I’m very much a luddite when it comes to AI, I’m unequivocally against its usage and development. The social and environmental costs AI incurs and proposes to incur are overwhelming. The celebration of AI with Chinese characteristics is often justified by the idea that AI can be useful, and the reason why it’s OK to be vehemently against it otherwise but support it when it’s being implemented by China is because AI can only be a force for evil within the capitalist framework. I agree with the latter point obviously but find it hard to accept that China driving AI advancement is a good thing for the world.

I don’t want to have a debate about whether China is a revisionist state, but I think we can all agree that China has refused to take the role of the Soviet Union in exporting socialism to the world. What happens when it exports AI to countries world over that very much operate within a capitalist framework while China does nothing to advance world wide socialism?

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[–] 3 points 9 hours ago*

I think a lot of discourse on here is missing just how powerful these LLMs are today and what impacts are coming. It's easy to make fun of one of these at a time, but that's not how they are going to be used in business. We're going to hit a point where commercially available clusters of agents can work as a team, with some agents writing code, others testing it, writing documents, handling user requests automatically, etc. Yes, one agent can Vibe Code some slop app that is useless, buy 20 of these things working together?!?

IT is cooked. I see departments of 20+ people across sales, marketing, development, etc. Being pared down to maybe 4-5 "AI coordinators" that babysit a bunch of always-working agents to keep them on task. So much that is computerized is vulnerable to this kind of disruption. And under capitalism it makes sense because why spend $100k/month on staff when you can get the same work out of 50k worth of tokens and a skeleton crew? AI doesn't take time off, doesn't get sick, and never refuses orders.

I hope China wins this and I hope Hexbear takes this threat more seriously.

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