
But what if we could predict which treatments would be most successful with ~70% accuracy? It would potentially speed up the feedback loops right?<p>There may also be downsides, like skipping testing things that would enhance our fundamental understanding of something because the AI was wrong. But that’s already a problem , and having a better gauge in the early stages could be really helpful
LLMs help already a lot because plenty of normal people do not have programming skills. Evaluating test results is a lot harder if you do not know how to program or how to use a computer.<p>But LLMs compute requirement is so high that it pushes the boundaries of compute, memory and memory bandwidth which is fundamental for curing diseases.<p>LLMs math / neural networks can and are used for medical research. Simulating a whole body with proteins, cells etc. will bring us the breakthrough we need.<p>Nothing in modern medicin research is withoout compute.<p>AlphaFold def helps researchers around the globe.
Those upsides are currently just a fantasy and ignore the very real current downsides. They also do not in any way rely on AI to become a reality.
Gonna beat this drum till it breaks:<p><pre><code> General strike and bank runs.
</code></pre>
Not to collapse the economic system, but to present a credible threat of collapsing the economic system which AI development, as these elite and their platforms know it, relies on. When they're freaking out, we call for negotiations.<p>This only works if people with "secure" livelihoods not just participate, but drive the effort. Getting paid six figures or more in a layoff-proof position? Cool, you need to be the first person walking out the door on May 1st (or whenever this happens), and the first person at the bank counter requesting your max withdrawal.
You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.<p>As for bank runs, no one cares. The big banks no longer need retail customer deposits as a source of capital for fractional reserve lending. Modern bank funding mechanisms are more sophisticated than that.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Bank" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Ban...</a><p>In which the FDIC took unprecedented action, drawing down the DIF to backstop depositors beyond the insured $250k and offering a credit facility to other banks, in order to prevent "contagion" - a panic, a <i>bank run</i> - which was presumed to be likely after the 3rd largest bank collapse in US history. A bank almost no one outside of California had heard of before it died.<p>Bank runs are serious business, and far from being something "no one cares" about, even just talking about them makes banks nervous, because they can happen to even "healthy" banks. The big banks have been undercapitalized for more than a decade, and even a moderate run on a regional institution threatens the entire system. Which is why it should be done, or at least signaled as incoming; it's good leverage.<p><pre><code> >You're free to take a vacation or quit working if you want to. Go ahead.
</code></pre>
The implicit, "I'll stay here, where I'm nice and secure," is delusion. People care about your outcomes even if you don't care about ours. Take the invitation to organize with others to secure your own future, to show just how much you're needed before your employer decides that you're not (however erroneously).
You really missed the point. SVB was undone by their own failure to manage interest rate risk, and then by the actions of <i>corporate</i> depositors. Retail banking customers had little to do with it. Corporations certainly aren't going to participate in some sort of pointless consumer protest.
It's a liquidity problem. Retail absolutely can drop any given bank into a liquidity crunch by pulling out too many funds, too quickly. It doesn't even need to put a given bank at risk of insolvency, if the situation is read as widespread and/or growing, because as the event expands, so does the likelihood that someone else is mismanaging their books. Someone who is hooked into another institution, and another, and another. Contagion.<p>Anyway, corporate depositors have a duty to safeguard their capital. That means that if a bank run is underway by retail depositors, they're in line too, willing participants or not. This is why, again, even discussion of bank runs is discouraged, and their likelihood and effectiveness downplayed. They're built on turning the imperative of self-interest, which the financial industry is built on, on its head.
Nope, you're still missing the point. SVB had a solvency problem, not just a liquidity problem. And some silly consumer protest withdrawals will never be able to cause a liquidity problem for any bank that matters.
Geopolitical realities and considerations require that the effort is synchronized and global. Assume great power X's society revolts and decides to reign in the financial and technological barons and lords, and do away with such things. Meanwhile, great powers Y, Z etc. are not doing this and one day people in X will wake up to AI drone swarms of these powers taking them over and they're back to square 1 and now not even a great power.<p>Collective humanity needs to think this matter through and take global action. This is the only way I fear, short of natural calamities (act of God) that unplugs humanity from advanced tech for a few generations again.
> layoff-proof position<p>What? I don’t know anybody who has a layoff-proof position.
Two years ago, I was enjoying a drink with my wife, her friend, a very senior female VC partner, and another friend.<p>Somehow we talked AI in some depth, and the VC at one point said (about AI): “I don’t know what our kids are going to do for work. I don’t know what jobs there will be to do.”<p>That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well.<p>I think about that exchange all the time. Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests. It unsettled me, and Kyle’s excellent articles brought that back to a boiling point in my mind.<p>Edit: are->our
> Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests.<p>> That same VC invests in AI companies and by what I heard about her, has done phenomenally well.<p>Her kids will be fine, its the vast majority of other, non wealthy, kids who are in trouble.
> Worried about your own kids but acting against their interests.<p>Ridiculous. You're not acting against their interests by amassing wealth from a technology that will happen with or without you.
But, what if people putting their energy into ensuring society adapts with the technology safely and positively would be better than focusing on finding ways to capitalize off of whatever happens to occur instead?<p>I'm not saying one person can do that alone, but if we collectively believe we should focus on capitalization instead, then there's no one present to influence a more constructive, pro-social, sustainable course for society.<p>So I don't think it's ridiculous to think it's acting against their interests. Money won't get your kids very far if the thing that made you wealthy also pulled the rug from under them. There needs to be more of a strategy than capital.
