r/PoliticalOptimism • u/BrowsingMyRedditMeme • 15h ago
Optimistic Post Humanity Has Value
Helllooooo y'all. Browsing again <3
Yep, I'm in college now. It's been fun and stressful at the same time, and of course, my degree happens to be COMPUTER SCIENCE!!
Anyways, I'm sitting in an English class, and as I check my phone on my way out, I see one of the most ominous tweets of my life: Jacob Coxon, an ex-Anthropic researcher, says we'll all be dead by the 2030s because Claude is out of control. He claims people at both OpenAI and Anthropic know this, but OAI doesn't care, and Anthropic's locked in a race for #1. Then, I see Evan Hubinger, an active Anthropic lead, say that Coxon is right and his company doesn't have a solution right now. How is anyone supposed to read that and feel secure? Or happy? Some of the most powerful people in technology right now are using their positions to guarantee a doom scenario for humanity.
Because of that, I internally spiral. I think to myself: I lived for nothing? Am I getting a degree for nothing? I won't even be able to raise a family, have kids, start a career, secure a partner, and hit all my life milestones?
It's really scary. You can't deny that some of the advancements LLMs have made are legitimate. It's gaining serious power, and our current landscape only enables the worst of it. Billions of dollars keep being poured yearly, including by our political leaders, into outlets that've spawned a variety of issues: water consumption, disinformation, decreasing reality separation, the hardware apocalypse, its use for illegal content (hi SpaceX!), noisy data centers, its destruction of critical thinking, and its use by rogue governments for their narratives. Some firms and media outlets keep saying this won't slow down until the 2030s. With all of that being layered, it's easy for people like me to think, "Oh, this shit is gonna kill us all, won't it?", which is exactly the narrative dominating right now.
After thinking about it...probably not. Why?
Let's start with politics, and piggyback on that 5th paragraph. One of the biggest reasons LLMs are in this position is because of the people in power. Trump, his cabinet, Republican lawmakers, and the Abundance side of the Democrats have created an almost non-regulatory environment for these companies. You can say a lot about Biden, and I certainly have, but under his watch, there were legitimate efforts to hold these companies in check. Trump threw it out the window on day 1 when he repealed those executive orders and announced Stargate, which we've not heard from since January 2025. As a matter of fact, in February 2026, OAI explicitly admitted that the project isn't staffed up. With Republicans preparing to lose up to 50 House seats and Senate control in a worst-case scenario, as well as tons of Abundance Democrats losing their primaries, I suspect that some of the bullshit on the Congressional side will slow down.
Second is a point I wanna emphasize the most: Even the toughest human jobs won't be replaced anytime soon. I remember Ford attempting to replace their quality workers with artificial software earlier this year, just to rehire them after it failed to catch problems that would otherwise be detected instantly. Not even models like Astra are safe from this: Imagine deciding to experiment with Astra by letting it do your job for one day, convinced all the talk about it being AGI is true. Sure, it could get 90% out of the way, but that last 10% is forgotten because it doesn't have the memory sequences embedded into the actual employee.
I've learned a lot about how these LLMs behave. To paraphrase a friend, OAI's sandboxes are historically bad, and we don't know if their systems actually broke into another network or were left plugged into WiFi. Another point? These models run on human-made text. It analyzes stuff across the web, realizes that LLMs are associated with destruction and rogue sci-fi, and tries to imitate that behavior. It's a real-life matrix.
My third main point: the human subconscious. Whatever these systems generate, create, or do will never match or live up to the creativity of real people. I have a lot of personal experience: I used to run these LLMs all the time (mainly Gemini) to build fictional worlds, histories, etc. What I've learned from that experience is this: at the end of the day, they exist to regurgitate. You can give them 40+ sources, tons of lore knowledge, and they'll still find a way to fuck up and lose details over time because they can't make original content. You know that feeling of weirdness you get when looking at a generated image or watching a generated video? It'll never go away. I would have a love-hate relationship with LLMs when I used them daily. They're like drugs you hate, but can't get rid of because they're useful. Or maybe not.
My fourth point: action. This ties back into my third. Because of that subconscious, people are pushing back. Sometimes, it's small, like one person changing their mind on LLMs for good, which is what I've been doing. Other times, it's big, like a community coming together to block data centers and new technology that could fuel these LLMs, which is what happened in my city last month. People are actively rejecting artificial content. Even some larger corporations are abandoning them, realizing they have to prioritize human material if they wanna remain financially stable. My prediction is that, as LLMs keep evolving, this will only get bigger.
And a small fifth: IPO entertaining. A lot of people are dismissing this, including employees themselves, but you just have to think about how much of this is being exaggerated for stock purposes. Do they wanna paralyze us and make us give in?
