Let’s all just pauze for a moment and try to take in the utter stupidity of Big Tech and US capitalism.
AI has been a thing for over ten years. Even before LLM’s we were doing great things with self-learning algorithms and there was a great deal of enthousiasm about where this technology would take us.
Fast forward to today and the blatant incompetence of AI agents, LLM’s or VLM’s to perform even the most simple tasks, stands in stark contrast to the billions being thrown at tech companies, to the hundreds of data centers popping up to fuel Big Tech’s hot air balloon, to greedy eagerness of corporate America to replace skilled workers with untested and unproven technology and to the devastating effects this AI bubble is having on the real economy.
Don’t get me wrong, AI is definitely the future (even id LLM’s are not). But this AI bubble is an utter waste of capital, resources and talent that could’ve been used to fuel actual AI development and innovation. What we’re seeing is not the birth of a bright new future, but the death throes of a dysfunctional political and economic system.
Why would graduates reject a future of technological abundance, economic growth, and unprecedented innovation?
Written like a sycophant. The abundance’s only purpose is to supplant the jobs those graduates will be looking for, cut their compensation, and simultaneously charge them for whatever services the AI rent seeks on. The economic growth is only for the 1%. And the “innovation” is nothing more than finding ways to exploit the public for fees while killing access to information and creating damaging imagery that distorts reality.
Cause it’s neither a hopeful nor inspiring future. We see the harms of social media, subscription only services, enshittification everywhere and the youth graduates into a job market where the ‘most prestigious’ companies aid in several genocides, their leaders and/or owners are pedos, Nazis or both and most important of all keep announcing the end of human labor.
What is there to be excited about?
We owe our children and grand children a better outlook on life.
Good. I believed in personal computers and the internet changing the world. However the promise was that it would make life better for everyone. It only made life better for a select few who then used it to further their own interests. I don’t think the new grads have anything to lose by refusing to play the game since it is completely rigged against them.
Speaking as a senior dev: AI has replaced new hires and interns, and the students know it. Why would management hire me juniors when Claude does what they can for cheaper? Will be interesting to see how this ouroboros functions in 10 years when it’s still recycling the state of the art as of 2022, and the senior devs start retiring with nothing but agentic backfills.
Will be interesting to see how this ouroboros functions in 10 years when it’s still recycling the state of the art as of 2022, and the senior devs start retiring with nothing but agentic backfills.
That’s a concern for future executives.
The ones making today’s decisions only need concern themselves with the current quarter’s profits.
By the time things fall apart, they’ll be down the road enjoying their golden parachute, while making “bold decisions” at some other company.
I’ve never had a coworker as stupid as AI. And yes I have had some really stupid coworkers.
That is the problem though, it can’t do what they do which is learn as develop and grow in skill and understanding. What is more, the companies peddling LLM as replacements are pushing it well below the cost needed to train and run the models and costs can fluctuate wildly depending on what the LLM is asked to do, so once the true costs are asked to be born by companies we’ll see how it really shakes out.
The vision: “Listen up you ungrateful insect. You’ll work for nothing, under constant surveillance, until you die early, penniless and in pain, from very preventable conditions. Also, we’re just going to fire you randomly. Fuck you”
Don’t forget the 60 hour work week
Then something unexpected happened. Students began to boo.
This was expected by everyone, I recall Eric Schmidt himself talking about how disappointed he was that students were booing but he would turn the students around at his speech.
From there the article roughly seems to be roughly dismissive of the students and pretty bullish about AI anyway. Real Skinner “no, it’s the children who are wrong” energy wrapped up in way too many words.
The children are suppose to use the tech yet they won’t. It’s like government pushing square dancing in schools.
I remember that bullshit, it was awful.
Grew up in the US and why the fuck did we have square dancing in gym class.
We had that shit in Canada too, so weird
You just told on yourself you’re gen z
Lol I’m not I’m millenial
Because young people are the ones on whom the burden of actual work always falls, so they can see that it doesn’t fucking work
It’s also a very stark warning of the future, if they are willing to throw them under the bus when the tech isn’t working, imagine what would happen if they actually had AI.
