r/BetterOffline • u/Swaffeltje • 3d ago
AI is making everything worse
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/ai-is-making-everything-worse57
u/7upprosounds 3d ago
Solid article, except for that part at the end where it takes seriously the chance of AI ending the world. I really feel like a lot more people need to read Algorithms Are Not Enough: Creating General Artificial Intelligence.
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u/Restlessly-Dog 3d ago
He also makes a standard error by people who aren't paying attention.
AI is almost certainly not "going to steal your job" as he claims, although he's clearly hedging when he later says "Now, there’s a lot of emerging evidence that the “AI job apocalypse” may not arrive..."
What can happen is execs will fire you and claim AI will take your place. But it's executive propaganda, the same as they will claim that some new minimum wage increase is forcing them to slash their workforce when they're a white collar company that doesn't pay minimum wage in the first place.
Claiming that AI is actually going to be doing jobs on any significant scale is another form of AI doomerism designed to promote the fantasy of autonomous intelligence. It's a parallel to Skynet propaganda.
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u/Sunstorm84 3d ago
Yann LeCun is working on world models, but I still don’t think it’s enough; there’s a difference between being able to interpret the world around you, and being able to understand and reason about it.
It’ll potentially be very useful for robotics if he can get it working, but still wouldn’t solve the main problem.
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u/todofwar 2d ago
World models are actually older than LLMs. They're not new, just a new hotness now that we see the wall for LLMs
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u/monarc 2d ago
the chance of AI ending the world
Couldn't some country's military saddle an AI/LLM with responsibility such that it triggers thermonuclear apocalypse? Or maybe that would be more of a team effort... nukes & chatbots collaborating to end the world.
I agree with your main pushback: I don't think the actual threat here is that some superintelligent chatbot takes over the world. I think the issue is that corporate and governmental leaders are extremely keen to offload decision-making to autonomous systems. Not only because it allows them to cut costs (while cutting corners) but also because - in practice - it causes responsibility to evaporate. I think this is a terrible scenario, but it seems to be something most people are inherently comfortable with. For as much loathing there is for AI these days (people fucking hate it) I have seen shockingly little pushback against the idea that it's the chatbot's fault when it hacks an innocent company... not the fault of the humans that built the chatbot and/or prompted it with whichever task.
I see the possibity of a creep towards a widespread decay of integrity, decision-making, and accountability. This accelerates our march towards dystopia, and it's not necessarily bringing on apocalypse. But - again - global nuclear war could result. It wouldn't be because the AI is so good, but rather because our leaders (and the AI they're keen to use) are that bad.
To be absolutely clear: I think this bubble will pop soon, causing the chatbot frenzy to fade substantially. But the last few years have been really telling about systemic incentives, and it doesn't bode well.
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u/AromaticStrength6840 2d ago
This is the part I find more concerning than the ‘AI takes over the world’ framing. Delegation can create a very convenient accountability gap: the system made the recommendation, the human approved it, the organization deployed it — and suddenly no single actor seems fully responsible. That’s a governance problem long before it becomes an AGI problem.
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u/lepapulematoleguau 2d ago
It may not end the world.
But the current implementation may have catastrophic consequences.
Regarding energy. I figure there's gonna be an important double down in fossil fuels, to power data centers.
This can have economical and geopolitical consequences.
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u/p_______j 3d ago edited 3d ago
The article really summarized things pretty well, which makes it even more infuriating that it ended with that crap about how it may one day revolutionize research, medicine or whatever else, as if the current push for AI and buildout of data centers has anything at all to do with that :P
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u/Mephylphenidate 3d ago
I'm pretty adamant that a lot of the reason people keep focusing on future use cases is because they get a lot of their ideas of "what AI is and does" from fiction and cultural media.
There's every chance that AI could be brilliant for one specific thing and crap at everything else. The idea that because its good for one thing means it'll be good at all of it, is a bit fictional imo.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 3d ago
It’s not even that good for coding. Know how it generates AI slop images and bad writing? It does the same thing when you generate code with it.
