this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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There is something here:
The big argument for why AI is supposed to be world changing, is the assumption it will be able to automate things better than a human, eventually.
That some day an AI will be able to make a better AI than a human could, and that AI would then be able to make an AI better than itself, and then it just becomes a question of who has the most hardware. Which is why the data center building is being pushed so hard.
But that assumption is the same as thinking a fallen object will keep gaining speed until it passes the speed of light. Or that Moore's law would really keep going forever despite a very real limit in physics for how small a chip can be.
A society where AI "drives innovation" will become technologically stagnant, because it literally can't innovate.
Ima be honest, if i was given the task to make a bot to beat another bot tried my best and couldn't. I would just go fork the best bot thats out there and use that as the base and not reinvent the wheel. Learn from its design then improve on it as i study it.
If the goal is ONLY to win a game of starcraft. Fuck it just download the bot. Frankly the fact the bots decided that wasting resources was pointless and to just do the simplier thing is sorta what we want them to do. Thats less eletrical useage, less water wasted, and gets the job done.
A lot of these "the bots cheated or broke the rules" end up always be just because either the rules are not defined, poorly defined or poorly thought out that no reasonable person would follow them either.
And thats the thing these models are litterally the text book definition of wisdom of the masses/mass consensus. They do exactly what the avg run of the mill person with the knowledge at hand would do. That ends up being rather all over the place since people are all over the place. But one of the most common things is that people generally. Hate fucking pointless work and will try to streamline, shortcut or simplify any work given to them to get an acceptable outcome.
Its rare you get someone that will stubbornly work on a problem forever that they can't over come with out changing their apporch rules be damned.
I gotta say, I've been hearing predictions that Moore"s law is coming to an end every year for the past twenty years.
Look, strictly speaking if you take Moore"s law word for word, sure there is a limit to how small a silicon transistor can be. However, realistically, I see no reason to expect computers won't continue to meaningfully increase in capability every year forever.
When a technology reaches physical limits, we figure out how to bend the rules and get a little bit more out. And when that stops working, we start exploring different architectures, different materials. I think it's just silly to predict that technology won't improve, when has that ever happened?
This is exactly what Frank Herbert warned us about.
Full on
I thought we were promised worms and spice....
Soon, it’s part of the RFK health plan
In several tens of thousands of years. But also, you don't get any. You're poor. Only the elite of the elite get spice.
With my test scores, I'd probably end up being a mentat.
Sorry, resource aristocracy and religious extremism is the best I can offer.
That comes later. Be patient. The spice will flow.
When you say "the big argument".. you are mainly talking about the CEOs. They are just auxiliary marketing personnel these days.
AI is changing the world, and will continue. But the ways it does that are drastically different than those CEOs say. I don't need it to think or innovate. I need it to follow the instructions left for it in the repo and just do the things I ask it to. It's getting decent at that. And it really does save me time. Soo much time in tech work is wasted having to go ask 6 people how a thing is done. And everyone comllains that noone write documentation. So now here comes AI. It can write the documentation and follow it. That is a big change. Myself... I used it to fix two bugs in some project that my work was dependent on. I wouldn't have even tried that without AI because I don't know the language, I don't know the many ways the project is used, none of that. I would have been stuck waiting for the team that owns it to fix it. Which surely would have meant escalating to management and all that BS. But AI helped me make the changes and lowered the burden for the owning team so they could actually release the fix. I got unblocked with 10x less effort. That's a big deal. Just don't ask it to think. There is plenty of dumb work to go around.
AI may impress the masses, but it reminds me of a cammercial we had on Dutch tv back in 2005. It showed a person driving a car, the navigtion system said "turn right" and the person immediately turned right into the bushes [video]. We laughed at this back than, but this is literally how AI behaves now. It might be getting more suffisticated, but it still operates like this.
AI will happily tell you that is a stupid idea at this point. The bigger problem is that a LOT of users actively tell the models to listen to them, not to question them, and to never push back. To do things on demand and with out planning out the next step.
At this point no reasonable model of any reasonable size should struggle with this sort of task. And they generally speaking don't. Its almost always user error poorly driving them now. The models arn't smart, they don't understand things. But they also arn't out right stupid. So long as you give them proper instructions, plan things out before hand properly and draft jobs correctly. They can and WILL do things right and not act like idiots.
People are expecting them to be proactively smart when they cant. They can be reactively smart and people just don't understand the difference. The models need to be treated like a well educated junior with no real world experience and they do really well.
Unironically middle and lower management skills are some times the biggest factor in proper useage of these models when used on large projects. Which i also find it funny that 9 times out of 10 real management people tend to have the worse management skills and thus struggle the most with using LLMs in a safe or reasonable fashion.
The worst part is not the AI, it's the people blindly following its instructions.
Blindly following them while also telling the model to never question them. It creates stupidity feedback loops.
Yes that too, but when you're dealing with "agent swarms" it's those agents who are blindly following those instructions. Like the recent hugging face hack demonstrated.
The worst thing about prison was the dementors.
yep. and the "ai creates a better ai" is a fallacy because the current ais are limited by the same things the ais they build are. everything the ais are trained on is just snapshots of human knowledge. a microscopic window of the limited reports on human experience which are themselves microscopic reports of a human's lifetime.
That's why they want everything recorded, survailled and archived.
Except the things society would actually benefit from being recorded, surveilled, and archived, like police body cam footage.
AI can innovate, but it needs be more advanced than an LLM, which just rearranges existing knowledge. You need some kind of evolutionary loop in its programming. How it continues after that depends on the particular flavour of dystopian sci-fi.
This is like saying tomatoes could colonize the galaxy enslaving all forms of life, if they evolved into completely different animals...
It's true, it just doesn't matter.
Anything can do everything if it becomes capable to do it.
The logistic map
I was with you 100% until this. "Innovation" is super easy. It will always be easy to extrapolate new things from existing things. People just over-romanticize "innovation" as some kind of magic.
I think chances are good that human produced newness will be on average more useful, complete and safe.
I don't think that's the case at all. Recombining existing things is interpolation, creating new stuff that is both novel and also interesting or valuable, is a completely different task
While there's some of both, I dislike the 'great white man' narrative of breakthroughs in science. There have been legitimate breakthroughs, but most (maybe all) of them were inevitable from recombination and mild improvements.
Definitely agree that the inventors are often given too much focus rather than a gradual evolution of ideas and discoveries over time that a much wider number of people made significant contributions to.
There are big leaps in understanding at times that do deserve to be recognised, Newton, Euler and Einstein definitely fit with this.
There is a really good series about the evolution of science and technology from the 1980s called Connections, from the BBC. Brilliant show and well worth a watch, it shows how technology evolves through chance and circumstances in so many cases rather than someone seeing a problem to be solved and thinking of a clever solution
All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.
People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.
A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren't viable before, though not a single input is new.
What did we have before the wooden spear that the wooden spear was a derivative of?
Digging stick