Neither of my kids had read 1984, which I thought was a scandalous oversight by their school, so I bought them each a copy.
My younger kid said “I guess I can see why it might have been more impressive for you reading it before technology, but this stuff is all pretty obvious”.
My kids are both post-iphone, and therefore natives of a totalitarian society in a way that I (pre-Internet) simply am not.
The goal of creating a hyper intelligent machine-slave is an inherently foolish and self-destructive one.
Because they are graduating into a empty job market
A family friend’s daughter graduates after the coming Fall semester with a computer game design degree and zero job opportunities.
Oof. That’s a rough industry to get into even before AI. A big part of the problem is the App Store ecosystem that pushes towards free or cheap games, making turning a profit super hard even for solo devs. (Have family in the game industry. Seen a few studios rise and fall with a single game.)
Because it silicon Valley is full of nazi pedos
That’s not true.
Some of them are libertarian pedos.
6 / half-dozen at this point
You’re right, I was just saying it for the bit.
Pretty much. Being indifferent to companies doing whatever they want, even when it is always against the public good, is functionally the same as advocating for it in this monopoly/oligopoly environment.
They say they arre, but theyre not.
I think this super “government shouldn’t do basically anything” libertarianism that the tech bros are, as well as many of their acolytes and zealots, is actually really anarcho-syndicalism. That name sounds scary and radical though, so they call themselves something that sounds like liberty. In my country (USA), that word is really, really loaded beyond its dictionary meanings.
There’s not a single anarchist bone between Thiel, Karp, Nadella, Andreessen, etc.
They still can only conceive of hierarchies, and how to use them to dominate people.
Anarcho-syndicalists are the people building unions. Captains of industry are the people smashing unions.
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The article author doesn’t understand what Silicon Valley’s actual vision for the future is, but the students do.
Everyone is rejecting Silicon Valley’s vision of the future.
Governments that are being well paid to establish the surveillance state fucking love it.
If silicon valley paid everyone as much as they’re paying the government people, it would be far more popular.
Because everyone else is too but they have the highest stakes and the least agency so the lazy option is to blame them.
The deer in the headlights thing with the kids today is real. It’s like the way they were raised - in that every move had to be “safe” and “right” - has short circuited the ability ot just leap at a problem, and tackle it.
I am the tech/maintenance/art director of a handful of small shops and work with the kids that are coming out of their first or second years of college (the “summer butterflies”, I call them) and I am constantly telling them that in the workplace situation, to not be afraid or hesitate to act on something.
There’s a lot of self doubt and not trusting their own gut instincts. (which often are correct) If the action isn’t right, that is less an issue than letting the problem fester.
For me, it’s about getting the kids to use their smarts - which they DO have - and in the framework of a situation where the answer isn’t found with AI, they know more than they believe.
It’s not just the pivot to AI, there’s also some cultural/political hangover tied to “getting it wrong” that cripples their ability to move. Yes, I remember going through the SAME thing, with the lack of confidence in my late-teens and through my 20’s, but the difference was, I did not hesitate to tackle a problem.
Screwed up plenty. Sorted the problems perfectly more often. The willingness to jump is what I always try to encourage.
I’d love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.
I think that reaction is more common today, not because they dont know what to do or are afraid, it is that they are familiar from birth with constant surveillance combined with litigiousness. If everything you do is being watched and every negative outcome is punished, not acting at all becomes among the safer responses to incidents like youre describing. We have collectively eliminated our collective right to fail and learn from it.
Wow, a “kids these days are just lame” sentiment, which is as tired and old as we have been writing it down. Every single generation have broadly had no self-awareness and recalled their coming of age with rose-colored glasses. They were plucky, hard working, courageous, but kids these days seem to never share those same traits.
I’d love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.