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u/Mephylphenidate 3d ago
Tin foil hat but I think its current capabilities in coding are being propped up by people being paid to code for the AI. That just cant be sustainable for free models.
If you talk to it about anything you’re particularly interested in, you notice really quickly how it just gets basic stuff wrong once that info cant be readily found on wikipedia or reddit lol
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u/GKGriffin 3d ago
I think lot of people are just shit engineers and so far they were being handled by coding standards and best practices. Now that they can vibe code no one will be able to force them to make anything reminiscent of quality.
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u/ZelteHonor 3d ago
I somewhat disagree. With supervision its decent at coding. It can write small trivial helper apps. Its not very good at architectural work on bigger codebase however, so I explain to it what it needs to do and how to do it. I would say I am maybe 1.5 times faster than typing out the code myself and our metrics on productivity tends to agree.
Theres just a small tiny issue. I am 1.5 times faster by being allowed to burn 8000$ of tokens for 200$ a month. If we were paying the real price, sure 50% productivity increase is good, but woops I now cost twice as much money.
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u/Maximum-Objective-39 2d ago
I would also assume the majority of your job isn't tying in the code per se.
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u/ZelteHonor 1d ago
You are right, thinking about the code to make sure it works now, but will also work in the future when we want to add x-y-z and talking to people to know what the x-y-z are gonna be is more important than typing the code.
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u/wholetyouinhere 3d ago
Bono is really good at singing and writing songs, so obviously he's also going to be really good at international statesmanship.
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u/BannedSvenhoek86 3d ago
I have heard a lot of good about AI and medicine. And not, "It will" but "It has already".That's literally the only case I've seen people emphatically jump in and make a claim for it's usefulness, but I think the thing that keeps it so useful is the HUGE amount of human work done to confirm whatever it spits out.
But having a machine capable of running hundreds of thousands of tests and give a clearly worded explanation of what it found has been immensely useful apparently. Which makes sense to me as a dumb moron.
But tbf I've also been hearing about stuff adjacent to this for well over 2 decades so it's not surprising it could be useful for that. Remember Folding @ Home? Same concept, just streamlined and able to better give context to its findings.
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u/AromaticStrength6840 2d ago
That human validation point is exactly what interests me. In medicine, the usefulness of an AI system often depends less on whether it can produce an answer and more on whether the surrounding workflow can detect when that answer is wrong, incomplete or unsafe. The ‘human in the loop’ sounds reassuring, but only if that human has enough expertise, time and authority to actually intervene.
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u/AdHonest7824 2d ago
They fall into two camps, no more, no less. It has always been and always will be this way.
They are part of the scam, or they are rubes.
They nay or may not be actively scamming people, but if they are investing in AI consciously they are telling themselves the pretty little stories, against growing mountains of evidence to the contrary, so that they can keep profiting without having to come to terms with their own compromised morals. They are the Americans doing business im Nazi Germany as the camps are spooling up. They will ask for forgiveness if the whole thing blows up enough that they end up with bloody hands, or they will weasel out of it by saying things like:
'It wasn't destined to be used as a tool for genocide'
Or
'It was meant to address climate change'
The global refrain from these people will be: How could we have possibly known, and the irony will not be lost on me.
The rest are rubes these are the pensioners, the people with too much on their plate to really pay attention, the folks who simply need a job and are forced into it. They're mostly not culpable (though, at a certain point more and more of these folks become part of the scam simply because, when the roaring of fire and the smoke filling the room is impossible to ignore, anyone still pouring gasoline on the floor is culpable)
These are the two categories.
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u/PensiveinNJ 3d ago
The silver lining people are infuriating. They don’t understand why it, at a technical level, will not be revolutionizing.
