Why? Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale. It will destabilize labor at a speed that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a gentle breeze. It will concentrate immense power and wealth in the hands of people who I don’t trust. And it will do all of this while consuming truly shocking amounts of energy.
Not only do I think these things will happen, I think the Altmans of the world would eagerly agree that they will happen. They just think it will be interesting / profitable for them. It won’t be for us.
And we, the engineers, are in a unique position. Unlike people in any other industry, we can affect the trajectory of AI. My skepticism (and unwillingness to aid in the advancement of AI) might slow things down a billionth of a percent. Maybe if there are more of me, things will slow down enough that we can find some sort of effective safeguards on this stuff before it’s out of hand.
So I’ll keep being skeptical, until it’s over.
> Because if I’m not right then I am convinced that AI is going to be a force for evil. It will power scams on an unimaginable scale.
Look at common scams. You get those texts from "Jane" who sent you an iMessage from an email address offering you a part time job and asks you to contact them on WhatsApp, right? (Well... Android does a better job at filtering spam) Or calls from "the IRS". Or anything else that's bullshit. This even includes legal scams like charging you for canceling your service or making it hard to cancel your subscription.
There's no skill needed for this. You don't need a brilliant coder. You need the equivalent of a call center in India. You need the equivalent of a poorly worded Nigerian scam email.
Shitty coding LLMs make this shit easier to mass produce. High quality LLMs only make it worse.
Personally, I'm just tired of all the shitty lemons[0] everywhere. I wanna buy a peach, but everything being sold is a lemon. All the lemons have done is make me annoyed and frustrated at all the extra work I have to do.
I now have 4 entries for my GF's birthday because when I merged a duplicated contact it just created more instances. I can't even delete them! Shit like this sounds petty and minor but when you're hitting 20-100 new issues like this daily, it isn't so minor anymore. I can't make any more lemonaid. There are just too many lemons...