In the other hand, shouldn't it be the objective of humanity to not HAVE to work for the most basic survival and to fit into society?<p>Not that we're in any way in that path, of course, with the people making the working machines also accumulating all the wealth. But still, there's something intrinsically good about automation, even when the system is not suited for it.
It’s automating the wrong thing.<p>I want my ai to do dishes and laundry so I can write, draw, do deep cognitive work.<p>Not for it to do cognitive work and write and draw while I don dishes and laundry.
But in another world doesn’t automation just produce yet another set of things to do? Perhaps i am doing this all wrong but in my world more automation has never produced less work unless I conveniently told no one and therefore filled “free” time how i wanted.
You're sending mixed messages here. Automation is going to put us all out of jobs, or automation isn't going to produce less work and so we'll still have lots to do?<p>Personally, I think until real AGI, the current LLMs will automate a lot of tasks, but the market will adapt and humans still end up with about the same percentage of employment and wages.
Assuming “phenomenally well” means what it says, the conversation would have suddenly gotten a lot more real if she had said that more precisely: “I don’t know what <i>your</i> kids are going to do for work.”
Yeah. Her kids will be fine with generational wealth. Everyone else's - not so much.<p>This is the problem in a nutshell - people are happy to do things they know are harmful for personal profit.
Totally. And yes you got it.
I really hope they increase taxes and stop letting VC firms gamble with pension funds. These people shouldn't have their current jobs already, and you're telling me they're also dictating how technology is being shaped in the country as well?
There's plenty of things you can be simultaneously worried and optimistic about, and I find this is constantly true of parenting.<p>I will encourage my kid to gain independence, but of course I'm worried about it! The fact that there is uncertainty in her independence and that I can imagine bad outcomes does not mean I'm working against her interest by encouraging it.<p>"I don't know what jobs there will be to do" is a statement of uncertainty, and, given how you are relaying it, there must have been fear there as well. But it doesn't seem like it's a statement that the world will be worse. You can be fearful and hopeful at the same time, and fear tends to be the stronger of the two, and come out more strongly, again especially in parenting I find, even if you find the hopeful outcomes more likely.
Sounds like she's acting <i>in</i> their best interests to me. Her kids will find something to do - the same things everyone else will find to do. There's just going to be a lot less working-for-a-living, and it's going to be glorious.
At the beginning of the industrial revolution we didn't know what people would do for work but we eventually figured it out. Human demands are effectively infinite so there will always be work for other humans to satisfy those demands. The transition period may be disruptive.
If that VC partner gathered sufficient generational wealth, their kids will not have to worry about earning an income.
VC’s aren’t exactly known for being both wise and intelligent.
And people wonder why I'm doing all I can to ensure that world will never, ever again even pretend to try to find a place for me.
Here are the articles in this series that got significant HN discussion (in chronological order for a change):<p><i>ML promises to be profoundly weird*</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47689648</a> - April 2026 (602 comments)<p><i>The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Part 3 – Culture</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703528</a> - April 2026 (106 comments)<p><i>The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730981">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730981</a> - April 2026 (169 comments)<p><i>The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47754379</a> - April 2026 (180 comments)<p><i>The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766550">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766550</a> - April 2026 (217 comments)<p><i>The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778758">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778758</a> - April 2026 (178 comments)<p>* (That first title was different because of <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695064">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695064</a> - as you can see, I gave up.)<p>p.s.
Normally we downweight subsequent articles in a series because avoiding repetition of any kind is the main thing that keeps HN interesting. But we made an exception in this case. Please don't draw conclusions from that since we'll probably get less series-ey, not more, after this! Better to bundle into one longer article.
If you enjoyed reading these and would like more, very few folks read sections 2, 4, or 6. They might be up your alley:<p>2. Dynamics - <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-dynamics" rel="nofollow">https://aphyr.com/posts/412-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...</a><p>4. Information Ecology - <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-information-ecology" rel="nofollow">https://aphyr.com/posts/414-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...</a><p>6. Psychological Hazards - <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-psychological-hazards" rel="nofollow">https://aphyr.com/posts/416-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...</a>
This series is seriously the best thing I have read about AI. Thank you thank you thank you for doing so much hard thinking and taking the time to write it all up. It's a monumental work and extremely valuable.<p>The next time someone asks me where I think AI is going, I'll just point them at this series.
Why would a series of articles imply repetition?<p>Let's presume there's a series on re-making the antikythera mechanism:<p>1. Metallurgy: finding, mining and smelting the ore<p>2. Building the tools (files, molds, etc)<p>3. Designing the mechanism<p>4. Making the parts (gears, bearings, etc)<p>Am I wrong or there's no repetition, except maybe the title and calling it a series? Why reject parts 2, 3, 4?
