I like the “wasn’t inevitable” list. The fact that two US corporations control 99% of phones is another one that feels about as comfortable as a rock in my boot and I hope this too is not inevitable, in the long run.
Imagine if the 80s and 90s had been PC vs Mac but you had to go to IBM for one or more critical pieces of software or software distribution infrastructure. The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability didn’t happen overnight of course. I don’t think it will be (or ought to be) inevitable that phones remain opaque and locked down forever, but the day when freedom finally comes doesn’t really feel like it’s just around the corner.
>Garbage companies using refurbished plane engines to power their data centers is not inevitable
Was wondering what the beef with this was until I realized author meant "companies that are garbage" and not "landfill operators using gas turbines to make power". The latter is something you probably would want.
After reading and watching things by quite a few historians, one of the points that sticks out is: most things in history were not inevitable. Someone had to do them and other people had to help them or at least not oppose them.
A lot of history's turning points were much closer than we think.
There are plenty "technology" things which have come to pass, most notably weapons, which have been developed which are not allowed to be used by someone to thier fullest due to laws, and social norms against harming others. Theese things are technology, and they would allow someone to attain wealth much more efficiently....
Parrots retort that they are regulated because society sees them as a threat.
Well, therein is the disconnect, society isn't immutable, and can come to those conclusions about other technologies tomorrow if it so chooses...
For any point of the past, this is the future. It is not what is "best" by some metric, nor what is right, or should be, is what actually happens. It is like saying that evolution goal is intelligence or whatever, is what sticks in the wall.
Can we change direction on how things are going? Yes, but you must understand what means the "we" there, at least in the context of global change of direction.
Everything is inevitable. If it happened, then it couldn't have happened otherwise. "Your computer sending screenshots to microsoft so they can train AIs on it" was inevitable, because that's what incentives pushed them to do. Vocal opposition and boycotting might become a different kind of incentive, but in most cases it doesn't work. The fact of the matter is that corporations are powerful, shareholders are powerful, the collective mass of indifferent consumers are powerful, while you are powerless.
I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism.
> Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice.
Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how this idea works. I think that the problem is that there are too many political statements to compare your own against these days and many of them are made implicit except among the most vocal and ostensibly informed.
Yeah, following the OP's logic, if I think this obsession with purity tests and politicizing every tool choice is more toxic than an LLM could ever be, then I should actively undermine that norm.
So I guess I'm morally obligated to use LLMs specifically to reject this framework? Works for me.
I do think AI involvement in programming is inevitable; but at this time a lot of the resistance is because AI programming currently is not the best tool for many jobs.
To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heating via a modern heat pump, and I won't go back to using wood as my primary heat source. Burning wood is purely for pleasure, and an insurance policy in case of a power outage or malfunction.
What does this have to do with AI programming? I like to think that early central heating systems were unreliable, and often it was just easier to light a fire. But, it hasn't been like that in most of our lifetimes. I suspect that within a decade, AI programming will be "good enough" for most of what we do, and programming without it will be like burning wood: Something we do for pleasure, and something that we need to do for the occasional cases where AI doesn't work.
This is the inevitability of unfettered capitalism. The pressure is towards generating wealth, with the intended hope that the side effect will be that this produces net 'good' for society. It has worked (to varying degrees) and has enabled the modern world. But it may well be running out of steam.
I do not think that the current philosophical world view will enable a different path. We've had resets or potential resets, COVID being a huge opportunity, but I think neither the public nor the political class had the strength to seize the moment.
We live in a world where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It will take dramatic change to put 'value' back where it belongs and relegate price farther down the ladder.
I think this person is too optimistic. Everything that will give powerful people money or influence and not get them killed is pretty much near inevitable.
I mean... of course it's not the future. It's the present. I have been seeing AI-generated posters and menus in real life on daily basis for about half a year. AI-upscale is completely normalized for average users. I don't know about other fields, but for graphic design we have well past this discussion.
>Your computer changing where things are on every update is not inevitable.
This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the internet now. I don't care about your "U""X" front end garbage. I highly prefer text based sites like this
I do disagree that some of these were not inevitable. Let me deconstruct a couple:
> Tiktok is not inevitable.
TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in Instagram and Snapchat. Global content discovery is a natural next experiment after extended follow graph.
> NFTs were not inevitable.
Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely.
I could deconstruct more, but the broader point is: coordination is hard. All these can be done by anyone: anyone could have invented Ethereum-like system; anyone could have built a non-fungible standard over that. Inevitability comes from the lack of coordination: when anyone can push whatever future they want, a LOT of things become inevitable.
