> People claim AI companies are "stealing" human labor but that's not true. They're saving (in their databases) the fruits of human labor and other bots/software. Then they're using that data to train AI models.
And profiting on it on a scale that’s hard to fathom. Someone who spent effort creating a great resource or doing some research and maybe got some income via donations, ads, whatever. Now that information from their resource is distilled into a big model. The original author is screwed, the model provider makes money through the effort of everyone else. It worked well for everyone before, because there was recognition, prestige, a sense of doing good for people, even a chance for some income. That’s completely eliminated with AI.
Actually think that’s a good thing for Apple. Compare how much money companies have absolutely shoved into the AI race, and how much circular investment is happening. Apple is one of the few massive players which hasn’t massively extended themselves and taken on a ton of financial risk. How do you make money on frontier models? By selling it to software companies, I guess.
Apple just needs a capable personal AI that respects privacy. They could eventually get that by self-hosting open model inference on their private cloud compute. They don’t need to light billions upon billions of dollars on fire to build data centers and do training to make a frontier model that’s nearly already a commodity. If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to), that approach seems financially stupid and risky.
> If they’re not selling tokens (and why would I want them to)
That’s one of the two things that has stood out most to me. Siri AI answers my questions. And that’s it. She stops.
Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic all constantly try and get you to answer follow-up questions. Because if you do that, you’ll use up more tokens and get more “addicted“ and end up buying a plan.
Apple doesn’t have one. I guess iCloud, but let’s face it, they already pushed that a ton anyway. They’re not trying to get you to use it for the sake of use. It’s not trying to be your friend.
And just like David Pogue says, it doesn’t lie. I just asked it an incredibly stupid question. Can you get pregnant from a picture?
“While I'm not a doctor, no, you cannot get pregnant from looking at a picture of someone. Pregnancy requires physical contact and the transfer of sperm to an egg. For accurate information regarding reproduction, consult a healthcare professional.”
Look at that! It immediately says it’s not a doctor. It gives a good answer, and then it says you need to seek out real advice to be sure things are accurate. Of the summer, I also got responses that ended with something along the lines of “I am an AI, please check information for accuracy.”
I’ve gotten incorrect answers, but they come with disclaimers and it doesn’t act like some omnipotent god that is desperate to be your friend.
The bigger challenge is that the mechanics of the day to day work have entirely changed. Mechanically, using C is similar to using JS. You’re tying and compiling and checking results, whatever. With an Agent what you actually do is completely different. Even as technologies have changed in the past and people have learned more, your mechanical day to day work would look similar, just with different tools. Not so with AI.
So it should be utterly unsurprising that many people are going through a bit of an existential crisis around this. Because what you actually sat down and enjoyed doing, what motivated you, may be entirely gone now.
And on top of that, there’s an extreme amount of pressure to do more in less time, which is by definition stressful. And do much more context switching.
I’ve often spent more of my time reviewing code than writing code off and on for decades as my role and team size changes. So, none of this is new to me except that the loops are much tighter and I don’t have to debate the social cost of pointing out what is workable but not acceptable after the 4th review cycle when I suddenly notice something new in code that had been there all along.
The truth is a lot of developers are terrible at reviewing design specifications and code. They rarely - if ever - find any real correctness issues and more than half believe it’s mostly a status / dominance game. Many can’t force themselves to deeply think about the code if they aren’t writing it.
An eagle isn’t having a conversation with an eagle on the other side of the world about whether it should eat its prey because it’s sentient. It just eats it. I think that speaks to a moral superiority, in some ways.
I’m not claiming humans are morally superior in sum (there is a lot of evil as well as good.) But it’s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we’ve essentially dominated the planet. And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the “least fit” to survive and reproduce.) And are also the only species which has doctors for other species.
All I’m trying to say: I can easily accept other species are intelligent and emotional. The fact that I can know that and accept that, to me, speaks to human “superiority.”