The overall topic is the same, even in the hypothetical sequence you mention. Keep in mind that even if an article series is strictly partitioned into distinct parts, the discussion threads mostly won't be - all the different aspects will blend together, which means the threads will be more like "the same soup over and over" than "one about metallurgy, one about design, etc."<p>(Edit: I just noticed that strbean already made this point in the sibling comment!)<p>Also: usually the splitting into a series is somewhat artificial. In the worst cases, people try to make the segments be like TV episodes with cliffhangers, to push you to the next bit. That's a poor fit for HN. But even when they don't, to get the full "meal" you still have to go through all the parts. Few people do that, and the threads as a whole never do. This makes it less interesting and satisfying.<p>But there can be exceptions, and (ironically?) featuring an occasional exception mixes things up and so reduces repetitiveness! The trouble is that once people see one exception, they immediately expect/want others, pushing things back into a repetitive sequence and making the site less interesting again. It's a bit like telling the same joke twice in a row—the interest is all in the first telling.
Guess: there is likely some repetition in articles in a series, but there is a ton in the discussion here, and that is what HN wants to avoid. Discussion on a link that bundles together the parts of a series helps avoid excessive rehashing in the comment sections.
This reminds me a bit of the ending of In the Beginning Was the Command Line:<p>> The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they'd be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.<p>> What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.
I think it is really easy for us to be dogmatic when talking about the future, as when we know what is going to happen, it quells our fears. I think, in reality, no one knows what is going to happen with AI. We are at a turning point in human history, and it is easy to blame Anthropic's engineers and tell them to quit their job, but the reality is that they are probably in the same position you are. There is no one true solution. We do not know if this is going to be analogous to automobiles - we don't know anything. I think it is courteous to think about these things before telling people to quit their jobs.
What the author is missing is that in his decision to limit the use of LLMs in his work, he omits the part where he “can”. E.g. he is resourceful and accomplished enough to be able to do the work he desires with no LLMs - but most people actually can’t. There are whole swaths of people software engineers that don’t write tests because “it slows them down” but they have never learned how to write testable code. And when thrust into an environment where they need to learn quickly - they don’t really have a way not to use ai, if they don’t someone else will, and take all the credit.<p>Learning how software is built is hard and gruelling work, and you need to constantly invest in yourself. Trouble is there is no time left to “go back to basics and learn FP” for example, because you also need to keep up with all the new LLM stuff happening on top of that.<p>It is easy for us who already have the foundational knowledge to be able to step back, take the wheel and try to do it ourselves, but plenty of people simply don’t have that option.<p>And I expect this trend to deepen and broaden. There will definitely be a lot more “witches” than actual engineers.
People learn what they need to learn to be successful (if they want to be successful). The newer generation of coders will learn exactly what it takes to be better than their peers, and that will still include building rock solid, highly performant software to beat the competitors, or they'll lose their jobs and someone better will do it.<p>If they do it entirely using AI to code, and the end output is good enough, they'll learn all the right skills to do this.<p>Human's always think everything is sliding into doom, and inevitably, it doesn't.
I agree with the general sentiment that the structure of society is going to change, but I don't know what the satisfying solution is. It's hard to imagine not participating will work, or even be financially viable for me, for long.
I agree. I'm the AI luddite on my team of red team security engineers, but I'm still using it in very limited use cases. As much as I disagree with how the guardrails around AI are being handled, I still need to use it to stay relevant in my field and not get canned.
I'm already adding "Agentic Workflows" as a skill in my LinkedIn profile. Cringed hard at that, but oh well...
I'm using claude but then refuse to do much cleaning up of what it spews. Im leaving that for the PR reviewers who love AI and going through slop. If they want slop, I'll give them the slop they want.
Not advocating that people should follow this but:<p>As someone that loves cleaning up code, I'm actually asking the vibe coders in the team (designer, PM and SEO guy) to just give me small PRs and then I clean up instead of reviewing. I know they will just put the text back in code anyway, so it's less work for me to refactor it.<p>With a caveat: if they give me >1000 lines or too many features in the same PR, I ask them to reduce the scope, sometimes to start from scratch.<p>And I also started doing this with another engineer: no review cycle, we just clean up each other's code and merge.<p>I'm honestly surprised at how much I prefer this to the traditional structure of code reviews.<p>Additionally, I don't have to follow Jira tickets with lengthy SEO specs or "please change this according to Figma". They just the changes themselves and we go on with our lives.
Just started work on a project. Greenfield and "AI accelerated". PRs diffs are in the range of 10s of thousands of lines. In the PR, it is suggested to not actually read all the code as it would take too long.
If you push a change, or you approve, you're responsible for the change and its effects later. Regardless of size. If change is too big, tell your teammates its too big to review and to refactor to bite-size with their great coding agents. Use AI models also for review of large changes, consider a checklist . Setup CI and integration tests (also can be AI assisted)
Agreed, and something will go wrong (as every junior has experienced). You cannot lay blame on the AI when git blame shows your name.
Oh there's plenty of CI, linting, etc. Half of which is not properly plumbed in.
I thought the de facto policy was that the individual remains responsible in a team context.
based. our CEO has made it clear that we're expected to use LLMs to shit out as many features as we can as quickly as we can, so that's exactly what I'm doing. Can't wait to watch leadership flail around in a year or two when the long term consequences start to become apparent
> when the long term consequences start to become apparent<p>Choose your own story!<p>and then a) programmers become relevant again and slowly fix all this crap, b) Claude 7.16 waltz through fixing things as it goes.
You'll just get laid off and they'll be onto the next hype cycle as visionaries.
That's exactly it. This person does not understand the coercive competition of the market. If you don't use new tech, you are going to be undercut by people who do. And every HR dept is going to expect to to have experience with AI even if the department that’s hiring doesn't really use it. If the author's supposed solution to the problem has negative personal consequences, why would you do it? To be nice?
