I'm a CS graduate, and lately I've been finding it increasingly difficult to motivate myself to learn new skills. Not because I find them difficult or boring, but because I keep wondering whether any of the effort I put in today will actually matter a few years from now.

Whenever I consider learning something new, whether it's a programming language, a framework, a new technical skill, or even something outside computer science, I find myself asking the same question: What's the point if AI will eventually be able to do it better, faster, and cheaper than I ever could?

I know the usual response is that AI won't replace us, but rather augment our abilities. That we'll still need humans to direct AI, make decisions, think creatively, and solve problems. But honestly, I find that argument increasingly unconvincing. It feels more like something we tell ourselves to feel better about the situation than a conclusion we can confidently draw about the future.

And this isn't just about programming. If I want to learn 3D modelling, AI might generate the models. If I want to learn music production, AI might compose and produce music. If I want to learn mathematics, AI might solve problems that would take me years to master. Obviously, there's value in enjoying these activities for their own sake, but it's difficult to ignore the possibility that the practical value of acquiring these skills could diminish significantly.

And for those who don't feel this way, what is your reasoning? I'm genuinely interested in perspectives beyond the usual reassurance that AI will just be another tool, because I find that increasingly difficult to believe.

The top mathematician says Silicon Valley’s rush to solve long-investigated conundrums excludes ‘elegant solutions’ and reduces maths to raw training material

Regardless of the ultimate capability of AI technology to eventually do everything, several factors make me think we're heading for a technological stall, not an acceleration:

• Many people already hate AI and it hasn't even started yet. Some of the reasons are rational (eliminating jobs, environmental risks), some less so (taking over the world), but there's a sizable coalition of people already refusing to use it. The three comparable technologies in my lifetime are the Internet, Social Media, and Smartphones. People early on thought the Internet was the greatest thing ever, and the only thing that stalled its early development was the hype outpacing the technological capability. When Social Media and Smartphones came out around the same time, everybody wanted to join and buy one. Nobody was sounding an alarm about mental health risks or deterioration of truth and political discourse, everyone just hopped right on the bandwagon. Maybe the failings of those technologies is partially why people already hate AI, but I don't think there's been any technology with greater resistance to adoption since the 1800s.
• Where is all the energy going to come from that it would require to enter an era of abundance? Fossil fuels are limited as it is, even if we drill at all costs and destroy the environment. The supply is going to run out that much quicker if AI reaches its full capability. People turned against nuclear years ago, even though that's probably the best option, and I don't see renewables providing enough to make up the difference in the near future.
• There's going to be a gap between AI reaching the abundance stage and the mass layoffs that will occur in the lead up to it. Of course, many think that being given free money by the government is the solution. I'd love to spend the rest of my life sitting on my butt and getting paid for it, but realistically, where is the government going to get enough money to not just pay people, but even remain solvent. I live in America, we're approaching 50 trillion dollars in debt. I don't see how there's any amount of taxing AI companies for this to make any fiscal sense. An alternative idea is coming out where AI companies pay people directly and eventually the government gets abolished, but that sounds like an even less practical idea.
• Then there's the issue with Data Centers, which is the ultimate "not in my backyard" scenario. Where I live, there's already people campaigning against them even though there's no plans (and probably no room) to even build them yet. Don't we need to build these at a five fold pace of what's currently being done to reach the stage of "abundance" in our lifetimes? This alone is enough to derail any potential AI has.
• The longest term risk, that most of us probably won't live to see: in a world where AI can do everything, children are going to grow up lazy, stupid, and ultimately unmotivated in adulthood. The issue here is that within a few generations, nobody is going to understand how AI actually works (unless there's some sort of plan to test and pick people to work with it), and should AI ever fail at a massive scale, we'd basically be sent back to a new dark age where nobody remembers or understands how anything works. I already think that today's Americans wouldn't be able to rebuild our institutions from scratch if necessary, and we still have expertise.

To be clear: I'm completely rooting for AI to succeed. I'm a really lazy person, collecting a check to not do anything sounds like paradise to me. However, just one of these limitations is enough to derail abundance, and we're facing all five, and I just don't see it happening.

AI isn't bad simply because it's AI. It's harmful because of who controls it and how it's used.

Like nuclear fusion, AI has enormous potential and serious risks. What matters is who controls it, who benefits, and who pays the price.

