My Stance on AI

Artificial intelligence is no longer a research curiosity. It now behaves like an infrastructure, and like any infrastructure it decides who can participate and who is left watching.

What I actually believe

I am not optimistic or pessimistic about AI as a people-leader. I try to view it academically so I can position myself and my people correctly.

I believe that some segments of AI is mature, such as object-detection, speech recognition, and recommendation systems. They are an integral part of modern enterprise systems.

What I'm going to talk about here is LLM, or more specifically any application of AI that has an interface to work on our reality. So it can be world models, LLMs, and AI-on-robotics. But to keep it even specific, I want to discuss more about the impact and how I position myself in it.

AI is NOT taking our jobs

There are notions that these AI systems will take our jobs. I am a programmer, so I am in the danger zone as per the prediction. But I'm not worried about it.

Anthropic and OpenAI, which is current world leader in commercialized AI frequently dooms about this scenario. That AI will abolish work, everyone needs UBI, and then the eventual collapse of humanity in a few years. Unfortunately, they have been preaching about it for years now. And, more often than not, companies actually began hiring humans more than before.

So, where's the problem for us?

Turns out, even though more entry-level job offers emerge they require skills that no entry-level applicant has. This is known as the chicken and egg problem or the Experience Paradox. Where you need experience to gain experience which require experience for entry and so on and so forth.

But we have AI, so why employers kept hiring even though, theoretically, they don't need it?

The answer might be that computers aren't trustworhty. They can't take responsibility. Heck, they actually cannot think.

When you see your LLM "thinking", it's actually just producing inner thought outloud in a format that they're trained to see it as "thinking tokens".

That's why you see them referring back to result of some toolcalls, way back in the trajectory, instead of inferring from memory. Even in initial response to user input, they might retype what the user is giving them.

Moreover, this just isn't how human thinks. We don't yet understand how consciousness work.

"thinking tokens" are just emulation of how some researchers in the AI companies think they thought.

This, in turn, makes current AI incapable of taking our jobs.

Sure, there are some already automated jobs out there. But the side effect is that there will be 1:1 number of jobs being replaced with other job titles on the opposite side of the wall.

In the future, there will be new jobs

I want to take a break and reflect, how most arguments against AI are all just defending their current position instead of adapting. In my field of work, a lot of cyber security people I know either quits or heavily used AI to automate their workflow. Can you guess who wins?

Apparently, what you needed to do when you face a change is to face it head-on. If you can't fight it, accept it and adapt to it.

Of course there are a lot of jobs that seemingly being fully replaced, like being an artist or a graphic designer. But to me, there's actually a new job called AI Image2Image Finetuner even though the name is currently non-standard. The thing is, artists can give their customer high-quality character or scene dataset to then finetune a model themselves. The produce is a finetuned model that they can market to people who likes them.

Great news is, a lot of people can spot AI generated images. Artists are here to stay, but the decision lies in their customers. Are they serving high-taste customers or are they serving budget customers.

It'll be harder, and I'm not trying to sugarcoat it,

If you do not adapt and search for new POV, there will be less opportunity for you than before. If you do not want to move on, you will get bulldozed by people who did.

I don't want you to get into your FOMO state, because in order to actually succeed in adapting you have to research slowly about how to position yourself.

My positioning

As a people leader, I have to look into my own people with inter-generational mindset in mind.

First, I live in Indonesia. A third world country being labelled average, middle class, and not worthy of anything. Second, I don't have the political power to transform the government. Third, I don't like the current government. Lastly, I just like the people, Indonesia as nation.

My current government, they're spiritually Israeli. No cares whatsoever to their people.

But that's how I get to know that Indonesian people are actually capable of detaching themselves from their own government.

One of the funniest thought I have is that, we can stop paying taxes and the government will cease to exist easily. It's so fragile.

But, I don't want to do that. Because, in my opinion, my generation has been teached powerlessness. If my government is teared down, we will get invaded easily.

What Indonesians can do is to accelerate people's collaborativity and power by forming communities and organizations. I don't mean political power in terms of to persuade the current government. I mean 'power' as in the independence of sustaining oneself.

I used to go to a school where we plant and nurture our own food and water. Even though, honestly, for some occasion we still import some goods from outside the controlled environment. Indonesians are very lucky to live in a humid environment where plants and animals can grow easily.

With the current technology, it has been more apparent to me that this kind of self-sustained, off-grid, and government-detached community to exist.

The Indonesian government dooesn't want to control its people, it still wants support, it still dreams for peaceful interaction with its own people. Albeit, some tragedies are still happening. And manipulation of naratives are also still happening. It's the goy factory, yes, but it has advantages.

Advantages that previously described community can rely upon.

So, to recap. I believe that Indonesians can use AI to their advantage to accelerate the making of self-sustained, off-grid, and government-detached community. Only then, that we can do whatever is needed to research what we wanted and have an upbringing to our own society. I have been in the trajectory to do this, so keep an eye on my next posts.

Cheers