You're taking the meaning of the word "inevitable" too literally.
Something might be "inevitable" in the sense that someone is going to create it at some point whether we like it or not.
Something is also not "inevitable" in the sense that we will be forced to use it or you will not be able to function in society. <-- this is what the author is talking about
We do not need to tolerate being abused by the elites or use their terrible products because they say so. We can just say no.
> Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable.
Just objectively false and assumes that the path humans took to allow this is the only path that unfolded.
Much of this tech could have been regulated early on, preventing garbage like short-form slop, from existing.
So in short, none of what you are describing is "inevitable". Someone might come up with it, and others can group together and say: "We aren't doing that, that is awful".
> Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable
It kind of was though. All the tech pieces were in place by 2009, between Chaum's ecash, Haber+Stornetta's merkle trees and real-world document blockchains (secured by the NY Times sunday classifieds no less!), and Back's hashcash. b-money and bit gold already had the idea and motivation. It was just waiting for a Nakamoto to make it all fault-tolerant. Someone would have figured it out eventually.
> Most old people in particular (sorry mom) have given up and resigned themselves to drift wherever their computing devices take them, because under the guise of convenience, everything is so hostile that there is no point trying to learn things, and dark patterns are everywhere. Not being in control of course makes people endlessy frustrated, but at the same time trying to wrestle control from the parasites is an uphill battle that they expect to lose, with more frustration as a result.
I'm pretty cynical, but one ray of hope is that AI-assisted coding tools have really brought down the skill requirement for doing some daunting programming tasks. E.g. in my case, I have long avoided doing much web or UI programming because there's just so much to learn and so many deep rabbit holes to go down. But with AI tools I can get off the ground in seconds or minutes and all that gruddy HTML/JavaScript/CSS with bazillions of APIs that I could go spend time studying and tinkering with have already been digested by the AI. It spits out some crap that does the thing I mostly want. ChatGPT 5+ is pretty good at navigating all the Web APIs so it was able to generate some WebAudio mini apps to start working with. The code looks like crap, so I hit it with a stick and get it to reorganize the code a little and write some comments, and then I can dive in and do the rest myself. It's a starting point, a prototype. It got me over the activation energy hump, and now I'm not so reluctant to actually try things out.
But like I said, I'm cynical. Right now the AI tools haven't been overly enshittified to the point they only serve their masters. Pretty soon they will be, and in ways we can't yet imagine.
I think a more accurate and more useful framing is:
Game theory is inevitable.
Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.
The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited.
If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.
Game theory assumes that all the players agree on the pay-offs. However this is often not the case in real world situations. Robert MacNamara (the ex US secretary of defence) said that he realized after the Vietnam war the US and the Vietnamese saw the war completely differently, even years after war had ended (see the excellent documentary 'Fog of War').
This argument has the unspoken premise that in large part, people's core identity is reacting to external influences. I believe that while responding to influences is part of human existence, the richness of the individual transcends such an explanation for all their actions. The phrase "game theory is inevitable" reads like the perspective of an aristocrat looking down on the masses - enough vision to see the interplay of things, and enough arrogance to assume they can control it.
Yes it's one thing to say that game theory is inevitable, but defection is not inevitable. In fact, if you consider all levels of the organization of life, from multicellularity to large organisms, to families, corporations, towns, nations, etc, it all exists because entities figured out how to cooperate and prevent defection.
If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.
"in formal experiments the only people who behaved exactly according to the mathematical models created by game theory are economists themselves, and psychopaths" [1]
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but I disagree a whole lot. The whole problem is that is it inevitable. Technology is an enormous organism. It does not care about the ethical or moral considerations of it. It's a tug-of-war who can use most technique to succeed -- if you do not use it, you fall behind. Individuals absolutely can not shape the future of technology. States can attempt, but as they make use of technology for propaganda and similar reasons -- they are also in a requirement of it. It is inevitable as long as you keep digging.
You are mistaken. The future is defined by the common man on the steet. Those are the same people who use Whatsapp, Facebook and instagram accounts heavily and regularly. They will soon become the biggest drivers of AI adaption.
The techies are drop in the ocean. You may build a new tech or device, but the adaption is driven by the crowd who just drift away without a pinch of resistance.
I don't understand people who use Instagram. I installed it for one specific person, and from opening the app to closing it, there's nothing but a nonstop torrent of pure garbage. I don't talk to that person much any more.
