A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
okay then where are all of the amazing novels, apps, movies, and productivity gains they were claiming?
it's more like lead, its mildly more convenient for completing a few tedious tasks but the trade-off is brain damage and profound waste and pollution
The danger isn't just bad art, and only thinking of genAI is naive. It's about how it's being woven into the systems that manage us. It can already analyze years of a person's digital activity to make automated judgments on employment or detect "wrongthink" in political contexts. We’re essentially building an invisible bureaucracy that can categorize and penalize people at a scale no human could ever audit. And do so at speed an efficiency that not even a whole department of humans could ever compete with. That's the atom bomb.
Algorithmic internet is already a horrible problem and AI can make it worse.
Yeah I'm worried about them
a) creating botnets that simulate grassroots political movements
b) as this user said, the joke about everybody having their own government agent was absurd because that level of attention given to an individuals activity was impossible. That's about to be a lot less impossible.
I don't see anything in what the op wrote suggesting ai is useful.
You're saying this as if no progress is being made. Shit is scary. They're researching at an alarming pace how to eliminate thought-based work, and only a few years in they are like maybe a third or halfway there.
Theres a weird quirk of AI haters who can only see the flaws and cant see how incredible its got out of nowhere. Like yes its got limits and problems and it may never be actually truly useful, but compare what we have now to what we had 10 years ago...whats it gonna be in another 10?
LLMs seem likely to be dead end for any logical thought: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/ This means at the end of the day you just get a sloppy illusion with no useful coherence as soon as it exceeds the complexity of a literal lazy copy&paste job: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
There is currently no technological innovation to fix this. Instead, AI progress seems to be stalling: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/experts-concerned-ai-progress-wall
Therefore, it's not naive to assume it may go nowhere until proven otherwise.
The people who warn about AI risk aren't worried about GenAI - they're worried about AGI.
We're raising a tiger puppy. Right now it's small and cute, but it won't stay that way forever.
I warn about AI. I don't care about AGI (yet) because we are far from it.
I'm worried about (in no particular order):
Nothing about this is small or cute.
I would be totally fine with something that I can supervise and that can run locally on my laptop without cooking it and doubling my energy bill. Also an economy where productivity gains benefit the workers, not the CEO. If I can do the same work in half the time, let me have the rest of the day off at full pay instead of doubling my workload and firing half your staff.
Hey! They also destroy communities by forcing them to pay for infrastructure upgrades while the companies get tax holidays in return for a bunch of jobs that only last 2 years during the construction phase and only add about 25-50 permanent jobs to the local economy long term.
Let's also not forget bringing back mothballed coal plants instead of building new ones.
Nothing about this is small or cute.
Compared to AGI it is. We don't know how far away we are from creating it. We can only speculate.
AGI talk seems for now to be merely hype to get investors.
LLMs seem likely to be dead end for any logical thought: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/ This means at the end of the day you just get a sloppy illusion with no useful coherence as soon as it exceeds the complexity of a literal lazy copy&paste job: https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
There is currently no technological innovation to fix this. Instead, AI progress seems to be stalling: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/experts-concerned-ai-progress-wall
We could've never invented LLMs and I'd still be equally worried about AGI. I've been talking about it since 2016 or so - LLMs aren't the motivation for that worry, since nobody had even heard of them back then.
The timescale is also irrelevant here. I'm not less worried even if we're 500 years away from it. How close to Earth does the asteroid need to get before it's acceptable to start worrying about it?
Compared to AGI it is.
The same way the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs are small and cute compared to a modern hydrogen bomb...
If we don't solve the AI problems we already have, there is no point speculating about AGI because our lives will be unbearable long before it arrives.
AGI is fake
I don’t think AGI is fake, conceptually. Humans are just meat-based computers. Eventually we will build something of comparable power and efficiency.
However, LLMs don’t seem like a viable path to AGI imo.
We disagree about genies being real (they are not) so don't worry about expressing or defending your points further.
Nobody's saying AGI is here right now - it's a concept, like worrying about an asteroid wiping us out before it actually shows up. Dismissing it as "fake" just ignores the trajectory we're on with AI development. If we wait until it's real to start thinking about risks, it might be too late.
Somewhere on TPB
I think it's more like people admiring a uranium fragment in ancient times. Better to stay out of it and let others decay themselves by using it
Good news is that there are people out there who are trying to make an ethical AIs. It's still an atom bomb (and as ethical) as you say, but at least it could be in the hands of those that actually value human well-being, not just their profit margin.
This podcast had an interesting conversation on it: https://shows.acast.com/tantra-illuminated-with-dr-christopher-wallis/episodes/new-horizons-ai-neuroscience-awakening-with-ruben-laukkonen
And the research paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.15125
I think that this is good and all for a regular person end user that might want to use it for efficiency. But the main problem OP is stating is that there will be people who will not use it so ethically, and we may not have the ability to "opt out", as it were.
True that. But I think it's valuable that there are people trying to find ways to make it ethical, since there's no way to put it back in the box either.
I can agree with that. As much as I'd prefer pressing the "delete all Ai in the world" button, it has some uses and doesn't have to be predatory.
I'd be more worried about that if it wasn't a fucking dumpster fire TBH, but a person using AI won't even be remotely capable of competing against a person who genuinely knows what they're doing for anything that actually matters: AI is dangerous to use if you are unable to correct the mistakes it is guaranteed to make.
But only the worst people have it, use it and demand it.
Let's also add the existential crisis now of AI soon to be having non-human interaction to execute kill commands on human beings in the "Defense" section. :(
It's also why we can't stop using fossil fuels. Those who refuse to use them will be outcompeted by bad actors and left behind.
If something can be done, someone will do it if it gives them a competitive edge. Classic prisoners' dilemma.
Civilization is terminally ill. The question is what will get us first, AI or climate change? Or something else?
Humanity's condition is not terminal, but your fatalism is....
Terminal...fatalism
I see what you did there
No fate but what we make.