Ask HN: Is synthetic data generation practical outside academia?
Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive?
Ask HN: Anyone else feeling increasingly alienated from the industry?
We were gonna change the world for the better, allow people to connect and access knowledge right from the palm of their hand. Working conditions were great, we were solving interesting problems and there was a general sense of positivity.
Now, our industry's leaders are embracing far-right movements across the world, actively working to make the world a worse place. Everything's increasingly shittified - Google and Netflix are putting ads even into their paid products.
AI companies keep talking about how their products will change the world, without talking or even thinking through the results of that change. In their dreams, they will replace most of the work force with computers, saving costs on those pesky wages. Not a single thought is given to what might happen to the recipients of said wages or how that would affect society at large.
Meanwhile, a contingent of our peers is enthusiastically working towards that future state, again, without ever thinking about consequences. In the process of doing so, we use immense amounts of energy, accelerating the already happening climate catastrophe.
It seems like we're openly building a dystopia, making the very few even more wealthy and powerful while dooming the rest.
What is one to do in this scenario if they have a conscience? Is anyone else struggling with this? How do y'all deal?
Also, seeing past coworkers strike it rich and retire early really deflates my spirits after trying to succeed for so long.
Investors want to hear about efficiency gains and cost savings (aka layoffs). Customers want solutions that work. Trying to balance building something useful while not contributing to the dystopia is genuinely difficult.
What keeps me going is focusing on problems that actually matter and being selective about who I work with. Not everyone can do this, but if you have some leverage, use it to push back on the worst impulses.
Who's gonna buy what they're selling?
I'm not sure why one would put the weight of the impact of your work on yourself. You've been trained to do certain job, you've been hired to do the job, and you are doing it. You can have moral quarrels with the company mission(like working for defense), but you can't change the whole industry's direction.
Do people who invented printing press and made all the scribes obsolete need to think about their impact on the world? Does inventors of the car who put all horses out of work need to think about their impact? Does people who invented atomic bomb need to put a weight of the devastation that it brought on their chest? All those things have 2 sides, it improved life in one way and worsened it in others.
Professional deformation - is when you treat everything in life as a puzzle that needs to be solved. And when you switch your focus from engineering to societal problems and try to solve that, unfortunately it's not working like that. Sometimes life is just a chaos and it's not your or anyone else fault.
It's just a job.
Not everything can be bought or killed over.
One of the things that's consistent through history is the tyrants always lose in the end, even though they amass all the resources. Because the average person would rather die than support the tyrants.
It may seem like everything is in SF today, but maybe in a few decades, it will all move to Lisbon or Sydney.
The history is mostly a string of tyrants and/or oligarchies ruling people who keep to themselves and try to not get crushed by the bigger forces.
We are folding ourselves into an ever smaller bubble and disconnecting from the world we live in. Not unlike the finance industry in the 2000s prior to the crash.
It's sad because technology can and does improve so much in the world.
Programmers have also been trying to code themselves out of a job since the beginning. Low-code and no-code automation products are some modern examples of that, AI is the latest attempt.
This isn’t new, but it’s seen as more of an existential threat.
When we look at computer so far, it’s possible that they’ve created more jobs than they took. The big question is will AI do the same, and how what will the transition be like? Those are uncomfortable unknowns, but the world has been through many such transitions before and humans always seem to come up with something else to do.
That being said, when I was young and naive, I took people's words literally (the good and the bad) and it used to drive me crazy. Now I recognize BS much more easily and keep my peace while doing what I love.
So no, not disillusioned at all. If anything, more certain than ever.
> What is one to do in this scenario if they have a conscience? Is anyone else struggling with this? How do y'all deal?
Political activity that prioritizes the well being (healthcare, affordable housing, economic security) of the majority over the very wealthy (if that’s your thing), and failing that, working a job that isn’t contributing to harm. We must be reasonable about what we can expect from ourselves.
Ask “what is all of this for?” You don’t have to be Amish, but the other extreme of effective accelerationism and rapidly increasing wealth concentration/inequality isn’t great either (historically speaking, it always ends in sadness). I also consider what side of a pitchfork and history I want to be on if the time comes.
Ten (well, nine) years ago we already had the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The tech industry was already rotten to the core. Heck, you could say it was that already in the nineties, when Microsoft's business practices made millions of people outright hate them - it's just that the reach of the industry wasn't as prevailing as it is now.
These are important questions to be asking for anyone that cares about the future, and it begs the question where we are going, and how will our children survive.
If you have the appropriate foundations in critical thinking (classical trivium curricula) and think about this deeply for a time, you'll realize some unpleasant truths, and some perspectives that you may have been blind to your entire life because of structured indoctrination.
Here are some of the insights I've found:
Those who choose to go without siring children have no future, and their decision-making subtly reflects this in the incentives they follow.