At the highest level, this becomes a question of whether we live in a predetermined universe or not. Historians do debate the Great Man vs Great Forces narrative of human development, but even if many historical events were "close calls" or "almost didn't happens" it doesn't mean that the counterfactual would be better. Discrete things like the Juicero might not have happened, but ridiculous "smart internet-connected products" that raised lots of VC money during the ZIRP era feels inevitable to me.
Do we really think LLMs and the generative AI craze would have not occurred if Sam Altman chose to stay at Y Combinator or otherwise got hit by a bus? People clearly like to interact with a seemingly smart digital agent, demonstrated as early as ELIZA in 1966 and SmarterChild in 2001.
My POV is that human beings have innate biases and preferences that tend to manifest what we invent and adopt. I don't personally believe in a supernatural God but many people around the world do. Alcoholic beverages have been independently discovered in numerous cultures across the world over centuries.
I think the best we can do is usually try to act according to our own values and nudge it in a direction we believe is best (both things OP is doing so this is not a dunk on them, just my take on their thoughts here).
123 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 893 ms ] thread- McCabe (Kurt Russell), Vanilla Sky
Imagine if the 80s and 90s had been PC vs Mac but you had to go to IBM for one or more critical pieces of software or software distribution infrastructure. The Cambrian explosion IBM-PC compatability didn’t happen overnight of course. I don’t think it will be (or ought to be) inevitable that phones remain opaque and locked down forever, but the day when freedom finally comes doesn’t really feel like it’s just around the corner.
Posted, alas for now, from my iPhone
Was wondering what the beef with this was until I realized author meant "companies that are garbage" and not "landfill operators using gas turbines to make power". The latter is something you probably would want.
A lot of history's turning points were much closer than we think.
I don't get the reason for this one being in the list. Is that an abusive product in some way?
There are plenty "technology" things which have come to pass, most notably weapons, which have been developed which are not allowed to be used by someone to thier fullest due to laws, and social norms against harming others. Theese things are technology, and they would allow someone to attain wealth much more efficiently....
Parrots retort that they are regulated because society sees them as a threat.
Well, therein is the disconnect, society isn't immutable, and can come to those conclusions about other technologies tomorrow if it so chooses...
Can we change direction on how things are going? Yes, but you must understand what means the "we" there, at least in the context of global change of direction.
https://reactos.org/
https://elementary.io/
I’m all for a good argument that appears to challenge the notion of technological determinism.
> Every choice is both a political statement and a tradeoff based on the energy we can spend on the consequences of that choice.
Frequently I’ve been opposed to this sort of sentiment. Maybe it’s me, the author’s argument, or a combination of both, but I’m beginning to better understand how this idea works. I think that the problem is that there are too many political statements to compare your own against these days and many of them are made implicit except among the most vocal and ostensibly informed.
So I guess I'm morally obligated to use LLMs specifically to reject this framework? Works for me.
However AI is the future for programming that’s for sure.
Ignore it as a programmer to make yourself irrelevant.
To better the analogy: I have a wood stove in my living room, and when it's exceptionally cold, I enjoy using it. I don't "enjoy" stacking wood in the fall, but I'm a lazy nerd, so I appreciate the exercise. That being said, my house has central heating via a modern heat pump, and I won't go back to using wood as my primary heat source. Burning wood is purely for pleasure, and an insurance policy in case of a power outage or malfunction.
What does this have to do with AI programming? I like to think that early central heating systems were unreliable, and often it was just easier to light a fire. But, it hasn't been like that in most of our lifetimes. I suspect that within a decade, AI programming will be "good enough" for most of what we do, and programming without it will be like burning wood: Something we do for pleasure, and something that we need to do for the occasional cases where AI doesn't work.
it's not.
I do not think that the current philosophical world view will enable a different path. We've had resets or potential resets, COVID being a huge opportunity, but I think neither the public nor the political class had the strength to seize the moment.
We live in a world where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It will take dramatic change to put 'value' back where it belongs and relegate price farther down the ladder.
What is the best way and how do we stop them?
This a million times. I honestly hate interacting with all software and 90% of the internet now. I don't care about your "U""X" front end garbage. I highly prefer text based sites like this
> Tiktok is not inevitable.
TikTok the app and company, not inevitable. Short form video as the medium, and algorithm that samples entire catalog (vs just followers) were inevitable. Short form video follows gradual escalation of most engaging content formats, with legacy stretching from short-form-text in Twitter, short-form-photo in Instagram and Snapchat. Global content discovery is a natural next experiment after extended follow graph.
