Angrydeuce

That's what I've been screaming about AI since the beginning.

Take self checkout kiosks for example. Anyone that is old enough to remember what the grocery store was like before the kiosks would know how much faster a human cashier was then the stupid fucking machine. There was no tabbing through 20 screens of fruit to find the plantains, there was no "sorry you have to scan every pencil individually and place them in the bag one by one because we can't do multiples", and there was never, ever, an unexpected item in the bagging area.

The doctor I go to has replaced all their front office staff with self check-in kiosks. You cannot check in with a person anymore. If you are unable to use the machine you have to press a special button and wait for someone to come from the back and press the buttons on the kiosk for you. The time to check in for an appointment with the person used to take under a minute. The kiosk takes 10+ and has a 25% error rate.

But none of that matters, because the machines don't draw a paycheck, and they don't care about anything else.

investors getting nervous?

It's simply amazing to me that we're going to have to start funneling people into Canada and Mexico again to escape this stupid bullshit.

This is basically Trump emulating Putin. 100% if Operation Epstein Distraction goes poorly, they're going to pull the same shit. And we still have (theoretically) 2.5 years of this shit to go.

Working in IT, what I've seen so far has been terrifying enough on a technical level, but the effect on the way people think is so, so much worse.

It's like the joke people make about how, before smart phones, you could rattle off a dozen phone numbers by heart, but now you can't even remember your immediate families? You've offloaded that part of your brain to the machine. So have I, almost everyone has. And when you're without your phone for whatever reason and need to get a hold of someone, you're boned outside of like 1 or 2 people maybe.

But what happens as more and more of these tasks get reduced to queries and the thinking part starts to atrophy? As we offload more and more to the machine. Like why even read at all if you can just have the machine read it for you and you can listen in your airpods? And what happens when you eventually can't even verify if what the voice in your ear is saying is correct and not just a digital hallucination?

Anyways, not trying to be argumentative, it's just, through the lens of what I experience day to day it's extremely concerning how quickly people are losing their ability to do things without leaning on AI, and more importantly, how quickly they're forgetting how to do things without it.

Just wanted to add that you'll pay out the ass for them compared to consumer trash, but there's a reason for the higher price tag. They're often made for heavy usage environments where they're on like 24/7 for years showing slideshows and shit in office lobbies. Consequently, they often lag behind the feature set of modern TVs which may or may not be a problem (personally I hate all that image enhancement shit but everyone has their preference) and the higher refresh rate is not as big a selling point so not a huge comparison there if you're looking to use it for gaming or something. They also have a much more clear repair path though replacement parts can be fuckin stupid expensive. It's bullshit that the only way you can get around the enshittification of consumer electronics is by paying the enterprise tax but that's how it is.

I work in IT and about once a year or so I have to spec out that sort of stuff for clients, and they're always like "WTF?!" when they see the cost of some of that Enterprise/Professional grade stuff, but the difference is, the no-name crap they could get for $1499.99 from a big box is going to burn itself up within 18 months and be trash while the $5000 display will be humming along for as long as replacement parts are still available.

There's a world of difference between having lessor skills or ability and offloading it all to a machine so you don't have to be bothered. Namely, effort.

Its not the fact that people can't write well that bothers me, it's that people don't care to even try to write passably almost at all anymore that bothers me. We're going backwards, not forwards. This is not some niche skill, the ability to communicate concisely. This is a fundamental part of being a social animal. And people are leaning more and more on machines to do it for them.

At what point does the language start influencing the thought?

Every person that loses their job to AI is just another person with lots of free time on their hands and no means to support themselves and their family.

I truly do not know what their long term plan is, assuming they even have one (bold assumption, I know) but it seems to me that having huge masses of unemployed people with tons of motivation and nothing better to do is like, the last thing I would be pushing for if I was of the ownership class.

Especially with data centers...which need to be connected to the outside world with sufficient speed to be anything more than miles of copper and hot chunks of metal playing with itself. I bet a handful of guys with some shovels and a dremel could seriously fuck up the productivity of a data center pretty easy.

I have a Vizio TV I bought in the mid-teens that only lets you change the source and turn the volume/channel up and down with the remote. Everything else...the display/audio settings, naming the inputs, setting the channel names...requires the Vizio app on your phone. Literally no other way to access them. If I'd have known at the time I would have returned it immediately, but unfortunately I didn't discover this for a couple weeks as it was on sale and I was leaving for vacation, so I bought it, dropped it at home, and didn't actually touch it until it was past the point where I'd have been charged restocking fees so I kept it.

I guess my point is....I wouldn't necessarily bank on that. They can easily just make the TV not fucking work without the account, just like some of the other brands I've interacted with that will not even let you bypass the initial screen when you power it on for the first time without entering an email address or else it gets locked in it's demo mode.

Even if 50% of them get returned they'll likely still be making money.

"I can only breathe with a mask on my face when im hiding my identity to beat up on people of color!!! Any other time though, fuck off!!!"

Perfect use case! Well, as long as the battery isnt compromised, I aint trying to die in a flaming plane crash lmao

I have so much random eWaste built up myself that Im like Oprah over here..."You get an old crappy laptop, you get an old crappy laptop! If it breaks who cares, I have plenty more where those came from, but dont use it for your tax documents because I will not be responsible" lol

I work in IT and deal with people spilling shit on their laptops all the time. This is precisely why I tell them that im not saying their shit is broken, Im saying they cant depend on it. Right now it might seem fine. Once whatever drop of liquid manages to corrode whatever random trace enough to break the connection, it wont. That day could be tomorrow, that day could be 10 years from now, or even never!

But the important takeaway from the conversation isnt that the laptop is broken, the key takeaway is when it stops working right, IM NOT PUTTING TIME INTO FIXING IT. Replace it, or dont...but dont call me on that day because the answer then is going to be the same as now...replace it. If you dont want to replace, goto 10. Thank you, have a nice day.

That being said, I'll use those things for noncritical shit all day long. I dont care if it shits the bed...I just grab another piece of shit off the shelf and make that the new bed shifter. But my plex server taking a dump is not the same as your CAD workstation taking a dump mid project, obviously.

See this is why I just do what I do. My ticket is going to get punched regardless eventually, and if the trade off to claw back a few extra years at the end of the line is to be miserable eating plain cheerios and running on a treadmill for 3 hours a day, they can have those years and Ill just be happy while Im living.

Thus far...knock on wood...its served me well.