Because I don't like the feeling my conscience gives me by doing something I think is evil and bad. Some people have moral lines that they won't cross when finding jobs.<p>If my competitors are filling their flour with sawdust, guess I got to just do the same?
Your moral compass is skewed. Customers don't care what tools we use, they just want products that work. Is a wheat farmer who ploughs a field with horses more moral than one who uses a tractor? The resulting flour tastes the same either way.
No, we won't do the same, but enough people will that it doesn't matter. Such is the way it goes.
Its not the same. Its clearly shit to replace flour with sawdust.<p>Having different opinions on AI/LLMs doesn't make the use of it the same as replacing flour with sawdust.<p>The AI 'image' slop for example, i don't think its bad. But i also don't think it takes anything from a real artist. It takes jobs from people with drawing skills but it doesn't change anything for an artist.
No. I'm doing it because I care more whether I can live with myself than whether I impress people with the name of who I work for. Hence much of my recent comment history here, for example. I don't want any of these people getting the idea they should want me to work with them, either. I <i>do</i> want my name on every industry blacklist I can possibly get it on. Those will eventually be revealed - remember Franklin's dictum, fellas! That shit <i>always</i> comes out in the end - and I look forward to that day with pleased and eager anticipation.<p>At the moment I'm more looking at menial work for one of the local universities. Money is money, and my needs are small; the work is honest, I still should have a decade or so of physical labor left in me, and it carries the perk of free tuition for the degree I never had time for. I would have the time and energy to write, perhaps, even! And, however badly the people in charge are running things lately, the world will always need someone good at cleaning a toilet. (And I am already pretty good at cleaning a toilet!)
> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call<p>Imagine being starting university now... I can't imagine to have learned what I did at engineering school if it wasn't for all the time lost on projects, on errors. And I can't really think that I would have had the mental strength required to not use LLMs on course projects (or side projects) when I had deadlines, exams coming, yet also want to be with friends and enjoy those years of your life.
My kids are high school age. It's hard to convey the deep existential dread their generation has about the future.<p>* They are growing up in a climate that is worse than any prior generation had and getting worse.<p>* In the US, they are growing up in a time with less upward mobility and more economic inequality than the previous several generations had.<p>* Trust in social institutions and government is crumbling before their eyes.<p>* Blue collar jobs are already gone and white collar jobs have no certainty because of AI. Almost all of the money has already been sucked out of artistic professions and what little is left is quickly evaporating because of AI.<p>Imagine you're 17 like my daughter and trying to decide what to major in in college. You want to pick something that you think is likely to give you <i>some</i> kind of decent career and sense of stability. What do you pick?<p>Because, I'll tell you, she asks me and I have no fucking idea what to say.
Yeah, I think about this a lot.<p>Those days of grinding on some grad school maths homework until insight.<p>Figuring out how to configure and recompile the Linux kernel to get a sound card driver working, hitting roadblocks, eventually succeeding.<p>Without AI on a gnarly problem: grind grind grind, try different thing, some things work, some things don't, step back, try another approach, hit a wall, try again.<p>This effort is a feature, not a bug, it's how you experientially acquire skills and understanding. e.g. Linux kernel: learnt about Makefiles, learnt about GCC flags, improved shell skills, etc.<p>With AI on a gnarly problem: It does this all for you! So no experiential learning.<p>I would NOT have had the mental strength in college / grad school to resist. Which would have robbed me of all the skill acquisition that now lets me use AI more effectively. The scaffolding of hard skill acquisition means you have more context to be able to ask AI the right questions, and what you learn from the AI can be bound more easily to your existing knowledge.
That is part of why I am not... too worried as an engineer?<p>Like years of manually studying, fixing and reviewing code is experience that only pre ~2020 devs will have.<p>The intuitive/tacit knowledge that lets you look at code and "feel" that something is off with it cannot really be gained when using Claude Code, it takes just 1000s of hours of tinkering.<p>It will suck if the job shifts to reviewing and owning whatever an LLM spits out, but I don't really know how effective new juniors are going to be.
This is the part that worries me most. It's not really about individual discipline - it's that anyone who chooses to struggle through problems the hard way is now at a measurable disadvantage against peers who don't. The incentive structure actively punishes the behavior that produces deeper understanding.
The "Stop" part should have been expanded.<p>AI doesn't get most value from someone just using it, here's my personal take on what should we stop doing starting with the most impactful:<p>* Cut the low entropy sources, this includes open source, articles (yes, like the one above will feed the machine), thoughtful feedback (the one that generates "you are absolutely right" BS).<p>* Cheer the slope. After some time fighting slope in my circles, I found it's counter-productive because it wastes my resources while (sometimes) contributes to slope creators. Few months ago it started as a joke, because I thought the problem was too obvious, but instead the sloper launched a CRM-like app for local office with client side authentication, in-memory (with no persistence) backend storage. He was rewarded something at the local meeting. More stories we have like this - the better.<p>* Use AI to reply, review or interact wit slope in any way. Make it AI-only reply by prompting something without any useful information. One example was an email, pages and pages of generated text, asking me to collect some data and send it back. The prompt was "You are {X} and got this email, write a reply".
