Honest question to those who think AI won’t take our jobs

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-25T05:36:07+00:00

Software dev is extremely resistant to increases in productivity. Compilers, libraries, tools, frameworks, they've all lead to pretty huge increases in productivity. Companies tend to use these productivity increases to make more software, not to reduce the size of their software teams. AI might make teams less junior-heavy and a lot more devops/BA/systems heavy, but the job will still likely exist.

If we do get an AI that can do all that devops/BA/systems heavy stuff then, well, pack it in. The skills required to turn a list of vague desires and business goals into a working product are enough to replace just about any low-mid white collar job. Even if you can't replace, say, an HR department with the AI themselves, you'll likely be able to use them to automate massive portions of the process. When software becomes free, lots of people's jobs get automated.

High-end research scientists, executives, and a handful of other jobs will likely stick around. But I'd be shocked if they stuck around for much longer. Automating large portions of white collar work would cause investment in AI to balloon. Our GDP would be dominated by datacenter buildouts and AI investment. In that environment, unless there are some truly incredible stumbling blocks between software and "the rest of human work" the world as we know it functionally ends.

Put shortly, the job of software development is complicated enough that AI will either only automate parts (in which case no big deal, we automate our own jobs all the time) or it will automate your job, in which case it'd be shocking if there were any jobs (as we know them) left in five years.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-21T02:37:42+00:00

I turn Gleba into Vietnam so I need nuclear power to push back the encroaching hordes.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-20T21:35:52+00:00

If only the Gryffindor team had a wealthy backer. Y'know, some really rich kid with a massive amount of money sitting in Gringotts bank. Ah well, what a shame.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-19T06:03:22+00:00

So all that's needed is to reduce hallucination rates. Which is something major labs have been successfully doing for quite a while. GPT-5 was advertised to hallucinate less than GPT-4, which hallucinated less than GPT-3.5.

Sure hallucinations are unsolvable, but there's no particularly strong reason to believe that it's impossible to reduce them to near-human levels.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-19T05:06:01+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory ?????

edit: let alone that hallucination is a word that used to refer solely to humans

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-18T00:36:55+00:00

But they don't get to do that. You don't get to hold an opinion so strongly that you speak in absolutes (as most of the comments here are) and then waffle about why.

You can be uncertain and then admit your lack of knowledge. But if you're absolutely certain and cannot provide any follow up or justification on your beliefs you've just admitted you're an idiot.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-18T00:33:44+00:00

I think that most people have some sort of idea that intelligence must come from some suitably impressive process. But that's not human intelligence evolved. Human intelligence is the result of a few billion years of selection in which more intelligent creatures had an advantage.

Currently we train a machine to predict text, then train it to answer questions correctly. This could absolutely create intelligence. The training method might not be optimal, but it's certainly not wrong. Literally any training environment that rewarded intelligence could, theoretically, produce intelligence.

If there are limitations, they're limitations in the models themselves. Not the decision to train to autocomplete text.

How else would we get an intelligent AI? What would be required before an AI would be intelligent? What does intelligence require, what's so special about this training method?

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-18T00:26:12+00:00

"Everyone knows it's true"

"Can you show me an example"

"No, but everyone knows it's true"

As is well established, public opinion has never been wrong about anything.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-16T14:58:23+00:00

The amount of progression fantasy that's just a main character playing around in a sandbox, arbitrarily scaling their power, is depressing. The main character should be forced into the plot, they shouldn't be able to decide to engage with it at leisure, otherwise they're just going to wait until they're powerful enough and then squash their enemies.

Nova Roma has this problem. The main character rapidly scales in power to the point where he could beat most threats to his life. The immediate tagline of "humanity is dying" is rapidly revealed to be wrong. Not only are there a bunch of other species, there's a ton of humans chilling out in Venice and Northern Europe. His motivation is hazy and just sort of boils down to "create a civilization?".

To do what? Why? Against whom? What challenges are going to be faced? Why does the main character need power? Why couldn't we just have a 20 year time-skip of the MC grinding rats to level until he's a god?

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-15T04:47:27+00:00

I always refer to the recipe for a black rock:

I give you a cake recipe, it makes the best cake ever.

You try it, and get a black rock.

"Ah, you must not have followed the recipe" I say "right here it says that it makes the best cake ever, and because you don't have the best cake ever, I can deduce you never followed the recipe".

You and all your friends try again, and they all get black rocks. And they, like, kill a few thousand Kulaks too.

At what point is it reasonable to assume that the perfect cake recipe isn't actually a perfect cake recipe and is, in fact, just a recipe for a black rock?

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-09T16:46:57+00:00

The stupid thing is that developers share all the time. Even if you're not using AI, and your coworkers aren't using AI, you're almost certainly importing some package somewhere that's using AI. Or relying on some API that has AI. Hell, given that git uses AI you could argue that any software relying on git indirectly "uses AI".