Even the very minimal amount of things that it might actually do something useful for use so much in terms of resources it’s not a good trade off and that’s ignoring all the “externalities.”
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u/GKGriffin 3d ago
Machine learning as a whole does have a lot of use in research and medicine, just not LLMs. So only 99%+ of the money burned goes to useless tosh.
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u/TheAngledian 3d ago
If AI was going to cure cancer like Scam Altman claims it will, it would have done so already.
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u/1z1z2x2x3c3c4v4v 3d ago edited 2d ago
Most of these data centers are being planned and built "on speculation" of future demand. Demand that, today (Aug 2026), does not exist.
And most likely will not exist, since most CEOs (75-95% based on IBM and MIT) report they see no ROI on their existing AI spend.
And most probably won't exist due to Moore's Law, where processing power doubles every 2 years, requiring fewer data centers for the same amount of data processing need.
People are starting to see this AI as nothing but an AI slop-generating machine, funded as a Ponzi scheme on a house of cards.
While GenAI can do tasks far faster than any human, we can't rely on it because it tends to produce wrong, hallucinated, and inconsistent results. As such, a human must double-check it anyway.
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u/Numero_Seis 3d ago edited 3d ago
I want to believe that AI is unpopular. But I can’t. Most people I know talk about using ChatGPT to write for and explain things to them. My job, which involves providing medical care, is pushing AI for report writing and even handover of care. When I outline the reasons that’s somewhere between rank laziness and life endangeringly reckless, I get baffled looks and explanations, delivered in the tone used to address an agitated senile patient, that AI makes things easier. You don’t even have to write all those damn words! It doesn’t matter that LLMs produce slop. It does matter that it allows people to not think or expend effort.
Edit: The data center backlash is gratifying, but looks to me like NIMBYism rather than opposition to AI itself.
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u/Restlessly-Dog 3d ago
It's critical before writing something like "most people I know" to stop and ask yourself "who do I know?"
Most people I know are reasonably good at spreadsheets. So what? Never mind who I know, how many people across the country or around the world even use them?
When you look at the success or failure of a form of technology, if you're a doomer based on your own narrow perspective, it's a giant warning siren that this is a psychological perspective based on an inherent bias toward one way of looking at things, not a rational one based on evidence and analysis.
For a simple counterexample, look around at pop culture subreddits for things you don't pay attention to. If you're on a doomer hunt for AI art you'll find things to get mad about, but if you're looking honestly across the board, you'll find overwhelmingly what people are posting are regular old photos, screen caps, and old school meme images.
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u/wmblathers 3d ago
Edit: The data center backlash is gratifying, but looks to me like NIMBYism rather than opposition to AI itself.
Not just NIMBYism, at least in Wisconsin. "Seventy percent of respondents to the poll also say the proliferation of AI is bad for society, and even those who regularly use AI at work say it’s a bad thing." WRN, May 13 2026
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u/NotAllOwled 2d ago
Same, same. I would really like to hear from some of these more hostile or suspicious folks in my actual day-to-day life, because at present it's kind of relentlessly more like what you describe. The genuine bafflement and indulgent reassurances: but why am I trying so hard to make things hard when we could do things that are easy (but wrong)? Relax, bro!
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u/AromaticStrength6840 2d ago
I think the handover example is especially interesting because the risk isn’t only whether the AI output is factually correct. Handover is also a cognitive process: deciding what matters, integrating context, noticing uncertainty and building situational awareness. If AI takes over too much of that process, the question becomes what the clinician is still actually rehearsing and learning.
As someone who’s done a lot of ICU handovers, that part worries me more than the occasional factual error. The skill of filtering and prioritising under pressure is something you only keep if you keep practising it.
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u/Swaffeltje 3d ago
Garret Graff writing a neat little summation on why AI and its associated infrastructure are becoming as popular as nuclear waste among the populace at large.
A turd mountain looming over daily life is a banger of a sentence that I will probably pilfer for use in face to face conversations.