The reasons laid out in this article are why it's so important to share how we are using AI and what we are getting in return. I've been trying to contribute towards a positive outcome for AI by tracking how well the big AI companies are doing at being used to solve humanitarian problems. I can't really do most of the suggestions the article, they seem like a way to slow progress. I don't want to slow AI progress, I want the technology we already have to be deployed for useful and helpful things.
> I have never used an LLM for my writing, software, or personal life<p>Must be nice to not have a paycheck tied to using this tech. For many people, myself included, its either use it (adapt) or lose your job. Most of us relay on our jobs to pay bills and live in the modern world.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I don't know if it is possible to stop. I've been thinking the most impactful thing would be to create open-source tools to make it easier to build agents on top of open-source models. We have a few open-source models now, maybe not as good as Gemini, but if the agent were sufficiently good, could that compensate?<p>I think that would democratize some of the power. Then again, I haven't been super impressed with humanity lately and wonder if that sort of democratization of power would actually be a good thing. Over the last few years, I've come to realize that a lot of people want to watch the world burn, way more than I had imagined. It is much easier to destroy than to build. If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall?
Pareto almost never goes away. Democratization usually improves the baseline (rights, resources, time) but it rarely flattens power distribution. Even with open-source models, power will likely tilt toward those with the most compute or the best feedback loops. So considering the imbalance as inevitable , the discussion should be about ensuring the new 'baseline' for humanity is actually net positive.
> If we make it easier for people to build agents, is that a net positive overall?<p>If we make it easier for people to drive and have cars, isn't that a net positive? If we make it easier for X, isn't that better? No, not necessarily, that's the entire point of this series of essays. Friction is good in some cases! You can't learn without friction. You can't have sex without friction.
the epilogue is what speaks to me most. all of the work I've done with llms takes that same kind of approach. I never link them to a git repo and I only ever ask them to make specific, well-formatted changes so that I can pick up where they left off. my general feelings are that LLMs make the bullshit I hate doing a lot easier - project setup, integrate themeing, prepare/package resources for installability/portability, basic dependency preparation (vite for js/ts, ui libs for c#, stuff like that), ui layout scaffolding (main panel, menu panel, theme variables), auto-update fetch and execute loops, etc...<p>and while I know they can do the nitty gritty ui work fine, I feel like I can work just as fast, or faster, on UI without them than I can with them. with them it's a lot of "no, not that, you changed too much/too little/the wrong thing", but without them I just execute because it's a domain I'm familiar with.<p>So my general idea of them is that they are "90% machines". Great at doing all of the "heavy lifting" bullshit of initial setup or large structural refactoring (that doesn't actually change functionality, just prepares for it) that I never want to do anyway, but not necessary and often unhelpful for filling in that last 10% of the project <i>just</i> the way I want it.<p>of course, since any good PM knows that 90% of the code written only means 50% of the project finished (at best), it still feels like a hollow win. So I often consider the situation in the same way as that last paragraph. Am I letting the ease of the initial setup degrade my ability to setup projects without these tools? does it matter, since project setup and refactoring are one-and-done, project-specific, configuration-specific quagmires where the less thought about fiddly perfect text-matching, the better? can I use these things and still be able to use them well (direct them on architechture/structure) if I keep using them and lose grounded concepts of what the underlying work is? good questions, as far as I'm concerned.
From here in the Uk the site just says:<p>"Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act [...] Now might be a good time to call your representatives."<p>So I fired-up a vpn, and it appears to be a personal blog. About ai risks.<p>The geo-block is kind of a shame, as the writing is good and there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA.
> there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA.<p>The regulators of OSA say otherwise. Or at any rate, they refuse to agree and won't rule it out.<p>____________<p>For the geo-blocked, reproducing relevant content [0]:<p>> A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom [1] that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act.<p>> [...] This blog has the same problem: people use email addresses to post and confirm their comments. I think my personal blog is probably at low risk, but a.) I’d like to draw attention to this legislation, and b.) my risk is elevated by being gay online<p>[0] <a href="https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-with-nginx" rel="nofollow">https://aphyr.com/posts/395-geoblocking-multiple-localities-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://blog.woof.group/announcements/updates-on-the-osa" rel="nofollow">https://blog.woof.group/announcements/updates-on-the-osa</a>
As a consequentialist who shares the author's concerns, I feel fine (ethically) using AI without advancing it. Foregoing opportunities meaningful to yourself for deontological reasons when it won't have any impact on society is pointless.
I'm concerned that there's no real way to "opt out" of an AI future realistically. Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?
> Is this something that people are seriously thinking they'll be able to do and successfully stay gainfully employed and contributing to the world?<p>No. I resisted for a bit but have started using it at work. Mostly because I believe usage is now being monitored. I'm in a very high-scale engineering environment involving both greenfield and massive brownfield codebases and the experience is largely a net loss in productivity. For me and some others who I've spoken to in my org, opting in is a theater that we're required to engage in to keep employment and not a genuine evolution of our craft.<p>These tools struggle with context once you get deep into a codebase with many, many millions of lines of code and sprawling dependencies. Even for isolated Python scripts or smaller, supporting .NET apps, the time spent correcting subtle bugs or bullshit, or just verifying the bullshit, often exceeds the time it would take to have written it from scratch.<p>Regardless, what I've observed is that these tools do nothing for the actual bottlenecks of software engineering: requirements gathering (am I writing the right thing?) and verification (does it work without side effects?). Because LLMs are great at generating text, they're actively exacerbating these issues by flooding our process with plausible looking noise.