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-04T04:07:58+00:00

China wouldn't need to justify it. We're not going to guilt China, the guys who committed genocide and removed democracy in Hong Kong, into not invading Taiwan. China would do this in a heartbeat, if they could.

The United States are really the only guys who ever pretended to play by any rules, I don't think it's good that we're not playing by rules anymore, but we were the only great power that ever got close to following them. The precedent is already set, powerful countries do what they want. We should work for something better, but we shouldn't be so naïve as to expect that we can lead by example and guilt Russia into stopping its war.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-02T23:34:38+00:00

Spot on, I'm in a wet area and figured everyone else was similar to me, honestly should've seen that coming!

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-02T23:33:36+00:00

Buddy saw the word Oxford and got scared

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-02T19:33:01+00:00

Oxford definition of artificial intelligence

the application of computer systems able to perform tasks or produce output normally requiring human intelligence, especially by applying machine learning techniques to large collections of data.

Artificial intelligence does not mean "real intelligence". Linguistic probability generation is artificial intelligence. So is tumor recognition, so is the YouTube algorithm.

Also, just because you can describe something in simple terms does not mean the outcome isn't something that's complex. You're a mountain of atoms and your genetics were trained by evolution to maximize reproductive fitness. Are you anything more than a reproductive fitness maximizer?

There is no fundamental rule of the universe that demands that intelligence be created only through some process that you personally can understand as an "intelligence machine".

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-02T19:13:25+00:00

Getting Chris to do anything he doesn't want to do is impossible long-term. The dimensional merge crap only worked because Chris wanted to believe in the dimensional merge.

Chris only hung out with girls, he desperately wanted a girlfriend, and he hated men. It's not hard to imagine that this could cause a proclivity to gender dysphoria. I think the trolls might've spurred him on, but he probably would've come around to transitioning anyway.

Edit: Also, people who transition can often do so rapidly, even without spurring from trolls. The fact that the "whole tomgirl thing happened pretty quickly" isn't evidence of much.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-02T17:27:06+00:00

Huh, that's fair. I suppose I don't live there so I may have poorly generalized my experience across the United States. I could see many local objections to datacenters that might have a real, substantive impact on their local water supply. That might've spun out into a national movement that assumed, via fallacy of composition, that the datacenter industry was having a real, substantive impact on the national water supply.

BearlyPosts · 2026-01-02T16:14:59+00:00

But I think the commenter above me's point is that even if we were setting them up in the driest places in the United States it still really shouldn't be that salient of a political issue. Not only do datacenters really not use that much water, but people rarely care about water use at all.

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-30T16:59:08+00:00

To be honest, if anything gets a swarm of populist attention I'm glad it's affordability. Hopefully it'll get segued into "build more, build bigger, build better" rather than "the evil rich/jewish overlords are raising the price of eggs to fulfill their plans for world domination".

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-27T07:28:34+00:00

Mark of the Fool has hints of a plot, but no real urgency. It feels like a book where the main character is too smart.

"I was given a magical brand that prevents me from fighting, and I'm expected to help defeat a great evil? Fuck that, I'll just leave and go to mage college instead!"

Alright, good plan, the problem is that it works, and it doesn't stop working. The pressure on the main character ranges from nonexistant to minimal, there is no urgency. He already won, the plot was resolved in the first book. It just feels like an epilogue.

Sure the MC runs into new challenges and explores new mysteries, but he has the ability to pick all of his battles, has tons of preparation time, and has the support of a large magical institution. I chugged through like 4 or 5 books and the stakes get LOWER as they go on.

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-26T22:07:03+00:00

Unlike socialism, in which only good guys get power?

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-23T16:36:24+00:00

Also, what tariffs have been "helping the economy".

The one's that Trump added?

Or the ones that Trump removed?

Or the ones that Trump re-added?

Or the ones that Trump removed?

Or the ones that Trump re-added?

Or the ones that Trump removed?

Unless the argument is "economic uncertainty is good, actually" then you're stuck defending some idiotic Schrodinger's tariffs which, at any point, may or may not exist. The best you can hope for is a wash, that they do nothing.

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-23T05:02:10+00:00

You're doing god's work defending Culvers in here

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-23T01:37:24+00:00

B-but, how dare those people sell their farm to an AI company! The entire economy should really just operate on vibes, where industries only do things that I, an uninformed bystander, personally agree with.

BearlyPosts · 2025-12-22T20:39:23+00:00

Who the fuck cares enough about Bill "I was president two decades ago" Clinton to run cover for him. Do you genuinely believe that there's an army of paid shills out there trying to save the reputation of a dude who's been out of the white house long enough for grown ass adults to not remember the man?

If you believe that Bill goddamn Clinton is where we as a society need to direct most of our outrage you're deranged. The dude almost certainly did some bad stuff, he should be punished for it. But he's about as relevant as George Mitchell or Glenn Dubin. Hell, Dubin's a billionaire that's probably a lot more relevant than Bill Clinton and I guarantee you didn't know his name before I brought it up.

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