Evil people, are those people who have willfully blinded themselves through choice, to the consequences of the evil acts they commit and they repeat such acts without resistance unless stopped. Evil acts being any act that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others, a definition which is somewhat objectively measurable.
Many people have been induced through structure and organization into becoming evil, and this has been done through a strategic separation of objectionable concerns.
This is a strategy used by both the Nazi's and Stasi, and its used fairly broadly. The complacent fuel the radical evil. The individual who materially supports an organization through work or otherwise, is equally responsible for the same misdeeds of bad actors within that organization, whether they know about it or not.
> It seems like we're openly building a dystopia, making the very few even more wealthy and powerful while dooming the rest.
This observation is partially misplaced. People are only blindly following the short-term incentives driven by money-printing, and steeped in survivor bias.
There is a lot of historical material by great thinkers on how society actually works and was built historically, but you have to go back to some pretty ancient books if you weren't taught it in your education. This generally speaking falls under Social Contract Theory, and Political Economy.
You are incorrect because you imply that the wealthy and powerful will survive the dynamics they are creating. That is quite unlikely for the same reason that perceptual blindness can be malignant. These people couldn't survive without the masses. If you can't see something you can't react, and when you cannot react you cannot adapt and then fail Darwin's fitness and die off. Malthus/Catton have a lot to say about how this would go do.
> What is one to do in this scenario? Is anyone else struggling with this.
Anyone with a brain is struggling with this.
The general consensus in my group, is that once a point of no return is reached, and in all likelihood we've already reached it given lagging indicators and lack of visibility, then the only thing one can do is withdraw the only thing of value they have and focus on efforts that will help them and their group survive which would involve building your own independent grid/community.
The likelihood of socio-economic collapse increases as money printing nears the 3rd stage of ponzi; where debt growth exceeds productive capacity and outflows exceed inflows. Chaos increases, shortage sustains eventually spreading to famine.
That third stage is usually when monetary properties of money break down, along with society, and its rule of law; at least historically.
You'll need to have the skills to defend yourself, make your own things, and be ruthless towards your own survival and the survival of others you care for.
I emphasize group because the lone wolf dies and is snuffed out easily by groups. You need community to survive, and you need to know how to make and produce what you need without modern supply chains.
Centralized hierarchies above a certain population fail to unavoidable dynamics given sufficient time, where they drag every member down with them.
Mises from the Austrian School of Economics covers this in his collected works on Socialism. The failures are indirect, but inevitably occur, and the intractable problems he describes cannot be solved.
The intelligent and competent withdraw to areas they can control when the environment becomes disadvantaged. This has already started happening in migrations from disrupted business sectors to other sectors. If the disruption spreads, you'll see a general withdrawal from society as a whole. Atlas will shrug. Violence always occurs when the rule of law fails. The primary purpose of a rule of law which has required components that have been broken, is non-violent conflict resolution.
If these things are new to you, I'd suggest you start off with Thomas Paine's Right's of Man, and then check out material introducing Austrian economics. It is fundamental education that will change your entire perspective and by extension life.
A long dark is coming, and the many alive today have been forcibly unprepared by past generations through the withholding of a proper first-principled education. That generation instead chose to replace it with torture furthering control and indoctrination.
If you are not familiar with what constitutes torture, and you'd be surprised because its everywhere today.
Torture is the imposition psychological stress. There are specific elements, structuring, and clustering designed for the purpose of thought reform, control through involuntary hypnotism, reduction of rational thought, or to the point of psychological break (disassociation/psychosis).
Isolation is one such element. (established authors on that subject matter include Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo circa 1950s).
Totalism based cultures die out. Protean-ism based cultures often survive.
However, with AI this has shifted. It takes immense capital investment and takes away any chance at equalizing.
Never gonna happen. Next question :)
> It seems like we're openly building a dystopia
Im not sure, but there are signs that you have been sold a distorted view of the world. Probably modern media and all sorts of propagandists who prey on people’s fears have caught you on the hook.
Yes, world is not a perfect place. It has its problems, ups and downs. It was always like that.
No. It’s not getting worse and no, you can’t predict the future and long term consequences of your actions.
For example there is a strong argument to be made that if not for nuclear weapons we would currently have massive wars (because no reason to restrain yourself).
While current conflicts (as terrible as they are) are magnitudes less deadly (in relative numbers) than ever before. At least in some parts of the world.
How can you be so confident AI will not create more jobs?
I personally don’t see current LLMs being such a major disruption as steam engines etc before.
But even if it is - I know from history that eventually all economy shifts make humanity better longterm.
Even current standards of “poverty” in some regions are so high that it would look like a luxury for people 200 years ago. Imagine having cheap internet and electricity.