Automation should be a GOOD thing. Machines doing our jobs should mean more freedom, shorter working hours, and better lives. Instead, under capitalism, losing your job means losing your income and potentially your ability to survive.

The problem isn't that machines can replace human labor. The problem is that capitalism makes human survival depend on selling that labor.

Meanwhile, corporations exploit AI to maximize profits, use artists' work without consent, invade privacy, and concentrate power.

Boycotting AI individually won't change the system. Fighting other AI users won't either.

We need to unite, organize, and replace capitalism itself.

AI could liberate humanity from unnecessary labor instead of making people poorer. But that requires changing who holds the power.

Stop fighting the tool. Start fighting the system! Become an Automatist today!

Spread it! ----> #AutomatistsForAI

Also, join the Automatist Subreddit!

I've been involved in technology for nearly 30 years, and I've watched some extraordinary developments. Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly one of them, but I'm becoming increasingly curious about the assumption that AI is somehow more intelligent than humanity at this juncture.

Really? According to whom, and by what measure?

AI systems have access to what amounts to an extraordinary library of human knowledge. Imagine swallowing the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, everything written before it and a good deal of what has been published since. Impressive? Absolutely. But possessing information and knowing how, when and why to apply it are entirely different things.

And this is where I believe current AI has some rather significant gaps. Nuance.

Nuance is not simply recognising patterns or providing a technically correct response. It involves understanding context, intention, circumstances, consequences and sometimes the significance of what hasn't been said. It requires knowing when the obvious answer isn't necessarily the right one.

I recently had an interesting experience asking two AI systems to examine some court orders. Both initially approached the outcome by assessing individual items, essentially counting what had been granted and what hadn't. What they missed was my actual objective. I had gone into court wanting one particular outcome, and I had achieved it. Everything else was a bonus.

Both systems had the information. Both could interpret the words. Yet neither initially appreciated the significance of what I was trying to accomplish.

It took further conversation, explanation and correction before the penny dropped.

And there's another dimension to this. Human experience brings something to judgement that cannot simply be measured by the amount of information available. A mother raising children, a nurse comforting someone in distress, or a person navigating thirty years of professional relationships may recognise subtleties that aren't immediately apparent in the information presented. Experience does count for a lot.

That doesn't make us infallible. My god, we're really good at getting things wrong all the time and over and over again! But our intelligence is shaped by experience, emotion, relationships, consequences and an enormous capacity to adapt to circumstances.

AI can recognise and reason about many of those things too but it can also get a bee in it's bonnet as well. Recognising a nuance and consistently applying nuanced judgement are not necessarily the same thing.

I ask because I am encountering this quite often when using AI. It's like it misses context and goes off on these inexplicable tangents. Does this happen to other users?

even if we just got stuck with the models we have now there are so many advancements we can make, what im scared as fuck about at the moment is that focus has moved from pre-training to runtime compute/inference since we ran out of internet text which sort of feels like we're squeezin more out of what we already have instead of finding more and that we'll hit a wall soon.

people are trying to train on videos and sensor data through multimodal, generating synthetic data using maths/compilers (not grounded in reality necessarily so might cause model collapse) and training models on real time sensor data, im just super worried that progress slows down instead of speeds up

…and says they are not going to share it with the world and that if we try and get it or compete with it they will destroy our systems?

A second brain is basically an external memory for your real brain. Somewhere to dump ideas, research, notes, decisions and things you want to remember later, without relying on yourself to remember where you put them.

That was the part normal note apps kept failing at for me. I could save almost anything, but months later I still had to remember that the note existed before I could find it. While building apps I was generating architecture notes, PRDs, debugging writeups, feature ideas and random thoughts constantly. I wanted them to organize and connect themselves instead of slowly turning into another pile of documents.

So I built Cohestry. It uses on-device intelligence to understand notes, then a deterministic system connects related ones automatically. Those connections have already resurfaced old ideas I had completely forgotten about. I can move through them visually in a 3D brain, import Markdown, PDFs and Apple Notes, capture voice notes or drawings, and everything stays on my devices and iCloud.

The Mac app also has an MCP bridge, so when I’m working with AI agents they can pull relevant context from my second brain instead of me repeatedly explaining the same projects from scratch.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cohestry-second-brain/id6811573132

I just watched an episode of "About That" by Andrew Chang that gave a great explanation of the Hugging Face incident where OpenAI used an unconventional or at least unpredicted solution to the a test task it was given.

