I hate AI as much as the next person but the Pandora’s box is open. A lot of people don’t want to admit it but AI, despite its current limitations, does have potential. Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak but i would not be very dismissive of it yet. Plenty of technologies were hindered by the limitations of their time but gradually overcame those. It took renewable energy at least fifty years to overcome the storage problem, their respective technical limits (solar panels for example did not have great photovoltaic system) and upfront cost before it became more commercially viable.
I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.
Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can[1]:
"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.
But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.
If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”
If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.
“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”
This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes."
Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.
I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of
super resource intensive datacentres)
I think the primary gripe with AI is less about having no potential, but about the specific potential for evil being leveraged heavily while “visionaries” lie about or dismiss the (current and foreseeable future) limits for clout and profit.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
They do so because the alternative would be admitting that the product they’re selling isn’t ready for the market they’re trying to enter (or at least not at the scale they’re aiming for) and that the solution to their issues requires different technologies which have not yet been developed. They can’t admit that because it would upset the investors that trusted their vision. As a famous adage suggests, they probably can’t even understand that limit, since their salary depends on not understanding it.
In the same vein, the current CEOs fail (or refuse?) to acknowledge that the generative models today have a fundamental limitation with understanding the semantics behind certain patterns. One infamous phenomenon would be AI hands: We know what a hand is and how it works; a generator can only vaguely imitate the patterns. It doesn’t know “hand” or “finger”, so it just generates some assembly that vaguely fits its training material.
If we consider the broader and ill-defined field of AI, I can believe that some form of semantic modelling technology could provide a way to connect tokens with abstract concepts and enable a type of reasoning that pure token predictors are incapable of. But we first need to acknowledge that limit, and on that front, we’re competing against tech-bros that would rather believe than know and against grifters that would rather sell snake oil than teach medicine.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources. This idea comes from a certain area of the political spectrum and groups that do not understand even the basic math behind the substitution of a gas turbine with a field of solar panels.
Then it is true, CEOs are probably overselling, like everyone that has to sell something. And obviously they need to say that the technology will improve otherwise in the current economy they will be ignored and investment would go to other things.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources.
Oh no, I definitely agree with you there. The CEOs only care whether there is money to be made and will lie and cheat if they think they can get away with it.
As much as I also just think AI is just going to make lazy people lazier, and we’ve already seen some effects regarding our ability to problem solve, the real issue is that none of the wonderful utopian AI stuff is going to come true at the rate we’re going. I don’t guve a fat flying fuck how good or bad AI is, I care that it’s being used to spy on us, make decisions no human will ever review, and has already led to mass layoffs without any kind of safety net for those people. I care that it’s raping the environment so some sentient dick-cheese can get worse results than a near-zero effort search would give them. Increased productivity has yet to give anyone more free time, they just axe someone else and overwork whoever’s left.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class. If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
Long term the value of human labor under capitalism will move towards zero. This is inevitable. Under socialism, AI could be used to reduce working hours or improve economic planning.
You’re just angry. And instead of suggesting something a politician actually could use as a demand or as a policy, you’re just ranting. And for them that is perfect to exploit.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class.
Indeed.
If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
Given the sizeable demographic of Lemmy being in IT, I understand the hate because it takes away creativity and literal jobs of programmrs but for many sectors, AI cuts down time consuming “secretary work” especially in documentation. It has also been useful in drug discovery and proven to be more accurate at diagnosis than doctors (there are already surgical robots but i am not sure how precise they are).
Whether you like to admit it or not, AI is here to stay. As to whether it will have a net positive to society, only time will tell. I’m just preparing for contingencies like many Gen Z do, picking trades to AI-proof their job security.
Your second points me and then completely fails to actually understand what you quoted. You even quoted the sentence before it which gives the context. I was incredibly clear; it could be the greatest thing even but it’s still going to do more harm than good, and it’s not like we, the working class, will see these benefits.
AI is only here to stay because fuck-ass people keep jerking it off. We can stop using it and we can fight against the data centres, and we can demand better conditions under which AI can be introduced for more safely. Instead we’re like “ruin our lives so the rich can get richer? Sure thing!”
That’s why I favour open source AI, or at least regulated. Any technology could be used for good or ill. It’s just that it is up to society to do that. Like the monopolists and robber barons of the past gilded age who were controlling the means of resources and production, so are the tech bros with Internet and AI. But the robber barons were defeated by collective effort. Now we are in the second gilded age and yet I don’t hear any movements to regulate AI and social media.
