This kind of warrior ethos outside of fantasy books or games is a huge turn off to me, it feels so anachronistic. I don’t understand why it seems so prevalent in the US, especially as a country built on Christianity that has Jesus coming as an harmless lamb to teach compassion, humility and love. Courage, devotion, perseverance, sure. Victory or defeat? No thanks.
i used to shun this kind of rhetoric when i was younger, preferring to think of myself a scholar among the Simon the chipmunks of the world, but I've come to accept that humans are made to fight. i dont think its wrong to venerate the warrior - im the farthest thing from a US citizen or a Christian, but my culture still has their folk heroes. look up lieutenant adnan if you'd like a stirring of the spirit
Yeah, I’m in agreement here. I get how this mindset might be off-putting, but we’re still in a phase of human development where if you don’t fight, you’re going to lose to people who will.
Trump is an example of someone who wants to fight, and now all of us who just want to get along are now playing catch-up, trying to figure out how to respond.
Sure those are the things Jesus advocated for in society, but it's not as if a warrior ethos isn't warranted for Jesus considering the attitude towards his message at the time. Especially when you gauge it in the light of what eventually happened to him. The ultimate message in Christianity is the necessity of perseverance in pursuit of goals. The world in general isn't immediately receptive to a message that priorities acceptance over lament.
Your complaint is well warranted, yet know as one on the other inside, Americans are apathetic and dejected. It is the mob that professes these self delusions as their own. And Americans are not self aware enough to distinguish the mob heads from their own and in the heat of exchange.
The individual American goes along with the strongest voice in their head. There have been a valiant few, this is a time of self satisfying rhetoric. Sweet lies over bitter truths, on all sides.
Now, the seeds of hypocrisy long since sewn, blossom into a mass mind sickness of self identity we see today. On all sides. Every side, even those twelve sides deep you would not recognize.
Power is everyone’s burden, it may only be delegated irresponsibly for so long before it collapses upon itself.
To me there is an even more important point than economics and geopolitics: the Chinese government is thinking about the long term sustainability of its population, and given how large it is it makes quite aligned with the rest of the world. Environment, health, education, science, etc. when comparing the trajectory and future plans of China and the US it is quite telling. Here are a few excerpts, guess if they come from Project 2025 or Xi Jinping 14 commitments:
- Adopting new science-based ideas for "innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development".
- Improving people's livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development
- Coexisting well with nature with "energy conservation and environmental protection" policies and "contribute to global ecological safety".
I don’t think the main issue is that this type of person has been put in charge, it’s that the system can fail because of the will of one person. It kind of reveals that the guardrails were decorum and at its core Americans elects dictators that up until now chose to behave well.
More generally I think in an age of social media democracies will have to evolve to prevent leadership cults. Maybe something like the head of state being indirectly elected by local representatives.
“The system” includes the voting public. If a sufficient fraction of the population decides to override all common sense and vote a selfish conman into ultimate executive power then they can’t make the shocked Pikachu face when the rest of the political establishment fails to curtail his abuses.
There was an interview with an otherwise “intelligent” person in 2024 who admitted he knew Trump is corrupt and would mercilessly abuse the position of President but decided to vote for him anyway because he thought that checks and balances would be sufficient.
This is like putting a fox in charge of the chicken coop and hoping the neighbour’s dog will stop it eating your chickens!
Conversely I have very little interest in the process of programming by itself, all the magic is about the end result and the business value for me (which fortunately has served me quite well professionally). As young as I remember I was fascinated with the GUI DBMS (4th Dimension/FileMaker/MS Access/…) my dad used to improve his small business. I only got into programming only to not be limited by graphical tools. So LLMs for me are just a nice addition in my toolbox, like a power tool is to a manual one. It doesn’t philosophically changes anything.
The analogy with evolution breaks down because currently the fitness function is broken. It would work in a world where anti trust would be still enforced, where customers could vote with their money instead of having to deal with enshitiffied monopolies. In a world where tech CEOs can buy a dinner to stay above the law, where tech is used as a weapon of influence so that
other countries like in the EU are not allowed under penalty of sanctions to not use US platforms even when it breaks their law, it is reassuring for engineer minds but ultimately pointless to explain the state of the industry from market dynamics alone.
A CEO can be valuable while still doing nothing with a simple explanation: they are cult figures whose purpose is to increase the stock value. This is obvious in the case of a drug addict like Elon like you describe, but others are increasingly copying the playbook.
I don’t understand the urgency to replace human work with AI. Why is every organization so eager about skipping the AI as an assistant step? Here there are already massive productivity gains in using the AI to create the draft of the report, it makes little economical to make it do the final version compared to the risk, maybe it’s just plain laziness? Same with developers, why is very organization wanting to leapfrog from humans write all the code to they don’t even read the generated code?
Not everyone is in an urgent hurry to replace people with bots; that's a hyperbolic construct.
But to try to answer some of what I think you're trying to ask about: The bot can be useful. It can be better at writing a coherent collection of paragraphs or subroutines than Alice or Bill might be, and it costs a lot less to employ than either of them do.
Meanwhile: The bot never complains to HR because someone looked at them sideways. The bot [almost!] never calls in sick; the bot can work nearly 24/7. The bot never slips and falls in the parking lot. The bot never promises to be on-duty while they vacation out-of-state with a VPN or uses a mouse-jiggler to screw up the metrics while they sleep off last night's bender.
The bot mostly just follows instructions.
There's lots of things the bot doesn't get right. Like, the stuff it produces may be full of hallucinations and false conclusions that need reviewed, corrected, and outright excised.
But there's lots of Bills and Alices in the world who are even worse, and the bot is a lot easier and cheaper to deal with than they are.
That said: When it comes to legal matters that put a real person's life and freedom in jeopardy, then there should be no bot involved.
If a person in a position of power (such as a police officer) can't write a meaningful and coherent report on their own, then I might suggest that this person shouldn't ever have a job where producing written reports are a part of their job. There's probably something else they're good at that they can do instead (the world needs ditchdiggers, too).
Neither the presence nor absence of a bot can save the rest of us from the impact of their illiteracy.
Because the biggest cost at a lot of orgs is staff. Your typical software shop will be comical—the salary costs towering down on all the others like LeBron James gazing down at ants. The moment you go from productivity gains to staff reduction you start making real money. Any amount of money for a machine that can fully replace a human process.
> that effort is completely abandoned directly because of AI
That effort is completely abandoned because of the current US administration and POTUS a situation that big tech largely contributed to. It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
> It’s not AI that is responsible for the 180 zeitgeist change on environmental issues.
Yes, much like it's not the gun's fault when someone is killed by a gun. And, yet, it's pretty reasonable to want regulation around these tools that can be destructive in the wrong hands.
This is off topic, I’m talking about the environmental footprint of data centers. In the 2010s I remember when responding to RFPs I had to specify the carbon footprint of our servers. ESG was all the rage and every big tech company was trying to appear green. Fast forward to today where companies, investors, and obviously the administration are more than fine with data centers burning all the oil/gas/coal power that can be found.
It’s still wild because it’s mostly useless. Rewriting a few core components might improve security a bit, but otherwise it’ll not change anything for end users. This is the typical attractive but useless project for bored programmer with no product or business vision.
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