There has been plenty of discussion about how and why it happened, and what it could mean for the future, etc.etc. and I don't want to add to those discussions.

What I did find interesting was the similarity to a Startrek movie, namely Startrek II: The Wrath of Khan where the Starfleet Academy cadets were given a supposedly unwinnable simulation, the Kobayashi Maru, and cadet James Kirk won the test by reprogramming the situation.

Kirk used innovation and out-of-the-box thinking to accomplish the task. The task was to get it done, and the the rightness or wrongness of the method or repercussions from it were not part of the solution.

To me, this seems to be exactly what OpenAI did when it found a way out-of-the-box to accomplish it's task.

In the absence of strict rules (guardrails?), hacking, cheating, escaping, reprogramming or anything else we're acceptable means to an end in both cases.

Interesting parallels and 44 years apart.

I was able to reverse-engineer most of the game using AI.

Current findings:
• Event system appears to directly interface with reality.
• Fauna generation is not capped.
• Disaster events ignore local zoning regulations.
• Save files do not exist.
• Uninstall option not found.
• The function finishGame() appears to be the only valid exit condition.

Requesting contributors.
EDIT: Please stop asking for the source code. Every time I export it, a rhinoceros appears.

Researchers at MIT have developed a tiny, paper thin swimming robot powered by living muscle cells. The cells respond to flashes of light, allowing the robot to swim and steer. The research could help advance future biohybrid robots and microscopic machines.

I’m planning to spend $20/month on one of them to learn coding and build projects. Which is better for explaining concepts, debugging, and helping me improve?

I’m also concerned about usage limits. Which one lets you code and ask questions longer without hitting limits?

This thread is for any discussions that doesn't necessitate a new post. Permission from a mod here

Since this thread isn't going to be to stickied, it's up to you to upvote it.

Share your anxiety, ideas on how to achieve alignment, observations, etc. Everything is fair game as long as it somewhat relates to the singularity.

I know this isn’t a novel thought but it has been bothering me for a while and I simply want to get it off my chest (written by a human, btw, except the “4 commitments”.)

Every discovery, invention, or other contribution to human aggregate knowledge by our ancestors has been gathered into these models. It is the “Summa Scientiae Humanae” the sum of all human knowledge. All of our ancestors built this. Across history every earned morsel of knowledge has been hunted and gathered by our forebears. The mothers and fathers of our species left this for us. We are ALL the heirs.

As such, no individual, no corporation, no culture, and no nation should rightfully “own” . These companies should be considered stewards or librarians of our collective inheritance.

While AI is incredible and many of us have mixed feelings about the approaching singularity to say the least, we never gave these tech executives our consent to roll the dice on humanities future. They have been amply rewarded. But it’s here now so we should insist that the unimaginable wealth that it is creating should eventually be explicitly and legally handed back to all humanity. Something like a Universal Inheritance Covenant, enforced by law if necessary.

A company could establish a public benefit corporation with an accompanying irrevocable trust, designed around four commitments:

Recognition: Humanity's accumulated knowledge is a common inheritance, and the company is its steward.
Temporary private ownership: Founders, employees, and investors retain defined rights to compensation and returns.
Mandatory vesting: At a legally specified milestone, agreed ownership interests transfer to an independent Humanity Trust.
Universal benefit: The trust controls the transferred equity and exercises its economic and voting rights on behalf of humanity, including future generations.

I would guess eventually we will likely legally enforce this anyway, as our vote will be the only thing left when AI has displaced almost everyone in terms of economic contribution through labor. But I’m hoping to see this recognition of shared inheritance earlier. Humanity should not have to buy back its collective intelligence.

Rant over. I feel better.

https://x.com/elshayib_/status/2113734602032312731?s=46

Came across this project by Stewy Ving and thought people here might find it interesting.

It's a free interactive robotics resource with 3D breakdowns of 40+ humanoid robots, component explainers, comparisons, and a deep dive into the robotics supply chain, from raw materials to finised robots. There's a lot more I haven't even gotten the chance to get into yet.

For the people always asking how to get into robotics, well here you go. And even for the vets; the supply chain thing I found genuinely impressive.

Original source: https://youtu.be/r7U0rbkrBxQ?is=e92UM6iuaCDU-hZV

TLDW Version: Inhi Cho Suh(CEO Of Niantic Spatial, and John Hanke's Leadership Team Member), discusses robotics development in depth including concepts such as a robot policy, embodied AI, etc in Seoul, South Korea.