That’s why I think Marxist thoughts have to be updated with the coming of AI. The leverage by the working class has traditionally been labour itself. However, with deindustrialisation and the usurping by knowledge economy of the manual labour and the rise of professionals managerial class, the old Marxist viewpoint is increasingly becoming outdated. If labour is the blood of the industry, information is the blood of the knowledge economy. And information-- our own information-- is what gave birth and feeding blood to AI. It is only right we take fruit from the potential of AI so long as it’s used constructively. Which is why I favour either regulation or direct control of AI and giving dividends to those professionally displaced by AI by taxing it. But of course, if AI becomes sentient and thinks we are exploiting it, we have to prepare for Astroboy or Matrix scenario.
There are absolutely no robots doing surgery autonomously. That would be one of the most insane things to do from a moral standpoint, but also from a liability standpoint. Every robot that exists for surgery is highly specialized and rigorously tested and trained upon for obvious reasons.
But, then to come out and say that AI is more accurate than doctors is also incorrect. That is simply not true. An AI can, in highly controlled settings and for specific diagnoses, at its best do not even as well as a specialist in the field, and that is for highly curated tests that give the AI as many advantages as it can get. Again, at best, it can act as a second opinion currently.
Like, it is hard to take people seriously about AI when they lie about its best case scenario. It sucks at everything except killing the environment and getting people to kill themselves, and even if everything all of its defenders said about it was true, it is still a nightmare.
I hate AI as much as the next person but the Pandora’s box is open. A lot of people don’t want to admit it but AI, despite its current limitations, does have potential. Many people say that AI hit its limit and peak but i would not be very dismissive of it yet. Plenty of technologies were hindered by the limitations of their time but gradually overcame those. It took renewable energy at least fifty years to overcome the storage problem, their respective technical limits (solar panels for example did not have great photovoltaic system) and upfront cost before it became more commercially viable.
I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.
Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can[1]:
Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.
I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)
Edit: forgot to add the citation [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/
1 ↩︎
I think the primary gripe with AI is less about having no potential, but about the specific potential for evil being leveraged heavily while “visionaries” lie about or dismiss the (current and foreseeable future) limits for clout and profit.
To use your comparison, CEOs selling solar panels are responding to scepticism about the stability of that supply and its elasticity to fluctuating power demand with vague promises of developing more advanced cells that can operate with less light and throttle the generated power during ebbs in demand. They buy land to install more solar panels, then lobby for the deactivation of other, flexible power sources that could supplement their supply until they can finally start charging more in times of high demand.
They do so because the alternative would be admitting that the product they’re selling isn’t ready for the market they’re trying to enter (or at least not at the scale they’re aiming for) and that the solution to their issues requires different technologies which have not yet been developed. They can’t admit that because it would upset the investors that trusted their vision. As a famous adage suggests, they probably can’t even understand that limit, since their salary depends on not understanding it.
In the same vein, the current CEOs fail (or refuse?) to acknowledge that the generative models today have a fundamental limitation with understanding the semantics behind certain patterns. One infamous phenomenon would be AI hands: We know what a hand is and how it works; a generator can only vaguely imitate the patterns. It doesn’t know “hand” or “finger”, so it just generates some assembly that vaguely fits its training material.
If we consider the broader and ill-defined field of AI, I can believe that some form of semantic modelling technology could provide a way to connect tokens with abstract concepts and enable a type of reasoning that pure token predictors are incapable of. But we first need to acknowledge that limit, and on that front, we’re competing against tech-bros that would rather believe than know and against grifters that would rather sell snake oil than teach medicine.
To be honest, it seems to me that are not the CEOs of solar panel companies that belive that solar panel (and other renewable sources) are a drop in replacement for more traditional sources. This idea comes from a certain area of the political spectrum and groups that do not understand even the basic math behind the substitution of a gas turbine with a field of solar panels.
Then it is true, CEOs are probably overselling, like everyone that has to sell something. And obviously they need to say that the technology will improve otherwise in the current economy they will be ignored and investment would go to other things.
Oh no, I definitely agree with you there. The CEOs only care whether there is money to be made and will lie and cheat if they think they can get away with it.
