I'm not sure people are hand-wringing about science fiction novels coming true. I think they're worried that moneyed interests will hammer at regulators and law-makers until they relent and let chatbots drive cars. I mean... it's a great strawman, but ultimately kind of wrong.
If you're right - and I think you are - that people have an intrinsic
suspicion not of "AI" but how the already powerful will abuse the idea
and myth of "AI", then LLMs have been a godsend. We need hype cycles
and premature false-starts to re-orient and prepare.
I don't know if I agree with you, disagree with you or just plain hate the world for inventing situations that are hard to put my brainstem around.
The other day I was thinking... "We should do every thing we can to ensure SoundTransit Light Rail (in the Seattle area) should fail. That way we could replace it with something that actually worked."
This kind of thinking may be accurate, but it introduces near-intolerable levels of uncertainty for the future. Or maybe I should just give up on using mass transit to get to work in the Seattle area. Similarly, maybe I should give up thinking there's anything that will prevent the rentier class from extracting value from the commons by way of broken technology.
> rentier class from extracting value from the commons by way of
broken technology.
At least you understand the economic reality; that broken technology
is now more profitable than working technology.
Most of us cling to a 20th century understanding of supply-demand and
value-add. We still think the giant companies and celebrity superstar
"technologists" are trying to "make the world a better place", We have
yet to really grasp enshitification - a fancier word for betrayal and
burning the social capital of science and technology (and people's
belief in it) accrued over many centuries.
You don't even need to be "political" about this, I'm just a computer
guy who wants to understand why everything around me is fucked,
despite so many very smart and hard-working colleagues toiling at this
for 50 years.
We keep trying to fix engineering, but we're tackling the wrong
problem. At some point the social conditions in which engineering
takes place must be addressed. It occurs to me that our ideas about
engineering may not scale beyond the initial industrial revolution
when Telford and Brunel built bridges out of iron that people could
obviously see and benefit from, or they collapsed into the sea.
Nowadays its confusing to know whether a new gadget is a labour saving
godsend or a weapon pointed at you to destroy your life and liberty.
