I think a better challenge would be to turn off the internet for a week and see what happens. The times I did internet detoxes, I felt completely relaxed and got a mental clarity I don’t have in my day to day life. Sadly I’m dependent on the internet for my job, so I can’t really detox like that nowadays, but I miss the feeling.
Something a friend and I were discussing today was that you can’t really avoid AI and remain productive right now. (We both teach university Computer Science.)
Ignoring how so much of modern society is running on it, you’d have to complete isolate to avoid it and it’s reach entirely.
Additionally, the tooling and infrastructure to support how things were done just a few years ago has all been stripped away. Online search is ass on every major engine right now, most of the forums are dead, documentation and discussion lives inside of private Discord channels. It feels like there just isn’t a back to go back to anymore.
People are severely overestimating the importance of AI. It’s more FOMO than anything else.
Wait until you have to pay non-subsidized prices for the use of LLM’s, how productive are they in reality when the real costs come in to play? You could just train and hire actual people to do the job far more accurately with some quality control?
Not denying there’s some fields with great benefits from LLM’s, but writing emails, answering phonecalls aren’t it. LLM’s cant even transcribe conversations with any proper accuracy and as a society we now trust them to make decisions.
It boggles the mind, really.
They weren’t using their brains before ai, what made you think they would now?
Are YOU using your brain right now?
Semi-related: I turned off spellcheck and autocorrect for a month to see what happens. Turns out I’m more dependant on it than I realized.
My autocorrect is my nemesis. The phone I had before this one had pretty solid autocorrect, but this current one has an autocorrect that is so terrible I’m forced to correct my autocorrect constantly.
Should probably do what you do and turn it off and see what happens.
At this point I’d rather turn it off, since iOS spell check csnt stop replacing real words with those I accidentally butchered once
I can totally turn it off, but it’s going to slow me way down as I’d re-read everything and go back and make edits.
True. I’m also using it a little bit to much. And also a little problem for me. Using Spellcheck for two Languages.
You are assuming they worked to begin with.
AI has been an amazing tool for those with no ability to think, to operate slightly like a person who can.
Like a peg leg helps a amutee walk. The issue is they are using to run and claiming they are the fastest.
The funny thing is my friend was all on the AI train. Lately he finally agrees with me that it’s trash, they had him use it at work and he spent more time fixing the code.
Something similar happened in January 2013. In protest of the SOPA/PIPA bills that threatened section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Wikipedia went dark.
It got everyone’s attention, especially students, who had grown accustomed to Wikipedia’s ubiquity as a resource.
did they work prior?
oh okay
I’ve been hoping that something like this would happen for what feels like too long at this point.
The global economy is probably already dependent on some Claude code instance updating an Excel spreadsheet on someone’s laptop with a note ”don’t close the lid!” attached to it
When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn’t have drivers to support USB and we couldn’t upgrade the computers because the software wouldn’t work on any other hardware.
So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.
I wonder if Proton can run these old softwares
At a previous job, I had to build laptops that would multi-boot DOS, Win95, Win98, and XP, all on one laptop. Our field-tech’s software had to have those specific versions of windows for the machines that they serviced, because of how the software interacted with USB and embeded floppy drives.
If you want to scare yourself:
spoiler
They serviced Medical devices: X-rays, MRIs, CT-Scanners, etc.
That’s dumb. The “work” in maintaining this excel file was the prompting and overall agent logic. In reality you’d be using something like openrouter and the instant claude “dies” for whatever reason you swap to whatever the freshest AI is. This never becomes ancient, it keeps up with the times.
I don’t know about that the entirety of European airspace was closed early in the year because of a pilot inputed some malformed data and it crashed both the primary and backup system. The backup system just fed the primary systems inputs into it, so that was inevitable.