> NFTs were not inevitable.
Perhaps Bitcoin as proof-of-work productization was not inevitable (for a while), but once we got there, a lot of things were very much inevitable. Explosion of alternatives like with Litecoin, explosion of expressive features, reaching Turing-completeness with Ethereum, "tokens" once we got to Turing-completeness, and then "unique tokens" aka NFTs (but also colored coins in Bitcoin parlance before that). The cultural influence was less inevitable, massive scam and hype was also not inevitable... but to be fair, likely.
I could deconstruct more, but the broader point is: coordination is hard. All these can be done by anyone: anyone could have invented Ethereum-like system; anyone could have built a non-fungible standard over that. Inevitability comes from the lack of coordination: when anyone can push whatever future they want, a LOT of things become inevitable.
Something might be "inevitable" in the sense that someone is going to create it at some point whether we like it or not.
Something is also not "inevitable" in the sense that we will be forced to use it or you will not be able to function in society. <-- this is what the author is talking about
We do not need to tolerate being abused by the elites or use their terrible products because they say so. We can just say no.
Just objectively false and assumes that the path humans took to allow this is the only path that unfolded.
Much of this tech could have been regulated early on, preventing garbage like short-form slop, from existing.
So in short, none of what you are describing is "inevitable". Someone might come up with it, and others can group together and say: "We aren't doing that, that is awful".
It kind of was though. All the tech pieces were in place by 2009, between Chaum's ecash, Haber+Stornetta's merkle trees and real-world document blockchains (secured by the NY Times sunday classifieds no less!), and Back's hashcash. b-money and bit gold already had the idea and motivation. It was just waiting for a Nakamoto to make it all fault-tolerant. Someone would have figured it out eventually.
I'm pretty cynical, but one ray of hope is that AI-assisted coding tools have really brought down the skill requirement for doing some daunting programming tasks. E.g. in my case, I have long avoided doing much web or UI programming because there's just so much to learn and so many deep rabbit holes to go down. But with AI tools I can get off the ground in seconds or minutes and all that gruddy HTML/JavaScript/CSS with bazillions of APIs that I could go spend time studying and tinkering with have already been digested by the AI. It spits out some crap that does the thing I mostly want. ChatGPT 5+ is pretty good at navigating all the Web APIs so it was able to generate some WebAudio mini apps to start working with. The code looks like crap, so I hit it with a stick and get it to reorganize the code a little and write some comments, and then I can dive in and do the rest myself. It's a starting point, a prototype. It got me over the activation energy hump, and now I'm not so reluctant to actually try things out.
But like I said, I'm cynical. Right now the AI tools haven't been overly enshittified to the point they only serve their masters. Pretty soon they will be, and in ways we can't yet imagine.
Game theory is inevitable.
Because game theory is just math, the study of how independent actors react to incentives.
The specific examples called out here may or may not be inevitable. It's true that the future is unknowable, but it's also true that the future is made up of 8B+ independent actors and that they're going to react to incentives. It's also true that you, personally, are just one of those 8B+ people and your influence on the remaining 7.999999999B people, most of whom don't know you exist, is fairly limited.
If you think carefully about those incentives, you actually do have a number of significant leverage points with which to change the future. Many of those incentives are crafted out of information and trust, people's beliefs about what their own lives are going to look like in the future if they take certain actions, and if you can shape those beliefs and that information flow, you alter the incentives. But you need to think very carefully, on the level of individual humans and how they'll respond to changes, to get the outcomes you want.
If you want to fix these things, you need to come up with a way to change the nature of the game.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentar...
The techies are drop in the ocean. You may build a new tech or device, but the adaption is driven by the crowd who just drift away without a pinch of resistance.
Do we really think LLMs and the generative AI craze would have not occurred if Sam Altman chose to stay at Y Combinator or otherwise got hit by a bus? People clearly like to interact with a seemingly smart digital agent, demonstrated as early as ELIZA in 1966 and SmarterChild in 2001.
My POV is that human beings have innate biases and preferences that tend to manifest what we invent and adopt. I don't personally believe in a supernatural God but many people around the world do. Alcoholic beverages have been independently discovered in numerous cultures across the world over centuries.
I think the best we can do is usually try to act according to our own values and nudge it in a direction we believe is best (both things OP is doing so this is not a dunk on them, just my take on their thoughts here).