The challenge is the consolidation of the power, they can’t realistically expect to actually shape how it will be used, but they have plenty of material and evidence of who actually does get to shape it and how it’s going to go. The biggest sociopathic, out of touch jerks are the ones cheering the hardest, and that is a very bad sign. They are cheering about software without developers, music without musicians, art without artists, and so on. They offer no appreciation for the people graduating at their own graduation and instead see it as a platform to talk up AI instead. It’s a gigantic “fuck you” to the graduates to leverage their commencement in such a way.
We have AI companies running ads about how someone was going to do comp sci, but since that can’t work out, they are going to do dance. Which we are to take as inspirational, but the practical reality to this scenario is no livelihood available. No vision for livelihoods, just elimination of opportunity. Plus they actually have used the damn stuff, they know the disconnect between promise and reality, but they are still stuck competing with it, which is also insulting as folks have no more confidence in grads than generative AI.
We have comments like this, making it plainly clear exactly what sort of structure they have in mind, from Larry Ellison: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."
Note he didn’t say “our best behavior”, it is “their best behavior”. He isn’t included, he isn’t a part of it. The rabble are to be managed and he is to continue to enjoy being “One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison”.
Every single generation have broadly had no self-awareness and recalled their coming of age with rose-colored glasses.
Ahhhh. No. I wish. My coming of age was sheer terror and a surreal nightmare that forced me to abandon any notion of higher education and jump into a job at a shoe factory at 17 and leave home or face years more abuse from the adults involved. I learned that motion no matter what kind or in which direction was preferable - and safer - than standing still. That was survival and there was no rose colored anything.
I could go into a similar tack with the assumption that everyone is middle-class and comes from a stable, safe home… God knows that’s something I can only imagine, but I can advocate for action - regardless of the upbringing of the kids. It’s not about anything but maintaining motion in one’s life.
The “fuck you” to the college students from these tech dipshits is predictable.
It’s the same “fuck you” that put the working class to pasture when the country’s factory jobs were offshored. I watched mine go to Korea at 21.
If the kids can leverage AI to undermine the dipshits, they could start with the phrase “monkeywrenching” and see where it goes from there.
That would be… interesting.
and I am constantly telling them that in the workplace situation, to not be afraid or hesitate to act on something.
This really depends on the workplace. I’m at a megacorp and trying to fix anything is far more pain and work that just not.
Like I could try to convince them to move off of python3.9 because that’s old and well past end of life. But I need to explain that to my boss, the business lady, some other manager, “the audit team” (whoever the fuck they are), and then grapple with how they have 5-10 years of code and not a single line of automated test coverage.
There’s no reward.
I just don’t see megacorps hiring people anymore. I mean is that really a career path like it used to be?
That’s kind of like “no one goes there anymore - it’s too crowded”
I mean, the one I’m at is mostly doing a hiring freeze. Management is frothing at the mouth over using AI. But there are currently a lot of people working here, some full time and some under dubious “contractor” arrangements.
Has no one been pointing out to management that even firms like Microsoft are backpedaling on using AI?
The costs seem too high, been reading about the whole pricing changes coming and it’s breathtaking.
I honestly see this as yet more of the same mentality that puts more faith in things than in other people. Corporations are notorious for this and it’s getting close to the tipping point where their literal human disconnect is going to bite them in the ass.
Has no one been pointing out to management that even firms like Microsoft are backpedaling on using AI?
Management doesn’t listen to low level people who actually do work. I think this is part of Ed zitron’s “Business Idiot” thesis. Upper management is so far removed from how things actually get done, they are in all measureable ways idiots
Sometimes they also have selfish or stupid side goals, too. Like, the rumor is the company gets a tax break for people going into the office. So now they make people go into the office, even when most of their team is remote. Climate criminals all, but they’re removed from the consequences.
Upper management are fools. Middle management just wants their paycheck, and maybe to rise high enough to become a business idiot themselves.
Upper management is so far removed from how things actually get done, they are in all measureable ways idiots…
Ah. Decades ago it was described as The Peter Principle wheren one rose in corporate hierarchical structures to their level of incompetence.
Charming to see that it is still there… (ofc, why would it not be?)
No child left behind really messed up education…
No child get ahead was more like it…