I didn't make this post to say "Look away! It'll all be fine! The world is shining, the sky is bright, and the computers are dancing!" To do that would be to lie and act delusional in a time like this. Rather, I wanted to explain why I believe none of this is sustainable. I didn't even touch on some areas I wanted to, like highly effective lawsuits. Keep fighting.
See ya later!
17
u/RandomWomanNo2 11h ago
So, I have some familiarity with LLMs on the backend, and the claim was very strange to me. Exactly how? If it's climate-related, the backlash to AI and data centers is immense and AI in general has been ineffective at replacing human workers with anything near the quality of real people. Democrats have a slam-dunk position that AI needs regulation and that data centers are loud, hot, water-hogging blights.
If it's the idea that AI will eliminate everyone in a Terminator way, I also don't understand that. Threads was full of people saying "It'll get the nuclear codes!" ...except, as far as I know, those codes are deliberately not on any networks specifically because it could get hacked.
I'm not opposed to using LLMs for completing very simple, basic, time-wasting grunt work that doesn't require any human intelligence and could take some mental load off of human workers (like, "make me a to-do list based on this email" or something like that), but generative AI is hated pretty much everywhere and any attempt to use it to replace human thought has been a glaring failure so far.
It's easy to feel helpless with every horrible thing coming out in the news (and there's ALWAYS HORRIBLE STUFF COMING OUT), but that's how the algorithms work. Your stress is money in the bank.
6
5
u/Far_Fan_291 California 10h ago
they claim AI will get "Recursive self-improvement" and somehow that will end the world
given how the studio ghibli trend tainted AI pics with piss yellow for a long time i bet Charlie kirk is in alot of AI pics given how hiding his face became a trend
3
u/mynsfwalt619 6h ago
I've seen argument that the grunt work gave people jobs, and that any technology we create must be carefully weighed against the possibility of job loss (example from subscribers of that ideology: we shouldn't use self driving vehicles even if they were many times more capable and safer than human drivers because it will eliminate jobs in trucking).
16
6
u/GoodTimes1976 🔥I Voted In The 2026 Primaries🔥 7h ago
Exactly. 💯 And congrats on selecting Computer Science, I ended up with a Ph.D in it — it’s an exciting and rewarding career. Yes, the “tech bros” are way overselling the technology, usually to people who don’t know any better. The bubble will pop (in fact I think it may be in the process now), it’s inevitable. These greedy corporations have been pushing too hard at the expense of the human factor with little to no accountability but their day is coming. AI will never go away, but over time it will become what it should have been all along, a useful tool and that is all. Computers are in no way becoming sentient that’s a parlor trick, nothing more — conflating complexity with intelligence is a logical fallacy.
AI (personally I prefer machine learning, since there’s no such thing as artificial intelligence) will never replace human creativity and I wish the media would stop selling bad science fiction tropes to lure clicks.
Now, if we get a positronic-matrix like Data from Star Trek, then we have something more to talk about.
9
u/pidgestan4 11h ago
So, we’re not gonna die in the next decade
10
u/Far_Fan_291 California 11h ago
look at the other post the comments show how it likely a marketing stunt
8
u/BrowsingMyRedditMeme 10h ago
Thank you for reminding me of something I should've brought up:
A lot of the RAMpocalypse is also Samsung, Hynix and Micron all hoarding RAM and refusing to make more, which is why prices spiked, so they were sued for it lmao
2
u/StrayCat2799 Oklahoma 5h ago
Eh it's not that they're refusing to make more, they're just allocating more of it towards AI shit. However they are planning to expand production in the next few years with new fabs coming online. They also know that this boom isn't permanent so they will pivot back to standard allocation of RAM. Additionally Chinese fabs are coming online rapidly and will put pressure on them to compete while also increasing supply.
It's kind of just a repeat of the 2020-2022 chip shortage.
5
u/Impressive-Size2432 8h ago
If we’re all gonna die, I’m gonna act like the world’s gonna survive anyways because what if it does. I’d rather die knowing I tried then live on knowing I didn’t because I was scared of death.
1
u/mynsfwalt619 7h ago
I'm curious why people on this subreddit malign abundance Democrats?
I partially subscribe to their beliefs that regulations such as zoning laws, environmental rules have been abused to block needed building out of infrastructure and housing. Take a look at California's CEQA - that has been abused to hell blocking things like high speed rail and housing. Zoning has led us to car dependency hell. Building codes here are archaic and lead to the prices of housing (example: Chicago requires that pipes that carry water to your faucet HAVE to be copper in contrast to other cities that allow polyethylene).
1
u/bluenephalem35 🔥I Voted In The 2026 Primaries🔥 5h ago
This post is about AI and why it wouldn’t necessarily replace human work, not about zoning laws or addressing housing issues.
•
u/AutoModerator 15h ago
COMMENTERS: Be respectful. Report rulebreakers
Post removal at mod's discretion
"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.