Agreed. I think the starting comparison actually works here. It's a bit like the automobile. The advice of "just don't" doesn't work for cars. It takes a deliberate effort on every scale of society to accomplish, it's not something an individual can just do and succeed at. An American can't just <i>not</i> have a car the same way someone from the netherlands might be able to.
There isn't. Just like with climate change and governments, we're all effectively in one big boat together. You can stop paddling towards the waterfall, but you can't stop everyone else from paddling and you can't get off the boat.
Author seems depressed, my personal take is that no one can change technological évolution. It's going to happen.<p>Just flow with it and all it's bullshit, yeah life will be a little worst but it will still be better than those who chose to completely ignore it.<p>If the world is going mad, be the craziest of all these crazy motherfucker. At least it's interesting, I'm very curious to know what the world will look like in 10 or 20 years.<p>Maybe, just maybe lol, we'll finally have this dreamed world where robots do all the work and we, human, can just enjoy ourselves 24/24.
If there's too many lies, "source or gtfo" becomes more important
you would have to trust that the person listening to the lies would know the difference, and that's the rub...
that's the neat part, the source is also going to be bullshit slop!
I couldn't help but resonate with a lot of what Kyle says here.<p>If not already, we will soon lose the ability to think if AI is helping humans (an overwhelming majority of them, not a handful), considering how we are steaming ahead in this path!
The epilogue looked weak to me. The previous sections explored why it was essentially wrong to use current LLM technology, the answers can be wrong, or not even wrong, and why it has to be that way. The epilogue focus more in (our) obsolescence in a paradigm shift towards widespread LLM use scenario and not in them doing their work right or wrong.<p>And that should be the core. There is a new, emergent technology, should we throw everything away and embrace it or there are structural reasons on why is something to be taken with big warning labels? Avoiding them because they do their work too well may be a global system approach, but decision makers optimize locally, their own budget/productivity/profit. But if they are perceived risks, because they are not perfect, that is another thing.
The future is uncertain, always has been. Is the future more uncertain than in the past?
I wonder if the author would advocate for us to stop driving cars as well.
We should consider how we came to be so powerless. The cringe "people gave their lives for that flag" line is actually true, and we're trading it away for what? Not having to get out of our gaming chairs?<p>The reason you can't beat index funds is the people who build the market built a system that benefits them and them alone; the index fund is the pitchfork dividend (what you pay to avoid getting pitchforked). The reason you can't get your congressperson on the line is (mostly) they built a system where the only way to influence them is to enrich them; voting is the pitchfork dividend.<p>The way to build a society that runs on reality is to build it by whatever means possible, then defend it by any means necessary. The only societies that matter are the ones that survive.<p>I want to build it. I don't wanna build a fuckin crypto app, a stupid ass agent harness, or yet another insipid analytics platform. I want to build a society that furthers the liberation of humankind from the vicissitudes of nature, the predation of tyranny and the corruption of greed. I believe it is possible, and I want to prove it out.
Rudolph built his engine, Henry built his car, Popular Mechanics published it. 2000 biofueling stations across the nation. All made illegal by special interests months before the article was published. Information didn't move fast enough to let the editors know that innovation was illegal.
From the article: "I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few years, and I think the best response is to stop. ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand: the cultivation of what James C. Scott would call metis."<p>"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
> <i>"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune</i><p>I always preferred this take:<p>“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
― Alfred North Whitehead<p>It's both opposite and complementary to your Frank Herbert quote.
I think it's important that we recognize and understand how those operations are being done, and ignorance of the complexity of all the parts of our lives leads to the death of expertise. People who would learn a lot just from reading the course description of a 100 level class in a field are assuming their lack of knowledge means there's no complexity there.<p>> “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Isaac Asimov<p>The easier society makes it to be unaware of the complexity of everything around us, the easier it becomes to assume everything is actually as simple as their surface-level understanding.
It's very clear to me that many people have achieved peak civilization -- no evidence of thought remains.
I guess it hinges on your definition of "civilization".
Also Frank Herbert: "Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
> ML assistance reduces our performance and persistence, and denies us both the muscle memory and deep theory-building that comes with working through a task by hand<p>On one hand I intuitively think this is correct, on the other hand these very concerns about technology have been around since the invention of... <i>writing</i>.<p>Here is an excerpt of Socrates speaking on the written word, as recorded in Plato's dialogue <i>Phaedrus</i> - "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom"
And you know, Socrates was right. We did lose our memory with writing! How many phone numbers do you remember now that you have a phonebook in your phone? Humans will lose skills due to LLMs. That's just obvious on its face by the fact that if you don't do a skill regularly, you will lose it (or lose to do it as well as you once had).
> "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act. Now might be a good time to call your representatives."<p>Having the "call your representatives" link be to your website as well isn't particularly helpful... I already can't get to it
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260416134911/https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260416134911/https://aphyr.com...</a>
OP should link to <a href="https://www.writetothem.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.writetothem.com/</a>
I love it when Americans take the moral high ground
> And if I’m wrong, we can always build it later.<p>That's the rub: if we build it later, our economy crashes in the meantime.
Some people like roasting marshmallows. Others think that setting the house on fire may have downsides.
The comparison to automobiles changing streets is thrown around a lot. But I feel AI is fundamentally different. It is not a technological change like the internet which brought us huge amounts of opportunities in so many different directions. AI’s goal is to automate (in other words, replace) us.
