Diminishing returns on steroids? No, clearly we just need to pump EVEN MORE MONEY AND DATA into this

I disagree with the “Pandora’s box is open” angle because my beef isn’t with the technology, but how it’s being used in practice. It’s a socioeconomic problem, but a technological one.

Cory Doctorow articulates it much better than I can^[1]:

"Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there’s some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I’ve got cancer. Thankfully, it’s very treatable, but I’ve got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible.

If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 x-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes."

Even with the technological limitations that AI faces at the moment, we could be doing so much more with it. I love this radiography example because so many of us have experienced someone in our life getting cancer. AI is absolutely capable of improving the rate at which we are detecting cancer at an early stage, which would absolutely save lives. Instead what we’re getting is that it is being used as an excuse to heap more work onto doctors and radiographers, worsening the situation for everyone.

I do agree with the broad strokes of what you’re saying, because absolutely it does take time for any new technology to integrate itself into society and become useful. However, I don’t believe that AI in its current form is capable of becoming commercially viable (and by “in its current form”, I am talking about a paradigm that demands excessive building of super resource intensive datacentres)

Edit: forgot to add the citation [1]: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

29 year old woman. A few times a week, on average, I’d say. Potentially multiple times in a day.

When I have a partner, I tend to do it way less though, because I find that the sex is way better if I refrain from masturbating. Orgasms from masturbation aren’t particularly satisfying for me unless I try to do a whole build up that I rarely have the time or energy for.

Worth mentioning that autism makes my general sensory experience pretty weird — I’m hypersensitive to most stimuli, and that also affects touch. This feeds into my above preferences in complex ways.

I also have a few physical disabilities that mean I’m less likely to be able to enjoy sexual pleasure as much unless I’m in the right mindset (i.e. chronic pain can distract from the physical pleasure).

It’s possible that you’re ahead of the curve when it comes to knowing what you like. I had a friend who was capable of reaching orgasm through masturbation, but it took so much effort that she rarely did it. Then she had a partner who helped her to figure out her own idiosyncratic preferences in terms of what she needed to reach orgasm, and that sparked a period where she “felt like a teenage boy” with how often she was masturbating. She was 32 at this point.

I have another friend who didn’t even orgasm until she was 31 due to only having dated guys who were stereotypical straight dudes, which had calibrated her bar of what to expect super low (not just in what she expected from partners, but in terms of what sexual pleasure could feel like in general).

Another friend didn’t masturbate at all until she was 28 (with the exception of some occasional pillow humping that she would feel tremendous shame about) due to religious trauma.

Unfortunately, the society we live in doesn’t really equip women well to be able to come to understand our bodies and communicate our sexual needs. A lot of my friends in their 30s (especially the women) have said that they’re loving their 30s way more than their 20s because of this kind of thing. 30 is still relatively young, so maybe (likely in addition to a naturally higher libido) you just have figured out what you like sooner than your friends have. Maybe some of them are yet to have an awakening of some sort, and the average rate of masturbation will be higher in a few years.

I like crochet or knitting. When I’m working on something, there’s usually a period where I do have to focus on the task, but once I get going, I love how I can just do it ambiently, as I’m either doing something else, or nothing at all — I used to take crochet to my university lectures, and it actually helped me to focus on the lecture.

Similarly, when I made a chainmaille hauberk, I liked how easily I could just zone out once I had a bag of rings and I just needed to interlock them, using pliers. When I was piecing all of it together, I needed to focus, but I spent tens of hours just mindlessly linking rings together

Either you’re replying to the wrong comment, or you need to go back and reread the comments you did reply to