scared

i live in the united states and i am ashamed of my country for the first time in my life. i do realize no matter what country you live in you have shame now or about something in the past. the good news is it always gets better eventually.

i fear the prices of everything going way up and it's starting already. i'm on social security and that's all we have except a small pension, if we lose ss for a while i'll be homeless and will lose my truck. i'm worried about how the rest of the world thinks about us, and i don't blame them. all because certain billionaires want more money and they are taking it from the poor.

all of that is bad but someday will get better but i have an alarming fear. with ai and robotics . with ai when it's perfect why hire serataries, journalist etc. we don't need people. and when they get fully functioning robots they won't need to hire people anymore. i'm retired so i'm safe but what about my kids and grandkids? we will be a welfare state where the gvernment will have to pay everyone and billionaires run everything, not mentioning names lol. i have a question, if we become a welfare state who is going to buy the billionaires stuff. i am not putting any society down but through living 68 years i have made observations. dictatorship doesn't work, communism doesnt work, and capitalism doesn't work, obviously. the only thing that could work in my opinioin is a hybrid of capitalism/democracy and communism/ socialism. besides, i wonder if the makers of ai and robots ever watched terminator, it is a possibility but i don't worry because my wife and i should be dead and buried by then lol.

mike

The main thing that concerns me about America is the way it seems to treat it's own people. There seems to be a lot of people struggling and fearing being homeless or struggling with making sure their medical insurance, if they have any will cover them. I live in the UK, where a lot of people complain about the NHS (free healthcare) and the welfare system but it seems a lot better than the gamble and worry it appear's to be in America at the moment.

I mentioned this in another thread but the companies competing in the generative AI space have no idea what the long term consequences of AI are, just as 200 years ago we noticed that CO2 levels were rising alarmingly quickly, but nobody imagined it was due to these fossil fuels that were driving the industrial revolution.

They do not care, though. The decision makers at these companies make their bonuses by being first to market, and nothing makes you slower to market than being bothered with ethics, or concerns about the environment, laws, or even the long term survival of humanity as a species.

The intentional intellectual anti-curiosity so many people curate, their willful ignorance, makes me feel helpless and hopeless. The original promise of automation in the early 1900s was that we would have to work fewer hours for the same wage and have more free time to pursue leisure*. People don't remember that. That information is lost to almost all of us. How many of us feel like we're living in that reality? Automation has just been used to oppress workers. Generative AI is no different!

And people have so little understanding about what generative AI actually is. It's not intelligent. It's basically a really really sophisticated autocomplete. I've tried using it for a few different things and anything beyond what could be discovered with an easy web search, it hallucinates. That's really the term of art for it. Look up AI hallucination. It's a synthetic bullshitter.

But so many people's lives are made seemingly so much easier by AI, and by techno-feudalism generally, not realizing that it's just the ruling techno-feudalist class forcing us to cannibalize each other. But at the end, the last people for whom it seems like their life was made easier will be up to be cannibalized for the sake of the techno-feudalists. They control the entire economy. But by then, well, there will be nobody left because the rest of us will have been cannibalized.

(*Let's be honest, that promise wasn't made to people of every race, gender, and creed.)

Point being, I'm scared, too, I don't know what the solution is.

I also am afraid and fears continue to grow. The different stories we get about Trump's Big Beautiful Big are so contradictory. You can't tell what to believe. Now he is again raising fears because of his tariffs. My state has raised taxes by $9 billion. Between tariffs, tax increases, conflicting information on budgets, I am deeply concerned about financial survival. I really don't understand how so many people can spend, spend and spend on travel, concerts, ball games etc. They are either very rich, or very much in debt.
Then there are all the health concerns, concerns about wars all over the world, concerns about our narcissistic president who will accept billion dollar gifts from foreign countries, rename the Gulf of Mexico, talk about making Canada a state, or taking over Greenland. He is making the world hate America.

I agree with your point, only more so. Our lives are not being made easier by AI, so much as making low effort bullshit more acceptable. I just read a news report about teachers at the college level using AI to create course materials. FFS! if you’re so apathetic towards your students that you’re fine with literally copy-pasting gibberish from ChatGPT without reviewing it, and calling that a syllabus, I don’t think you have any place in education!

It’s like this across the board. Students are doing it, coders are doing it, people who want to make art but can’t be bothered to learn how are doing it, and the signal to noise ratio is deteriorating as we speak. It might make your job easier for the day, but really all you did was kick the actual work down stream, as the poor sap who picks up your work product is now waist deep in useless information that makes no point nor draws any useful conclusions. Laziness is no excuse, but as long as we measure output by volume, this continues to degrade.

Sorry about the soapbox (again). I could say more but I have to do something to figure out how to adapt to this new reality. TBF, I am certainly guilty of slinging more than my share of bullshit in the day. I just didn’t use a giant computer cluster that consumes as much power as a small city to do it. Goddam. We could be using that much computing power to study black holes. Instead, some 20 year old in Marketing is using it to write facebook posts promoting Tide.

I dunno maybe I'm somewhere between delusional or ostrich with head in sand but I look at the world around me and think pretty much "it's as bad as it always been"

I have very strong memories of Bush 2 and the tea party and the like and between that and three or 4 recessions since 2000 I find it hard to not think this is just "same shit different day"

I mean I remember talking heads in the mid 2000s claiming that we're going to have a holy war with the Muslim world that never happened or people clutching their pearls regarding "the bush doctrine"

Feels like people have just figured out that outrage drives clicks and neurosis sells and nothing much has changed.

I mean, the U.S. and many western countries are supporting Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. (For context, my mother is an Israeli Jew.) In the U.S., we were just starting to get to a place where trans people like myself were just beginning to be treated as fully human, and that's being rolled back. I'm kind of at the likely half-way point of my natural life, and right now is the worst I've ever seen it. I lived close enough to the World Trade Center to smell it in September, 2001. Things had been a mix of getting better and worse since then, but lately things getting better has stopped and is being reversed, and the worsening is accelerating drastically. The outrage driving clicks is part of a feedback loop that's affecting people's perception of reality and fueling policies making things worse.

Don't want to be accused of mudslinging but part of this shit is cause by people all across the spectrum being like "you have to agree with me 100 percent or your the enemy"

You can say that about both conservatives and liberals in my opinion.

Regarding having compassion for all sides in the genocidal behavior of the basically authoritarian Netanyahu regime. I watched something from a committee hearing of some sort where a string of academics in the areas of genocide and anti-(insert marginalized demo here) activity were asked to simply give their definition of anti semitism, and if criticizing the Israeli military actions amounted to anti semitism.

My favorite answer said that antisemitism would be a desire to harm Jews because of their ethnicity or religion. As for the second question, he said something along the lines of it being absurd to conflate Isreal’s government with all Jews. From what I know, free inquiry is a good activity in Judaism, meaning it is okay to disagree. There are Jews both in Israel and abroad who criticize the Israeli government, and obviously to expect them to be fine with whatever the military does is just stupid.

I took away a new perspective from this. Not that I had any sympathy towards the patently false claim that Netenyahu’s actions represented Judaic people as a whole, but rather a clearer understanding of how to counter that bad faith argument. I can relate wholeheartedly to being horrified and mortified by the actions of my own government!