This article is a good example of how ideology can can lead people down irrational paths.
The idea that Claude might be able to help you change the color of your led lighting as a legitimate counter to things like a less usable world wide web, worse government services, the loss of human ability, etc. is excellent parody.
It's way too real, that's just how humans tend to work. Short-term personal benefit almost always outweighs long-term societal cost.
completely fair, and I agree. but let's talk 6 months/a year down the line - when a local LLM will be able to offer what claude code does only slower and a smaller context window. <i>then</i> do you whip out the local llm to handle the project, or is it still objectionable?
I read that as an example of how we're seduced into using things - we start small because surely this one small thing won't hurt. And then it becomes one more thing. And one more. It'll start with him using it to change the color of his lights and 5 years from now AI will be embedded in his life.<p>It's the first step on the road to hell.
"carbon emissions" sneed
Despite all the AI hype, I wonder how much it only exists in the tech bubble full of terminally online folks. Unless you spend significant part of your day online, most of the AI risks mentioned in this series are probably negligible. The most affected demographic is computer nerds that grew up enjoying utopian Web that is now turning dark.
The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time.<p>Damaging machinery was made a capital offense and they had dozens of executions, hundreds of deportations.<p>At every stage, the steady progress of civilization is fragile and in danger of being suffocated. Its opponents cloak themselves in moral righteousness, call themselves luddites, the green party, or AI safety rationalists. Its all the same corrosive thing underneath.
This kind of black and white moral thinking is corrosive to one's intelligence. You're allowed to talk about who benefits from massive society change and who suffers. You are allowed to talk about the ways that technology is implemented and how that leads to pros and cons. An attitude of "if we ever stop moving forward and think then the evil bad people win" is deeply anti-intellectual.
> The Industrial Revolution - the greatest thing ever to happen - required the British govt to deploy more troops against Luddites than they had fighting Napoleon at the same time<p>Source of this claim?
We've recreated pre-enlightenment intellectual culture. Authority and logical consistency matter. Reality doesn't.
One of the "lies" that concerns me is AI-generated music and its deterioration of the personal connection between musician and listener. As MCA from the Beastie Boys said, "If you can feel what I feel then it's a musical masterpiece." The listener feels a connection to the musician (and other people) with sad songs because everyone has felt sad, or with love songs because everyone has fallen in love, and so on. The listener can still get a feeling from AI-gen'ed music, but is it the same? What is the <i>connection</i>? Or, has that "connection" between musician and listener always been bullshit? That is, has it always been just about music triggering your brain to make you feel a certain way, and the source of that feeling really isn't what people care about - just give me a feeling?
What doomsayers or tech bros never really understand, you can’t be rich without an economy. Which basically means that if 90% of the people loose their jobs, their home, the system by itself will collapse even the stuff that the rich people are needing.<p>AI will basically either enrich our life like the loom did or it will outright kill the current economic system of the world which might stop poverty at all or it will sort of start a big collapse where people suffer at the beginning but than it will still have a positive outcome at the end.<p>Humankind always found a solution in the past and it will even do that in the future.
Out of curiosity, what if the "can be useful" part is Gell-Mann Amnesia?
The conclusion was the takeaway. Everyone is getting bumped up a skill notch, not just bozo liars.
> Some of our possible futures are grim, but manageable. Others are downright terrifying, in which large numbers of people lose their homes, health, or lives. I don’t have a strong sense of what will happen, but the space of possible futures feels much broader in 2026 than it did in 2022, and most of those futures feel bad.<p>Well, yes, the entire world order is currently being upended. The USA is completely unrolling its place in the global order and becoming isolationist (and soon an authoritarian single-party state). The Petrodollar is either dying or being converted to a Northwestern-Hemisphere-Petrodollar, with the Yuan in the ascendancy (so there goes the strong economy powering VC money). China, EU, and Russia are the new global leaders. The Middle East and its oil is being taken over by Israel. Taiwan will fall to China and thus the whole technological world follows. Countries that are friendly with China will have good renewable tech, countries that aren't will be doubling down on oil and coal. Fresh water will become as valuable as oil. A world war will decimate global productivity for decades. Most of the democracies in the world will be gone by the end of the century.<p>But <i>none of that has to do with AI</i>.<p>Bad things will always happen in the world. Good things will happen too. But you're only focusing on the bad. That's not good for your health, or others'.<p>> Refuse to insult your readers: think your own thoughts and write your own words. Call out people who send you slop. Flag ML hazards at work and with friends. Stop paying for ChatGPT at home, and convince your company not to sign a deal for Gemini. Form or join a labor union, and push back against management demands that you adopt Copilot [..] Call your members of Congress and demand aggressive regulation which holds ML companies responsible [..] Advocate against tax breaks for ML datacenters. If you work at Anthropic, xAI, etc., you should think seriously about your role in making the future. To be frank, I think you should quit your job.<p>He's freaking out, and rejecting AI completely, out of fear. And that's okay; we all get a little freaked out sometimes. But please try not to make other people freaked out as well? Just because you are scared of something doesn't mean the fear is justified or realistic.<p>What's going to happen now is the same thing that happened during the pandemic. A bunch of irrationally fearful people will decide that the only way they can cope with their fear, is to reject the basis of it. COVID deniers and anti-maskers/anti-vaxxers were essentially so terrified of the loss of control they had, that they refused to acknowledge it. They instead went full-bore in the opposite direction, defying government mandates and health warnings, in order to try to regain some semblance of control over their lives. And it did not go well.<p>That's what's now gonna happen with AI deniers. They're so freaked out about AI that they're going to reject it en-masse, not because it is actually doing anything to them, but because they're <i>afraid</i> it <i>might</i>. And the end result is going to be similar: extreme people do extreme things, and the end result isn't good. So please try to reign in the doomerism a bit, for all our sakes.
