That’s just an excuse by reddit. Moving to the new style allows them to choke down and control the way that posts and replies are displayed and nested. This is good for them, because it allows them to offer white glove PR services to paying customers. It also obfuscates useful user supplied content so that it can be sold wholesale to anyone who has the money to buy it. That’s more important to them than offering a good user experience and useful website to the proles.

Anyone still posting on reddit (who isn’t a bot) is working for free for an unscrupulous company.

How so?

I think there’s a reasonable, rational position somewhere between the ai hype cringelords on the one hand, and the egotistical humanists on the other who refuse to believe that ai could ever match human output. I think it’s hard to look at what has happened over the past 5 years and have any confidence that ai will be constrained to some trivial, manageable ceiling.

I understand the skepticism people have around claims of the transformative power of ai. Some of those claims are just companies trumpeting their own products, and these breathless tech articles about how this or that tool is going to change everything, it’s tiring. But I think that can numb us to the signs that something transformative and irrevocable is actually happening.

Even if we assume that current ai is at its limit of progress (it isn’t), if an agent costs $10k/year and works 24 hours per day, there is a far greater tolerance for mistakes than a worker who costs $50k and wants vacations and benefits, and sleep. Gates makes this point, and I think it’s strong.

Layoffs due to ai replacing human work are happening in the tech sector already, which I think is arguably a canary in the coal mine situation.

Generative AI hasn’t produced anything that exceeds human capability in any field

Chess is an early and canonical example of ai doing exactly that. The speed at which it can complete human-like tasks far exceeds human capability. It’s hard to talk about the enormous problems with ai if we accept it as an undifferentiated point in the march of technological progress.

I think (comically) Gates uses the word “cognition” to mean, the business output of an individual white collar worker. In that realm, today, ais are faster, more durable, more scalable, more easily put into parallel than humans, they work around the clock and they’re cheaper.

I don’t like ai. Still, I think Gates is absolutely right that ai is going to swing a wrecking ball into white collar work and there’s no government or industry plan to deal with the human impacts of that.