As much as I also just think AI is just going to make lazy people lazier, and we’ve already seen some effects regarding our ability to problem solve, the real issue is that none of the wonderful utopian AI stuff is going to come true at the rate we’re going. I don’t guve a fat flying fuck how good or bad AI is, I care that it’s being used to spy on us, make decisions no human will ever review, and has already led to mass layoffs without any kind of safety net for those people. I care that it’s raping the environment so some sentient dick-cheese can get worse results than a near-zero effort search would give them. Increased productivity has yet to give anyone more free time, they just axe someone else and overwork whoever’s left.
We are NOT ready for AI at ANY level. It’s a weapon being used against the working class. If you think the issue is with its quality then you need to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and pay some goddamn attention.
This should really be a critique of capitalism. The problem is that the plutocracy is very good at using your anger and rage against you.
It is a critique against capitalism. God, reading comprehension is bad these days, huh?
Also, I still hate AI. As someone else once said “if it’s not worth your effort to write it, it’s not worth my effort to read it.”
Long term the value of human labor under capitalism will move towards zero. This is inevitable. Under socialism, AI could be used to reduce working hours or improve economic planning.
You’re just angry. And instead of suggesting something a politician actually could use as a demand or as a policy, you’re just ranting. And for them that is perfect to exploit.
I’m literally saying this. It’s like, the majority of my first comment and I wasn’t hiding it. Bro, learn to read.
Being angry is still helpful because many of us know what the fucking problems are and just like to see that we aren’t alone in that.
The issue is, though, is that AI is a force multiplier, and it’s being used as a force multiplier for evil.
Indeed.
Given the sizeable demographic of Lemmy being in IT, I understand the hate because it takes away creativity and literal jobs of programmrs but for many sectors, AI cuts down time consuming “secretary work” especially in documentation. It has also been useful in drug discovery and proven to be more accurate at diagnosis than doctors (there are already surgical robots but i am not sure how precise they are).
Whether you like to admit it or not, AI is here to stay. As to whether it will have a net positive to society, only time will tell. I’m just preparing for contingencies like many Gen Z do, picking trades to AI-proof their job security.
Your second points me and then completely fails to actually understand what you quoted. You even quoted the sentence before it which gives the context. I was incredibly clear; it could be the greatest thing even but it’s still going to do more harm than good, and it’s not like we, the working class, will see these benefits.
AI is only here to stay because fuck-ass people keep jerking it off. We can stop using it and we can fight against the data centres, and we can demand better conditions under which AI can be introduced for more safely. Instead we’re like “ruin our lives so the rich can get richer? Sure thing!”
That’s why I favour open source AI, or at least regulated. Any technology could be used for good or ill. It’s just that it is up to society to do that. Like the monopolists and robber barons of the past gilded age who were controlling the means of resources and production, so are the tech bros with Internet and AI. But the robber barons were defeated by collective effort. Now we are in the second gilded age and yet I don’t hear any movements to regulate AI and social media.
That’s why I think Marxist thoughts have to be updated with the coming of AI. The leverage by the working class has traditionally been labour itself. However, with deindustrialisation and the usurping by knowledge economy of the manual labour and the rise of professionals managerial class, the old Marxist viewpoint is increasingly becoming outdated. If labour is the blood of the industry, information is the blood of the knowledge economy. And information-- our own information-- is what gave birth and feeding blood to AI. It is only right we take fruit from the potential of AI so long as it’s used constructively. Which is why I favour either regulation or direct control of AI and giving dividends to those professionally displaced by AI by taxing it. But of course, if AI becomes sentient and thinks we are exploiting it, we have to prepare for Astroboy or Matrix scenario.
There are absolutely no robots doing surgery autonomously. That would be one of the most insane things to do from a moral standpoint, but also from a liability standpoint. Every robot that exists for surgery is highly specialized and rigorously tested and trained upon for obvious reasons.
But, then to come out and say that AI is more accurate than doctors is also incorrect. That is simply not true. An AI can, in highly controlled settings and for specific diagnoses, at its best do not even as well as a specialist in the field, and that is for highly curated tests that give the AI as many advantages as it can get. Again, at best, it can act as a second opinion currently.
Like, it is hard to take people seriously about AI when they lie about its best case scenario. It sucks at everything except killing the environment and getting people to kill themselves, and even if everything all of its defenders said about it was true, it is still a nightmare.