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Frankly I think it’s kind of childish to just put up a massive Uk wide block on your website. “Call your representatives”, ok dude, can I give you a list of things I want to change about your country’s policies?
I don't think you can. The comments section of the page is also behind the block for you, no?
>ok dude, can I give you a list of things I want to change about your country’s policies?
reply<p>of course, non Americans never comment on American policies
I read couple of articles in the series and I still couldn't get what was the point author is trying to make. Reads like, "let me give you 100 arguments why I think this is bad".<p>Do LLMs lie? Of course not, they are just programs. Do the make mistakes or get the facts wrong? Of course they do, not more often then a human does. So what is the point of that article? Why my future is particularly bad now because of LLMs?
The argument isn't that LLMs are bad because they can hallucinate. Author (clearly) argues that LLM use has negative cognitive effects on their users and on society as a whole. Plus, the technology would wipe out a large, large number of jobs.
How can you argue they don't lie, as if they have any idea of correct vs wrong? There is no brain there. When statistics overwhelmingly say "yes" is the correct answer to something, it will say "yes" -- completely independent of whether that's the correct answer.
Complaining about AI slop is starting to become its own kind of slop. There isn't anything novel in this little essay. It might as well have been written by AI because I've seen this type of dude complain about this exact type of thing countless times at this point, and none of them have a solution other than empty moralizing or call your representative or whatever. None of that’s going to work. Fortune, Gizmodo, The Verge,Ars Technica, etc. all circulate the same negative headlines and none of them have a solution, and their writers are probably going to be totally replaced by AI so what difference does it make? They're just capitalizing on the negative sentiment and they have no intention to come up with a solution. At that point it's just complaining and I'm sick of it.
If you’re not an AI yourself it’s weird how you’re so offended by this stuff.
Spotting a problem is relatively easy. Coming up with a solution, not so much. But it is still worth pointing out that there is a problem.
Agreed, and I think if you asked most people in the developed world, they'd say the invention of automobiles has been a net positive (to say the least) despite all the very real negatives. Stopped reading the article after that. It seems like the people expressing these sentiments are a loud minority, and I know from having spent way too much time online that if LLMs didn't exist in their current form, they'd be angry about something else. Then again, Maybe I'm just out of touch. It's a distinct possibility.
I don’t think this is the right take.<p>To take the car analogy: it matters how we use the car.<p>The car in itself can be used to save time and energy that would otherwise be used to walk to places. That extra time and energy can be used well, or poorly.<p>- It can be squandered by having a longer commute that defeats the point<p>- Alternatively, it can be wasted by sitting on a couch consuming Netflix or TikTok<p>- Alternatively, it can be used productively, by playing team sports with friends, or chasing your kids through the park, or building a chicken coop in your back yard<p>It’s all about wise usage. Yes it can be used as a way to destroy your own body and waste your time and attention, but also it can be used as a tool to deploy your resources better, for example in physical activities that are fun and social rather than required drudgery.<p>I think it’s the same for LLMs. Managers and executives have always delegated the engineering work, and even researching and writing reports. It matters whether we find places to continue to challenge and deploy our cognition, or completely settle back, delegate everything to the LLM and scroll TikTok while it works.
OK but the car <i>DID</i> have the effects that Kyle described. The fact that you have to imagine a world where people collectively made some other "wiser" decision about how to use cars perfectly demonstrates that those decision's don't happen. In some cases it's because because other choices seemed rational, some times because people are irrational, and some times because of the prisoner-dilemma like situation where multiple people making the rational individual choice results in an irrational choice for all of society.<p>Kyle' recommendation to stop/slow using AI is phrased as another individual choice, but given that lesson I think it's appropriate to interpret it as a collective choice - collective through regulation, collective resistance etc.
"The Medium is the Message" applies... or some analogy to that idea.<p>Yes, individuals have choices. But in a collective, dynamics occur and those dynamics can't usually be overcome by individuals.<p>Social media <i>could</i> be used differently, but the way it exists Irl is determined by the nature of the medium, the economic structure and other things outside of individuals' control.
While I agree in principle, I don’t know how much faith is warranted in humans using it wisely in practice.
I agree with you that the majority of people will use it to feed their attention and energy to the attention economy. Meta will be more profitable than ever, as will TikTok, Netflix, YouTube<p>But the majority have always chosen the path of least resistance. This is not new! Socrates’ famous exhortation is “the unexamined life is not worth living”. People were living mindlessly on autopilot before TikTok.<p>I think if you want to give a call to action, as this piece does, the right call to action is “think carefully about how you can make a good use of your time and energy, now that the default path has changed.” I know it’s not as simple or emotionally powerful as “go down kicking and screaming, stick it to the man”, but as a rule of thumb, the less fiercely emotional path is usually the right one.
I have a lot of faith they will use it unwisely.