Does superiority matter? Not most of the time. What about when it comes down to life and death? If the choice was to keep one human alive or one theoretically more perfect AI alive? (Boil down utilitarianism into its essence.) doing the “most good” is by definition a human construct. Maybe an agent could have one. But if you don’t accept human superiority on some level, would you accept that a more perfect AI deserves to live more than you? To me, that’s the implication.
> But it’s pretty obvious that humans are the superior species evolutionarily in that we’ve essentially dominated the planet.
That in itself is an anthropocentric viewpoint. I'm sure an eagle watching down, seeing a human running around, could easily consider humans as quite inferior as they are so slow and restricted to 2d movement. The shark that sees a swimmer at the surface, struggling to stay afloat and unable to breathe under water may surely assert its superiority over such primitive beings. It all depends on the metric you use, and we obviously pick the metric that makes us shine.
On the moral side, few eagles, or bird species, have exterminated other species. Much less knowingly out of greed. Oh but that's different? Sure, if you ignore what makes humans look bad, morally. No surprise humans come out on top then.
> And on some level, are beating evolution itself (by fixing genetic issues and helping the “least fit” to survive and reproduce.)
That's a quite narrow viewpoint as well. Evolution is in full swing, just not in the "smarter/faster/taller/stronger" sense that a naive view of it would make you expect. "Fitness" is a concept relative to the existing conditions, and if the conditions make it easier for teenage cancer patients to reach reproductive age, then that's just less of a fitness disadvantage. Doesn't mean evolution stops.
People have created machines that can, at their core, regurgitate human knowledge. They do not have long-term memory, self-direction, self-improvement, emotion, etc. At their very best, we have harnesses that can bootstrap short-lived artificial intelligences that can perform tasks and do knowledge work.
At best, we have artificial, short-lived, simulated consciousness. Human consciousness at its heart has a lot to do with emotion and experiences. An AI does a task today and goes away. The simulated consciousness hasn’t experienced or learned anything, even if can improve its environment (harness). Any expressed emotion is simply a ghost of the fact it was trained on the works of an emotional species, or RL to make it more approachable to humans.
I think there should be a lot more burden on folks trying to argue that (effectively), machines should be considered morally equivalent to humans.
Yes, having massive implications on society is a fucking fair and reasonable thing for a human being to be concerned about. Anything related to survival of the species is biologically reasonable to be concerned about.
The fact that we’re even considering this concept is an indication that human consciousness is special. Do other apex predators decide not to eat meat because it’s conscious? Despite some level of animal intelligence, they have no sense of morality. (See e.g. Orcas playing with their food.)
Other species simply do what it takes to stay alive, and that’s what this truly boils down to. If giving AI rights would lead to the destruction of humanity, yes, we should be be concerned.
For example, utilitarians might think of the greatest good for conscious species (simulated or not). Well, it’s trivial to have billions of AIs, and not so trivial to have billions of humans. Whose greatest good wins?
I would not say $1-$2k/mo extra income counts as a huge amount richer. It’s like 58th percentile by family income. I don’t really think it makes sense to call solidly middle class income rich in any sense…
This is why I like to really interrogate Claude on what it’s planning to do, what the implementation will look like etc before writing code. Without enough direction and time thinking about it, it can definitely go in an unintended direction
I usually use Fable with superpowers to generate plans and do subagent driven development but unfortunately I was at my Fable weekly limit with some other usage left.
On 5g, I’ll say this. I’m on a Verizon MVNO with a fairly recent iPhone Pro model in a major metro area.
I frequently have to disable 5g and switch data to LTE to get any actual service, even when I have full bars of service. It’s highly annoying phones don’t do this by default
And profiting on it on a scale that’s hard to fathom. Someone who spent effort creating a great resource or doing some research and maybe got some income via donations, ads, whatever. Now that information from their resource is distilled into a big model. The original author is screwed, the model provider makes money through the effort of everyone else. It worked well for everyone before, because there was recognition, prestige, a sense of doing good for people, even a chance for some income. That’s completely eliminated with AI.
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