Reminds me of some stupid company maybe a few months ago that had their PRs failing due to copilot being down the dumbasses didn’t build an “if no AI” failsafe into their workflow. And no one knew how to recover it
I know my work already has reports built by running data through Claude and having it spit out an xls. Though, it’s not quite as integral as the all-important closet laptop.
So far, so good.
Outages via https://downdetector.com/Imagine this: someone do turn ai off for a week. Govs learns 97% (everyone except few scientists, me and Joe)… 97% of voters are stupider than anyone ever though. Govs will know exactly what to do with stupid rams. Scientists will panic.
No, lets not do this. (it is done already, facebooks, tiktoks, instas, reddits already proven and provide exact datas, with daily updates and per subgroups.
Holy fuck, what are you trying to say?
Turning AI off for a week will not reveal anything to capitalist institutions whose stated purpose is to influence elections that they did not already know.
What it will do is reveal within friend groups and within communities who has a brain that they’re willing to use and who’s been skating by on other people’s brains since long before ChatGPT came along.
you said things, some say many things, but it was certainly a thing you did.
great job.
I write well enough for the e-mails I’m required to send, I don’t code, I have no use/desire to generate “art,” and I don’t like search results I have to double check so I’ve been blessed (cursed?) to not have to use “AI” in my daily life.
If we shutdown AI there’d also be a massive hiring spree and wages would probably tick up a bit to compensate. AI is just the latest scam to suppress workers and wages. They want perpetual suffering for us and infinite gains for themselves.
As a millennial the only positive of LLMs is that younger generations won’t threaten my career
Younger generations are, by and large, as technologically illiterate as boomers are. It doesnt apply to all of them, but the majority of them grew up with nothing but easy UIs. They may not chicken-pick to type, but they still cant troubleshoot anything and tend to know nothing outside of interacting with a typical interface. They definitely grew up with nothing like Windows 95 or 98 (or even XP) where you had to actually understand how a computer works to some extent to use the thing (or fix it)
Millennials, particularly the younger millennials especially, grew up right in the sweet spot to be at a tech advantage. At least as far as the average person goes. Obviously anyone passionate about tech will be far ahead of the average person, regardless of age
We tried to teach ours and got “dad can you just fix it I’m in a game”. Then no desire to learn in free time.
Would you mind sharing how you tried to teach and what you think went wrong?
Wholeheartedly agree. This is from 2013, and I feel it’s only gotten worse since then.
Arguably even windows 95/98 was rediculously easy compared to dos or Unix systems before it.
Sit a kid down in front of a c64 with a manual and see if they can do anything on it. If they can read the manual that is…
Sure these systems are “obsolete” but the brain training is priceless. Kids now are training their brains to love ads and corporations. Its gotten super bad. And I’m not even an old person (just been into tech history my whole life) so its rediculous I’m even saying this.
The older gen z too I would say
As a millenial looking to change careers, because I was done with the old one. No, it sucks!
I agree. I am more than happy to pass the torch when the time comes. I certainly don’t want to work forever, but I also want to be able to train competent replacements at some point.
They will if you don’t use AI though
Don’t believe you, seems like useless nonsense to me
Considering how much competitive jobs have become refusing to use a powerful tool like AI won’t help. I’m not saying that you should use it just that people using it will be advantaged over these who don’t
I work in a creative industry, as far as we are concerned it is plagiarism
It is also non deterministic crap that developers should know better than to use
I work in a creative industry, as far as we are concerned it is plagiarism
AI can be useful in pretty much every field, if you are shoveling snow llms can help you making a plan and draw a route to do it faster
We have path finding algorithms. Large Language Models aren’t suited for that.
Probably speaking to the choir here, but I do feel it is worth pointing out that those same algorithms were considered AI until like 3-5 years ago when the zeitgeist shifted to AI=Transformers/LLMs
I know enough to understand it’s useless, it will fall apart when the psychosis wears off
Video generators are becoming excellent and image generators already are, what makes you think people will give up on these tools? The industry is already adapting, 1/3 of the ads you see now are made with AI
